Science Fiction Books > S Science Fiction Books

Settle This Hash! Space Captain Smith

Advantages: Strong characters, good jokes, exciting action
Disadvantages: A few duff gags?

...that Victorian Britain somehow rules space through tea, moral fibre and good bearing, isn't laboured in this book, although Britain's antagonistic relationship with the French is referenced pretty frequently. The set-up comes over mostly through the character of Isambard Smith. Heroic, chivalrous, ruthless, gung-ho, quite stupid, incredibly lucky and English to the core, Smith is a fantastic comic creation who can always be counted on to say the ...
...highlight was his ranting about his school days while disintegrating Ghast troopers in one of the novel's climactic battles. He also has a strong line in catchphrases. 'I'll settle your hash' crops up several times like a public school Terminator, and a successful mission tends to lead to a line about 'tiffin'. There are also some knowing parodies of other works. Rick Dreckitt is a brilliant inverted parody of Blade Runner's Deckard - an android ...

Olly_Plimsoll 13.05.2009 · Read Full Review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Space Captain Smith - Toby Frost

Sexy Robots

Advantages: fun
Disadvantages: only for fans

My first encounter with Charles Stross was through Halting State, a William Gibson-meets-Christopher Brookmyre near-future post-cyberpunk crime caper. "Saturn's Children" is a different species within broadly the same habitat, a not-so-near-future space-opera thriller, more of a Asimov-meets-Philip K Dick-with-a-sprinkling-of-Douglas Adams. My s-f reading is a bit haphazard, but this was the first vision of the post-human world in which not only ...
...patrol the borders in search of self-replicating pink goo (although Lem's Cyberiad is set in a robotic world, but a much more grotesque and surreal, an explicitly satirical one). Freya Nakamachi-47 is a robot in a Solar System full of robots. It's a post-human world, still running on approximately human-designed principles, especially socially, despite the extinction of the Creator race several hundreds of years ago. Freya's raison d'etre, though, ...

magdadh 26.06.2009 · Read Full Review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Saturn's Children - Charles Stross

So long, and thanks for all the laughs...

Advantages: Easily the the most intelligent and well-written book of the Hitchhiker's series.
Disadvantages: Little input from some of the best characters.

...the Earth here after being so unexpectedly blown-up in the first book? On the way home, he hitchhikes (not surprisingly!) and is picked up by a robust ginger-haired man called Rufus. Nothing particularly odd about that, until Arthur glances behind him and looks upon the sleeping woman-of-his-dreams; Fenchurch (named according to the London station where she was conceived...) But, before he can find out more about her, Arthur is dropped off outside ...
...again. At length, he returns to his normal life on Earth - his apartment is still there, his friend's are still present and well and the destruction of the Earth branded as 'something funny in the water' - nothing more than a mass hallucination. It also appears that it's only been a few months since Arthur Dent's mysterious disappearance. But Arthur knows better and goes about finding the exact location of the cave he lived in, in Prehistoric Earth. ...

Sam_Garland 10.07.2006 · Read Full Review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of So Long, and thanks for all the Fish - Douglas Adams

1'st Sight of Brentford

Advantages: Music, Time Travel, Strange Moustaches Etc etc
Disadvantages: Time Travel makes me dizzy

I read this book on holiday it was meant to last me through the holiday but I actually read it in 1 day. Mostly because I stayed up all night reading it. This book should come with a disclaimer not to read it when you have a drink as time travel makes you very dizzy and you need to lay down. The characters you meet are brilliant. I loved the character of Soap Distant but this was the 1st time i had met any of the characters and I was a bit confused ...
...through time and sanity. Mostly marred by insanity I think. It contains so many twists I can't even begin to explain the story. You meet Soap Distant (traveller to the centre of the earth) first who seems about the sanest character in the story and like so many people he is chasing his 15 minutes of fame but he comes back to a world very different to the one he left. Richard Branson rules the world you would think he couldn't do much worse than the ...

bellybee 27.11.2004 · Read Full Review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls - Robert Rankin

Halo: The Flood

Advantages: A great storyline - follows the game well
Disadvantages: A long storyline - follows the game in which we know

...get this book, after reading Halo: The Fall of Reach. It was not being sold anywhere in the UK. Its excitement had died out after me being two years late. So I brought it of eBay. Having read the actual book, I thought it was quite good... but... when I was reading it, I kept on thinking to myself: "Couldn't anyone just play a game and write a book about the game and become a millionaire easily?" Yes, they could. It was annoyed me that the fact that ...
...by its self. So, could Halo: The Flood be useful to Bungie? I think so. Bungie copied some things on Halo: The Flood as well as The Fall of Reach. Like, take the Helljumpers, ODST's, the ability that the Covenant can talk! Their own storyline, which was featured in Halo 2. So I think that Halo: The Flood proved itself useful to Bungie and us. ...

UKJaguar 05.07.2009 · Read Full Review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Halo: The Flood - William C. Dietz