BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Deep Vault (2016) Life After/The Message (2016) The Blood Drawn Chronicles (2016-2018) The Switchboard (2017)   The London Necropolis Railway (2018)    The Echo Protocol (2019)     Arca-45672 (2019)   Confessions from the Nocturne Nebula (2019)     The Deep Vault is rollicking dystopian science fiction. A band of youngsters escaping some unknown apocalypse find themselves navigating a bunker that appears to include a government project that breeds monsters and has two squabbling competing computer systems as well as a mad scientist. This is the excuse for some gruesome body horror as well as a move through levels that will be familiar to any games player. It is dark but fun stuff, the darkness alleviated by the mildly comic and satirical treatment of the leading characters.  Life After and its sequel The Message adopt a method that is usually tiresome and has become hackneyed already in the fictional podcast space - the dependence of narrative on the detritus of technology (usuall

The Anubis Gates (1983) Declare (2000) Three Days to Never (2006) My first reading of Tim Powers' classic The Anubis Gates was to enjoy a 'suspension of disbelief' romp through a quasi-steam punk literary time travel fantasy with Egyptian mythological themes. A second reading made me understand better why Powers can be frustrating as well as worth reading. The secret to Powers is (as he has articulated in an interview on his working methods) extremely dense plotting in advance of actual writing in which events that happen in one part of a book are flagged up indirectly in others. Everything is supposed to hang together logically and in detail by the end but this can be very demanding on the reader and possibly a little self-indulgent on the part of the author. One does not always have time to work out for oneself whether everything really does hang together but a second reading (with the basic story already loaded into the brain) permits the reader to

A Colder War (2000) The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1) (2004) The Jennifer Morgue (Laundry Files #2) (2006)   Halting State (Halting State #1) (2007)   Charles Stross   Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity #1) (2006)   Justina Robson   The Devil You Know (Felix Castor, #1) (2006) Vicious Circle (Felix Castor #2) (2006) Dead Men's Boots (Felix Castor #3) (2007)  God Save The Queen (Graphic Novel: The Sandman Presents #32) (2008) Thicker Than Water (Felix Castor #4) (2009) The Naming of the Beasts (Felix Castor #5) (2009)  Mike Carey   The Execution Channel (2007) Ken Macleod  The Red Men (2008) Matthew De Abaitua  The Bastion Prosecutor (Kalahari #2) (2009) A. J Marshall The mid-2000s were quite a good period for British popular fantasy-horror-science fiction genre writing. These books should not be neglected simply because time passes. What is curious is how a sex demon appears in two of them (and elven eroticism in a third) which is either coincidence in the ca