Science Fiction Books > by Author Surname (First Letter)

Whimsically Equine (Tim the Tiny Horse - Harry Hill)

Advantages: funny and gentle
Disadvantages: slight

...make an attempt at reviewing Tim as a stand-alone. I am happy to say that it acquits itself well. Tim is a horse, blue and so tiny that he lives in matchbox with a tic-tac box for a conservatory. A single Hoola-Hoop makes his lunch (he prefers barbecue beef flavour) and a fly (called Fly) is his best friend. Tim doesn't do much - apart from a few not very successful attempts at making it big in the media he seems to spend his days watching television ...
...necessary for enjoyment. For example, Tim has a bit of obsession with a newsreader called Anna Ford: I don't have a television so I am not familiar with Ms Ford (I checked and she's real and not a character in Tim's milieu), but I can still appreciate Tim's heartache. There is a wealth of astute observations of our modern lives in Tim's adventures and some of them brought tears of recognition to my eyes. I particularly enjoyed Tim's foray into the ...

magdadh 20.05.2009 · Read full review
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Review of Tim the Tiny Horse - Harry Hill

The Triffids are Coming

Advantages: Tense, atmospheric, compellingly written
Disadvantages: Dialogue feels slightly stuffy in places

...Wyndham's 1951 novel 'Day of The Triffids', main protagonist Bill Masen awakes in a London hospital to find that his eyes are heavily bandaged and nobody appears to be around to attend to him. Tentatively removing his bandages and discovering that he is still able to see, Masen quickly discovers that the hospital is deserted and some terrible catastrophe appears to have occured, with the city in a state of abject chaos. Everyone appears to be blind, ...
...the numerous pubs throughout the city, whist others cling to one another in an attempt to find food and somehow remain alive. Masen remembers the radio reports about strange cosmic phenomena in the sky that played out during the weeks he was incapacitated in the hospital, and it soon becomes apparent that watching these weird lights in the sky has somehow caused 99% of the worlds population to go completely blind. This is not all that humanity suddenly ...

Burning_Darkness 02.07.2009 · Read full review
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Review of The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

Does my second head make me a deviant?

Advantages: Thoughtful, intelligent sci-fi...
Disadvantages: ... some occasionally long-winded speeches

The Chsysalids by John Wyndham is a post-apolaclyptic vision of a world where people are obsessed with conformity to the norm, or in their words, "the image of God". Anyone who does not conform to this image becomes an outcast, and the women who are categorised as Deviants are sterilised before being sent off. The "image of God" has 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes, 1 nose, 5 digits at the end of eat hand and foot… etc. You get the idea. The narrator of this ...
...is, so is safe from the religious-minded people around him, chief of whom is his father. Not so lucky is a girl he meets who has a physical deviation, and this causes him to wonder whether it really is the will of God being done by the zealots here… As David realises the danger his special talents wrought from his differences could cause, and becomes aware of others with the same talents, he is drawn instinctively away from his family. He knows that ...

CaptainDisaster 31.08.2005 · Read full review
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Review of The Chrysalids - John Wyndham

Restaurant and galaxy book

Advantages: funny story, very well written
Disadvantages: no disadvantages

...because I feel they are the chief books of Trampers to the galaxy. The CBOTTG are books that when the words are read the writing marks you in a thrilling and funny way. I never cause an almost terrible thing to happen like the reading of the Hitchhiker books to pass from my life. That is a most unverifiable thing I would be doing. Although the writer of this book was reputed to be a crotchety writer, I found his ideas were very substantial. His books ...
...With the five novels, belonging to the Hitchhikers guide trilogy, Douglas Adam gave his life to writing them in a very different way to other books which was to first begin in 1979 and to finish in 1992. The books have been read by millions of readers and they have been a very pleasant read, so I hope they will be read for hundreds of years. I am not sure, if future novels will ever be written like this but I had never once actually seen something ...

lovelyben 18.09.2006 · Read full review
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Review of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams

The Granddaddy of the Daleks

Advantages: Beautifully written, exciting plot twists, a remarkable feeling of realness
Disadvantages: The plot may be too slow for some, the history is quite distant now

...1897), 1898's "The War of the Worlds" by HG Wells is effectively the great-granddaddy of every alien invasion story. And it reads like Thomas Hardy. The unrelenting reality strikes the reader from the very beginning, with that portentuous and famous "no one would have believed ... " first chapter. "War of the Worlds" was a novel written for various reasons, but perhaps most importantly it was a parody. In the previous twenty years or so, "invasion ...
...aliens invaded and behaved to the British the way the British had behaved to other countries in their Empire) and melding it to the structure of these xenophobic penny dreadfuls, HG Wells came up a very memorable and novel idea. Despite the tremendous suspension of disbelief required to envisage creatures from Mars invading in giant armoured tripods, Wells makes this a lot easier for the reader by setting his invasion in a "true" setting - certainly, ...

GlasgowWho 24.06.2009 · Read full review
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Review of The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells