Meghan Douglass’ short indie sci-fi horror that is dark, bleak, and utterly disturbing in all the right ways. Coming in at around the 50-page mark, I blasted through Humanity Lost really rather quickly. You might think that’s not enough time for a story to make your skin crawl, but, oh boy, this did exactly that.

Ringworld is one of those classic sci-fi books that curiously seems to fall into the same kind of subgenre as Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama—that of people exploring an awe-inspiring alien megastructure no-one’s ever seen before. I enjoyed that book a lot, and so I knew I had to give Ringworld a go, especially having heard good things about Larry Niven’s work generally. So this was my first delve into his Known Space universe, but the experience left me torn.

Oh my gosh, why did I put off reading this for so long? I’ve had Duckett & Dyer: Dicks for Hire sitting on the Kindle for ages, and I’d never gotten around to it until now. And it is hilarious. I haven’t read many comedies—only Hitchhiker’s Guide, some Discworld, and Terry Brooks’ Magic Kingdom For Sale. Sold! and that was quite a long time ago. So it was refreshing to read some more sci-fi comedy, and G.M. Nair’s novel was an absolute riot.

I know I’m always in for a good time when Drew Wagar releases a new book. The Elect Saga is an interesting series; not technically new, but newly released wide. Drew announced to us on his Discord that he was re-writing and re-editing the short fan-fiction series he’d written years ago for the Elite-inspired videogame, Oolite, removing any copyright offending content, and releasing it out into the wild for all to read.

This book had been sitting on my shelf for well over a year by the time I picked it up to actually read. Such is the way of the eternal TBR. I’m glad I finally did, though. I really love the cover art for this book, and those of its sequels Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, each one taken from a single painting by John Harris, split into triptych. And I have to admit, the cover is really what drew me to Ancillary Justice initially. Well, that, and an intense curiosity about such a highly-regarded space opera. So, let’s get into it.

Ever since university, I’ve kept in the back of my mind the idea of reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Why university? Because one of my lecturers was a Barsoom super-fan. One time, I wrote an essay for his class which was about writing the preamble to a constitution for a new human settlement on Mars under John Carter. The trouble was, it needed to be 500 words. Most preambles to constitutions are 150 - 200 words long. So, using my imagination, I came up with an entire story to fill out the word-count of how these people escaped the tyranny of Earth and established a settlement on Mars.

I’ve been saving this one up for a while. I really enjoyed reading through the first three books of the Questrison Saga, Heliopause, Ephemeris, and Accretion. Their blend of space opera and fantasy with intense action was a lot of fun, and those first three are relatively short.

Another book I’ve read as part of Drew Wagar’s Monday night Twitch book club. Similarly to the situation with H.G. Wells, I’d never read any Jules Verne before, though I am familiar with a number of his more famous stories - particularly Around the World in 80 Days, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And those are mainly via TV and movie adaptations

I picked up Last Flight of the Necros Night by Eldritch Black & E.G. Seven for free on Amazon, and the premise sounded good, also I really dug the vibe of the cover art. I fancied a little taste of cosmic/sci-fi horror, especially since I recently played the new remake of Dead Space, so I’m on a bit of a kick at the moment. I’m sorry to say this one didn’t do it for me.

On Monday nights, fellow author, Drew Wagar runs a Twitch livestream all about science fiction, fantasy and writing. At the end of 2022, he had the idea to use the streams as a sort-of book club, where we would collectively look at old (public domain) sci-fi novels. Our first piece of “homework” was to read some of H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds if we hadn’t already read it. I’d personally never read it, though I was familiar generally with the story from movies and TV. So I downloaded a copy and started reading…

A Twilight-zone inspired science fiction short story collection from J.D. Sanderson. Anthologies and short story collections really are great, aren’t they? I’ve come to enjoy them over the last couple of years, and it’s one of the more unexpected things to come out of my journey back into reading science fiction. Especially from fellow independent authors. There’s a goldmine of great ideas and exceptional work to be read, that all too often doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

It took me a while to get through Children of Dune, not because it’s not good - because it is, very much so - but because November and December are heavy months for me, and I didn’t find the time nor the inclination to read very often. So it took a lot longer than I would have liked, and in fact, I finished it just before Christmas. There’s a lot about Frank Herbert’s writing that’s really grown on me as I’ve continued through the series…

Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama has been recommended to me a lot over the last year or so, and for good reason. It’s one of the heavy-hitters of classic science fiction, one many would consider an “essential” read. I’m not so prescriptive as that. Even though I fully believe in the benefits of reading widely, and of having a mixed repertoire of the classic and modern - especially as a writer - I also believe that people should read whatever they want to read, and not to be made to read something that doesn’t suit them. That said, Rendezvous with Rama is one I would highly recommend…

I’ve been interested in reading Neuromancer for a while, so you can imagine I was thrilled when my wife’s cousin lent me her copy of the book. It’s sat on my shelf for a while though, because, y’know, TBRs be like that sometimes. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went in to reading it. I have encountered the cyberpunk aesthetic minimally - mainly through movies like Blade Runner, or games such as Cyberpunk 2077…

Before I started reading Accretion, Dianne warned me on Twitter to “buckle up”, and… Oh boy, yeah. It’s been a wonderful journey going through this space opera saga, and I’m looking forward to reading its conclusion with Luminiferous. Apologies to everyone for the delay in putting out this review. I recently reviewed Gareth L. Powell’s Light of Impossible Stars and About Writing, and for some reason my brain was adamant I only had two reviews to write, not three. So when I did the previous two reviews…

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally read Light of Impossible Stars. Last time - when I reviewed the second book in the series - I said I wouldn’t leave it too long before reading the last book, but it took more time to get to than I had anticipated. Having now finished the trilogy, I can say with confidence that it is an absolute masterwork. Carefully and meticulously crafted, there’s not a word or phrase used idly. Before I dive into the review proper, I wanted to talk briefly about the prose in a broad sense across the whole series…

Very unusually for me, I went straight into Ephemeris immediately after finishing Heliopause. I have so many books on my TBR that I tend to like jumping around, like sampling everything at a buffet. But this time, I went straight from book one to book two in the same series! Ephemeris has an odd description: it’s a prequel, sequel and concurrent companion piece to Heliopause all at the same time. This kind of out of the box thinking is one of the many reasons I have come to love indie publishing.

As with all the books on my TBR, I’ve been meaning to read the Questrison Saga for a good long while now, ever since I first saw J. Dianne Dotson pop up in the Twitter writing community, and now here we are: Heliopause, the first book in the four-part space opera series. In many ways I’ve felt like Dianne’s passion to create this universe that’s sat with her for a long time has parallels with my own approach to the Augment Saga. And that’s intriguing.

Science fiction and futurism are not exclusive to any one culture, and often we find ourselves - in the white western world, at least - reading all our SFF from the same cultural sources. However, we are enriched both as readers and writers when we diversify the types of stories we read in our beloved genre. It makes us more understanding, gives us greater empathy, and broadens our scope for ideas. There are wonderful stories out there from people writing from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and early on in my renewed reading journey, I decided…

This was a tricky book to review. I had been meaning to pick up Faraway Sky, Ocean Deep for a long time - ever since Alan announced he had completed his first NaNoWriMo project, in fact, which is an amazing achievement all its own. Writing over fifty thousand words in a single month is mind boggling to me, and I absolutely applaud his determination and discipline in getting it done.