Books

(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Good lord but swashbuckling space operatic fun is good for the too tightly tied down soul. When all the stresses and obligations of life have you feel suffocatingly pinned into a very small and ever-diminishing space, picking up a superlatively good piece of wide-ranging sci-fi Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) It has long intrigued this reviewer why it is that we love “found family” stories so much. It’s not that they don’t present a comforting and warmly lovely scenario; after all, who doesn’t love the idea of sadness, loss and crushing social isolation being countered by slowly Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) There is an inestimable joy to finding your people. We all start out in life with a family into which we are born, which can either work for us or not, but along the way, if we’re lucky enough, we accumulate friends so close they become that Continue Reading

(courtesy Scholastic) If you have grown up and are comfortably ensconced as a member of the heteronormative majority, you will have likely seen little to trouble your secure worldview. Almost everything caters to the idea that society, and indeed civilisation as a whole, has been shaped in its entirety by Continue Reading

(courtesy Ultimo Press) I know, I know, I KNOW that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover (unless you’re part of a publishing company’s marketing team in which case that’s all you want to do). BUT, and in the case of Letters to our Robot Son by Continue Reading

(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

(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

(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