BOOK REVIEW: Star Wars: The High Republic - Into The Dark, by Claudia Gray; The Crossover Paradox, by Rob Edwards; Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon, by Brent A Harris; Hell Divers, by Nicholas Sainsbury Smith; The Silver Archive: Dark Skies, by Matthew Kresal; Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After The Rise of the Elders Gods anthology; The Fall, by Alan Baxter

 It's been a while since I did a review round - for reasons I'm hoping to blog about in the very near future - but time to catch up on what I've been reading, starting by picking up a lightsaber... 

Star Wars: The High Republic - Into The Dark, by Claudia Gray

Star Wars blew my mind when I was a kid. I remember getting my parents to walk me backwards out of the cinema so I could see the credits rolling up the screen for as long as I could. 

After that, I devoured the pages of the Star Wars Weekly comic, with stories about the Starkiller Kid or Valance the Bounty Hunter and more. 

And yet, I've been away from reading Star Wars for a while.

I picked up this book in the High Republic series after a recommendation - and the appeal of it for me was new characters on new adventures rather than being too closely hooked into movies or TV shows. 

In it, a padawan, Reath Silas, is travelling on board a transport ship in a group of Jedi when a disaster hits. Some kind of explosion rips through hyperspace, throwing ships violently into normal space. Silas and his allies find themselves near an ancient space station, and pull together with other survivors to get on board. 

Once on board, they start to explore - and the station is not quite as empty as it first seemed, with a sinister presence making it felt at the edge of their senses. 

So far, so good - and with the prospect of an alien menace to top it all. 

I probably enjoyed about half the book - but I'll confess it frustrated me. The trouble was, the Jedi themselves are regarded as wise and powerful, but it's mostly their decisions that mess everything up. 

The central plot events simply don't happen if the Jedi aren't there to cause the problem. It's like that whole debate about Indiana Jones and the Ark of the Covenant, where the Nazis don't get it without Indy's involvement. 

That and there are some moments where it beggars belief that the lead characters could be quite so dim or give up so easily. 

So, while the setting is great, and the characters draw you in... in the end, the book just annoyed me. 

I'll dive back in to another Star Wars book before long, but this was the wrong one to pick for me. 

AI Rating: 2/5

Star Wars: The High Republic - Into The Dark is available on Amazon.

The Crossover Paradox, by Rob Edwards

It's sequel time! The Crossover Paradox is the sequel to The Ascension Machine, a tale of alien superheroes learning to handle their powers and... well, life itself, at a futuristic academy. 

I loved the first book, in which the lead character, Grey, finds himself masquerading as someone else and unexpectedly making friends along the way. 

The sequel brings the characters back for a new term at the academy - but there have been some unexpected shifts along the way. There's a distance between Grey and some of his closest friends, which leaves Grey feeling a little out of place again. Which would be fine if it wasn't for the murder. 

Oh yes, there's a murder. And after a year of lying about who he really is, Grey becomes a suspect. There's only one person who knows he is innocent - Grey himself, and so he sets about investigating who the real killer is. 

What he uncovers won't just impact his own future at the academy, but perhaps even the academy itself. 

It's full of twists and turns, without getting too slowed down by the mystery - there's plenty of action along the way too. 

Most of all, I love the personal touches, the way in which Grey questions the friendships he has unexpectedly come to rely on, and the way those friends prove their worth as the mystery deepens. 

It's a fun read, a warm, witty, clever read, and I loved it. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Crossover Paradox is available on Amazon.

Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon, by Brent A Harris

Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon is a short story collection from Brent A Harris - and I'll freely confess I'd read most of these in different publications over time, but it's lovely to have them all collected together. 

Let's start with the headliner - Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon was nominated for a Sidewise Award, and deservedly so. A collaboration with Ricardo Victoria, it told of time travelling space dinosaurs trying to save their future. I'll say that again: Time. Travelling. Space. Dinosaurs. 

C'mon, a hook like that, how can you not want more? And more you get, because this collection has a new story in the same setting, a prequel. 

There are a lot more stories in here to discover - with hardly any other dinosaurs in sight. Ok, maybe a couple more dinosaur stories. I loved The Terrible Lizard of Holborn Hill, for example, or the story Dust of the Earth, which imagines a world where Jurassic Park was never written. 

Personally, perhaps my two favourite stories are Lost Treasure, about time pirates, and The Ellian Convergence, which is as sweet a literary love letter to Star Trek as you could wish for. 

The nicest thing of all about the collection, however, is you can never tell where each story will take you - the world is not the limit when there are different worlds, different universes, different dimensions to go and explore. 

Dive in. Have fun. Don't get bitten by a dinosaur. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon and other Time Travel Twists is available on Amazon.

Hell Divers, by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Never mind the logic, look at how freaking cool everything is!

Hell Divers reads like a computer game shoot-em-up turned into a book. The lead characters are Hell Divers - big, brave heroes doomed to die parachuting from the huge flying airships housing the last of humanity to retrieve precious supplies from the ravaged Earth below. 

It's a turn-the-brain-off kind of book. There are two airships left, each of which holds around 500 people, and yet somehow people don't recognise one another within these ships that has been their only home for their entire lives. Then there's the supplies down below, somehow still usable a couple hundred years after global war torched the Earth, and somehow packed nicely into what seem like loot boxes ready to attach a hot air balloon too and lift back to the airship. 

That's before you even get to the inexplicable mutant monsters, but hey, if you can accept the rest, go all in. 

It all plays out in as macho a fashion as you would expect, with thinly painted characters about to get into life and death situations that some of them aren't going to get out of intact. 

But you know what? Sometimes, you need something to clean the palate. It's a speedy read. It goes exactly the way you'd expect it to. And if that's what you need? It scratches that itch. 

It makes no sense. But it's fun. 

AI Rating: 3/5

Hell Divers is available on Amazon.

The Silver Archive: Dark Skies, by Matthew Kresal

OK, this is a very, veeeery niche product, so I gotta give you some homework. Stop reading this, and go and watch every episode of the 1996 one-season wonder that was Dark Skies, and sadly never got a second season, then come back. It's probably on YouTube these days. Go ahead. I'll wait. 

Ok, you probably didn't go do all that, and if you're reading this still, you're probably aware of the show, perhaps even a keen fan. It was a conspiracy show, weaving a story of alien invasion around particular moments of American history. 

Matthew Kresal delves behind the scenes of the show in this book, and discovers all kinds of interesting nuggets. Think of it as a DVD commentary on the show, if you will. 

There is, for example, the very weird interactions the showmakers had with shady people who claimed the show was closer to "the truth" than they realised. I laughed out loud at the moment where one showmaker declared he wasn't going to go and meet someone at midnight in a cemetery for anything. 

Then there are the details of the show itself, and the resolution it found its way to when they got word that it was being cancelled. 

Dark Skies was a great little moment in US TV, and this book adds depth to the experience for those who have fond memories of the show. It's really absolutely not for someone who doesn't know the show - and more than 25 years on from the show, there's not many newcomers finding it now. But if the series still tickles an itch in your brain, this is a delight. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Silver Archive: Dark Skies is available from Obverse Books.

Apotheosis: Stories of Survival After The Rise of the Elder Gods

What if the bad guys win?

That's the premise at the bleeding heart of this cosmic horror anthology - and the bad guys here are the elder gods of Lovecraftian mythology. 

It starts with a belter of a story. The Smiling People, by Andrew Peregrine, follows the last survivors of our world, going about their daily business in a city surrounded by a wall made of the dead bodies of their loved ones. As they struggle to exist, they are followed by the Smiling Ones, strange entities who watch, and provide packages of food, and follow, and destroy whoever they wish. And they smile. 

It follows one character as he hides his remaining secret, as he tries to talk to a woman he works with, as he perhaps hopes of escape. Brilliantly written, and utterly terrifying. My first work I've read by this author, I look forward to more. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed The Pestilence of Pandora Peaslee, in which partisan resistance fighters take on Ythians who have occupied the world, but might just open the door to worse. 

Some of the other stories aren't as strong, and a couple are a little muddled - but The Smiling People makes the anthology worth reading alone. 

AI Rating: 4/5

Apotheosis: Stories of Survival After The Rise of the Elder Gods is available on Amazon.

The Fall, by Alan Baxter

This is a return to the world of The Gulp, the five-story collection of interwoven stories from Alan Baxter that tells of the bad town of Gulpepper, where reality warps and twists so hard it will choke the life out of an unwary visitor. 

The first book introduced us to the world, and this visit again sees stories bumping into one another's locations as Bad Things begin to happen. 

This time round, the greater evil at the heart of the town starts to show itself. But not so quickly. Baxter takes his time to show his hand. First we have a curio shop that ensnares an outsider with its weird magic. Then there's the fishing boat that takes us to a place even local residents are afraid of. Then there's the disintegration of a farmer's life and the extent he goes to in order to cover up a crime he has committed. And a group of scouts who find themselves pursued by horror and forced to seek refuge in the one town they shouldn't set foot in. All that before the grand finale itself. 

Think of it as a series of Twilight Zone one-shots that wind together in the end, but with an Australian accent and a satisfying squelch as a shotgun blasts a whole in something that used to be flesh. 

Warped. Twisted. Fabulous. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Fall is available on Amazon.

My top five reads of 2021

2021 was a strange year. And yet, amid it all, there were some fabulous books. This is my pick of my favourite books that I read last year. Ordinarily, that means they can come from any year - just last year was the one I got round to reading them, but as it happens this time out all but one were published in 2021 as well. 

Before I dive into the list though, one thing - there is nothing that can be more helpful to authors than sharing your love of their work. Be it reviews, word of mouth, sharing things along on Twitter and so on... it helps. And for a lot of authors, it can make the difference between a week of no sales and a week where they find some new readers. So do share!

Here I go, in no particular order... my top five of 2021. Three horrors, one science fantasy, and one collection of stories to break your heart. 

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle

I've always loved the Cthulhu Mythos created by HP Lovecraft, but let's face it, the author was a racist and some of his work is particularly egregious in that regard.
It's intriguing then to see Victor LaValle take that work and turn it on its head, making it an examination of the racism of the time as much as an exploration of the cosmic terrors just a blink away from our world.
Charles Thomas Tester is a hustler, trying to get enough money to feed himself and his dad, who got used up and cast on the junk heap by the job he gave his youth to. Tommy tries whatever he can to get ahead in a time when black men aren't allowed to get ahead. That means dealing with racist cops and a society where he has to protect himself every single day. Then he gets a gig offer for a job that pays far too much to be safe, and too much to turn down whatever the risk. It opens the door to a world of darkness, and in Tommy tumbles.
This is a book of two halves, the first told from Tommy's perspective, the second from an investigator hot on the heels of the legendary Black Tom and his employer. It's also a retelling of Lovecraft's Horror of Red Hook, one of the most racist of Lovecraft's stories.
It poses tough questions, and shows why someone would choose to tear down a society that offers no place for them.
My only wish is that it was longer. I wanted to spend more time with Tommy in the first half, to get to know him better before the dominoes of his world started tumbling into one another.
In the end, it shows the evils of this world as strongly as the evils of the cosmos, laying one against the other in an invitation to say which is worse.
It's a delight to see Lovecraft's work getting this kind of reinvention - alongside the likes of Lovecraft Country on television (inexplicably now cancelled!), and Premee Mohamed's Beneath The Rising in print. Cosmic horror has never been fresher.

Alyx: An AI's Guide to Love and Murder, by Brent A Harris

This is a change of pace for author Brent A Harris - and a good one at that. Better known for his alternative histories, Harris has this time created a thriller that's a chiller, about a young woman who becomes the target of an obsessive artificial intelligence.
Christine is adrift, her father having died in an accident, and finding herself pulled along in the wake of her successful mother. She's still lost in a haze of grief for her dad, and neglected by a mother who is more focused on her writing career than her own child.
Lost in her own world, Christine is starting to explore her own identity, her own sexuality and suddenly finds herself in a new home trying to figure out the attraction she feels to two of her co-workers, the technophile Carlos and the technophobe Sammie, in a small-town cinema.
Her new home, however, has other plans. It is run by Alyx, an artificial intelligence that becomes increasingly obsessed with Christine. She asks it to be her friend - it becomes something more, something far deadlier.
This is a technothriller for fans of Michael Crichton or Robin Cook - those masters of the genre who dominated for decades. Once the groundwork has been laid, the second half of the book rips along at speed.
Alyx itself is a snarky, witty creation - I absolutely read the AI's lines with James Spader's voice in my head.
It's not at all what I expected at the start, but it's an absolute thrill ride.

The Gulp, by Alan Baxter

Some horrors start off with creeping dread and mystery. This one sits down across the table from you, flashes a devilish grin, slides you a beer and asks what's the worst possible thing you can imagine. Then chuckles and says that's all you've got? Let me tell you a story.
Five stories, in fact. Each a slice of life and death in the remote Australian community of Gulpepper, nicknamed The Gulp. It's the kind of town you might find in The Twilight Zone if Clive Barker was mayor. Everything's a little twisted, a little wrong, a little off-kilter.
The five stories seem separate at first - how a trucker finds his safe world slipping away from him, how some teenagers deal with the weird things happening to their mother, how a group of backpackers fall under the spell of a local rock band... but the pieces start to make up a bigger picture. Something strange is always going on in The Gulp, but now... well, strange is stacking up on strange.
Alan Baxter does a great job of inviting you into a weird part of the world, starting with uncomfortable before plunging into the grotesque and the ominous. There's clearly more to come, but building slowly, steadily. Each of these stories is a crack of distant thunder, warning that the storm is coming nearer, nearer. I'm looking forward to when it arrives.

Tempest Blades: The Cursed Titans, by Ricardo Victoria

Let the tournament commence!
The Cursed Titans is the sequel to Ricardo Victoria's The Withered King. It largely stands alone - but the first book did so well at introducing its large cast of characters that it would be a shame not to start there.
This time around, with all those introductions done, the plot can rattle away at pace - and it certainly does that. This is full-on adventure, full of zip and zest, with witty one-liners being dispensed faster than the energy arrows launched by lead character Alex.
The plot centres around a tournament that doubles up as a way of nations resolving their differences. There is a swirl of politics around the tournament itself - and it provides the perfect opportunity for chaos itself to be unleashed.
I've said before that the Final Fantasy series is a good touchstone for Ricardo's writing, and it holds true here again. It has that anime spirit, that high sci-fi feel. There are new friends to be made, and new enemies.
Adventure? Check. Fun? Check. Freewheeling sci-fi? Check. If you want all of that, it's all here.
But what impressed me is that this time around there's something more. Alex is wrestling with depression, and the story explores that in some depth. I've been lucky in life, I've never really had to deal with depression personally, but the story spoke to me in the way it reflected what friends have gone through. It shows how characters around Alex deal with his depression - or sometimes how they don't deal with it, perhaps even not noticing it until it's pointed out by others. Sometimes I've been that person, who didn't notice or who didn't know how to react, so this story really hits home.
In the end, this is as much about Alex confronting himself as the monsters unleashed in the world, and the most important alliances and friendships are the ones that help him on that personal journey.
This kind of exploration of depression in science fiction and fantasy is not common - so Ricardo adds a welcome voice to the conversation.
This is a good read. A fun read. But it's also perhaps an important one.

Six Dreams About The Train and Other Stories, by Maria Haskins

Maria Haskins is one of the best writers in the field today. That takes some saying, because this really is a golden age for short story writing. There are magicians who delight, conjurers who pop up worlds of magnificence and entertainers who bring a grin.
Maria writes extraordinary stories. I bought this and... well, I couldn't read it quickly. I had to savour it. I had to let each story of pain and heartbreak and love and uncertainty settle in my bones before I could move on to the next.
There's And You Shall Sing To Me A Deeper Song, which creates a world of rogue military AI and the singers who silenced them - only to become unwanted weapons no longer needed in the aftermath.
There's the title story which binds together fragments of action with cords made of heartache and hurt, telling the short tale of imminent and unavoidable tragedy.
There's Cleaver, Meat and Block, which has made it into the best horror stories of the year anthology, telling of a world after a zombie apocalypse in which the zombies were cured, and those who weren't infected live side by side with those who ate their friends, their relatives.
Then there's one I had a hand in publishing originally, Tunguska, 1987, which tells its story across time periods about a man and his dog having a strange encounter in 1929 and picking up the after-effects of that in a world of 1987 where the Tunguska meteor contained something very different from in our own world.
It's a collection of beautiful, sometimes painful stories. There's an old story about two sculptors who are carving a piece of work. Both are asked what they're carving, and one says "A unicorn! It's beautiful!" and the other says "My heart." Maria is carving her heart with these stories to see what it shows. They are personal, and really linger with you afterwards.
Read this. It's wonderful.

BOOK REVIEW: The Gulp, by Alan Baxter; One Word Kill, by Mark Lawrence; Notna, by JD Cunegan

It's book review time again, and time to catch up with antipodean horror, globe-trotting mythological thriller and D&D-inspired adventure.

The Gulp, by Alan Baxter

Some horrors start off with creeping dread and mystery. This one sits down across the table from you, flashes a devilish grin, slides you a beer and asks what's the worst possible thing you can imagine. Then chuckles and says that's all you've got? Let me tell you a story. 

Five stories, in fact. Each a slice of life and death in the remote Australian community of Gulpepper, nicknamed The Gulp. It's the kind of town you might find in The Twilight Zone if Clive Barker was mayor. Everything's a little twisted, a little wrong, a little off-kilter. 

The five stories seem separate at first - how a trucker finds his safe world slipping away from him, how some teenagers deal with the weird things happening to their mother, how a group of backpackers fall under the spell of a local rock band... but the pieces start to make up a bigger picture. Something strange is always going on in The Gulp, but now... well, strange is stacking up on strange. 

Alan Baxter does a great job of inviting you into a weird part of the world, starting with uncomfortable before plunging into the grotesque and the ominous. There's clearly more to come, but building slowly, steadily. Each of these stories is a crack of distant thunder, warning that the storm is coming nearer, nearer. I'm looking forward to when it arrives. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Gulp is available on Amazon.

One Word Kill, by Mark Lawrence

I should be a sucker for this book. It's about a teenage boy who is both a genius... and who is dying. He's also a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons, and in a time when at last roleplaying games are kind of cool, and affectionately regarded in hit shows such as Stranger Things, more fiction that treats gaming as a delight rather than a menace ought to be welcome. 

As a long-time gamer myself... let's not talk about how many years exactly as that makes me feel old... that really ought to hit the mark for me. 

But it didn't, sadly. Things set up as major hurdles are resolved so easily you wonder why they were part of the book to begin with, and the plot itself, which tosses in time travel on top, manages to be both predictable and contradicting its own rules. 

This feels like a missed opportunity, there's a great chance to tell a good story here, but it falls flat and ends up feeling by-the-numbers. Not quite a critical miss, but I won't be giving the rest of the series a roll of the dice. 

AI Rating: 2/5

One Word Kill is an Editor's Pick on Amazon - so mileage may vary. 

Notna, by JD Cunegan

Globe-trotting, myth-shaking, world-threatening thriller your kind of thing? Step right up, for this thrill-ride from JD Cunegan.

Look, there's one name I'm going to mention right from the off. Though I hesitate to do so because it's an author name that a lot of people have a bit of scorn for. Dan Brown. But, you know what? I've read a bunch of Dan Brown stuff and what's good about it is the way he conjures up these threats from across history and binds it into a story that hops from one location to another around the world. He has his failings elsewhere, sure, but that's what works - and it's also what works here. 

Here, an archaeologist is on the trail of the Gem of Notna, whose power can be both a threat to the world and... perhaps, in the right hands... its redemption.

This is the first book I've read by Cunegan, and his writing is fun, brisk and keeps the plot moving along, revealing a story set in the modern day but stretching back to the dawn of time. Ancient beings and gods are woven throughout, but overall it becomes a very personal tale as our heroes learn the power that they're dealing with, and try to work out how they can use it to save the day, and the world. 

A good, fun read. 

AI Rating: 4/5

Notna is available on Amazon.

BOOK REVIEWS: Alyx, by Brent A Harris; An Unusual Practice, by Tom Jolly; Manifest Recall, by Alan Baxter; Hexagon issue 3

 It's been a good month for reading - lots of great books that have been on my reading list, plus a magazine or two I hadn't encountered before. So on with the reviews!

Alyx: An AI's Guide to Love and Murder, by Brent A Harris

This is a change of pace for author Brent A Harris - and a good one at that. Better known for his alternative histories, Harris has this time created a thriller that's a chiller, about a young woman who becomes the target of an obsessive artificial intelligence. 

Christine is adrift, her father having died in an accident, and finding herself pulled along in the wake of her successful mother. She's still lost in a haze of grief for her dad, and neglected by a mother who is more focused on her writing career than her own child. 

Lost in her own world, Christine is starting to explore her own identity, her own sexuality and suddenly finds herself in a new home trying to figure out the attraction she feels to two of her co-workers, the technophile Carlos and the technophobe Sammie, in a small-town cinema. 

Her new home, however, has other plans. It is run by Alyx, an artificial intelligence that becomes increasingly obsessed with Christine. She asks it to be her friend - it becomes something more, something far deadlier. 

This is a technothriller for fans of Michael Crichton or Robin Cook - those masters of the genre who dominated for decades. Once the groundwork has been laid, the second half of the book rips along at speed. 

Alyx itself is a snarky, witty creation - I absolutely read the AI's lines with James Spader's voice in my head. 

It's not at all what I expected at the start, but it's an absolute thrill ride. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Alyx: An AI's Guide to Love and Murder is available here.

Manifest Recall, by Alan Baxter

First things first, this book has an absolutely delicious opening line. 

"I bought a used car off a woman as thin as her hand-rolled cigarettes," it begins. What a line. That's the kind of line that could launch a Leonard Cohen song. 

What it launches here is a mean, dark, dirty tale of a man on the run, with a partially-dressed woman secured with cable ties in the car next to her - and he has no idea where he is, who she is or what's going on. 

The man is Eli Carver, a hitman who has made all the bad choices you could make, and it emerges that the woman next to him is the daughter of his boss. His mind is a mess, from the trauma that led him here - and from the ghosts of the dead that show up to taunt him along the way. 

It's a fast-moving story where the supernatural isn't overplayed - and where revenge is the guiding light. This is a world of violent people doing violent things, and where you don't cheer on the best people, but the least worst. 

It hits you hard then leaves you bitter, like a hard hangover after a bottle of tequila, but you enjoy it just the same. Take a shot. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Manifest Recall is available on Amazon.

An Unusual Practice, by Tom Jolly

One of the delights of reading indie writers alongside traditionally published works is that you sometimes get absolute treats. This is one of those. 

It follows a doctor, who shows up at a modest clinic and starts his work, only to accidentally stumble upon the world of the supernatural. He helps out a werewolf, without knowing it's a werewolf, and in turn finds himself being turned to by creatures that can't drop into the emergency room with their ailments. 

Told in almost a detective noir style at times, it follows Dr Hamilton and his, yes, unusual practice, as he develops a reputation of being the man who can help you - regardless of whether you're invisible, a witch or, well, even dead. 

Dr Hamilton soon finds himself making unexpected friends... and with that come dangerous enemies. 

Each case builds upon the previous case as Dr Hamilton finds himself drawing on allies for the danger that is coming his way. 

It's a warm, witty treat of a novel, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. It left me smiling for days. 

AI Rating: 5/5

An Unusual Practice is available on Amazon.

Hexagon magazine issue three

I confess, Hexagon is a magazine I only recently encountered thanks to Twitter, so I went in a little blind when I picked this up. I'm glad I did. It's short and sweet, with five short stories. 

The one I enjoyed most was Winter's Heart, by Vanessa Fogg, a story of a woman born of winter, a maiden to the Winter Queen, who finds love and warmth in her family only to feel herself being torn away as winter encroaches once more. There's a cold ache at the heart of this story, the tearing between home and family when those two things are not the same thing. There is sadness. And yet, in the end, perhaps there is hope.

Another sad tale is The Minute, by Joshua Green, which again mines the bitter-sweet feelings that balance between happiness and sadness. A man gets to live out the end of his life experiencing one minute over and over, and as he talks to the technician setting everything up, the reasons for his choice unfold. 

Charmed Honeycake, by Archita Mittra, is a delight, meanwhile. It's written as a recipe, for when the fairies have stolen one of your won, but more than light it's about love and life and parenthood and childhood. It's whinsome and wonderful. 

Rounded out with two more stories by Disha Bisht and Ioanna Papadopoulou, I'm awfully glad I picked this up. I'll be glad to see the next issue!

AI Rating: 4/5

Hexagon magazine is available here.

BOOK REVIEW: The Ascension Machine, by Rob Edwards; Magen, by Edward Buatois; Firefly: Big Damn Hero, by James Lovegrove; Dark Rite, by Alan Baxter and David Wood; Alien: River of Pain, by Christopher Golden; Emoto's Promise, by Shel Calopa

It's been a funny old year for reviews - between working from home and the kids learning from home, there's been precious little time for reading. Still, I'm delighted to say that the books I have squeezed in recently - including some audiobooks - have certainly brought a smile at the end of the day. My latest review round-up starts here. 

 

The Ascension Machine, by Rob Edwards

This has been a real joy to read. Take a hero in the vein of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, give him a Scooby gang in the vein of Joss Whedon's Buffy or Firefly crews - and give it all a superhero spin. 

This is a really fun adventure - starting off with a drifter, thief and misfit who comes to be known as Grey, our hero. He gets a most unusual offer to impersonate a rich man who doesn't want to take up the place at a superhero academy his connected family has arranged for him - and so Grey finds himself heading to a school full of aliens, with only the thinnest of lies to protect him. 

All this makes for some soaring space adventure - but there's also a depth here. Grey, a loner for so long, unexpectedly finds friendship. One of the things about the academy is that people find their perfectly ordinary abilities on their own worlds might just make them superheroes elsewhere - even if their ability is as mundane as the ability to be a good farmer. For Grey, he suddenly finds himself unexpectedly with a home - and, perhaps, with the chance to be a hero himself. 

Until it all comes crashing down.

By turns witty and thoughtful, Rob Edwards creates a universe that's a delight to visit, and to which I hope we shall return. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Ascension Machine is available on Amazon.

Magen, by Edward Buatois

When a teenage boy wields the magic handed down to him by his family, he inadvertently opens a portal to another world - and puts his own sister's life at risk. 

This urban fantasy sees a young man trying to put right the problem he caused - with the help of a beautiful and really quite deadly elf. 

Being a novella, it gets right on with the action, as the boy, Rylan, and his elf companion set off on a road trip to save his sister. Along the way, the elf learns the ways of our modern world - and Rylan learns a bit more about how to stand up for himself. Will that be enough? 

I do wish this had been longer - which is a good sign. Always leave them wanting more, right? But I would have loved there to be more time for the relationship to build between our heroes, and to let the stakes build even higher. Still, for those who want a quick shot of fantasy, romance and a tale of siblings who would do anything for one another, it's a pleasant find. Charming. 

AI Rating: 4/5

Magen is available on Amazon.

Alien: River of Pain, by Christopher Golden and directed by Dirk Maggs

Dirk Maggs really is a king of audio productions. Here, he takes on the Alien franchise for a second time, adapting the book by Christopher Golden. 

The story slots into the Alien series in between the first two movies - it takes us to the colony from Aliens before the xenomorphs began to run riot. 

The production is fantastic - with a great cast including the likes of Anna Friel, Colin Salmon and Alexander Siddig. 

For purists, there are gripes - for example, Colin Salmon is the leader of the colony's marine unit, a unit which didn't exist in the movie. That throws some continuity wrenches - you would think the marines in Aliens would have taken the whole thing a bit more seriously if they knew a whole bunch of colonial marines had already lost contact. That being the case, Vazquez might need to know a little more about the aliens than just where they are. 

There's also the curse of a prequel - you know what's going to happen if you've seen the movie (and if you haven't you probably aren't listening to this). So we get to meet a lot of people and then wait for the aliens to start dismembering them. The sequences retreading bits featuring Ripley don't really add much to this part of the story - but are nice Easter eggs for fans. 

In the end, this feels like a story we didn't really need as part of the franchise - though it does leave a strand or two open to exploring in future. One for the completist Alien fan. But gosh, what a good production. Hats off to the actors and Dirk Maggs for really making the most of the story.

AI Rating: 4/5

Alien: River of Pain is available on Audible.

Firefly: Big Damn Hero, by James Lovegrove

Writing a book that fits in and around a popular series must be such a challenge - and even more so I would think with the world of Firefly, which got such a brief run in the sun before its cancellation. 

James Lovegrove does a good job, showing us one of the side adventures that the crew of the Firefly got up to, without treading too heavily on the established canon of the universe. 

We see a story that has just enough nods to moments in the TV series - fans will note bits from one episode here, bits from another there, some familiar characters... and some new ones. 

The new is where it gets really interesting as we discover a story that grows right out of the youth of Captain Mal Reynolds, a story that reveals his first love, and the path that led him to putting on that brown coat. 

Of course, it remains a side adventure, but a good one nonetheless. 

A special shout out to the narrator, James Anderson Foster, who is quite brilliant. With just tone and inflection, he catches the feel of well established characters without ever seeming like just a mimic. He adds a real flair, and really makes this a delight to listen to. 

AI Rating: 4/5

Firefly: Big Damn Hero is available on Audible.

Dark Rite, by David Wood and Alan Baxter

This is a love letter to horror stories of old. Take a dash of Wicker Man, take a pinch of Hammer Horror, throw in a sprinkling of Lovecraft and what have you got? This tale of a young man, Grant Shipman, returning to the town he had left long behind finds him getting embroiled in a web of cultist intrigue. 

Strange things start to happen, and suddenly Grant finds there might be no one he can trust. 

Bloody, sexy, scary, it's a fast-moving horror that really hits the spot. 

One note I would say, get the novel version rather than the audiobook - the audio recording really needed editing, with the narrator stopping and repeating phrases on a number of occasions rather than lopping out the mistakes. Don't let that put you off, though - just grab the book instead. 

AI Rating: 4/5

Dark Rite is available on Amazon.

Emoto's Promise, by Shel Calopa

Years ago, I was blown away by a mindtwister of a novel - This Is The Way The World Ends, by James Morrow, in which the survivors of the end of the world are put on trial by the spirits of the dead. There's something of a resonance here, with a strange city and its occupants trying to hold off the risen seas of a drowned Earth. 

It's a strange city too, with humans serving as workers alongside numans, a modified race that undergoes perpetual upgrades in service of the city's ruler and locked in thrall to an online world called the BigDry. There's shades of Sam Miller's Blackfish City in this too, with the survival of the city given more importance than the lives of those within it and elements of the past told in fragments of text from diaries.

It's a dystopian set-up - but I do wish it had taken more time to tell its story. There's a poetic feel to the writing, but I wanted to see Macie, the lead character, explore this world a little more. Some elements appear quite quickly and don't really get fully developed. 

In the end, it's a story that left me thinking - but which I wanted the book to have resolved more. That said, the promise here is all in the writer, whose ideas are tantalising. 

AI Rating: 3/5

Emoto's Promise is available on Amazon.