|summary=It is perhaps appropriate for a book that centres around the battle for the afterlife to begin this review with a confession: this was my first encounter with Iain M Banks' Culture series of science fiction novels. At first, I worried that this put me at a significant disadvantage as for the first 100 or so pages, I spend most of the time being completely confused about what was going on. However, as the strands started to come together, it became apparent that this is partly Banks' style and indeed it's one he uses in his non-science fiction books too. Keep going, it does come together.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841498939</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Gibson
|title=Zero History
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It's almost obligatory when writing anything about William Gibson to recall that in an earlier short story, he invented the term 'cyberspace'. Gibson remains at the cutting edge of what is 'cool'. Like most of his books, Zero History is a thriller, but at its core are issues surrounding technology, how we interact with it, branding and marketing. It would be easy to criticise much of his content as being too shallow and concerned with 'nothing' - but then that's part of his point.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670919527</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charles Stross
|title=The Fuller Memorandum
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Our world is not as it seems. We share it with aliens, zombies, demonic spirits, with ancient god-like entities that are all keen to eat our bodies and devour our souls. It's lucky, then, that we have the British secret service to protect us, more specifically a top secret branch of the secret service called The Laundry. This organisation is so secret that even the bosses at MI6 don't know of its existence. The point of the Laundry is to keep all the myriad of terrors endangering the Earth at bay by the careful use of science, technology and magic, magic being a little known branch of applied maths.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841497703</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ian McDonald
|title=The Dervish House
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=The reader is plunged straight away into the busy, bustling centre of Istanbul. And climate change appears to have arrived. In 2022 thousands of Istanbul's citizens died in a heatwave and now, only three years later it's 'Thirty-three degrees in April, at seven in the morning. Unthinkable.' You can almost hear the collective thrum of all those air-conditioning units trying to make life bearable for the local people.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575080531</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jeff Somers
|title=The Terminal State
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=In this future, desolate, post-apocalyptic world, the last thing Avery Cates wants to do is choose a side. The police are androids, artificial cases for clones of people who die in the making, and the other source of power is not much better. But it's them that pressgang him into joining their army. What little freedom and power he had as a lone gunman is lost, as he's given nanotech augments to make him a super-soldier. Which is bad news - as is the fact the two most powerful and hated people in Cates's universe are the very people who buy him from the army to do one last job - and they can be very persuasive about him accepting it...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841498750</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Terry Dehart
|title=The Unit
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=We all know about the nuclear family, well now meet the post-nuclear family in Terry De Hart's brutal vision of a post apocalyptic America.
We know the score; terrorists attack key US cities with nuclear devices, US retaliates on the nations supporting the terrorist. There is only one possible outcome, mass casualties and the breakdown of civil society leading to the rise of barbarism in a devastated landscape in the grip of a nuclear winter. Within this madness a family survives not knowing how much of the country or the world has been destroyed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841499331</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ken MacLeod
|title=The Restoration Game
|rating=5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Lucy Stone works for a videogame company in Edinburgh. She enjoys the job - particularly being one of the boys - and it's given her a sense of belonging that she'd craved but never had. And then her mother calls. A CIA spook, Amanda wants Lucy's firm to rewrite their upcoming game to feature the mythology of a small ex-Soviet republic. Krassnia is where Lucy was born, where she lived for her first seven years, and where she spent the scariest day of her life. Amanda wrote a seminal work on Krassnian mythology and Lucy uses this to reshape the game, knowing that it's likely to be used as a tool in a hoped-for colour revolution.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841496472</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Wooding
|title=Black Lung Captain: Tales of the Ketty Jay
|rating=4.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Things on board the Ketty Jay have never been as low. Darian Frey and his crew are even having trouble thieving from defenceless orphanages. So when the next token job-they-can't-refuse comes along, they fall under it's spell. An explorer has returned with tales of untold riches, courtesy of the most mysterious artefacts and treasures of an unknown civilization. The fact that the remains are those of an aircraft crashed in the most Arctic of rainforests, inhabited by the most evil beast-men monsters, is neither here nor there. The problems start with what they find there, which is worse than anyone could have expected - or indeed years ago, with a mysterious connection between the remains and the more unusual crewmember...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575085177</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Beckett
|title=The Holy Machine
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=In the near future, only Illyria city stands for science, technology and progress in a world dominated by religious fundamentalism of every faith (and then some). The city was founded as a haven for those intellectuals not possessing any such religious convictions, who advocated reason and logic instead, and were persecuted for their 'blasphemies' in the early stages of the upheaval. George Simling, the introvert protagonist and second generation Illyrian, falls in love with a beautiful woman called Lucy. Unfortunately however, Lucy is actually a syntec, a robot ASPU: Advanced Sensory Pleasure Unit, a prostitute. As George obsessively visits her, he realises that she is starting to develop a level of consciousness and self-awareness outside of her programming. Lucy is due for a routine mind-wipe so George decides to flee with her to the technophobic outlands in order to save this newly discovered consciousness.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848874626</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Pittacus Lore
|title=I am Number Four
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Meet John Smith. By all appearances he is the usual fifteen year old American kid, except for the fact he and his 'father' shift location every few months. John is certainly not his real name, but has to face up to reality - school bullies, hot girls and in fact any friends being unattainable with such a peripatetic lifestyle. 'Dad' stays at home, scanning the internet and all news sources, in order to protect the pair - for they are among the remaining dozen or so inhabitants of Lorien, living in hidden exile on Earth, but hunted by their enemies from yet another alien race. Can the fact they are permanently pursued grant them any peace - especially when 'John' is about to undergo some rather prominent alien-style puberty?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141332476</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Cobley
|title=The Orphaned Worlds (Humanity's Fire)
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=The planet Darien, once a lost outpost where earth colonists co-existed with the native Uvovo, is now the focal point of an intergalactic struggle. Hegemony forces are in occupation mode, Earth is standing back reined in by inter-planetary politics, whilst planet-side local alliances are fighting back guerrilla-style. This is the least of the galaxy's concerns, however. It might even get air-brushed out as a little minor difficulty in the history-books-to-come. There is a much bigger problem to worry about.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841496332</amazonuk>
}}
