Books tagged with: evolution

Desperate to find a new home amongst the stars, the last remnants of the human race are cast out into deep space. Thousands upon thousands asleep aboard a colossal colony ship, hibernating until a habitable planet is located. Eventually they discover a world which was terraformed by humanity long ag...

Code of the Lifemaker is a science fiction novel by James P Hogan. I can hardly believe that this is the same author, which wrote Realtime Interrupt. Okay, it's not exactly a character driven story, but it's much better than RI and Hogan has a lot of interesting things to tell here. Code of the Life...

This review was originally published in 2012 and has been re-published following the launch of the book in the US, published by Crown Publishing. I often start a review with a bit of blurb about the book itself, setting the scene for the reader and I try to never give too much away - limiting the in...

Darwins Radio is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. Just the title alone should give you a good idea as to the subject of this book. Yes, Bear has returned to genetics and luckily Darwin's Radio is a lot better than Blood Music (not that hard). Christopher Dicken finds a mass grave with mutated p...

Evolution is a monumental tale of the very evolution of mankind, from the age of the dinosaurs to way into the distant future. Created by the multiple award winning author Stephen Baxter. Evolution begins it's story in the Cretaceous period over 65 million years ago (the age of the Dinosaurs), and j...

Limit of Vision is a science fiction novel by Linda Nagata. Finally a Nagata novel is published in Europa and finally I get my hands on her latest book. Limit of Vision takes a look at an non-human intelligence and the some of the options we may have in out near future. About fifty years in the futu...

Odd John was first published in 1935 and was one of the very first novels to explore the theme of the super human, coining the term homo superior . It's being reviewed here as part of Gollancz excellent SF Masterworks series. Written from a narrator's perspective, Odd John is a pretty unique piece o...

Spaceship Earth is a science fiction novel by Tom Schwartz. Scientists have discovered that the universe is a "closed system" and that the rate of expansion is slowing. This means that eventually the universe will stop expanding and begin collapsing upon itself, ultimately resulting in the opposite...

The Augmented Agent is a collection of science fiction short stories by Jack Vance. Jack Vance:I read the intro and.....Basically it was a campaign for Vance heroes as regular fellas running around and doing incredible things to the environment they are written into with wits and brains rarely emplo...

The Darwinian Extension: Completion is the third volume in the The Darwinian Extension trilogy, written by Hylton H Smith. Over twenty years have passed since the Red planet was first colonised and contact was made with an alien intelligence. Much has changed in this time, Mars now has a thin, breat...

The Darwinian Extension: Transition is the second volume in the science fiction trilogy from author Hylton H Smith, and follows on from the events in Initiation. Transition begins in the year 2038, 2 years have passed since the return of the Copernicus, the ship carrying the first Mars colonisation...

The Drowned World is J.G. Ballards first novel. It's written more than twenty years before he writes his, probably, best known novel The Empire of The Sun. Ballard actually wrote about 10 SF novels (and countless shorts) before he writes Empire of the Sun, and if you enjoyed Empire of the Sun and yo...

A secret Russian mind research laboratory in Podol'sk is destroyed in a freak accident involving one of its patients. The resulting devastation leaves thousands dead and a mile wide crater where the ground has quite literally been pulverized. Plucked from discredited obscurity, parapsychologist Beau...

The War of the Worlds was originally written in 1897 and it's never been out of print. It's one of the earliest stories to depict conflict with an alien race and has been influential in film, radio, TV, music and even science. The Guardian has gone as far as to say: A true classic that has pointed t...

Illustration ©Grahame Baker-Smith from The Folio Society edition of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells The work of H. G. Wells is both seminal and formative to our current interest in Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy. The collection of these two novellas in one volume is a common publication format....

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a talent for writing deep, meaningful scifi. He won the Arthur C Clarke award in 2016 for Children of Time and the 2019 BSFA best novel award for the follow-up Children of Ruin . There are few authors that can quite match his vision for non-human intelligence, or his flair for...

It starts off sensibly with tweaking a DNA strand here or there to prevent a hereditary illness. Who could argue against that? However, it is not long before people realise that they can use the same tools to make sure that a child has their father’s eye colour and Mother’s hair. Why even bother pic...

If you are like me, you will have an escape plan from the building you work in, just in case there is a zombie attack. My plan is to get to the roof and use one of the ladders up there to simply steer the zombies over the low edge. This might work, but not in the Antarctic, were there are few buildi...