Tag Archives: Science Fiction

QUICK REVIEW: Fandom For Robots – Vina Jie-Min Prasad

First published in Uncanny Magazine and nominated for Best Short Story awards at both the Nebulas (2017) and Hugos (2018), Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s Fandom For Robots offers a warm, affectionate take on online fan communities and the value of fan fiction. As “the only known sentient robot”, Computron resides in the Simak Robotics Museum and takes the stage each day to answer audience questions and demonstrate his sentience. When an audience member suggests he might enjoy a Japanese anime series called Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード) he finds himself drawn in by the show’s story, despite his inability to experience it emotionally. While waiting for new episodes, he discovers a fan-made wiki for the series, which sets him off on an unexpected path.

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QUICK REVIEW: Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory – Martha Wells

Taking place after the events of Exit Strategy (novella #4 in the phenomenal Murderbot Diaries series), Martha Well’s short story Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory is a quiet little study of one of the series’ most interesting characters. After the unpleasant events on TranRollinHyfa, Dr Ayda Mensah is back on Preservation Station with SecUnit and all of the survey team, trying to get on with her life. The trouble is, it’s not that easy to get over being kidnapped by corporate murderers, and Mensah is spending more time on finding ways to help SecUnit than she is dealing with her own pain.

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A Game of Broken Minds – Tom Jolly

Released in ebook by Distant Shore Publishing, Tom Jolly’s novella A Game of Broken Minds is a high concept modern-day science fiction tale of desperation and expanding horizons. Living on the streets of Santa Maria after a disastrous series of events, Cory is reduced to taking part in unlicensed pharmaceutical tests for money, taking drugs designed to induce tap into the unused parts of the human brain. To his considerable surprise, after he takes the latest pill he finds a strange voice manifesting in his head, claiming to be some kind of networked superbrain. While this seems like a good thing to begin with, Cory realises that the new, expanded world he’s become a part of is dangerous indeed.

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QUICK REVIEW: Debtless – Chen Qiufan (translated by Blake Stone-Banks)

Translated into English from the original Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks, Chen Qiufan’s short story Debtless explores bleak but powerful questions of wealth inequality, corporate control and memory manipulation in a sci-fi tale of asteroid mining and the impossibility of debt repayment. In a world where memories, debts and earnings are genetically encoded into people’s DNA, working brutal shifts in deep space mining facilities is a particularly dangerous way of attempting to repay a debt. Square Head stays relatively safe as his specialty is data analysis rather than hands-on work, but as he starts experiencing unusual dreams and his fellow miners begin to die around him at an increased rate, he finds the realities of his life changing around him.

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Fugitive Telemetry – Martha Wells

After briefly veering into full novel territory with 2020’s Network Effect, Martha Wells’ brilliant Murderbot Diaries series returns to its novella-length roots with Fugitive Telemetry, the sixth book in total and the fifth novella in the series. Set (slightly confusingly) between Exit Strategy and Network Effect, it’s essentially a detective story as Murderbot turns investigator in the wake of an unexpectedly dead human turning up on Preservation Station. Concerned that the death might be a sign that GreyCris are attempting to strike at Doctor Mensah, Murderbot begrudgingly agrees to work alongside station security – who seem equally unhappy about the arrangement – to investigate the murder.

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QUICK REVIEW: Immersion – Aliette de Bodard

Winner of both Nebula (2012) and Locus (2013) awards for Best Short Story, Aliette de Bodard’s Immersion is a powerful, thought-provoking story that belongs to her Xuya series – science fiction stories set in a world of Vietnamese culture-inspired alternate history. On Longevity Station, Quy spends her free time watching the spaceships arrive bringing Galactic tourists to the station, feeling caught between happy memories of her student days and the realities of her life now. When she’s called in to her family’s restaurant to help with negotiations for a Galactic couple’s wedding anniversary plans, she finds herself faced with the shocking sight of a woman who’s so lost in her attempts to fit in that she’s forgotten who she truly is.

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Bear Head – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War (2017) was a bold, powerful piece of typically smart sci-fi; its sequel Bear Head picks up some of the same characters and themes and runs with them. Life for construction worker Jimmy Marten is pretty dull, despite the fact that he lives on Mars and has all manner of interesting body modifications, right up until the digital awareness of a talking bear takes up residence in his digital headspace. Honey the bear is a bit confused about what she’s doing, but she knows that she wants to make contact with her old friend Bees, the Distributed Intelligence who laid the foundations of human life on Mars. These days Bees is something of a digital bogeyman however, and while Honey tries to put her fragmented memories into order, back on Earth the tide of political opinion continues to turn ever more extreme, led by the relentless, loathsome presence of World Senate hopeful Warner S. Thompson.

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Iron Truth – S.A. Tholin

Book one in S.A. Tholin’s Primaterre series, Iron Truth is a bold, expansive science fiction adventure packed full of strong characters, breathless action and looming cosmic horror, all within a beautifully crafted and believable setting. Botanist Joy Somerset leaves Mars on a colony ship bound for a new life on a quiet, unpolluted planet, only to wake from cryo-sleep to find herself in a bleak future, trapped on dust-shrouded Cato. Meanwhile Commander Cassimer of the Primaterre banneretcy leads his squad to Cato in search of a missing ship, their mission quickly complicated by the planet’s inimical weather. In Joy’s eyes, the Primaterre soldiers offer hope of a way off-planet, but she has a lot to learn about the new world she finds herself in. To distant, closed-off Cassimer, Joy is just a means to an end, until over time she becomes more than that – a source of strength, and something to hold onto when his world is turned upside down.

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Inscape – Louise Carey

Louise Carey’s debut novel Inscape is a smart, modern sci-fi thriller, a dystopian tale exploring a worryingly realistic future in which corporations dominate every aspect of life, and London is held on a knife-edge between two all-powerful tech behemoths. Tanta is a Corporate Ward of InTech, raised to be utterly loyal to the company which has given her everything, and trained to be the consummate agent. When her first full mission ends in blood and loss, she throws herself into hunting down the source of leaked corporate data alongside a partner whose chequered history and weary worldview couldn’t be more different to her own. Tanta is desperate to succeed and prove her value to InTech, but as her investigation proceeds she’s forced to confront some difficult truths about the company and her life up to this point.

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Dogs of War – Adrian Tchaikovsky

With his novel Dogs of War, prolific SFF author Adrian Tchaikovsky explores questions of ethics, free will and what it means to be human, wrapped up in an enthralling story about genetically engineered animal soldiers. Seven feet tall and capable of astonishing feats of violence, Rex is a Bioform – a biotechnical hybrid of dog and man – engineered solely for war. He leads his pack (including Honey the bear, Dragon and Bees) into combat following the orders of his Master, his obedience rewarded by his feedback chip, and all he wants is to be a Good Dog. When faced with the freedom to follow his own path and make his own decisions, however, Rex learns that being a Good Dog isn’t always easy.

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