Pile by the Bed reviews The Death I Gave Him by Em X Lui a science fiction, locked room retelling of Hamlet complete with AI, experimental drugs and surveillance.
Pile by the Bed reviews For the First Time, Again, the final book in Take Them to the Stars, Sylvain Neuvel’s science fiction series that reimagines the second half of the Twentieth Century and in particular the space race.
Pile by the Bed reviews Flight from the Ages and other stories by Derek Kunsken, a series of short stories mainly set in Kumsken’s ever expanding universe of his already connected Qauntuim Evolution and Venus Ascendant series.
Pile by the Bed reviews Bad Cree by Jessica Johns an Indigenous horror story that explores issues of resilience in the face of the impacts of colonisation, exploitation and cultural loss.
Pile by the Bed reviews Ordinary Monsters (The Talents #1) by JM Miro – a tense Victorian-era fantasy involving children with powers and an existential threat to the world.
Pile by the Bed reviews Until the Last of Me by Sylvain Neuvel, second in his shadow history meets science fiction Take Them to the Stars trilogy
Pile by the Bed reviews The Quantum War, the third of four books planned in Derek Künsken’s heist-fuelled science fiction Quantum Evolution series.
Pile by the Bed reviews The Apollo Murders an alternate history techno-thriller debut by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Pile by the Bed reviews A History of What Comes Next, the first in a new series by Sylvain Neuvel which imagines an alien influence behind the space race.
Pile by the Bed reviews Reproduction the first novel by Canadian poet Ian Williams which explores human relationships and the intersect between biological and found families.
Pile by the Bed reviews Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia which true to its title is a gothic horror thriller set in the mountains of Mexico in the early 1950s.
Pile by the Bed reviews Frying Plantain the debut novel by Zalika Reid-Benta, a series of short stories which follows the life of a young girl of Jamaican descent growing up in Canada.
Pile by the Bed reviews Greenwood by Michael Christie – a compulsively readable, beautifully observed, deeply felt and rich multigenerational family saga
Pile by the Bed Reviews The Quantum Garden (Quantum Evolution #2) by Derek Kunsken, sequel to The Quantum Magician.
Pile by the Bed reviews The Test by Sylvain Neuvel a timely, Black Mirror-style look at citizenship tests.
Sylvain Neuvel returns to his world of giant robots in the third and final of the Themis Files series Only Human. Like the second book in the series, Waking Gods, this volume jumps forward ten years from the cliffhanger ending at the end of the previous entry. That cliffhanger saw the giant robot Themis and the four people inside whisked away to the planet of the robot builders. This volume starts with their return to a very changed Earth but also, in flashbacks charts their ten year stay on an alien planet. Following the massive destruction of Waking Gods, the Earth is a changed place. America has managed to restore the last remaining giant robot and uses it as a tool of aggressive expansion. During the events of Waking Gods, the world learned that many people were genetic descendants of aliens who arrived thousands of years ago. Those with high levels of genetic traces of alien DNA are being persecuted and put in camps. Many of those persecuted are Muslim, although the connection between the alien DNA and Muslims feels like a stretch by Neuvel put in to bring his allegory home to readers who do not do allegory well….
Find You In the Dark has an intriguing premise. Martin Reese is a retired tech billionaire with a wife and teenage daughter. But Martin has a secret hobby. He follows the careers of arrested serial killers and uses the clues they leave behind to find where they buried their victims. He then goes out, uncovers the body, takes his own series of macabre photos and then anonymously calls the police to reveal the location of the body and brag about the fact that they failed to find it. But his activities have caught the attention of a real serial killer who decides that it is time for Martin to experience the real thing. Find You in the Dark tries to play it both ways. Martin is not a serial killer but his character is based on the premise that he has all the psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies to be one, just never the will to carry it through. The assumption is that his obsession with actual killers is his proxy way of dealing with his desires. So much so that he started following and then married Ellen, the sister of serial killer victim Tinsley back when he was in college….
Award winning Canadian author David Bergen’s new novel Stranger takes readers on an odyssey from Guatemala across borders into the United States. Along the way he looks at issues of Western exploitation, illegal immigration into the US and global inequality. But he does this in the frame of what is often a heartbreaking, beautifully observed tale of a mother’s quest to regain her child. Iso Perdido works at a fertility clinic in Guatemala. Women come from the West for treatment there based on the lake’s supposed powers to promote conception. The clinic is also used as a way of providing unwanted Guatemalan children to wealthy couples who cannot conceive. Iso starts an affair with Eric, one of the (married) doctors at the clinic and becomes pregnant. But before she can do anything about the pregnancy, Eric has a serious accident and is taken by his wife back to the US to recouperate. When her baby is born, the clinic tricks her into selling the baby to the doctor and his family and sends the baby to the US, The rest of the tale is Iso’s journey to the US to infiltrate the gated community in which the doctor and his…
Maybe there is something in the water but the idea of decommissioned oil rigs as places for residence seems to be popping up a bit in science fiction lately (see also Jon Wallace’s Rig, reviewed here). In Madeline Ashby’s Company Town, the rig is off the coast of Canada and is the centre of a sprawling ocean-based town of five towers called New Arcadia. When the book opens, New Arcadia is being taken over by the Lynch Corporation following a disaster which destroyed much of the rig’s production capacity. Go-Jeung Hwa is an outsider. Unlike pretty much everyone else on New Arcadia she has no technological modifications. This makes her both different and very valuable. Hwa acts as a body guard for the local sex workers who engage in a very well managed business. But she catches the eye of Zacharia Lynch, the ageing head of the Lynch Corporation, who wants her to be bodyguard for his teenage son and heir Joel who will be attending the local school. In what is a serious sci-fi twist early on, it turns out that Joel is threatened by time-travelling forces from a Singularity future, that is a future controlled by an Artificial…
