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Over the last few years British Science Fiction has been going through something of a renaissance, producing a range of interesting and exciting new writers. This is a small selection of novels from the current crop.
Swiftly: A Novel by Adam Roberts
Swiftly is set in an alternate history which based on Jonathan Swift`s Gulliver`s Travels. 122 years after Lemuel Gulliver`s voyage his homeland is in crisis. The British Empire, grown rich on the exploitation of Lilliputian slaves, is at war with the French, who are backed by the giant Brobdingnagians. Caught up in the war is Abraham Bates, who is faced with questions of loyalty, conscience, and love. Adam Roberts has written both a rip roaring 19th century adventure, a love story and a thought-provoking pre-atomic SF novel about our place in the universe.
9tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
`9Tail Fox` is a noir melding of ancient Chinese folklore, organised crime and cutting edge medical technology. A policeman is murdered in San Francisco and spends the rest of the novel hunting down the man who did it, and trying to get the answer to some terrifying questions. Why is he in another man`s body? Why is someone trying to kill him (again)? And why is he being haunted by a nine tailed Albino fox? From the shell-shattered streets of Stalingrad in 1942 to the back alleys of San Francisco`s Chinatown, evocative of place, crystal clear in its depiction of character, this is literary fantastic fiction at its most compelling from one of the most exciting writers working today.
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
The year is 4034. For short-lived `Quick` races like humans, space is dominated by the complicated, grandiose Mercatoria whose rule is both military and religious. To the Dwellers who may live billions of years, the galaxy consists of their gas-giant planets - the rest is debris. Our human hero Fassin Taak is a `Slow Seer` privileged to work with the Dwellers of the gas-giant Nasqueron in his home system Ulubis. His life work is rummaging for data in their vast, disorganised memories and libraries. Unfortunately, without knowing it, he`s come close to an ancient secret of unimaginable importance. Fassin Taak must uncover a secret hidden for half a billion years, but everyday war goes closer.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans, mutants and arcane races throng in the gloom beneath its chimneys. A stranger has come, with an impossible demand, and soon the city is to be gripped by terror, and the fate of millions will come to depend on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crime-lords alike. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground as battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings, and a reckoning is due at the city`s heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape.
Click here to find and request copies of "Perdido Street Station"
Black Man by Richard Morgan
One hundred years from now and against all the odds Earth has found a new stability, the political order has reached some sort of balance, and the new colony on Mars is growing. But the fraught years of the 21st century have left an uneasy legacy. Genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century`s wars have no wars to fight and are surplus to requirements. And a man bred and designed to fight is a dangerous man to have around in peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars but now one has come back and killed everyone else on the shuttle he returned in. Only one man, a gene-engineered ex-soldier himself, can hunt him down. So begins a frenetic manhunt and a battle for survival, and a search for the truth about what was really done with the world`s last soldiers. Black Man is an unstoppable SF thriller but it is also a novel about prejudice, and about the ramifications of playing with our genetic blueprint. It is about our capacity for violence but more worrying, our capa
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Winner of the British Science Fiction Association award for best novel, Brasyl is a story that begins in the favelas, the slums of Rio, and quickly expands to take in drugs, corruption, and a frightening new technology that allows access to all the multiple worlds that have slipped into existence in other planes every time we make a decision. This is rich, epic SF that opens our eyes to the world around us and posits mind-blowing alternative sciences. It is a landmark work in modern SF from one of its most respected practitioners.
Page last updated: 04/03/09