Book Reviews

Imagine waking up one morning to find that the most advanced minds in history have packed up and left. Not gone to war, not collapsed under their own weight, just gone: beyond the orbit of Mercury, out past the reach of ordinary human concern. That is the world Matthew De Abaitua builds in The Destructives,…

Matthew De Abaitua published If Then in 2015 through Angry Robot Books, and it remains one of the most quietly ambitious British science fiction novels of the past decade. The second book in De Abaitua’s loose Seizure Trilogy (following The Red Men), it takes the familiar dystopian premise of algorithmic control and does something genuinely…

K.C. Alexander’s debut novel Necrotech arrived in 2016 from Angry Robot, the first entry in the SINless series. It drops you into a near-future cityscape where corporations own everything worth owning, where the government issues a SIN (Security Identification Number) to every citizen, and where people who refuse that system become SINless: off the grid,…

Imagine a city buried beneath the earth, sealed away from everything the old world once knew, where the ruling class has decided that the most dangerous thing a citizen can do is read. That is the premise behind Carrie Patel’s Recoletta trilogy, and Cities and Thrones, the second installment published in 2015 by Angry Robot,…

Tristan Palmgren’s debut novel opens inside a Carthusian monastery outside Florence in 1348, as the Black Death begins its catastrophic sweep through Europe. Brother Niccoluccio Caracciolo has watched his brothers die one by one. He is the last alive, surrounded by the silence they left behind, his faith shaken and his prayers going unanswered. Into…

Megan E. O’Keefe’s debut novel drops readers into the desert city of Aransa, a mining settlement perched on the edge of a vast, scorched wasteland. Published in January 2016 by Angry Robot, Steal the Sky is the first volume of the Scorched Continent trilogy, and it announces O’Keefe as a writer with sharp instincts for…

Kameron Hurley’s Empire Ascendant, the second volume of the Worldbreaker Saga, picks up where 2014’s The Mirror Empire left off and immediately makes everything worse. Published in 2015 by Angry Robot Books, this 460-page epic fantasy drops readers into a world where parallel universes are colliding, genocide is state policy, and every character who survived…

Wesley Chu’s The Rise of Io arrived in October 2016 as the first book in a new duology set in the same universe as his Tao trilogy, and it came with one of the most appealing premises in recent SF: a habitual loser, both human and alien, thrown together by accident and forced to figure…

Published in October 2015 by Angry Robot, The Flux is the second novel in Ferrett Steinmetz’s ‘Mancer trilogy, following Flex and preceding Fix. The series is built on a premise that sounds whimsical but plays out with real emotional weight: in this version of our world, obsession creates magic. Love something deeply enough, whether it’s…