Science fiction reviews: speculative narratives exploring technology, space, time, and the future of humanity.
In the South Pacific, 1,000 feet below the ocean surface, a United States Navy investigation team discovers a spaceship. It is approximately three hundred years old. It is of American manufacture. And it contains, inside its enormous hull, a perfectly smooth golden sphere that none of them can explain. Dr. Norman Johnson, a psychologist who…
It is January 2021 in San Francisco, and most of the Earth’s human population has emigrated to off-world colonies. Those who remain live under a layer of radioactive dust called kipple, which settles on everything and seems to accumulate faster than it can be cleared. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter for the San Francisco…
Arthur Dent’s house is being demolished to make way for a bypass when he learns that the Earth is also scheduled for demolition — to make way for a hyperspace bypass — and that his friend Ford Prefect is not, in fact, from Guildford, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse….
Charlie Gordon is 32 years old and has an IQ of 68. He works as a janitor at a bakery in New York, takes reading and writing classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults, and wants, more than anything, to be smart. When he is selected for an experimental brain surgery — a…
Dan Simmons published Hyperion in 1989, and the science fiction community has been arguing about where it ranks among the best the genre has produced ever since. The argument usually ends with it near the top. The novel is the first book in the Hyperion Cantos series, and it won the Hugo Award for Best…
An Asylum of Mirrors Chris Panatier’s The Redemption of Morgan Bright is the kind of novel that earns its horrors honestly. Published in 2024 by Angry Robot, it follows Morgan Bright, a woman who checks herself into Hollyhock Asylum under a false identity in order to uncover the truth behind her sister Hadleigh’s death. What…
The Font of All Authority Ever Dundas’s debut novel HellSans is a work of sustained invention. Published in 2022 by Solaris, it imagines a near-future United Kingdom in which a single typeface, HellSans, has been enshrined as the national standard, enforced by law in all public communications and spaces, and capable of inducing a state…
Bootleg Magic in the City of Smoke Jasmine Gower’s debut novel Moonshine arrives with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what kind of book she has written. Published in 2018 by Angry Robot and nominated for the Endeavour Award in 2019, it is a fantasy set in Soot City, a version of 1920s…
