Editorial reviews

Jeter is too good a writer to not provide us a more substantive performance and he is too smart a writer to explain steampunk as merely a vehicle that returns us to those halcyon days of a past that are more imagined than real.

Day One is an all around excellent thriller with a high gore factor and lots of creepy plausibility.

A rousing finale, far more convincing than its rather too zombified predecessor—one that almost lives up to the extravagant praise this series has received in some quarters.

Fortune’s Pawn was a very entertaining read; it ticked off nearly all the mental check boxes I set up when I open up a space-based science fiction novel.

I’m sure Parasite will find an eager and hungry audience. I think I’ll pass on the next dose, though.

At times disgusting, always suspenseful, and utterly unique, Parasite gets under a reader’s skin and will make them question the true meaning of being human.

Shaman is set in an era of human history almost unimaginably different from ours, but Robinson brings it alive through a detailed account of Loon's experiences.

The plot may be creative and the heroine delightfully plucky, but the story itself ultimately descends into the ridiculous and convenient.

A space opera that skillfully handles both choruses and arias, Ancillary Justice is an absorbing thousand-year history, a poignant personal journey, and a welcome addition to the genre.

Occasionally thrilling but not very credible and full of blunders.

Leckie's novel cast of characters serves her well-plotted story nicely. This is an altogether promising debut.

It’s an investment, and in the end it’s a worthwhile investment: a trip into the past and some of the early stages of human society, filled with imagination and creativity. An anthropological treat, to be sure!

I give both the novel Abaddon’s Gate and The Expanse series very high recommendation.

Though rather more modest in its scope and conventional in its concepts than Kim Stanley Robinson’s staggering space operas, Shaman tells an ambitious, absorbing and satisfyingly self-contained tale on its own terms.

If there is a master of dystopian fiction which illuminates not only scientific possibility, but also examines the human condition with unflinching and unbiased honesty, then that master is Margaret Atwood.

Douglas E. Richards has meshed medical thrills, international intrigue, and sci-fi elements in The Cure, resulting in a fast-paced novel. Behind every twist is another twist.

MaddAddam feels inessential. It doesn’t have as much trouble staking a claim in the speculative-fiction field as Talt suggests, but it never finds its feet within this particular series.

This finale to Atwood’s ingenious trilogy lights a fire from the fears of our age, then douses it with hope for the planet’s survival. But that survival may not include us.

Fans of the author’s smooth prose and intense research will find enough of both, but the book is far outclassed by both Robinson’s earlier works and other prehistory novels.

The bedrock elements of the warring worlds, especially their fantasy capabilities and limitations, are as hard to remember as the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, though fans of Hunt (The Secrets of the Fire Sea, 2012, etc.) will be thrilled by the piquant minor details.