Tag: reviews

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.
But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.
On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.
But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

Winner: 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella
Winner: 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novella
Winner: 2018 Alex Award
Winner: 2018 Locus Award
One of the Verge’s Best Books of 2017
A New York Times and USA Today Bestseller

So, All Systems Red won a *lot* of stuff. And it’s just utterly splendid. A somewhat depressed Company supplied SecUnit hacks its own governor unit so can pretty much do what it likes, calls itself Murderbot (long story) and has a soft spot for soap operas. Then some creatures start attacking Murderbot’s clients and it, somewhat reluctantly, is forced to do something about it.

I love Murderbot. The story might be short (well, it *is* a novella), but it’s fast and funny, and the plot fairly whistles along. It’s also a lovely character study, delving into the mind of a machine hybrid that’s not entirely sure who it is, or wants to be.

You see, Murderbot doesn’t really like people. It just wants to be left alone to get on with watching the long-running Sanctuary Moon. I can empathise a lot with Murderbot.

All Systems Red is the first of four (at time of writing) in the Murderbot Diaries, and I’m greatly looking forward to following their adventures.

You can get All Systems Red here (affiliate link)

All Systems Red by Martha Wells is published by Tor. You can find Martha Wells on twitter @marthawells1 or on her website marthawells.com

Published by Orenda Books
Source: Review copy
Married couple Jack and Ali Gardiner move to a self-sufficient spiritual commune in the English Fens, desperate for fresh start. The local village is known for the witches who once resided there and Rosalind House, where the commune has been established, is a former psychiatric home, with a disturbing history.
When Jack and Ali arrive, a chain of unexpected and unexplained events is set off, and it becomes clear that they are not all that they seem. As the residents become twitchy, and the villagers suspicious, events from the past come back to haunt them, and someone is seeking retribution…

The Lingering is a deliciously creepy gothic tale of strange goings-on in a mysterious former psychiatric institution populated by some slightly odd characters.

What more do you need to know?

Oh, fine. Right, it’s also part psychological thriller, part domestic intrigue, part ghost story, and entirely brilliant. It’s got a lovely slow-burn build up where the characters and setting are introduced and you think that things might be a *bit* odd but then the tension starts ratcheting up, notch by inevitable notch. Given that the story is set in an abandoned asylum, you know that the characters aren’t in for a nice little summer holiday.

You’ll never look at a bathtub in quite the same way ever again, I can assure you.

There’s a creeping sense of unease as the story progresses and we find out more about Ali and Jack Gardiner, and what brought them to the self-contained commune in the Fens. It’s clear pretty much from the off that they’re hiding secrets, both from the commune and from each other, and it’s fascinating watching that play out over the course of the story. I loved Smeaton Dunsmore, head of the cult-like community lead by The Book of Light, and fellow commune-member Angela Fairley’s hunt for the paranormal in the halls of the former hospital.

And Rosalind House plays such a central role in the story, with its myths and legends about what might have happened there. It’s a fabulously creepy setting, and coupled with the what-are-they-really-up-to semi-religious commune, you’ve got the perfect mix.

If you like your psychological thrillers with a dash of paranormal, or your mysteries with a hint of Halloween chill, The Lingering will be right up your street.  Perfect for a cosy night wrapped up on the sofa. Just make sure you’ve got all the lights on…

Huge kudos to Mark Swan (@kidethic) for another stunning cover. It captures the mood of the book perfectly.

The Lingering by SJI Holliday is published by Orenda Books and is out now. Many thanks to Karen Sullivan and Anne Cater at Orenda for the review copy.

She killed the man who trained her. She killed the fleet that came for her. She killed the planet that caged her. Now she must confront her father.
Mars Xi is on the run, a bounty on her head and a kill count on her conscience. All she has left are her mutant cat Ocho and her fellow human weapon Pale, a young boy wracked by seizures who can kill with a thought. She needs him treated, and she needs to escape, and the only thread left to pull is her frayed connection to her father, Marius Teo. That thread will take her to the outskirts of the galaxy, to grapple with witch-cults and privately-owned planets, and into the hands of the man who engineered her birth.

This is the third (and final?) book in Corey J. White’s Voidwitch Saga, the first being the splendid Killing Gravity (a ‘a kick-ass, whip-smart sci-fi short story/novella’). Book 2, Void Black Shadow continued in much the same vein. Mars Xi, genetically engineered psychic voidwitch is on a mission to retrieve one of her friends, and woe betide anyone who gets in her way.

These books are bloody, brutal and relentless. And cracking entertainment. Mars is brilliantly acerbic and pissed off with anyone who gets between her and her target, which turns out to be 90% of the people we meet. So much blood.

So much mayhem. So much fun.

And so we find ourselves at book 3, Static Ruin. Its publication sort of snuck up on me, and I dashed off to buy a copy as soon as I found out that it was already A Thing.

If you’ve already read the first two books (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?), you’ll know exactly what to expect. Mars Xi is on her final trajectory, aiming to find the man who made her. Mars is delightfully unpleasant to a whole host of new people, though the action is somewhat more measured in pace from the at times frantic bloodbath of the first two parts. The stakes are higher this time around and Mars faces some tough realities on her quest for answers. We’ve seen in the other books that no-one is safe, and the same is very much true here.

We’re introduced to some new faces (well, Mars did kill an awful lot of people thus far) as well as some old favourites – I particularly love Ocho, and Mars’ super protective attitude to her “cute space ferret of death” (as described by Warren Ellis).

As you can probably tell, I bloody loved these books. Highly recommended.

Static Ruin by Corey J. White was published in November 2018 by Tor.com. You can find Corey over at his website, coreyjwhite.com or on twitter @cjwhite

You can get a copy here (affiliate links)

Killing Gravity (Voidwitch Saga Book 1)

Void Black Shadow (Voidwitch Saga Book 2)

Static Ruin (Voidwitch Saga Book 3)

They say revenge is a dish best served cold but Violet Winters isn’t the sort of criminal to play by other people’s rules.
Double-crossed and with her reputation as a master thief on the line she can only see one course of action. 
A Raucous Rampage of Revenge.
With a detective nipping at her heels and her escape route ablaze she’ll be lucky to escape with her life let alone anything else.

A couple of years ago I was sent a copy of a book called The Dali Deception, a cracking little heist story. I do love a good heist. 🙂

So when Adam got in touch to ask if I’d be interested in reading his latest, Kill It With Fire, I jumped at the chance. The email arrived and I jumped right in.

It’s a short story which finds us back in Kilchester with Violet Winters out for revenge. The action comes thick and fast and I breezed through this in an hour or so. But stories are as long as they need to be, and Kill It With Fire is nicely paced and a lovely little outing for a couple of our favourite criminals. And it features my favourite character Katie hitting people a lot, which never gets old.

Good fun, and an excellent way to pass an hour or so.

You can find Adam Maxwell on twitter @LostBookshop or on his website. Many thanks to Adam for the review copy. 

Published by Orenda Books, November 2018
Source: review copy
Seth Beauman can’t sleep. He stays up late, calling strangers from his phonebook, hoping to make a connection, while his wife, Maeve, sleeps upstairs. A crossed wire finds a suicidal Hadley Serf on the phone to Seth, thinking she is talking to The Samaritans.
But a seemingly harmless, late-night hobby turns into something more for Seth and for Hadley, and soon their late-night talks are turning into day-time meet-ups. And then this dysfunctional love story turns into something altogether darker, when Seth brings Hadley home…
And someone is watching…

I’ve sat and looked a blank page for the past half hour, trying to come up with some kind of coherent thoughts about Will Carver’s Good Samaritans. I’ve read a lot of Orenda Books’ output over the past couple of years, and I’ll say this – you’ll always get something different, something unique, something unlike you’ve come across before.

And that’s definitely the case with Good Samaritans. It’s very dark, very graphic and gripping, and demands that you read just one more chapter.

After all, the chapters are short, so one more can’t hurt, can it?

Narrator: Oh yes it can. They can hurt a lot.

Told from multiple viewpoints, Good Samaritans is a story of crossed lines and crossed fates. After a brutal opening, I found it took a little while to settle into the style of the book, flicking as it does from Seth to Maeve to Hadley, from present to flashback, from first to third person. But once you’ve adjusted, you’re in for quite a ride. There were several points at which I was convinced that I’d figured it out, only for something to come out of left-field and blindside me. One in particular (and I’m not giving anything else away) had me put the book down and glare at it (in a good way!) for a minute or two before diving back in.

The plotting is devilishly clever, and Carver does a splendid job of getting into the heads of some spectacularly unsavoury people. Good Samaritans is definitely *not* for the squeamish, featuring some very graphic (and energetic) sex, and some very unpleasant things done with bleach.

If I had any quibble I’d loved to have seen more of Detective Pace, who feels a little like background texture. Maybe he could have more adventures… Will?

Good Samaritans is a phenomenal read. I finished it the day it arrived, hooked from the first page.

Good Samaritans by Will Carver is published by Orenda Books. Thanks to Karen for the review copy. You can find Will on Twitter @will_carver.

The Interdependency, humanity’s interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse. The Flow, the extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel between the stars possible, is disappearing, leaving entire star systems stranded. When it goes, human civilization may go with it—unless desperate measures can be taken.

Emperox Grayland II, the leader of the Interdependency, is ready to take those measures to help ensure the survival of billions. But nothing is ever that easy. Arrayed before her are those who believe the collapse of the Flow is a myth—or at the very least, an opportunity that can allow them to ascend to power.

While Grayland prepares for disaster, others are preparing for a civil war, a war that will take place in the halls of power, the markets of business and the altars of worship as much as it will take place between spaceships and battlefields. The Emperox and her allies are smart and resourceful, but then so are her enemies. Nothing about this power struggle will be simple or easy… and all of humanity will be caught in its widening gyre^[1].

Regular readers of this blog (I know there must be some of you out there) will recall that I bloody loved The Collapsing Empire, the first book in John Scalzi’s Interdependecy trilogy/series.  I’m normally pretty good at keeping on top of my favourite authors (no, not like *that*. Get your mind out of the gutter) so I was more than a little surprised to discover book 2 was out already. One quick trip to the bookshop^[2] later, a quick reshuffle of the TBR pile^[3] and here we are.

We’re back. Glorious worldbuilding, snarky characters, feuding Houses, and an Emperox looking to save humanity. So far, so sci-fi, but The Consuming Fire is clever, funny, and it’s like taking the essence of an Iain M. Banks book and boiling it down until you’ve stripped it down to the pure essence of an idea, making it 100% more witty, with a ton more diverse characters and 100% more sex. There are a lot of characters shacking up with a lot of other characters in this book.

Warren Ellis described it as

…frictionless high-speed platinum-pulp science fiction storytelling.

which pretty much sums it up perfectly.

I read it in one sitting. It’s short, fast and pretty darn awesome. You have to read book 1 first though.

^[1] No, I had no idea what ‘gyre’ meant either. Turns out it’s ‘a spiral or vortex’. See, we both learned stuff today! Don’t tell me I never do anything for you.
^[2] See? Bookbloggers *do* buy books.
^[3] Only joking. You approach the TBR pile at your peril. I just kind of bypassed it a tiny bit.

When writer, comedian and Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn’s son scrawled a picture of him at Christmas and titled it ‘Some Old Bloke’, Robert was cast deep into thought about life and what it means to be a bloke and an old one at that.

Whether he is waxing lyrical about fresh laundry, making an impassioned case for the importance of alternative energy or recounting a detailed history of the dogs in his life, Robert presents a refreshingly open and un-cynical look at the world at large and, of course, the joys of being a bloke.

Ah, Robert Llewellyn. Star of Red Dwarf and Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars to our American chums), lately of Fully Charged and Carpool. Here with Some Old Bloke he tells a delightfully rambling sort-of-autobiography series of tales about a variety of topics, which one could easily imagine him telling over a pint of something nicely refreshing in a pub somewhere.

I’d love to have a chat with Rob in a pub somewhere. He comes across as the sort of guy who’d have a story for pretty much everything, an anecdote to while away the time between the glass being full and oh look, the glass is empty, can I get you another drink?

The stories range from his youthful hippy days driving an ancient van around the country, to the somewhat surprising (to me at least) revelation that he once ran a shoe-making business. There are tales of dogs that he’s owned, of the time he emptied the portaloos for famous people on a film set, to tales from Scrapheap Challenge and its American cousin, Junkyard Wars. It finishes up with an impassioned chapter about the importance of alternative energy. As viewers of his YouTube channel Fully Charged will be aware, Robert has a keen interest in the topic, and he presents a fascinating case for it.

I really enjoyed Some Old Bloke. I guess that as I’m one too (my brother cheekily suggested that I look not unlike Mr Llewellyn, with our short cropped hair, beard and glasses), I’m the book’s perfect target audience. And maybe that’s the case, but if you’ve enjoyed watching Rob on tv or YouTube over the years, then I’m confident that you’ll enjoy this philosophical ramble too.

Some Old Bloke by Robert LLewellyn is published by Unbound, and is out now.

Robert Llewellyn is an actor, novelist, screenwriter, comedian and TV presenter, best known for Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge, Carpool and Fully Charged. He drives an electric car and writes under a rack of solar panels in Gloucestershire.