Kim Miller

Book 2 of The Bromeliad. The Nomes have driven the truck until they crash it and are forced to run into the wilderness again. They come across an abandoned quarry and take refuge in the manager's hut. Once again, disaster as the quarry is about to reopen.

Some of them take off to explore and find a permanent place for the community to live.

The men arrive to get the quarry into action again and the Nome need a quick escape plan. Having once driven a truck they decide to take a digger from the quarry and to an old barn up the hill behind the quarry. Everyone gets loaded into the front scoop and the 'drivers' get coordinated again and they drive the digger out of the yard with the workers running after them in the muddy field.

This is book #1 of The Bromeliad Trilogy. It's really a kid's series but worth it as a lighthearted adult read. The story is about a group of Nomes (no G) who live in a hedgerow outside an English city. They face being trodden on by humans or eaten by foxes, In a severe winter and with too many of them eaten they sneak on board a truck at the motorway service centre. It takes them to a department store in the city.

And there they find other Nomes living in the store. Neither community knew the other existed. City Nomes and Country Nomes have to find some way to get along.

Disaster strikes when they find out the store is to be shut down and they all have to find somewhere else to live. So they engineer some planks and ropes and teach themselves how to drive the truck and escape the store, which they accidentally set alight as they leave.

It was an extra delight for me when the truck dropped the Nomes at Arnold Bros department store. Pratchett names a street alongside the store. Arnold's department store in Great Yarmouth was started by my ancestors and that same street runs past it. So the Nomes were sheltering in my families old business. Arnolds was later bought and renamed by Debenhams.

Remember The Artful Dodger from Dickens' Oliver Twist? Here he is in Pratchett's delightful story of a teenage boy living in the back streets and underground sewer tunnels of Elizabethan London. After an eventful day where be becomes a hero he meets a journalist named Charles Dickens. And the plot thickens.

This book has Pratchett's characteristic sense of fun and the absurd but far from Discworld.

Imagine a man living a lonely life on the family farm. Nobody knows how old he is, it's as if he's always been there. In reality, he's been there since the American Civil War.

When he got back from the war and became the last one of his family an alien visitor arrived. The alien asked if he'd like to host a way station for interplanetary travelers. As long as the way station was underneath his house he would hardly age, but they didn't want the surrounding people to know about it.

One day something happened that brought people to his door.

The story maintains a sense of the deep humanity of Enoch, the farmer. When everything might easily collapse around him he manages to hold fast to some quality that his neighbours lack.

Arguable PKD's most iconic work, and definitely one of his strangest. In a far future humans are colonising the Moon and developing strong psychic abilities. Companies are employing psychics to sit in a room and do industrial espionage from a distance. One company sends a team of them to the Moon for such purpose but there is an explosion and not everyone survives.

Second story strand: People who are almost dead can be put into cryo-sleep and kept alive. They can be temporarily brought out of sleep for conversations through a psychic medium. But these sessions shorten the ultimate storage time possible for the person.

Put these two strands together. Some of those sent to the moon have died and are in cryo-sleep.

Everyone tries to get on with their lives, but strange things keep happening. It seems time is running backwards and everything is inexplicably old. And then Ubik appears in advertising. It's the universal fixit. One spray and everything is good again. But what is in the can and where do you get it?

PKD puts together a narrative that has the reader questioning 'who is alive and who is in cryo-sleep?' And does it even matter? After all, PKD's ability to blend the reality of human consciousness with weird alternatives is never ending.

This is the final book in Baxter's Zelee Sequence but was recommended to me as a worthwhile stand alone book.

As the sun approaches heat death Earth's scientists work out that it's happening much to soon and something must be happening to it. The Zelee series deals with alien wars etc and space travelers also work out that other starts are degenerating too quickly.

By sending a probe into the sun they find the problem and realise that it's non-repairable and it looks like the whole galaxy is threatened by the same thing.

As the book approaches the end they work out that the aliens with whom they were at war for so long are really the solution to a galaxy wide problem.

I read this at the recommendation of a friend who likes it so much that he buys copies to give away to friends. However, MacDonald's language is to archaic for me to really appreciate his style of literature.

Lilith was a mythical figure and Adam's first wife, created from dust as was Adam, but she wouldn't submit to him and was banished so God then made Eve from Adam's rib.

Lilith continues in some mythical stories as a rebellious temptress. But MacDonald asks, can Lilith find redemption? Long story short, she does in the end. And that's it from me.

PKD does it again. In a far future where humans are colonising the planets they need to be 'chemically encouraged' with the drug Can-D to maintain their lives in the boredom of life on the bleakest places imaginable. The principle drug involves sitting around a playing board called a Layout - think of Monopoly in 3D - and engaging with each other as the drug blanks their minds and takes them into the game.

Palmer Eldritch is a mystical figure who enters the story with a new drug called Chew-Z that he says eclipses anything else. Of course he wants to sell it because of course he does. But Chew-Z does not require a Layout, and the Layout marketers don't like it.

It sounds like a silly plot but PKD works his magic and we enter the typical PKD world where we question the difference between human sentience and whatever other alternatives are presented.

The place where it all started. Gibson throws his unsuspecting readers into the gritty world of cyberspace. If only we'd been warned. Ironically written in 1984, Gibson's view of the future is dark and dangerous. It's a world of cyberhacking into the brains of others and neural enhancements for those who can afford it. And running underneath the human drama is the goal of an artificial intelligence that is becoming sentient and wants to merge with the only other AI that can match and complete it.

Yep, the humans want computer enhancements built in, and the computers want to be humans. OK, I didn't get that a bit quite right. The computers want to be greater than humans.

This book demands a lot of its readers, but pays off in the end.

Consider that downloading your consciousness into a computer was possible. That means you could live forever, as long as somebody maintained that computer. Now imagine that a rich guy employed a software developer to write a software package that was self-preserving and could not be destroyed because it was deployed across some vast system, and in that package were various levels of habitat for downloads to live. Forever is now becoming more of a possibility.

Welcome to Permutation City. What could possibly go wrong?

A collection of short stories that fit into the world of Reynold's novel, House of Suns. Each story finds a place and time within the original saga and fills in a bit of some of the characters. I didn't find that any particular story set up a future element of the original book, so they are engaging to read but are not necessary for continuity.

One summer evening the children of some industrial scientists are outside on the lawn while their parents are having a dinner party. They notice that the stars suddenly go out. The adults inside have missed the most significant thing to happen in human history.

The book follows the world's exploration into what has happened and the path followed by the families of the children. It is slowly revealed that something very dangerous is happening to the solar system and the Earth is being protected from some imminent collapse.

The children follow different paths into adult life, all trying to deal with the catastrophe. Some chase scientific research, some join a religious cult, some seek answers through the terraforming of Mars.

Wilson has given us a magnificent story of hard science fiction woven around an exploration of what humanity thinks is fundamentally important when faced with the possibility of total destruction.

I saw the TV series and loved it. And I'm a fan of both Gaiman and Pratchett, so reading the original story was essential.

The TV followed the book much more than most adaptations and the two are slavishly similar. However, the TV 'final conflict' scenes between the boy, the four horsemen, and the devil are much better than the book's portrayal.

This book hooked me early and held me until the end. In a far future Abigail clones herself into 999 other 'shatterlings'. Although they share her gene structure the clones can be either male or female and the original person is somewhere among them. The clones then take to space in separate space ships and over the next several million years they regularly meet up.

The book is told from the viewpoint of two main characters who are both clones, one female and one male. They are in a relationship, which is generally frowned upon in the clone community. The original story of Abigail as a child and into adulthood is spread through the novel.

These two are both late to a reunion and find destroyed spaceships and the debris of battle floating in space. The goal then is to save who they can and to find the perpetrators and the reasons for the attack.

Reynolds has a way of holding a story together over the millions of years of narrative time. His writing expands into the endless space allowed for it by the intergalactic environment.

A difficult novel to keep up with. A priest wanders into the desert outside Alice Springs to try to work through his crisis of faith. He starts to write a treatise where he imagines a conversation between two philosophers that he thinks might each have something to say to him.

Alongside that narrative is a story of living a chaotic life in inner city Sydney as a young man, weaving through the various worlds of Redfern's indigenous community, early indy rock concerts and the beginnings of community radio as people try to stake a claim in the local culture.

It reads in part as a personal memoir but uses the priest in the desert to frame a deeper sense of aimlessness and despair. It's not the easiest read but rewards the concentration needed to see it through.

Shteyngart's telling of a future where the US has suffered financial collapse and is under the control of foreign national banks who are taking over everyday life. And Russian immigrant Lenny has fallen in love with Korean immigrant Eunice. They try to keep their struggling relationship alive on social media. Much of the novel is social media posts that demand the reader to keep up.

His characteristic satire once again rules the page in a weird but brilliant story.