Review of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides

A young man goes on a short field trip – he is a geographer and is bitten by a snake – by the time he recovers and returns home, nearly all of humanity has been killed in a mysterious plague. The man, Isherwood Williams or ‘Ish’ as he comes to be known, searches for clues as to what has happened and then travels across America to search for survivors. He meets a woman, older than him but clearly a strong survivor and they set up house together along with a handful of others back in his native California.

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Review of David Brin’s Existence

David Brin is a multiple award winner: the front cover of this book boasts the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell awards and science fiction fans will know that these are as prestigious as awards get. He has proved in other books that he is not averse to tackling the big themes when it comes to science fiction and this book, Existence, is no exception.

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Review of Hamilton’s Great North Road

It is the twenty second century and convenient wormholes in space have been discovered to link the earth with a variety of other planets, each more or less suitable for habitation. At once, there is a ready stream of people willing to and chance their luck on another world: quite a few of them perceive themselves to be subject to persecution or oppression of one sort or another and leg it to a place where they can be free (or FREE as I expect they would say), religious fanatics and criminals also pass through the wormhole (it is a British trait to export our troublemakers elsewhere) where they can bother and shoot up foreigners instead.

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Review of Pratchett and Baxter’s The Long Earth

As it turns out, with the aid of a potato and a few wires and switches, it is possible for people to step out from this world to one of a series of identical or almost identical worlds, only without any people in them. There is, in fact, an apparently endless and possibly infinite series of these worlds – which people talk about as the ‘Long Earth’ – extend towards both the east and the west, so to speak.

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Review of Charles Stross’s Rule 34

One thing we can be sure of in the future is that it will provide more opportunities for people to get what they want – through the internet and its
future growth, primarily – and that a great deal of what people want may not be exactly good for them. In a not very distant future Scotland, the internet has become a kind of monstrous presence which can link people with anything they can imagine: hook your wireless connection to a simple 3D printer and the product of your imagination, however monstrous or indeed wonderful it might be, will be brought to life. Perhaps literally, if that is how your mind works.

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Review of Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds

Environmental crisis has brought the earth to the brink of destruction and the great powers have disappeared from the scene, leaving the African nations to rise as new global hegemons. Mankind has spread throughout the solar system, with robot-operated production facilities active even beyond the orbit of Neptune.

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Review of Mieville’s Embassytown

Far, far away and a long time in the future, space travel has enabled humanity to spread throughout the cosmos and come into contact with all kinds of unusual manifestations of alien life. Few aliens, however, are as unusual as the Ariekei, who have formed a complex society based on a dualistic form of language that they call, well, Language. Language differs from ordinary language in requiring two component parts which must be spoken simultaneously: fortunately for the Ariekei themselves, they each have two speaking orifices which can be used for this purpose.

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Review of Cobley’s Seeds of Earth

Although each birthday makes me increasingly and uncomfortably aware of the fact that the number of books I will have time to read in my life is decreasing every day, as well as being reminded whenever I look at the bookshelves of the swelling ranks of the books I have already bought but have not yet had time to read, imagining that not being able to discover new authors and new works remains a dispiriting one.

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Review of Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is one of a number of Soviet era Russian (in fact Ukrainian) authors unable either to settle into the post-revolutionary lifestyle or to have his fiction published. In fact he died, in 1950, forty years before the stories in this collection were published and these were the first to be made available to the public. It is not, of course, very surprising in retrospect to consider that the individualist Krzhizhanovsky, unable to blend in to society as a whole, would constantly find his work rejected by the official censors and the editors who acted as their gatekeepers.

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Review of Bester’s The Demolished Man

Into the twenty-fourth century and the world is dominated by a form of industrial, monopoly capitalism regulated not just by state laws but by the presence of a group of ‘espers’ – people who have been able to develop powers of extra-sensory perception and who can be used, therefore, to determine the intentions of people and so stop any crime before it is committed. The espers are also used as human resources managers, business consultants and in a whole range of ways to support the political-economic system. Is it possible that such a system can change human nature overall?

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