Tag: Sci-fi
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BBC National Short Story Award 2013
£7.99 – available now Congratulations to Sarah Hall, who was named this week as the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2013. Her story, Mrs Fox, is an earthy fable about a complacent husband whose wife undergoes a shocking transformation. Hall emerged as the winner of the £15,000 prize from an all-female shortlist…
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The Lowest Heaven, Memory Palace
We’re used to book tie-ins for films, TV shows and grasping celebrities but fiction inspired by an exhibition is a more engaging combination. Alongside Hari Kunzru’s dystopian Memory Palace, written as part of a new V&A exhibition, there’s The Lowest Heaven, a science fiction anthology to coincide with Visions of the Universe at the National…
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Jack Glass: Adam Roberts
Admirers of Adam Roberts have suggested his clever, playful prose might earn him a Booker Prize nomination if it wasn’t for the fact he writes science fiction. His latest book is a mash-up of SF and Golden Age detective fiction with the exuberance of Anthony Burgess and the self-aware intricacy of academic crime author Michael…
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The Long Earth: Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
Paperback now available – sequel out June 20 For all his staggering success, Terry Pratchett’s a writer who benefits from a partner in prose, if only to rein in his relentless mirth making. The Long Earth, a novel with ‘hard’ SF author Stephen Baxter about a chain of parallel Earths, is not as knockabout as…
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The Shining Girls: Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes has sprung herself from the South African science fiction ghetto into more lucrative high-concept thriller territory, following her sardonic cyberpunk debut Moxyland and the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Zoo City. The Shining Girls is a serial killer story set not in Cape Town but Chicago, and it’s based firmly in the 20th century.…
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The Teleportation Accident: Ned Beauman
Now in paperback – £8.99 Ned Beauman published a precociously confident debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, in 2010. He’s followed that with an audacious comic romp that made the Man Booker Prize longlist. The globe-trotting story begins in Berlin in 1931 where sex-starved set designer Egon Loeser is working on a production about his 17th century…
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In Other Worlds: Margaret Atwood
In recent years, a few of the more hidebound members of the science fiction community have sniped at Margaret Atwood’s unwillingness to fully embrace the SF label. It turns out that she’s a lifelong reader – and writer – of genre fiction who’s frustrated that such classification feels like books ‘being sent to their room……
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Anathem: Neal Stephenson
Part sci-fi thriller, part mystery, part coming-of-age story, part musing on maths and physics, imaginative tour-de-force and a novel of ideas (a great many of them) if ever there was one. Too good to summarise with something trite like un-put-down-able, but it is, so there you go.
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The Planet of the Apes: Pierre Boulle
A book that spawned an industry of tie-ins and spin-offs and gave Charlton Heston a legitimate excuse to run dementedly about a beach in a loin cloth and emote for all he was worth. But despite its many (mostly) lame connotations, the original novel (this book you’re about to buy) is really rather remarkably good. …
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The Passage: Justin Cronin
You know what? This isn’t important literature; it has nothing [much] to say about the world we live in and isn’t interested in holding a mirror up to anything for the sake of critical commentary. What it is, however, is what a good novel should be, which is bloody entertaining and genuinely thrilling. The print…