The News At SF Reviews

It's our birthday!

SF Reviews celebrates its first birthday this month. Thanks to all of you who have followed our progress and commented and criticised.

Celebrations will be held on Friday 25th January in Geronimo's Bar in a major Asian city. If you can correctly identify which city this it, you get added to the SF Reviews Birthday Card List. What a stunning prize. If you care to attend, send an email to max@sfreviews.com and I'll buy you a drink.

The absolute best books this month were

"Stand On Zanzibar" by John Brunner
"Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis

Brunner's "Stand On Zanzibar" is an SF classic. Even after all these years, it's still an excellent read: clever, thought-provoking and exciting.

"Doomsday Book" was a delightful surprise. I had no idea that Connie Willis could be so good.

I rated the "The Stone Canal" and "The Fourth World" pretty highly - both were very enjoyable.

I also reluctantly ploughed through two rather bad books and managed to scribble a couple of words on each:

"To Bathe In Lightning" by Anne Gay
"Virus Clans" by Michael Kanaly

I recommend that you don't read these books. In fact you're probably better off not even reading the reviews of these books.

Moving on quickly to another subject, that of classic SF: I'm hoping to regain access to the vast vaults of Wing 2 and roll out at least some of the ancient storage crates within. If successful, be prepared a tumult of reviews of the last century's classic SF.

The redesign of the web-site is still in progress, albeit in the background (patience, Jane, one day soon the murky-green colour will be no more).

OK, here are the latest uploads. If some of these links appear to be broken, it is probably "line-wrapping", so either widen your window to display the URL on one line, or cut and paste the two parts into the browser window.

"To Bathe In Lightning" (1995) by Anne Gay

"Doomsday Book" (1992) by Connie Willis

"The Fourth World" (2000) by Dennis Danvers

"Wheelers" (2000) by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

"Stand On Zanzibar" (1969) by John Brunner

"The Stone Canal" (1996) by Ken MacLeod

"Falling Free" (1988) by Lois McMaster Bujold

"Virus Clans" (1998) by Michael Kanaly

"Stations Of The Tide" (1992) by "Michael Swanwick

"The Falling Woman" (1986) by Pat Murphy

Well that's all for now. As always, tell me what you think about the reviews and the site. Do let me know if there are books you think I should review.

Now I'd better get back to rereading "Ringworld", a pleasurable relief after having spent days working through the military melodrama of David Weber's "Ashes of Victory", but more of these next month.

Take care

Max max@sfreviews.com