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It doesn't necessarily have to, but science-fiction can present us with new ways of viewing who we are as people and as a society right now, how we confront genuine issues that are around us today, how we respond to changes and consider where that might take us in the future. Traditionally, that often that involves our relationship with technology, a reality that seems to be becoming more science-fiction-like every day. There are many innovative ways of exploring that subject and, as a black writer writing about a family of Nigerian origin, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor definitely takes an interesting and unusual approach to those themes in Death of the Author . What is really unusual in her approach to SF is that the futuristic science-fiction appears a side issue to the main story set in a more familiar reality only slightly more advanced than the present day. That's a style more often employed in the genre of fantasy, where they want to keep one foot in...

The focus of Ed McBain's take on crime in Guns is, unsurprisingly, on guns. You can look at the logistics of carrying out a hold-up on a New York liquor store in a number of ways and Colley has been weighting the options up. The fact that it's in the middle of an August heatwave could play a part in how things play out, he's a little superstitious that it's the thirteenth job he has worked on with Jocko and their driver Teddy, but the one factor that is inevitably going to be the most significant on this or any job is the use of guns. But Colley trusts these guys and, after all, they even gifted him with the gun he carries after being released from prison, so despite his reservations outside the store, Colley is in. He's right to be worried though because the thing with guns is, while it gives you enormous power and control, what happens when someone else in the liquor store also has a gun? And what if it's two cops holding guns? The first 30 or so pages of Gun...

It's not unusual for a PI crime thriller to open with the discovery a dead body, but Where There’s Smoke is unusual in that it opens with the absence of a dead body. To be accurate, the corpse of Anthony Gibson has been taken from Abner Boone’s funeral parlour. Abner isn't keen on reporting the disappearance - it wouldn't be good for business - and he hope that if it's found quickly before the funeral, he can avoid telling the family of the loss. To that end he employs former police lieutenant, Benjamin Smoke to help him out. Smoke is 48 but retired from police, unsatisfied that he has never had a really difficult case to solve, everything has been routine, he has never come across anything that resembles a perfect crime. This one however intrigues him enough to want to look into it a little bit further, and inevitably the more he finds out the more odd and complicated it looks. The deceased's son suspects that the road accident that killed Anthony is murder as Ton...

Brian Moore is a difficult writer to pin down - and it's literally decades since the time I was reading him - but there are at least a few constants which you can easily associate with his Belfast, Northern Ireland background, his characters often struggling with Catholic guilt when confronted with events that challenge their beliefs in who they think they are. Those are more evident in his earlier books located in Ireland, but living in Canada his works gradually acquired a wider and less easily definable character (although I remember those themes still being to the forefront in Black Robe ), and a wider popular readership leading to a number of major film adaptations. One book which is harder to reconcile with anything else in his writing - other than the nature of writing itself - is The Great Victorian Collection . The premise clearly lays out what is in essence a very intriguing idea, but one you would think has limited scope to develop. Anthony Maloney, an assistant professo...