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What I love about Bob Shaw's fiction is that you never know where he is going to take you. Some SF authors have certain themes that preoccupy them, but Bob Shaw seems to be more open to the richness that can come with imagining advances in technology, new worlds, other dimensions. You can go really anywhere. The Ceres Solution might seem to involve two disaffected young people, outsiders who aren't accepted among their peers - a common theme in science-fiction and fantasy - but Bob Shaw obviously has a different spin on it. One of those outsiders is Gretana ty Iltha on the planet Mollan. Warden Vekrynn has selected her for an observation mission to Earth. She has no intention of going to such a place of death, illness and violence, where the people have life spans so much shorter than the 50 centuries that the inhabitants of Mollan enjoy. Vekrynn however suggests that it is precisely an intense experience that would make her life truly interesting. Mocked for her appearance as...

In the introduction to A View from the Stars - a collection of short stories, essays and an interview with the author - Cixin Liu acknowledges how much of a debt is owed to the masters of classic science-fiction, but in such works as The Three-Body Problem series, Liu has also demonstrated the fresh perspective that he and other Chinese writers can bring to the genre with their own particular history and background. Like a lot of SF writers, much of that writing experience and confidence was gained through publication of short stories in specialist SF magazines and online publications, a few of which are collected here along with introductions and essays where the author expands on his ideas for technology, the future and the place of humanity in the universe. When we think of science-fiction, it's usually about advances in technology that make improvements to our lives, allow us to communicate quicker and faster, expand the range of human knowledge, see new worlds, imagine new w...

The first part of Cixin Liu’s epic Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy first appeared in China some 15 years ago and ten years ago in English translation, and since then the Chinese author has been shaping up to be one of the most interesting and original of science-fiction writers, heralding perhaps a new wave of Chinese SF. Judging from the first volume of the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem , his work inevitably shows some classic influences and traditional themes, preparing the ground for an alien first contact/invasion idea, but in other respects, in his blending of hard SF and pulp adventure with political and sociological ideas, he has a unique spin on those familiar themes. The Three-Body Problem opens in China during the Cultural Revolution in the years 1967-68. Ye Wenjie witnesses the prosecution of her father, an astrophysicist, resisting charges of anti-revolutionary intellectualism mounted against him and suffering the consequences. Ye Wenjie is also an astrophysicist...

" What kind of case do you think we have in front of us? ", asks a police officer in charge of a case of an unknown child with a strange tattoo on his chest. " Something long and complicated, I suspect ", says Commissioner Sharko. You can take that as a given particularly as there appears to be a common theme developing in Franck Thilliez's Sharko and Henebelle cases. Le Syndrome [E] and [Gataca] both touched on unusual phenomena relating to brain and body functions, to the coding of DNA and dangerous explorations or experiments with human behaviour. In the case of [Gataca] , that long and complicated route tracing a killer went back 30,000 years, which is a tough cold case to follow. There is another ‘cold’ case here in Atom[ka] , their third joint case, if not going quite as far back as Cro-Magnon times. Christophe Gamblin has been found dead in a freezer, put there while alive and frozen to death after having been tortured, leaving a scratched message in t...

It is no surprise that Hitchcock chose Conrad’s The Secret Agent - not as the 1936 film of that name but ' Sabotage ' made the same year - as one of the style of espionage thrillers with which he would make his reputation. Conrad sets a high bar for the dark murky activities of the secret service, the value of his work evident in the wealth of experience and knowledge that goes into the dealings of international affairs, colonialism, not to mention the darkness at the heart of man. There is certainly plenty of the latter in Under Western Eyes  but, other than the explosive opening, not much that would make a Hitchcock thriller. Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, a student at St Petersburg University, is a not the typical figure to get involved in murder and conspiracy, but when it lands at his door it presents him with a dilemma. He returns to his apartment one evening, intent on working on studies to secure himself a solid position as an academic, only to find Victor Haldin, a fello...

Inevitably, considering Hugo Pratt's travels, living and working around the world, his collection of war stories written between 1969 and 1992 for Gli scorpioni del deserto (The Scorpions of the Desert) are far from typical. Actually, there's nothing inevitable about it of course, as the plotting, motivations of the characters and the wide perspective from all sides of the international conflicts are far from what is commonly found in wartime adventures and exploits. It's a measure of how great an artist Pratt is that even as an Italian national, his view of his home country's operations in North Africa is seen from the perspective of the allied forces and not from what we might expect as a tolerant or excusable view of ordinary Italian soldiers caught up in the conflict, but even the 'enemy' are given a fair hearing. Such an approach is not unlike those found in the adventures of his most famous character Corto Maltese then, and similar characteristics can be...

Despite being a Booker and multiple prize-winning author Anne Enright’s fiction has a reputation, in my mind anyway, of being difficult, miserable family dramas. Aside from not being a follower of what literary critics deem worthy, the descriptions of the content of her books would be enough to put me off reading them. The intense family drama of The Green Road seems to bear out that impression, but at the same time it completely overturns the negative connotations and preconceptions I had about her work. I'm sure some of her other writing might be more difficult and more miserable - that remains to be seen for me - but The Green Road is characterised by beautifully direct, precise and evocative writing, and while indeed family troubles are to the fore, there is rather a deep insightful look into lives struggling to adapt to the changing times, presenting an expansive overview of how lives can take off in unexpected directions. The family in question are the Madigan family, and t...