(courtesy Tor Publishing Group) There have been more than a few stories of artificial lifeforms who have ended up being considerably more human than their creators. But is there anyone more human than the eponymous protagonist of this marvellous series by Martha Wells, a robot created to enforce, with extreme Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Watching a writer’s journey is often a gloriously fascinating thing. Going from an impressive debut to successive novels that build upon actual realisation and beguiling promise, many writers go from strength-to-strength, honing their talent and their gift for evocative wordsmithing into something that leaves you breathless Continue Reading
Book review: Exodus: The Archimedes Engine #1: Become the Traveler by Peter F. Hamilton
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There is an enormous luxury and sense of expansive indulgence that comes with settling into a sci-fi epic that stretches for almost 900 pages. That sense of narrative pleasure only grows greater still when the author who has penned this magnificent space operatic masterpiece is Peter Continue Reading
Book review: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong
(courtesy Penguins Books Australia) A preview of this novel was provided by Angry Robot Books in return for a free and fair review. Plunging into any fictional book is an act of active and engaged imagination. It can’t not be; here you have a story that recounts events that have Continue Reading
Book review: Cheddar Luck Next Time by Beth Cato
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) A digital preview copy of Cheddar Luck Next Time provided by Angry Robot Books Books in return for an honest and objective review; the novel released 8 April 2025. Cosy mysteries are becoming quite the thing. It makes sense – we live in a world rapidly Continue Reading
Easter book review: Friends of Dorothy by Sandi Toksvig
(courtesy Hachette Australia) While this book is not set at Easter, it carries themes of redemption and renewal, and of love and connection which surely are at the heart of this most redemptive of seasons … If you ask most people, they would tell you that they are very nicely Continue Reading
Book review: The Montegiallo School of Swearing by Andrew HC McDonald
(courtesy The Fremantle Press) Reinventing your life is no easy thing. Oh everyone dreams of Eat. Pray.Love.-ing the hell of their tired, meaningless or traumatically disrupted lives, but dreaming of it happening is far easier than taking the concrete steps necessary to manifest it in the real world. But sometimes Continue Reading
Book review: Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There are countless space operas out there in the world of science fiction, a great many of them imaginatively adept at crafting galaxies of possibility, good and bad, and of taking us on rip-roaring journey from planetary pillar to cometic post. But not all of them Continue Reading
“Do you think we can trust it?” The innate humanity of Murderbot is on full display in its first trailer
(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTBased on Martha Wells’ Hugo & Nebula Award-winning book series, Murderbot is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really Continue Reading
Book review: By Her Hand by Marion Taffe
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) By and large this reviewer, an habitual buyer of books even though his TBR is threatening to collapse on him at some point in the not-too-distant future, doesn’t usually have books bought for him. But when that does happen, when someone does take the chance Continue Reading