Books tagged with: morality

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post apocalyptic science fiction novel by Walter M Miller. It is a strange story of a post apocalyptic monastery, which tries to save information about the time before the great destruction. The idea is good enough, but I can't say that I like what Miller has done with...

Occasionally a book and a writer comes along that breaks rules left right and centre, but does so with panache and style that makes you tip your hat. The beginning of A Fistful of Clones clearly sets it out to be one of those books; an accessible science fiction comedy that immediately endears, the...

I will be honest—I was not thrilled about the idea of thinking about this book again in order to write a review. I was so bothered by the end of this series that I felt depressed about it for a week after I finished the novel. I loved Divergent. I thought that Insurgent was a pretty strong follow-up...

Amped follows on directly from the events of Wired reviewed late last year. We rejoin the brilliant scientist Kira Miller who has discovered how to boost the human IQ to extreme post-human levels for short periods of time. With this extreme intelligence comes the danger that the same process brings...

Reviewed by Matt Karder. I have never been an ardent fan of short stories but this collection certainly is an exception. The flow within the prose is a major factor. Short sentences bursting with content focus the reader’s attention very effectively. A Worm In The Well & The Worm Turns The first two...

Anvil of Stars is the sequel to The Forge of God, written by Greg Bear. Sometimes reviewing a sequel is nearly impossible without spoiling the first book for people who hasn't read it. This is one of those times and I'm not going to try, so if you haven't read The Forge of God (tFoG) yet, don't read...

Axiomatic is a collection of science fiction short stories by Greg Egan. Most science fiction fans these days would agree what when it comes to hard science fiction, Greg Egan is one of the best. In ten years he has given us a good handful of novels, all every much driven by the laws of nature, as E...

Bête has one of the best opening chapters I've ever read. It begins with farmer Graham Penhaligon as he is preparing to kill a cow. Nothing unusual about that except this cow is pleading with Graham (the narrator of this fine story) not to do it. The gift of speech given to animals forms the core of...

Carrion Comfort is a Dan Simmons horror novel, best known for the Hyperion and Endymoin series. Except for the stories in Dark Visions this is the first horror by Dan Simmons that I've read. I'm not sure what kind of expectations I had for this book before I started on it, but I can't say that I was...

Cat's Cradle is my first foray into the world of Kurt Vonnegut, I have heard his name mentioned over the years but for one reason or another I have never actually picked up one of his novels. My youngest brother recommended his works (specifically siting Slaughterhouse five) and I have been picking...

Disaster Park is a science fiction novel by Mark Konkel. Imagine that you could experience the greatest (or worst) disasters in human history, be on board the Titanic as it leaves Southhampton docks on the 10th April 1912 or perhaps a visitor on the 92nd floor of the North Tower on that fateful day...

Divine Murder is a speculative fiction novel by Ward Kelley. One of the most fascinating elements of reading a fairy tale or a science fiction is the acceptance of a magical world where angels alight serenely with outstretched wings, birds and animals converse fluently, and uncommon things happen qu...

Empire State is the début novel of the talented author Adam Christopher, combining a superhero tale with an alternative reality prohibition era noir-esque New York. Throw in gangsters, private investigators and a rogue robot and even a slight nod to steampunk then you have one daring mix. The parall...

Hardcase is a detective fiction novel by Dan Simmons. Dan Simmons certainly gets around. He has written straight horror, epic SF, thrilling espionage and with this book he has opened a door the the hard-boiled Private Investigator genre. Hardcase is the first book in a series of books, about the for...

Utopia takes place five years into the reign of Alvar Kresh as the governor of Inferno, who is now married to robotisist Fredda Leving. The re-terraforming effort is doing fairly well, but many believe still doomed to failure. The plot centers around a plan created by an Infernal named Dalvo Lentral...

Lord of Light is a science fiction novel written by Roger Zelazny. Reading classics, isn't exactly what I would call a duty, but one should remember to pick up a classic once in a while and see why it became a classic. Some of them are actually quite good! I don't think that I've ever read any Zelaz...

Villain.net: Power Surge is the 3rd volume in the Villain.net series, one half of the merged series (with Hero.com) from the author Andy Briggs. Jake Hunter is now on the council of evil and is finally in a position to extract revenge on those most deserving. He also has a mission, to restore his fa...

Alex Lamb's Roboteer paints a picture of a future, that in the political climate of today, feels far too possible.  In this book, a war rages between two sides of humanity, two different and opposing ideologies and lifestyles.  One side, combining genetic and induced mutation with advanced technolog...

Have you ever wondered what happens in those years after the Superheroes have saved the planet? Would they continue to fight crime or would it all turn into a big PR exercise? While many would see them as noble warriors who are elevated far above the common man what would happen if they themselves f...

Stolen Lives examines the questions of self and free will. How do we become the person we are? What would happen if our memories; the details of our very identity were stripped away? Matt Tyler is going to find out. He awakes to find no memories of who he was, in a strange place with others who also...

The Cassini Division the third volume in the Fall Revolution series which began with the Star Fraction, written by Ken Mcleod. My second read by Ken MacLeod (how do you pronounce that?). Humanity has come a long way since the Star Fraction and the struggles of Moh Kohn. Humanity has split into a pos...

The Corridors of time is a science fiction novel by the author Poul Anderson. Reading almost exclusively in english, very few of the stories that I read take place in my home country of Denmark, in fact I think that this is the first one, that I've read, which takes place mostly in Denmark. Well, ex...

Douglas Richards has a wonderful way of injecting science fiction elements into a thriller style plot without upsetting the balance and comparisons to the late Michael Crichton are inevitable. If anyone was to compare authors it would also be fair to say that Richards is a worthy successor to Cricht...

The Death of Grass is a classic post-apocalyptic tale of a world without grass. Written in 1956 - just as the post-apocalyptic genre started to gain ground, created by the British author Samuel Youd - under the pen name John Christopher. The Death of Grass was Youd's second novel and was written in...

The Demolished Man was the first ever novel to win a Hugo award for "Best Novel" in 1953. As with much of Alfred Bester's works, it remains an understated classic. The novel is set in the 24th Century with a society who can no longer hide their crimes following the rise of police telepaths (known as...

The Nomad of Time trilogy (The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar), compiled into one volume in this paperback edition from Gollancz is a nostalgic treat for fans of steampunk and alternative history. These three stories are the memoirs of Oswald Bastable, Captain of the 53rd...

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg is very much a "literary mashup" novel which fills in the blanks from Jules Verne's classic novel "Around the World in 80 Days". It's being given a new lease of life thanks to Titan Books, originally published almost 40 years ago. As the title suggests the novel introdu...

The Shores of Tomorrow is the third volume in the Chronicles of Solace series by Roger MacBride Allen. In the far distant future, mankind has learned, thanks to Oskar DeSilvo, how to terraform planets. Once that operation was complete, humanity would colonize that world but what few people know is t...

This second volume in a collected anthology of Ursula Le Guin’s work showcases more of her Science Fiction and fantasy stories and has a more prominent escapist theme than the first. Her introduction to this volume is deeply insightful, commenting on the writer’s perspective of genre being more abou...

Ben Elton is a talented fellow. I've loved most of the TV programs he's been involved in from the Young Ones and Blackadder to Blessed and the Thin Blue Line . His humour is often satirical, off-the-wall and almost always makes me laugh. The only novel I've read of his prior to Time and Time Again i...

There seems to be a bit of a resurgence in the superhero story and this new wave of fiction manages to offer a different slant on the traditional tales, combining the modern interpretation of a superhero set within with the contemporary urban fantasy framework. Turbulance manages to go one better an...

Twiglight Candleflies is a collection of three post apocalyptic short fiction stories, written by Scott Niven. The three stories presented here are told in different styles and set in different worlds but all have a post apocalyptic edge to them. While each is a fairly short and sweet story they all...

When I received this anthology to review I hadn't delved into the background behind its journey to publication. It was interesting to see its crowd-sourced origins and development. There are some misconceptions people have with crowd source funded books, firstly that the quality of the writing might...

Watch is the sequel to the acclaimed novel "Wake" (nominated for a Hugo award in 2010) and is the second volume in the WWW series by the award winning author Robert J Sawyer. Catlin Decter is a gifted 15 year old blind girl who is given the gift of sight for the first time in her life through the gr...

Kira Miller is a highly gifted engineer working in the field of gene therapy; she manages to enhance the function of the brain to such a degree that makes immortality a real possibility through a savant like consciousness. But what secrets could be unlocked by playing god with the human brain? Wired...

Frankenstein , or The Modern Prometheus, is a novel by Mary Shelley, first published anonymously in London in January 1818. It is a book that almost everyone in the English-speaking world has an opinion on, and a surprising number of them have never read. Most of those opinions are about the wrong c...

The Bastard Legion is the latest Military Science Fiction from Gavin Smith, very much in the style of his earlier book Veteran and its sequel War in Heaven , although not connected in terms of plot or characters.  Smith’s hard hitting protagonist is Miska Corbin, a thief and hacker who steals a pris...

The Batman Universe comes in all shades as long as they are dark blue, dark grey or black. You have your lighter fare such as LEGO Batman or the 60s incarnation and you also have your darker versions. Tim Burton’s Batman was dark, Christopher Nolan’s was darker still, but both owe homage to the iter...

Haimey is the engineer aboard the Singer, an interstellar salvage vessel named after its shipboard Intelligence. Haimey is genetically modified for zero-G, and she has brain-enhancing implants that connect her to the rest of the crew and chemically manage her emotional state. Haimey, Singer, and the...

Call me old fashioned, I am a little scared of the future. This is a sentiment that will hit many of us eventually. What is wrong with the way technology works right now? Do I really need to talk to my speakers or plug myself into the Matrix just to order a pizza? The idea of getting behind the whee...

What if God was one of us? Just an Artificial Intelligence like one of us. Just a stranger on the internet, trying to wreak our lives. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Bible will know that God can be a little tricksy. If that God can flood the world or demand you sacrifice your child, what wou...

If you look at the Star Wars timeline from afar it can seem a little depressing. An Old Republic falls only for an Empire to rise. That goes and you get The New Order. It seems that the rebels are always having to rebel against something.  However, for the Sith to rise, there  must  be moments when...

When an intellectual property becomes huge it can go one of two  ways,  a homogeneous blob of the same stories on repeat, or a vibrant  universe full of different adventures. Star Wars was already massive, but  recently has branched out even wider. This included a reset of the tie in novels and rath...

If I lived in a Star Trek universe I would always travel by shuttlecraft and refuse to use the transporter. I am just uneasy with the idea of being split into atoms and reformed elsewhere. I am, for all intents and purposes, the same person, with the same memories, but am I? Is it not true that one...

Space travel is often painted in a glamourous fashion. Sleek ships sail among the stars as the crew members go on daring adventures, but the reality would be much more cramped. The planet Earth may feel a little crowded at times, but compared to being in a space craft, we can walk for miles and brea...

As a fan of the expanded Star Wars Universe of novels, I pinch myself with the amount of quality content there is. These are not just novelisations of the films, or even expansions of the most well-known characters, the novels are cutting deep and exploring corners of the universe that have not even...

If you had the chance to start over again from an early age and know what you do now, would you take it? A chance to live your life again; buy those shares in Apple, know some of the exam questions and football results? The answer for me is no. 80 years more life is not worth risking my family. What...

Calling your book The Escher Man is a bold move, but a move that T. R. Napper made. The name conjures up imagery from the artist of staircases to nowhere that lead back to the start. How does that effect the man eternally made to walk these steps? Throw in some Cyberpunk future and memory manipulati...

Over the years Star Wars has become a complicated beast, even the first film was a Space Opera that had a lot going on. Throw in various timelines and you have an epic on your hands, but some of the simpler stories are the ones that work the best. The Acolyte was series that expanded on The High Rep...

Vigilance is the third book in the Fractal series from Allen Stroud, following Fearless and Resilient . You know how it is with series; by the time you hit book three, you've got a pretty good idea of what you're getting into. The big question is whether the author can keep the momentum going, or if...