In the introduction of The Folio Society’s edition of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood writes… ‘Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction – in the line of descent from Orwell’s 1984 – not a traditional science fiction in the line of H.G Wells’s War of the Worlds.’ Her reasoning is that
Move over the Losers Club, there’s another club in town and boy do they pack a punch, they’re called the TK TP club and they come from The Institute. There is so much to discuss, so I’ve tried to keep this spoiler free…so enjoy! King is the master of horror, there’s no getting away from
Ambitious businesswoman Mae Yu runs Golden Oaks – a luxury retreat transforming the fertility industry. There, women get the very best of everything: organic meals, fitness trainers, daily massages and big money. Provided they dedicate themselves to producing the perfect baby. For someone else. Jane is a young immigrant in search of a better future.
Once upon a time–when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was still in high school–I had a wonderful English teacher who treated his students as peers and insisted that we all call him by his first name; his enthusiasm for literature and drama was outright contagious. He convinced me to read outside my preferred genres
Long ago, Earth’s terraforming program sent ships out to build new homes for humanity among the stars and made an unexpected discovery: a planet with life. But the scientists were unaware that the alien ecosystem was more developed than the primitive life forms originally discovered. Now, thousands of years later, the Portiids and their humans
Philip K Dick is in my opinion and many others the master of science fiction. His works seems to drip off the tongue when one mentions said genre, such works as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly – the list
The world is besieged by natural disasters, a disease that affects only the young is spreading, and tragedy appears at the forefront of everyone’s lives. The Migration is a wonderfully skilful novella that combines an elegiac beauty with an overarching sense of societal menace. Written from the perspective of Sophie, a sixteen-year-old girl who is
What is interesting about literature written in the past is the omnipotent manner with which one, from our saggy hi-tech sofas in the future, can now read it: the time capsule quality of it. A quality so much more heightened when reading someone’s version of the future as written in the past, often wildly off
It is both bizarre and resonant that, in the same year Donald Trump has declared he is going to create a Space Force for planet Earth, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, by many considered one of the all-father texts of military science fiction, should be reprinted. Originally published under the title ‘Starship Soldiers’ in The
Just when the world turned around a little too fast and spun itself into a new dystopian reality is hard to pin-point exactly. It seems it might have kicked-off around 2016 when every one of your favourite celebrities started dying and the Western electorate ticked the box marked ‘collective suicide pact’. Then again, it could
