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  • 10/09/2022 20:01 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Stars and Bones cover

    Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell

    (Titan Books, 2022)

    Reviewed by Stuart Carter

    Gareth L. Powell has, it seems, spent his pandemic rewatching some classic science fiction cinema, in particular Alien, Aliens, Battlestar Galactica, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to come up with his own unique remix. Beginning with a classic horror opener (but it is only an opener!) when a spaceship detects a strange signal and impetuous humans land to investigate, only to wake something not only unpleasant but eager to spread, using the vector of those impetuous humans.

    However, Stars and Bones does a lot of heavy world-building before the unpleasantness properly kicks off. For instance, 200 years before the events of Stars and Bones, on late 21st century Earth, World War 3 had broken out. We were only rescued by the intervention of omniscient aliens, who stopped the rain of deadly nuclear missiles when, literally at the very last moment, they detected a Zefram Cochrane-style invention of warp drive. Impressed by our human smarts, they saved the planet. Despite our impressive brains (or, rather, one brain), they were deeply unhappy with the attempted global suicide, and so humanity, although saved, was banished from Earth. The entire population (along with some domestic pets) was moved into hundreds of gigantic space arks and set to travel the cosmos until such time as we might again be trusted to take proper care of a proper planet.

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    Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.


  • 07/09/2022 21:00 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Braking Day cover

    Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji

    (Jo Fletcher Books, 2022)

    Reviewed by Phil Nicholls

    Scottish author Adam Oyebanji makes a strong impression with his debut novel. Midshipman Ravi MacLeod is training to be an officer aboard the colony ship Archimedes. The voyage to Destination World, Tau Ceti, has taken five generations and Braking Day is approaching. This is the day when the Archimedes, along with her companion vessels Bohr and Chandrasekhar, will begin deceleration as a prelude to orbiting their intended colony planet.

    The detailed setting aboard Ravi’s ship is fascinating. The Archimedes has eight habitation rings, rotating in opposing pairs. However, the seventh, Ghana, is showing wear from the long journey and the eighth, Hungary, is a burnt-out wreck. While both rings appear in the plot, Oyebanji does not feel the need to provide the full backstory for their history. Instead, a few snippets of detail are scattered through the book and the setting feels so much more real for Oyebanji’s light touch.

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    Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.


  • 04/09/2022 14:08 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Kings of a Dead World cover

    Kings of a Dead World by Jamie Mollart

    (Sandstone Press, 2021)

    Reviewed by John Dodd

    What would happen if the governments of the world accepted that there were too many people on the planet and took measures to reduce the population by any means? They started by killing the criminals, then euthanising those with terminal diseases, then euthanising anyone older than a certain age. At this point, you’re fairly sure that you’re in a really dark world where there’s not going to be much in the way of happy endings. Then they decide that there’s still too many people, so huge buildings are made to put people to sleep for a long time, which allows the minimal resources that are available to be used as they need to be.

    There’s a lot to take in from the start, it’s a cross between the Matrix and Dark City, where the sleeping pods are looked over by Janitors, who have a massive responsibility in watching over those who are in their block of pods, but literally no oversight, they can do as they wish, when they wish, how they wish.

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    Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.


  • 02/09/2022 11:35 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Kairos cover

    Kairos by Gwyneth Jones

    (Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2021)

    Reviewed by Nick Hubble

    It’s fantastic to see Gollancz reissuing so many of Gwyneth Jones’s novels in the, ahem, ‘Masterworks’ series. Whether one should wish classic status on any author is a moot point, but I can’t think of many writers in the SF field whose work over the last four decades is as distinctively personal and yet as universal in its significance. While the Clarke-Award-winning Bold as Love (2001) and Life (2004), previously unpublished in the UK, are perhaps the most obvious selections for this series, the inclusion of Kairos is the one that gives me the greatest joy. This is in part because some of it is set in Brighton, where Jones lives, in areas well known to me such as the wasteland near the racecourse and the Whitehawk neolithic camp. Generally, the ambience is evocative of the rundown alternative Brighton, rather than the developers’ nightmare which has emerged in recent years. However, more importantly, Kairos is the novel which best captures the magnitude of the change during that strange period in the 1980s when British history was to jump track so catastrophically.

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    Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.


  • 10/07/2022 11:09 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Anthropocene Unconscious cover

    The Anthropocene Unconscious by Mark Bould

    (Verso Books, 2021)

    Reviewed by Jamie Mollart

    In 2016 the acclaimed Indian author, Amitav Ghosh, wrote ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable’, widely considered to be one of the most important books to address the way Climate Change is approached in literature.

    He argues future generations will be amazed at the way in which we have collectively ignored the most pressing threat to our species within our collective art and literature. He uses the term ‘Anthropocene’ specifically in reference to our attempt at terrestrial destruction rather than the literal definition of ‘age of man’.

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    Review from BSFA Review 16 - Download your copy here.


  • 05/07/2022 19:49 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    World Brain cover

    World Brain by H.G. Wells

    (MIT Press, 2021)

    Reviewed by Paul Graham Raven

    As I began to draft this review, I read a newsletter with a section titled “Can the world computer save the world?”, excerpting three essays by a tenacious technologist (who I shall decline to name) which advance a hand-wringing “what went wrong?” critique of cryptocurrency in order to conclude that—shock, horror, &c.—the particular flavour of imaginary money they work with (and in which they are presumably well-supplied) is the One True Coin that can “out-perform current models of capitalism”. (The newsletter’s curator, to his credit, notes that this bit “goes a bit too ‘computers can do anything’ for me”, which may explain his header’s implicit invocation of Betteridge’s Law.)

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    Review from BSFA Review 16 - Download your copy here.


  • 02/07/2022 10:07 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Alien3: The Unproduced Screenplay cover

    Alien3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson by Pat Cadigan and William Gibson

    (Titan Books, 2021)

    Reviewed by Dev Agarwal

    While no BSFA reader would ever judge a book by its cover, you may find that Alien3 comes so loaded with cultural signifiers that you have to parse them before cracking it open. Like a riddle it has both two authors and only one. It is unproduced (as a film) yet it is also the third adaptation of William Gibson’s script (following a graphic novel and an audio drama).

    Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) are both such prominent works that they need no introduction here. The documentary of the film, Memory: The Origins of Alien (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2019) is testament to the ongoing attraction that the concept holds to genre consumers and film fans alike.

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    Review from BSFA Review 16 - Download your copy here.


  • 28/06/2022 19:12 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Open Door and Other Stories cover

    The Open Door and Other Stories of the Seen & Unseen by Margaret Oliphant

    (British Library, 2021)

    Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

    One of the most interesting writers of the late 19th century was “Mrs Oliphant” (1828-1897), a novelist, short-story writer and critic of immense if variable productivity who, after her husband’s death in 1879 supported an extended family through her literary efforts. While a number of her novels were best-sellers, she is probably best-known today for her supernatural fiction.

    In The Open Door Mike Ashley presents six stories with an introduction which asks, though doesn’t really answer, why so many British women of that time wrote ghost stories. For Oliphant, the reasons Ashley gives seem sound, linking fashionable spiritualism and a personal set of family traumas and losses. Most of the stories here offer glimpses into what Oliphant was to call the “Unseen”, the surrounding Afterlife which, according to some Spiritualist beliefs, can communicate with us. There’s a sense of loss, melancholy, and moral questioning which speaks well to the modern reader.

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    Review from BSFA Review 16 - Download your copy here.


  • 25/06/2022 08:22 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    The Book of Accidents cover

    The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig

    (Del Rey, 2021)

    Reviewed by Jamie Mollart

    This is a massive book in pages, ideas, style, genres, and in pretty much every way. I picked it up and for the first 50 pages it felt like Stephen King, and I mean that as a compliment.

    It’s got that classic horror feel and is set up using many of King’s tropes: a dysfunctional family moving back to the town where the father grew up; things not being quite why they seem; creepy neighbours; and a history in the town which looks set to resurface with dire consequences.

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    Review from BSFA Review 16 - Download your copy here.


  • 21/06/2022 20:02 | Anonymous member (Administrator)

    Horseman cover

    Horseman by Christina Henry

    (Titan Books, 2021)

    Reviewed by Dave M. Roberts

    Washington Irving’s story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow makes a point of the ambiguity in relating the local legend of the headless horseman. When Ichabod Crane had his encounter with the horseman, there was question after the event as to whether he had had a genuinely supernatural experience, or if he’d been the subject of a rather brutal practical joke, most likely at the hand of Abraham van Brunt, his rival for the hand of Katrina van Tassel. As Crane disappeared that night, the townsfolk never knew the actual truth, although after rereading the story it seems fairly clear to me it was the latter.

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    Review from BSFA Review 16 - Download your copy here.


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