To The Last Page

There are various sides to Alastair Reynolds’s work, although personally - with the exception of Pushing Ice  - I’ve yet to find anything that measures up to his initial Revelation Space trilogy of novels (and even there I’m not quite as fond of Chasm City as the other two books). One interesting recent development however is his YA novel Revenger , which seems to be continuing in the forthcoming Revealer , but just as promising is the author’s expansion of the Revelation Space universe in his Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies series. Be warned however, this first book in what is now being extended as a series was originally published in 2008 as The Prefect . At the time, The Prefect didn’t strike me as one of Alastair Reynolds’s best books, but perhaps that was judging it by the expansive scale and rather more imaginative ideas of the other Revelation Space universe books. The Prefect is more in keeping with the pulp-SF origins of Reynolds’s short-fiction and on a level of action and...

The reader is likely to have certain expectations when it comes to Stephen Donaldson embarking on a new fantasy series. Some of them are met in Seventh Decimate , the first book of The Great God’s War, and some are not. For others we’ll have to just have to wait until the series really gets going, because Seventh Decimate has all the appearances of an introduction to a fantasy world that is going to get a lot bigger with a lot more complex moral questions to be resolved. As an opening book, Seventh Decimate certainly starts off in a fairly straightforward and conventional manner, but a more expansive view is hinted at, and it might even be the whole purpose of the author’s latest reworking of fantasy genre. We begin in a familiar and basic warring kingdoms setting, where there are (initially at least) only two kingdoms in conflict; Belleger in the south and Amika to the north. An old enmity exists based on an ancient and unreliable legend, and the result has been endless battles, ski...

Evolving from the irreverent tone of his earlier violent crime fiction, I guess we’ve all had to accept that Christopher Brookmyre is now the more mature Chris Brookmyre, but it can’t be denied that the author was running out of steam in a limited genre that he had metaphorically as well as literally beaten to death. Since then he’s been more ambitious in his range and subject matter and his latest science-fiction work Places in the Darkness is one of his most promising ventures yet. Alice Blake of the Federation of National Governments has been assigned a six-month posting to Ciudad de Cielo to replace the former head of Security oversight on the station. CdC is a space station in orbit seventy thousand kilometres above Ocean Terminal on earth. As they are currently working on a project to build a spaceship, the Arca Estrella to set out for other habitable planets, the station is supposed to be an ideal, a place that “should be clean and pure because it’s the birthplace of mankind’s ...

One of the pitfalls of writing apocalyptic fiction is the question of scale. How do you convey the immense consequences of a worldwide disaster/pandemic, but also keep it relatable on an individual human level? Most books of this kind find the need to focus on a small group or community as a microcosm of the wider world, and there’s justification for this in the simple fact that the focus is always likely to be on immediate local concerns, and since worldwide communications will be one of the first things to go, who knows what is going on in the wider world anyway? Nora Roberts – not an author you would expect to operate with this genre – seems to have a clear concept and structure in mind in Year One , the first book of her apocalyptic fiction series, Chronicles of the One. The book aims big at the opening, with a deadly pandemic that has wiped out two billion people by the time you get to page 45. There is then a focus on a smaller group of people, or at least several small teams of ...