(USA, 2017) Successfully capitalising on audience nostalgia is a process which Hollywood hasn’t quite perfected yet. Though recent years have seen reboots and remakes of films such as The Magnificent Seven and Robocop, seldom do these attempts at revitalising a past success recapture the hearts of those enraptured by the original. In part, this is Read More
Naomi Alderman’s fourth novel, and first endeavour into speculative fiction, is based on the simple question: what might happen if women really did run the world? Set mainly in the near future, the novel is told from various points of view as first teenage girls, and then women, suddenly become aware of a whole new Read More
A graduate of Northwestern University, Attica Locke was a Fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab. She has been a scriptwriter for Paramount, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, HBO and Dreamworks, and is currently a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire. Locke’s focus is African-American cultural and political history and her 2010 Read More
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a science-fiction novel set in a distant future where humans have reached out beyond our solar system and joined the larger galactic community. It follows the interspecies crew of the industrial ship Wayfarer as they seek their fortune building a wormhole highway to a mysterious and Read More
At a time when dystopian futures are a young adult novel’s game, Anna Smaill’s The Chimes rises from the ashes of teen love triangles and marketable trilogies as an original take on what has recently become an oversaturated genre. Edging more towards the book burning likeness of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Smaill secures an older demographic Read More
Volwys & Other Stories is a collection of science fiction stories, culminating in a novella entitled Volwys. Douglas Thompson has published eight books to a mostly divided critical reception, with reviewers undecided on whether or not his books are exemplary of the genre. Volwys & Other Stories definitely belongs to the science fiction genre, imaginatively Read More
J. Michael Shell’s The Apprentice Journals follows the story of Spaul, one of the few remaining Apprentices in a post- apocalyptic America, an individual with the ability to speak to the strange elemental beings that now run rampant across the Earth. Spaul crosses paths with another Apprentice, a mute woman named Pearl, who merges with Read More
Beta Life is a collection of science fiction short stories, tied together by the thread of artificial life (A-life). From body-altering nanotechnology to the future of immersive games, Beta Life explores the imaginations of over a dozen writers and scientists, each with their own unique take on the future. The opening story, Martyn Bedford’s “The Read More