Category Archives: Reviews

Fugitive Telemetry – Martha Wells

After briefly veering into full novel territory with 2020’s Network Effect, Martha Wells’ brilliant Murderbot Diaries series returns to its novella-length roots with Fugitive Telemetry, the sixth book in total and the fifth novella in the series. Set (slightly confusingly) between Exit Strategy and Network Effect, it’s essentially a detective story as Murderbot turns investigator in the wake of an unexpectedly dead human turning up on Preservation Station. Concerned that the death might be a sign that GreyCris are attempting to strike at Doctor Mensah, Murderbot begrudgingly agrees to work alongside station security – who seem equally unhappy about the arrangement – to investigate the murder.

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QUICK REVIEW: Immersion – Aliette de Bodard

Winner of both Nebula (2012) and Locus (2013) awards for Best Short Story, Aliette de Bodard’s Immersion is a powerful, thought-provoking story that belongs to her Xuya series – science fiction stories set in a world of Vietnamese culture-inspired alternate history. On Longevity Station, Quy spends her free time watching the spaceships arrive bringing Galactic tourists to the station, feeling caught between happy memories of her student days and the realities of her life now. When she’s called in to her family’s restaurant to help with negotiations for a Galactic couple’s wedding anniversary plans, she finds herself faced with the shocking sight of a woman who’s so lost in her attempts to fit in that she’s forgotten who she truly is.

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Priest of Gallows – Peter McLean

Book three in Peter McLean’s phenomenal War for the Rose Throne series, Priest of Gallows delivers another gripping tale of gangsters, intrigue and espionage, family bonds, harsh justice and escalating danger. Picking up where Priest of Lies left off, it begins with Tomas Piety – army priest, businessman, Queen’s Man – in the uncomfortable position of governor of Ellinburg. When word arrives of the Queen’s untimely death, however, Tomas returns to Dannsburg with his closest companions, where he finds himself pulled ever deeper into the murky world of the Queen’s Men. Under the orders of Provost Marshall Dieter Vogel, Tomas sinks further into the role of Queen’s Man while rising higher in Dannsburg society, but even as he does so he’s forced to consider how far he’s prepared to go in the pursuit of respect, power and authority.

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Sistersong – Lucy Holland

Retelling a traditional murder ballad in the shape and style of an epic fantasy, Lucy Holland’s Sistersong is a fascinating, evocative and at times shockingly dark tale of family, magic, faith and suppressed voices set in post-Roman Britain. In the kingdom of Dumnonia, the three daughters of King Cador each search for their place in life and in their family, while war gathers on the horizon and their father’s connection to the land and its magic wanes as the Christian church gains power. As the danger of Saxon invasion grows and the fortunes of the kingdom fade, the sisters are each faced with choices that will have significant consequences for themselves, their family and their people.

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Network Effect – Martha Wells

After four excellent novellas, Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series gets its first novel-length instalment with Network Effect, which offers everything that makes this series so much fun…just more of it! Their research mission completed with only one minor incident of life-threatening drama, Murderbot and its human charges return to Preservation space, only to come under attack from a mysterious enemy ship. When several of its humans – including members of Dr Mensah’s family – are kidnapped during the attack, Murderbot puts its media consumption aside and goes immediately on the offensive. Passing through a wormhole and encountering both suspiciously alien-like enemies and the unexpected presence of an old sort-of-friend, Murderbot quickly finds that the situation is stranger and much more uncomfortable than it could possibly have expected.

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QUICK REVIEW: The Tilean’s Talisman – David Guymer

Long before tackling the Doom of Gotrek Gurnisson in Kinslayer and Slayer, David Guymer’s first contribution to the saga of Gotrek and Felix was the short story The Tilean’s Talisman. First published in Hammer & Bolter Issue 14, and then in Gotrek & Felix: The Anthology, it sees devious skaven Siskritt attempting to steal a magical item of great power – the titular talisman – from a Tilean merchant, while the tavern around him burns. It’s a plan of typical skaven brilliance, using a bigger assault on the human city as cover for Siskritt’s own agenda, but the one thing he didn’t plan for was the presence of a certain belligerent dwarf Slayer and his human companion.

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Elsa Bloodstone: Bequest – Cath Lauria

Part of the Marvel: Heroines series from Aconyte Books, Cath Lauria’s Elsa Bloodstone: Bequest is a madcap thrill-ride full of monster battles, jet-setting and bickering siblings. Elsa Bloodstone – badass monster hunter, daughter of the famed Ulysses Bloodstone, definitely not a team player – is quite content with her life spent travelling the world, slaying assorted horrors for money. When a simple monster hunt is interrupted by mercenaries wanting her bloodstone shard, however, it seems as though her life is about to get a bit more complicated, an impression only reinforced by the appearance of a previously unknown half-sister asking for help in recovering her own, recently-lost bloodstone. Begrudgingly, Elsa agrees to help Mihaela, and the two of them set out to track down whoever’s behind the bloodstone theft.

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The End of Enlightenment – Richard Strachan

After tackling the human followers of Chaos in his debut novel for Black Library, Richard Strachan returns to Age of Sigmar with The End of Enlightenment but focuses on two very different factions – the Lumineth Realm-Lords and the Ossiarch Bonereapers. In the wake of the Necroquake, the Lumineth march on Shyish determined to bring Nagash to account. Stonemage Carreth Y’gethin holds himself aloof from the war, determined to leave behind the violence of his youth during the Spirefall, but when his sister is killed fighting the Bonereapers he finds himself drawn into the conflict regardless. Tasked by Teclis himself with defeating a dangerous general of the Ossiarch legions and staving off a terrible future, Carreth struggles to balance his god-given duty with his own spiritual equilibrium.

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The Second Bell – Gabriela Houston

Bleak yet hopeful, grounded but magical, Gabriela Houston’s debut novel The Second Bell is a quiet, powerful story of family, community and survival inspired by dark Slavic mythology. In a remote, mountainous village, Miriat gives birth to a child with two hearts – a striga – and is forced to choose between abandoning her daughter or leaving the village forever. Choosing exile, Miriat raises her daughter amongst other strigas, who teach Salka to control her second heart and the dark powers it possesses. Life in the striga village is hard but safe until nineteen year-old Salka faces a choice of her own, which puts both her and her mother at risk and threatens the balance of her life, and the village as a whole.

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Bear Head – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War (2017) was a bold, powerful piece of typically smart sci-fi; its sequel Bear Head picks up some of the same characters and themes and runs with them. Life for construction worker Jimmy Marten is pretty dull, despite the fact that he lives on Mars and has all manner of interesting body modifications, right up until the digital awareness of a talking bear takes up residence in his digital headspace. Honey the bear is a bit confused about what she’s doing, but she knows that she wants to make contact with her old friend Bees, the Distributed Intelligence who laid the foundations of human life on Mars. These days Bees is something of a digital bogeyman however, and while Honey tries to put her fragmented memories into order, back on Earth the tide of political opinion continues to turn ever more extreme, led by the relentless, loathsome presence of World Senate hopeful Warner S. Thompson.

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