Tag: science fiction

Short Stories from Tor.com

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One of the things I most enjoy about Tor.com, a website focusing on science-fiction and fantasy publishing, is their original fiction. Recently I’ve been pleased to see that some of their short stories have been published as ebooks, complete with gorgeous covers that are designed for each one. At around 30 pages per story, these make wonderful amuse-bouches between more lengthy reads and are usually less than £1 a piece on Amazon. And, if you’d rather read them for free, you can always seek them out on Tor.com itself. As the stories aren’t long enough to warrant individual posts, I thought I’d collect my thoughts together five at a time.

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The Midwich Cuckoos (1957): John Wyndham

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★★★½

This is one of the books, like The Stepford Wives or Rosemary’s Baby, that has become an icon of popular culture: even if you haven’t read it, or seen the related films, you know the basic premise. I spotted it in the library today and, because I have another of Wyndham’s books lined up waiting to be read (Triffids, no less), I thought this would make an interesting comparison. For some reason I’d always imagined that Midwich would be a horror story, but it’s something far more subtle and sophisticated: a creeping, chilling sci-fi thriller which places its characters in the ultimate moral dilemma.

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The Power (2016): Naomi Alderman

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★★★★

On one otherwise unremarkable day, something starts to happen that will change the world. One by one, fifteen-year-old girls all over the world discover a strange crackling sensation in their fingertips. One by one, they discover that their maturing bodies allow them to manifest sparks of electricity that can be thrown from hand to hand, transmitted through water and used as a weapon. Suddenly, women can harm or kill men with barely a second thought. The girls discover that, through their touch, they can activate the same power where it lies dormant in the bodies of older women. As society teeters on its foundations, a handful of very different women – and one man – find themselves at the heart of the storm, as they try to harness and understand this critical biological development.

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Lament for the Fallen (2016): Gavin Chait

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© David Fisher

★★★★

Again, it was the cover that did it. The eerie face, with its scored lines and sunburst of golden rays, reminded me of an ancient tribal mask. I was intrigued by the apparent disconnect between that and the sci-fi plot summarised on the back of the book. Gavin Chait’s first novel turned out to be quite different from any such novel I’ve read before, and not just for its African setting. While on the one hand it offers a sobering future, in which the planet’s ecology has been ravaged by greed, it also shows seedlings of hope, as people strive, even in the darkest days, to create a better world.

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The Philosopher Kings (2015): Jo Walton

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★★★½

Thessaly: Book II

We rejoin the inhabitants of the island of Kallisti twenty years after the conclusion of The Just City, when the project to construct a living version of Plato’s Republic foundered on the rocks of debate, arrogance and divine impatience. A generation has passed since then and, with many of the Masters dead and a new crop of Young Ones growing up, it falls to the Children – those brought to Kallisti at ten years old – to steer their way towards the best possible world. But things are not what they once were and, in the absence of Athene, the high ideals of a philosophical city are already beginning to crumble.

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The Just City (2015): Jo Walton

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★★★★

Thessaly: Book I

In his book The Republic, Plato dreamed of a just society in which the pursuit of knowledge and excellence would be the highest goal. It was a daring dream, the first utopia: an elaborate thought-experiment which has captivated the imagination of thinkers through the ages. But could it actually work? Athena is determined to find out. Gathering together those who, throughout history, have read Republic and prayed to her that it might be possible to live in such a place, she prepares the groundwork for the realisation of the greatest political fantasy ever imagined.

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The Chimes (2015): Anna Smaill

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★★★★

When I asked to review this book, it was a shot in the dark. I knew nothing about it, nor the author, nor that it had been longlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. I was simply interested by the blurb’s description of its world: a future England, post-apocalyptic and dystopian, with the crowded hubbub of London at its heart. It turned out to be a gem: one of the most original concepts I’ve encountered for a very long time, and a story told with a profound sensitivity to the musical quality of words.

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Dragonflight (1968): Anne McCaffrey

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★★★

Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I read a lot of classic sci-fi novels that my dad had bought in the 1970s and 1980s and then relegated to a box in the attic. These were my first ‘grown up’ books and together they opened up a whole world for me, but I haven’t read them since. However, a few weeks back someone donated a treasure trove of these novels to the book stall at the village fete (not my dad’s copies, I hasten to add), and I saw the perfect opportunity to revisit the stories which had had such an impression on me as a child. First up on the nostalgia road-trip was Dragonflight, which I remembered with great fondness. Inevitably, it didn’t quite stand up to the test of time, but – having forgotten virtually everything about it except the characters’ names and the dragons – I still found it exciting and fast-paced, with a clever blend of sci-fi and fantasy at its heart.

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Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

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Star Trek: Into Darkness

★★★½

(directed by J.J. Abrams, 2013)

Although I tend to write about quirkier films on the blog, I have to be honest: most of the time, like everyone else, I go to the cinema for the simple reason that I want to be entertained. I’m not a huge fan of action films; nor am I anything remotely approaching a Trekkie; but I really enjoyed the first instalment of the rebooted Star Trek franchise and wanted to see the sequel. Into Darkness obliged by completely bypassing the critical part of my brain and going straight into overdrive, leaving me with a bubbling sense of exhilaration and a grin on my face a mile wide. It may not be a great film. It may not be Art. But it was bloody good fun.

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Cloud Atlas (2004): David Mitchell

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★★★★ ½

I’m delighted to be able to kick off the New Year with a post on a real stunner of a book, which I expect will already be familiar to most of you. There are a few literary adaptations coming out in the cinema over the next couple of months and so in principle this gives me an opportunity to revisit the books that I have read and to track down those I haven’t. Cloud Atlas is one of those I hadn’t read before: it came out when I was at university, but I was never particularly attracted to it because all the reviews I read simply lost themselves in hyberbole about its conceptual brilliance and neglected to give me any real sense of the story. Eight years later, having found a copy for £1.50 in a charity shop, I’ve come to realise that actually the critics were right. The concept is brilliant.

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