In the old days books were described as 'X meets Y', while more recently it's the fans who get the mention - in this case 'perfect for fans of Orphan Black, Killing Eve and Keeping it Real ' though we also get in the title tag ' Blade Runner meets Barbie '. There's an element of truth in most of these, but Maud Woolf has nonetheless pulled off an entertaining and different novel. Lulabelle Rock is a film star who over the years has accumulated 12 Portraits - these are not human (so not clones as they are described in the blurb), but are replicas, pretty well only distinguishable by not having palm prints or the usual stuff inside their body. The idea is that the Portraits can be used to do boring tasks that Lulabelle can't be bothered with, from social media to guest appearances. But for whatever reason she has create a thirteenth Portrait, the first person narrator of the book, who is given the task of decommissioning all the rest. (If a human did...

The third novel in a series can be a bit of a let down, but Robert Jackson Bennett makes this the best so far. In his beautifully imagined world which has advanced biological technology while otherwise being near-medieval we once more encounter the unlikely pair of investigator Dinios Kol and his boss, Ana Dolabra whose ability to pull together information from multiple sources to come to deductions isn’t quite human - and whose personality is abrasive to say the least. They are called in to deal with what appears to be a relatively simple murder with a clear perpetrator, but that conclusion risks political instability as the daughter of one leading family is killed by the son of another - the two lines being close to Montagues and Capulets in their hatred for each other, even though their businesses are intertwined. What gradually becomes revealed is a far more complex plot involving a horrendous biological mechanism that, at the same time, gives Bennett a chance to tell us much more ...

This is a re-read of a 1964 science fiction novel that in some ways holds up very well, though there are some issues. Sunburst is what you might call an anti-superhero novel. After an accident at the local nuclear power plant, Sorrel Park is now the only town in the US with a coal-fired power plant and is cut off from the rest of the country. Initially this isolation of the town was to stop others hearing more about the nuclear disaster, but when children born after radiation exposure begin to develop psi abilities, the place remains locked down as they prove to be disastrous - after a night of horrendous behaviour they are captured and put in the Dump, surrounded by a field that suppresses psi abilities, stopping them from getting out. As we get into the story the government is getting ready to open up Sorrel Park. The central character, 13-year-old Shandy, who has a had a difficult life after her parents died when she was young, gets pulled into the influence of the scientists who r...

The sub-genre of alternate history has always felt an uncomfortable fit with science fiction - but where else are you going to put it? Two of my favourite classics of the genre both posit a modern England where the Reformation didn't happen and the Catholic Church is still a powerful force. I've already reviewed The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, but I've now re-read Keith Roberts' 1968 classic Pavane . Though usually described as a novel, this is really a linked set of short novellas, featuring an 1960s Britain that follows on from Queen Elizabeth I being assassinated, resulting in a clamping down of Catholicism that also has ended with an iron grip across half the world. The novellas present (mostly) charming snapshots of a rural, low-tech England where steam traction engines pull trains of wagons across the country, long distance communication is largely by semaphore towers and monks work on lithographic printing presses. Roberts does a wonderful job of giving us the ...

It has always seemed a hope that we could help readers to think about science through science fiction, and this latest book in Springer's noble attempt to have crossover titles between science and science fiction (more on the series later) digs into the history of schemes to educate using SF as either bait or a medium of education. Jörg Determann sets out up front that he is not out to tell us how this should be done, but rather to document the attempts. There is a whole range of media here: we begin with university classes on science fiction writing, move onto movies and TV, planetariums, museums, 'The Science of X' books and finally games and the future of the approach. Some sections worked better than others. The movies and TV part was probably most enjoyable, while the planetariums parted seemed somewhat excessive, dedicating a whole chapter to a very niche means of doing science education.  One mixed section was 'The Science of X'. This dealt with the books tha...

Reading Victorian fiction can be difficult without context - in some cases, an annotated version can work wonders. The best remains Martin Gardner's wonderful annotation of the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark , but while the annotation of Jules Verne's moonshot tale lacks Gardner's light touch it still delivers plenty of useful background. I started devouring science fiction when I was around 11 and worked my way through both Verne and H. G. Wells alongside more contemporary books. I found Verne stodgy and slow compared with the dramatic power of War of the Worlds or the humour of The First Men in the Moon , but it was still interesting, and Walter James Miller's 1995 translation works better than the version I came across way back then. What I doubt pre-teen me picked up was the way Verne pokes fun at America where the book is set, though even then I was doubtful about the concept of sending men to the Moon in a projectile from a huge cannon. Surely, I though...

If there was an A to Z of SF greats, while even younger science fiction readers could probably come up with A for Asimov, far fewer are likely to make Z for Zelazny - which is a shame. Unusually, Zelazny spanned science fiction and fantasy - although a touch pulpy, his Princes in Amber series of books were a genuinely different fantasy series - but he was also, without doubt one of the leading SF writers of the twentieth century. Here we get collected what should be some of his greatest short stories and novellas, starting with the classic and poignant A Rose for Ecclesiastes. For some reason in the intro we are told about a story that's not included that should be - 24 Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai - why isn't it here, then? In some ways, the experience of reading the book was a disappointment, because I think I prefer the lowbrow version of Zelazny's writing in those Amber books, rather than his new wave, more intellectual work, which mostly features here. I did enjoy...

Having recently re-read a classic in Neuromancer , a friend asked if I'd come across Macroscope (which I hadn't). Dating back to 1969, it's very much a period piece. It reinforces my view of Piers Anthony as capable of coming up with interesting and different ideas but not being a great writer in terms of style. The macroscope in question is a kind of super-telescope that instead of using photons makes use of macrons (as opposed to macarons) - which travel at the speed of light but don't follow an inverse power law, making it possible to observe in detail what happens at any location in the galaxy. But it can also act as a kind of super-educator with a catch. Central characters initially are two mid-twenties individuals: Brad who is super-intelligent and Ivo who is super-intuitive. They have a mysterious past which is only hinted at - Brad brings in Ivo to try to deal with the aforementioned catch that the macroscope wrecks the brains of intelligent people when trying ...

Sometimes it's good to revisit the classics - in this case not H. G. Wells or Asimov, say, but the archetypal cyberpunk novel. William Gibson did not invent the genre, but this 1984 contribution is standout. (Interesting side note: Gibson makes use of the term 'matrix' for an immersive virtual reality world, admittedly 8 years after it was used on Dr Who , but well ahead of the movie.) Even the opening line has a certain fame. There are some such lines that resonate whether for their quality, such as Austen's 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,' or for different reasons with 'It was a dark and stormy night,' made infamous by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and beloved by Snoopy. Neuromancer gives us an opener that immediately establishes that cyberpunk feel: 'The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.' The central character Case is a former...

This near-future dystopian view of a tech giant taken to the extreme still has the power to bite thirteen years after it was first published, though some flaws are now more obvious. Central character Mae gets a job at the Circle, a sort of Google+Meta+Musk. To begin with all is wonderful, though even early on she gets a shock when she is disciplined for not RSVPing an invitation to something she wasn't interested in, sent simply because her socials said she had once visited a country. As things get more intense, Mae (who frankly can be a little slow on the uptake) becomes a key figure in the Circle, wearing a streaming camera all day and taking viewers around the campus showing what's happening. The message of the company is no secrets, no lies - with everything in the open the world will be better. This may seem a naive view, but it's interesting that in 2009 the then CEO of Google (referring to the Glass product) said ‘If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, ...