Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds

I loved this book. It’s a tale of murder and revenge, with a stunning twist that will keep your fingers glued to those pages. Two tales in fact, since the life story of a historical character is told in flashback, that explains the situation on the planet where the story begins.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

I’ve read and loved Gibson’s recent work, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, but I’d never before read this classic cyberpunk novel.

It’s good, but having read his later work it’s clear he has progressed enormously as a writer. This isn’t to bash Neuromancer. The story is fast-paced and gets going from the start, no messing around. However this is an earlier work, and shows it. The talent is there, but not as well-tuned as in his later work. If you’ve never read Neuromancer I’d certainly recommend it, but behind Gibson’s more recent books.

Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber

This is a book I read in a couple of days, and then spent a couple of months thinking about. Then I read it again.

It starts off, as many SF stories do, with humanity exploring the galaxy, colonising planets, and then coming into contact with an implacable alien force bent on humanity’s destruction.

They win.

Humanity is reduced to a few colonists sent off in a desperate last-ditch effort to re-establish the species, and stay low-tech and out of sight until humanity is ready to face the aliens and win. Instead, the colony directors brainwash the colonists into believing them to be angels, sent by god to rule over them. The military directors argue against this, there is a fight, and the ‘angels’ manage to wipe themselves out.

Nine Hundred years later, a robotic body is activated, complete with the memories of a young ship’s officer. Her task, given via recorded message, is to go out into a society ruled over by a rigid church that has banned technology, and prepare the way for the second coming of humanity.

Her name is Nimue Alban and hers is one hell of a story.