Author Archive: Gareth D Jones
From Distant Stars (book 2) by Sam Peters (book review).
Sam Peters’ 2017 debut novel ‘From Darkest Skies’ was one of those addictive books that I didn’t want to put down, filled as it was with mystery and intrigue, conspiracies and dangers. His follow-up novel, ‘From Distant Stars’, does not disappoint, taking us straight back into the action with agent Keon Rause, an investigator on […]
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (book review).
Two books came to mind as I started reading Sam J. Miller’s book ‘Blackfish City’: ‘Austral’ by Paul McAuley and ‘America City’ by Chris Beckett. Of course, it turns out the book is not particularly like those novels at all, except in some superficial sharing of tropes. It’s set in a future where climate change […]
The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson (book review).
The idea behind dating apps meshes with social media to create compatible social groupings known as Affinities in Robert Charles Wilson’s near-future novel that initially seems to be heading towards a utopian tale of co-operation and acceptance, but soon turns into a wonderfully complex tale of social revolution. Adam Fisk’s life is fairly humdrum, with […]
Origamy by Rachel Armstong (book review)
The art of origamy (sic) weaves space and time, alternative universes and parallel histories in a mind-bending and befuddling fashion that allows the origamy circus-troop family of Mobius to see and experience any point in space and time. From the beginning, where Mobius has lost much of her memory of her own personal history and […]
Planetfall (book 1) by Emma Newman (book review).
In a small colony settlement on a far planet, the appearance of a stranger from outside brings change to the community and unpleasant echoes of the past in Emma Newman’s haunting interstellar tale ‘Planetfall’. It’s a psychological drama with convincingly complex characters and a multi-layered plot that wraps interplanetary colonisation around faith, biology and betrayal. […]
The Smoke by Simon Ings (book review).
Simon Ings brings us an alternative Earth in his latest book ‘The Smoke’, where history has diverged at some point from what we know to produce something far more bizarre than usually encountered in alternative histories. This is due to the pivotal event where this world split from our own being a biological discovery rather […]
Something Coming Through by Paul McAuley (book review).
When the alien Jackaroo come to Earth, they claim to be concerned only with the welfare of mankind. They provide access to fifteen extra-solar planets for mankind to colonise and from these worlds come a steady stream of alien artefacts from the lost Elder Cultures, artefacts that are little understood but that affect people in […]
Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds (book review).
I have found all of Alastair Reynolds’ ‘Revelation Space’ books and short stories to be wonderfully atmospheric and perpetually gripping and, out of all of them, the standalone novel ‘The Prefect’, featuring Prefect Tom Dreyfus, was my favourite. On his website, Alastair Reynolds had made a comment that he thought it unlikely that he would […]
By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (book review).
A century or so from now, the problem of famine has been overcome by a technique that transforms hair into solar energy collectors that works by a kind of photosynthesis, so that nobody need eat food any more. This means that the poor must wear their hair long in order to survive, allowing them to […]
Artemis by Andy Weir (book review).
Unlike half of the world’s population, I haven’t read Andy Weir’s debut novel ‘The Martian’, but in common with the other half of the population I did watch the film and rather enjoyed it. Andy Weir returns to the world of populist hard SF with ‘Artemis’ which takes us this time to the Moon, location […]
