THE GOD GAME by Danny Tobey

THE GOD GAME Danny Tobey (www.facebook.com/dannytobeybooks) Gollancz (www.gollancz.co.uk) £16.99 Charlie and his friends are high-school misfits. Nerds and losers, the group of five friends call themselves the Vindicators, and spend most of their free time in the school’s Tech Lab, coding and building robots. Charlie, once a star student, has let his work suffer following […]

An Extract From PROXIMITY by Jem Tugwell

PROXIMITY Jem Tugwell (www.jemtugwell.com) Serpentine Books (www.serpentinebooks.com) £8.99 1 Thief For the first time in ten years, the real me walked free. I savoured every beat of excitement that pulsed through me. All those failures, but now it was working. I let the corners of my mouth drag up an unfamiliar smile. They couldn’t […]

EMILY ETERNAL by M.G. Wheaton

EMILY ETERNAL M.G. Wheaton Hodder & Stoughton (www.hodder.co.uk) £14.99 The sun is dying. Five billion years earlier than scientists believed it should, it looks set to wipe out all life on the planet Earth. Emily is an artificial consciousness, a university experiment designed to help humans process trauma. When her creator discovers a way in […]

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY by Mur Lafferty

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY [EXPANDED EDITION] Mur Lafferty (murverse.com) Century (www.penguin.co.uk) £20.00 Han and Qi’ra have grown up in a life of poverty and crime on Corellia, a world known for its distinctive starships. Part of Lady Proxima’s gang, these scrumrats earn their living through petty crime in the world’s seedy underbelly. When Han […]

EXTRACT: SALVATION by Peter F. Hamilton

SALVATION Peter F. Hamilton Pan Macmillan (www.panmacmillan.com) £20.00 Earth Calling Drifting through interstellar space, three light-years out from the star 31 Aquilae, the Neána abode cluster picked up a series of short, faint electromagnetic pulses that lasted intermittently for eighteen years. The early signatures were familiar to the Neána, and faintly worrying: nuclear fission detonations, […]

EMPIRE OF SILENCE by Christopher Ruocchio

EMPIRE OF SILENCE (SUN EATER BOOK 1) Christopher Ruocchio Gollancz (www.gollancz.co.uk) £16.99 Hadrian Marlowe, eldest son of the ruler of the planet Delos, is little more than an embarrassment to his father. A wannabe scholiast, he is far from the strong son who could rule with an iron fist in the event that Lord Alastair […]

EXTRACT: THE HAND OF AN ANGEL by Mark Brownless

THE HAND OF AN ANGEL Mark Brownless (www.markbrownless.com) £1.99 Prologue 2013 Eighth International Congress of Clinical Psychology, Granada, Spain The printed A3 sheet clipped to a folding stand outside the lecture theatre announced the afternoon sessions. Shortlist lecture series: Elspeth Dickson Award for New Research Areas A list of research papers and their presenting authors […]

EXTRACT: SHATTERMOON by Dominic Dulley

SHATTERMOON Dominic Dulley (dominicdulley.com) Jo Fletcher Books (www.jofletcherbooks.com) £16.99 MENDER Consciousness returned slowly. At first the familiar throb of a ship’s mass-inversion drive made Orry think she was in her cabin, but the smell wasn’t right. There was an antiseptic odour that brought to mind a hospital, but it was fighting with something earthier, a […]

THE SEVEN DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE by Stuart Turton

THE SEVEN DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE Stuart Turton Raven Books (www.bloomsbury.com) £12.99 A man wakes in the middle of the woods and can remember nothing except the name “Anna”. Hearing noise nearby, he believes that Anna is being murdered, but has no idea why he believes this to be the case, or why she might […]

GUEST POST: Who is Elyse Martingale? by MATTHEW BLAKSTAD

Name: MATTHEW BLAKSTAD Author of: SOCKPUPPET (2016) LUCKY GHOST (2017) On the web: www.matthewblakstad.com On Twitter: @mattblak Ah, yes: Professor Elyse Martingale. Doyenne of Britain’s post-war computing revolution. Political radical and scourge of the state. Inspiration to a new generation of 21st century hacktivists. Surely you know all about Elyse Martingale? What’s that? You’ve never heard of […]