An alien apocalypse is Rick Yancey’s take on a new challenge for the plucky heroine prototype that has emerged in the wake of Katniss Everdeen. Whilst The 5th Wave is not quite a dystopia, there is something startlingly familiar about the feisty female lead who attempts to single-handedly take down the alien race that’s oppressing humankind in a post-apocalyptic world. With the film adaptation just released in the US, could this be the next YA mega-franchise?
January 29th, 2016. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 2.5 | Rick Yancey | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
Melanie is ten years old, with skin as white as snow, just like in the fairy tale. But she doesn’t live in a tower; she lives in a cell, and is taken from there through the corridor to the classroom, and the shower room, where she is fed grubs once a week before a chemical spray falls from the ceiling. She knows that the place she lives in is called the block, and that the block is on the base, which is called Hotel Echo.
January 19th, 2016. Terry Weyna and Ray McKenzie´s rating: 4 | Mike (M.R.) Carey | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Andrew Martin is a distinguished mathematics professor at Cambridge University who has just discovered the solution to the Riemann hypothesis, thereby solving the secret of prime numbers and unlocking the secrets of the universe. That is, at least, until he is assassinated by an alien race and his body is taken over by a Vonnedorian agent intent on wiping out all traces of his mathematical discovery so that the puny human race will never hold the secret of the primes.
So begins The Humans,
January 14th, 2016. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 4 | Matt Haig | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan
In Kirsty Logan’s watery debut, the world as we know it still exists, only it is entirely underwater. Eerie and poetic, The Gracekeepers has been dubbed a dystopia, but it actually reads much more like a regular fantasy. Small scraps of land are all that remain of earth’s continents after rising water levels, leaving humanity in two groups: “clams,” the lucky few who cling to the land and “damplings,” those that must live out on the sea. The two groups have an uneasy relationship: half-mistrustful,
December 23rd, 2015. Ray McKenzie and Jana Nyman´s rating: 3 | Kirsty Logan | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel
“Quiet” and “lovely” are not usually words one reaches for when describing a post-apocalyptic novel. Not with the reverted-back-to-savagery cannibals; the road-raging-mohawk-sporting highway warriors; the gleeful told-you-so rat-a-tat of survivalist gunfire, or the annoying mumblespeak “braiiinnnnss” from the shambling zombies. But quiet and lovely are exactly the words I’d use to describe Station Eleven, the post-apocalyptic novel from Emily St. John Mandel that is happily missing all the above and shows the modern world ending with neither a bang nor a whimper,
December 22nd, 2015. Bill Capossere, Ryan Skardal, Ray McKenzie, Marion Deeds, Tadiana Jones and Stuart Starosta | Emily St. John Mandel | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 10 comments |
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
A provincial Canadian town in the 1920s doesn’t automatically scream sci-fi to most readers. But that is the beauty of Margaret Atwood’s tenth novel, The Blind Assassin (2000). She weaves a sprawling, post-war tale with pulp science-fiction stories that have readers leaping between Port Ticonderoga and Planet Zycron. It doesn’t sound like it should work, but the story is only made richer by these contrasting worlds.
The novel opens with Iris Chase recalling that her sister drove a car off a bridge.
December 3rd, 2015. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 3.5 | Margaret Atwood | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh
Post-apocalyptic literature is having a bit of a moment. This is probably because you can’t call anything dystopia anymore without someone rolling their eyes, but still. Louise Welsh’s contribution to the genre is A Lovely Way to Burn, in which a flu pandemic (kind of grossly nicknamed “the sweats”) is wreaking havoc on the human race. Welsh’s tale is set in contemporary London and it’s all her heroine, Stevie Flint, can do to try and survive the descent into chaos.
December 2nd, 2015. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 3 | Louise Welsh | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
How the Marquis Got His Coat Back by Neil Gaiman
Fans of Neverwhere, rejoice. The Marquis of Carabas has returned and is as slippery and smooth-talking as ever. Neil Gaiman takes readers into London Below once more as the Marquis embarks upon an adventure to retrieve his stolen coat. Despite being much smaller in scope and scale than Neverwhere, it is impossible not to be immersed in Gaiman’s fantastical world.
The Marquis has lost his coat.
November 5th, 2015. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 4 | Neil Gaiman | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
A serial killer is at a serious advantage when they can jump through time at will, as Harper Curtis of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls can. This does not bode well for Kirby Mazrachi, intended victim of said serial killer who should’ve died after Harper sliced open her stomach and slit her throat. But Kirby miraculously survived the attack and is determined to find the man that derailed her life.
The problems with trying to find a time-travelling serial killer,
November 3rd, 2015. Ray McKenzie, Terry Weyna and Marion Deeds´s rating: 4 | Lauren Beukes | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
The problem with writing about unremarkable and average people is that they are unremarkable and average. In what is basically one long novel-sized homage to Xander from Buffy, Patrick Ness tackles what it is to be the underdog in his latest novel, The Rest of Us Just Live Here.
Mikey lives in a nondescript American town, trying to navigate the pitfalls of high school. There have been various catastrophes in the town’s history: a vampire invasion,
September 21st, 2015. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 2 | Patrick Ness | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…
Detailed, thoughtful review, Bill. I'm going to read it for two reasons. First, Karen Russell wrote it, and second, it…