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I think I can see why Alastair Reynolds has decided to expand on his earlier novel The Prefect (repackaged as Aurora Rising ) and come around to the idea that there are more adventures to tell within the ranks of Panoply, the organisation responsible for monitoring the democratic process within the Glitter Band in the author’s Revelation Space universe. I’m not sure why I hadn’t noticed it before (perhaps because there’s less of a mass killer-robot distraction in this one), but the parallel of the role of the Prefects trying to uphold federalism and democracy within the Glitter Band becomes much more obvious in Elysium Fire when the question of “the will of the people” of a handful of worlds wanting to “take back control” through autonomy arises. To put it another way, it seems like there is going to be what you might call a ‘Glexit’ crisis. That however isn’t the main problem that the agents of Panoply have to deal with in this second Prefect Dreyfus novel, although as you’d imagine...

It was clear that the Asterix series was never going to be the same without its original creators René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo involved, although the series managed very well with Uderzo taking on both writing and drawing duties after Goscinny’s death in 1977. Since Uderzo retired in 2009, the series has continued with the new creative team of Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad, and to be honest, on a surface glance at Asterix and the Chariot Race (their third post-Uderzo title and the 37th title in the series) you’d scarcely notice the difference. Uderzo’s drawing style is replicated well, the characters retain their familiar characteristics, poses and mannerisms, and the plot is classic Asterix. There is nonetheless a nagging feeling that something is missing. The Roman-bashing Gauls are back in action then, but in Asterix and the Chariot Race  it’s not so much a one-sided magic potion-fuelled punch-up as a competitive race in the manner of Asterix and the Olympic Games  ...

It doesn’t take too long to notice that Bloody January has all the classic ingredients and, most essentially, the style of a classic noir. The only real differences here is that we are walking down the mean streets of Glasgow and that the main detective isn’t a private one but one of dubious character in the Glasgow police force. Other than that, the character of corruption and moral decay is as plain as the mean streets, wasteland areas, damp housing schemes, dingy brothels, bleak drinking dens and dodgy nightclubs of a bloody January in the city in 1973. The nature of the characters that inhabit this moral wasteland and the situation that they find themselves in is also one familiar to fans of classic noir, but this is no pastiche; if it feels noir, then it’s the nature of the subject and Alan Parks’ debut is very much rooted in the its own time and place. In such an environment our lead detective Harry McCoy would of course be a heavy drinker, would be familiar with and no doubt sa...

The ambitious concept, the format and the structure don’t immediately strike one as original, but sometimes it’s what you do with an idea that is important and there’s no reason why Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon can’t be better and more purposeful that some of the models it brings to mind. In the case of Gnomon , the obvious comparisons are works by David Mitchell, Christopher Nolan and – almost inevitably these days when you are dealing with high concept science-fiction – Philip K Dick. Gnomon is made up of a number of interconnected stories, exotic in nature, covering cast distances of space and time in the manner of Mitchell’s Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas – and there’s a little bit of the computer game world and Orpheus mythology of Mitchell’s opera with Michel van der Aa, Sunken Garden . There’s an element of Christopher Nolan’s Inception in that those identities are overlaid, imported into the mind and ‘lived’ in a mental dream-state, adopting a persona from a scanned memory, and the...

They certainly seem to do things differently in the police force for the Black Forest region of Germany, but then the case faced by Freiburg detective inspector Louise Boni is quite unusual in how it develops and how it is investigated. In fact, the Freiburg police are on the case even before it becomes an incident, showing quite a bit of interest in a Buddhist monk who has mysteriously appeared near Liebau and is roaming silently across the snowy landscape of the Black Forest region, bearing some signs of injury. For some reason the local authorities are quite concerned about this - not about the monk’s injuries or the fact that he is completely unprepared for the elements, but where he has come from and what he is doing out there at all. The monk doesn’t seem to speak any of the common European languages of the region, so Louise Boni is called in to help out. Again, it’s hard to understand the rationale of the police force, since Boni is off-duty and not physically or mentally in goo...