Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Let’s say you want to write a superhero story without superheroes. What do you do? Simple. You endow ordinary people with superhuman intelligence and enhanced senses by implanting something in their brains. Chips, maybe. Or nanocytes. Then suddenly...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of the more prolific and successful science fiction authors of the twenty-first century. And the voters at the World Science Fiction Convention confirmed his status as one of the best when they granted his Children of Time Trilogy the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes London. 1952. Twelve years earlier, the United Kingdom had surrendered to Nazi Germany following a brief and humiliating war in Norway. Now, Prime Minister Lord Beaverbrook leads a cabinet that includes the Fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, in the critical post...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When we read a science fiction novel, we’re entitled to expect three things. A story that’s at least minimally plausible. Suspense about how the action will unfold. And a style of writing that clearly conveys what happens in language that communicates...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Christopher Walters is a trauma surgeon in a place where life itself is traumatic. He carries the nominal rank of captain in the United States Army in southern Siberia. There, the Americans are attempting to hold firm on the Western Front in a war with the Novos,...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes When COVID first struck with lethal fury a few years ago, the pessimists among us conjured up visions of a landscape devoid of human life. Bodies in the streets and on the roads. Cities everywhere depopulated. Farmlands lying fallow for lack of attention....
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When Angels Wept is one of the most remarkable works of alternate history I’ve ever come across. A professional historian wrote this award-winning “What-If History of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” and it shows. Author Eric Swedin builds his story...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes It’s 2075, and the human race is in the earliest stages of colonizing the solar system. A trillion-dollar high tech company named Maverick Enterprises has built Elderon, Earth’s first space colony in Low Earth Orbit. It’s designed to house five...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When we think of surveillance so pervasive that it seems impossible to hide, most Americans’ minds turn to today’s China. Certainly, the Chinese have surpassed past totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union and East Germany in tracking the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Somewhere in the vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of stars and innumerable planets in orbit around them, intelligent life must have arisen. The circumstances of our emergence on Earth are unusual. But it’s hubris of the highest...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes All too often dystopian fiction paints the future all in black and gray. But Alice Sabo’s inventive Changed World series is full of life and color. After a killer pandemic late in what seems to be the twenty-first century, one community—presumably among...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Whiz-bang technology leaps from the page in Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata. It’s a suspenseful novel crammed with action. But its main attraction is the artificial life form whose name appears as the novel’s title. LOVs—tiny, genetically engineered...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Here you’ll find my candidates for the nine best among the more than three dozen techno-thrillers I’ve read and reviewed. Of course, you might ask what qualifies a novel to be called a techno-thriller. Definitions seem to vary. But mine is that it’s a story in...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes What might we reasonably expect of a novel set in interplanetary space several centuries in the future? Certainly, at a minimum, some plausible picture of technology more advanced than today’s, right?. No alarm clocks, for example. Or fluorescent lights,...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes In his 2019 techno-thriller Delta-V, Daniel Suarez relates the story of James (J.T.) Tigue and the other seven men and women on a privately financed international team that ventures out to mine resources from the asteroid Ryugu. Now, in Critical Mass, the sequel,...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Anyone who followed the news in the early 1960s is well aware that President John F. Kennedy was, indeed, “surrounded by enemies.” Bryce Zabel chose well when he used the phrase as the title of his 2015 alternate history thriller. JFK’s enemies...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes The Great Silence. The Fermi Paradox. Two names for the same fact: no alien civilization has gotten in touch with us, much less showed their faces on Earth. That, despite the fact that the Milky Way galaxy consists of an uncountably large number of planets...
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Brace yourself. It’s 1943. King Edward VIII sits on the English throne, courtesy of Adolf Hitler. Winston Churchill leads the British government-in-exile from New York City. All Europe marches to Nazi orders, save the Soviet Union. There, savage fighting continues for the third consecutive...
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Get ready for the action and a fast-shifting setting. A CIA black site in Colorado. A sprawling cattle ranch in Oregon. A paleontology dig in northeastern Thailand. And a secret Chinese scientific laboratory underground in Yunnan Province. The book opens there in China as “Distant Rain...
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Dystopian fiction too often aims to sketch out a possible future, taking one of two directions. Either exaggerating what’s gone bad. Or just casting out hints of the problems, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps on the canvas. The characters seem to exist merely to...
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Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.