Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer A while ago we read Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin because I wanted to do a book that was like Nineteen Eighty-four without actually being Nineteen Eighty-four. This month I had a similar thought. I kind of wanted do something like Dan Simmons' Hyperion, but new. I think that this one will fit the bill. It's got the care and attention to language with a slightly archaic style and some interesting philosophical ideas.…

Autonomous  by Annalee Newitz One of the things I really like about the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction is how the ideas of what a near-future dystopia might look like change over time. Many of the fears of early cybepunk books are now reality, and other anxieties have replaced them. Autonomous deals with a few of these but one in particular, the growing power of the pharmaceutical / biotech industry. The protagonist is a pirate, in classic and modern terms. Jack…

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence by Michael Marshall Smith This month I wanted to do something a bit lighter and stranger and I think the new book from Michael Marshall Smith might do the trick. Folks who've been with the group for a while might remember that one of his earlier books, Only Forward, was read by the Odd Book Club back when we were running two book clubs. He tends to do a mix of the peculiar…

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden This is a book I've been eyeing off for the book club for a while now and while it is science fiction, it's also a lot more than that too. Like many of the recent books to wear the Afro-futurism label it's a mix of science and the supernatural, contemporary ideas and folk lore. It was also shortlisted for the Lambda LGBT literary award in the science fiction/fantasy/horror category. The winner incidentally, was…

The Drowned World  by J G Ballard Tuesday September 4th from 6.00pm at Durty Nelly's. We've done quite a few recent books over the last few months, so I thought this time we'd do something older. Written in 1962, The Drowned World is set in a future where global warming has rendered whole areas of the planet uninhabitable. London, where the story takes place is flooded, hot and overgrown with jungle. Told from the perspective of a survey team sent…

Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne CharnockThis is the winner of the 2018 Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction literature, and I'm always interested to see what the group makes of award-winning books so its what we'll be reading in preparation for our October meet.It begins in a near-future and spans several generations focussing on a subject that is often left vague in science-fiction, childbirth and conception. Already we have technologies that offer vastly more options and…

The Thousand Year Beach by Tobi Hirotaka I've been keen to do this one ever since it first appeared in the 'forthcoming' notices. A Japanese science fiction book set in a virtual tourist destination that has had no tourists for more than a thousand years, the AI constructs within left to their own devices. Then something new and destructive arrives and changes everything. We haven't read any Japanese science fiction before so I'm intrigued to see what folks will make…