If you want to read a book that’ll really show how horrific people can be to one another then this is it. It tells the story of the murders of Mollie Burkhart’s family. They were all members of the Osage tribe; in the 1920s they were among the richest people in the world. And yet […]
Published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies ; Issue #225, May 11, 2017 This is a wonderful story. I actually don’t want to say anything at all about it, because I think not knowing any details is best. So that’s all I’m going to say. Just read it, you won’t be disappointed.
Humanity is dying out. Climate change. Terrorism. Disease. People have accepted that these is no future, just a slow decline and then they’ll be no more. The colonies on Mars have resulted in death, there will be no new missions to Mars. Humanity is resigned to extinction. Susannah doesn’t have any more hope than anyone […]
First published by Uncanny A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy in May 2017. Okay, this is wonderful. There is something about Ursula Vernon’s writing that just works so well with my brain. I love her no nonsense characters, and her gentle subverting of tropes. Well, not always gentle, there can be trampling underfoot of […]
Published in Apex Magazine, August 2017 This is one of those short stories that I just didn’t gel with, I think I needed it to be longer… defeats to purpose of a short story, I know, but I needed to know a bit more about the ending. This isn’t, I don’t think, and problem with […]
Published in Uncanny Magazine, Sept/Oct 2017. Issue 17. Short stories often don’t really work for me. Either too little happens or too much. Also being so short they often don’t have enough time and space to devote to character development. And that’s often what makes a story, long or short, work for me. But I […]
I don’t think I would have picked this book up at all if it hadn’t been nominated for a Hugo this year. The trilogy The Divine Cities is nominated in the Best Series category, and I am attempting to read at least one book in each series before voting.1 I am so glad that this […]
The Books of the Raksura ; 1 So after reading the wonderful murderbot books1 I wanted to read more by Wells. And this is the first book in the The Books of the Raksura which is nominated for Best Series in the 2018 Hugos I figured this was a good place to start. The main […]
First published by Uncanny A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy in May 2017. Finley has just been bitten by a vampire. Now he has to deal with becoming a vampire himself, and an unregistered one at that. He certainly didn’t ask to be turned, and most definitely never filled out the proper paperwork. Plus […]
Published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine September/October 2017 – read it online Ever since the “blackout” when a virus attacked their database the inhabitants of a generation ship have prioritised a way of keeping their history alive. Whether that is historical events from earth, or specific tunes or re-enactments of popular films, the Memory Project […]
Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine #132, September 2017 Bot 9 has just been activated after a long time offline. The Ship it serves has a huge list of to-do activities and it has been tasked to track down an Incidental, a pest infestation. But Bot 9 is slightly concerned that something is going on that […]
The Machinaries of Empire Although this novelette is part of the larger Machinaries ‘verse, you can read it without any knowledge of that wider world as it is a prequel. So it also contains no spoilers, unless you count getting to know a character before they appeared in Ninefox Gambit a spoiler… It features Shuos […]