Review of Cosmic Crash – Book 2 of The Space Penguins series by L.A. Courtney

Any publication that encourages primary-age children to read and enjoy science fiction is going to get a thumbs-up by me. My granddaughter and I acquired the first two books at the school’s Book Fair, where I was dismayed to see the welter of sugar-pink and purple covers covered with sparkling stars about pets, dolls and fairies intended for girls.

A friendly Year 5 girl nudged Frankie. ‘Look in the Boys section. There’s some cool adventure books there.’

She was right. That was where we found the Space Penguins books, which Frankie scooped up, flicking through the pages. She immediately decided she wanted to take these home because of the enjoyably madcap illustrations.

What’s black and white, and flies faster than the speed of light? The Space Penguins! They’re the ice-cool crew of the spaceship Tunafish. With their pioneering flying skills and resistance to the deep freeze, these intergalactic avians are going where no fin has gone before. Captain T Krill, Rocky Waddle, Fuzz Allgrin and Splash Gordon are on a mission to explore new planets, rescue alien life, and battle their former comrade-in-wings: Dark Wader. Alert! Alert! In Cosmic Crash! the penguins splash-land on a watery planet, they find themselves in the tentacles of a monstrous sea creature. Can they escape with their ship in one piece or are they well and truly sunk?

As you can tell by the blurb, the books are delivered with a stream of puns, shamelessly plugging into science fiction classics with the wordplay around the names of the characters – and using non-stop adventure to keep young readers and listeners hooked. Each of the penguins has well-defined characteristics, and the dialogue had both of us laughing aloud at times – though there were a number of jokes only I got. Though I’m quite comfortable with that as the best children’s books recognise that adults can spend significant chunks of their lives reading stories aloud and reward us accordingly.

I like the premise that NASA decided penguins were better suited to space travel than humans as they can swim through zero gravity without losing control and are far better acclimatised to the cold of deep space. Their ship, the Tunafish is equipped with an extensive supply of frozen fish and a cool onboard computer – and they are ready for the next daft adventure. Is the story believable? Not really – but it features one emergency after another to test the space penguins’ courage and ingenuity. Needless to say, they all emerge with credit – however, they still haven’t managed to evade their nemesis, former crew member Dark Wader, which sets up the team for the next adventure in Galaxy Race!, the next book in the series. I don’t think Frankie and I will be waiting for the school book fair before we get hold of it, though…
8/10

Review of Leviathan Wakes – Book 1 of The Expanse by James A. Cory

I’ll be honest – although I’d heard a lot of good things about this book, I did approach it with some scepticism. All too often, I’ve picked up a recommended space opera that is supposed to be character-led, with plenty of action and a sharp, well-rounded world, only to find that it isn’t. Because writing a really good space opera takes a lot of skill. Although I did have some hope about this particular offering – James A. Cory is the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who wrote this together. And Leviathan Wakes was also shortlisted for both the Hugo and Locus Awards last year.

Humanity has colonised the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond – but the stars are still out of our reach. Jim Holden is an officer on an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for. War is brewing in the system, unless Jim can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathiser Holden, he realises that this girl may hold the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations – and the odds are againstem. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.

This whole tale – that spans the Solar system – is told through Holden and Miller’s viewpoints. Both characters are complex and convincing, with dislikeable traits as well as their evident strengths that get them through the repeated danger they find themselves running towards. There are also solid reasons why they are busy putting themselves in harm’s way, which I liked. I do get a tad fed up when the plucky heroes keep muscling their way to the danger zone, as everyone else is busy fleeing. During the book, the characters go through a variety of adventures which completely yank them out of their previous lives and take them on a journey that changes their viewpoint about most things. Miller, in particular, is extremely poignant near the end.

The world is detailed, layered with awkward corners and believable factions that are busy blaming each other for the unfolding terror unfurling in their midst. And all this comes to us filtered through the protagonists’ viewpoint – this isn’t a book where the author sees fit to jump out of the characters’ heads and serve up chunks of omniscient point of view. The result is that the narrative tension doesn’t ever let up. The storyline powers this long book from beginning to end – all 561 pages of it. So I was locked into the plot for every single page and would have happily gone on reading another 500…

That doesn’t happen very often. Though I’m a sucker for a really tight, well-written space opera, they aren’t all that thick on the ground. Certainly not one with the readability, tight plotting and strong characterisation that Leviathan Wakes offers. I’m going to give myself a late Easter present and buy the next instalment - Caliban’s War – stories of this quality don’t come along every day of the week.
10/10

Review of The Clockwork Rocket – The Orthogonal – Book 1 by Greg Egan

There are degrees of science fiction – some books are long on character development and the social consequences of futuristic living, while being short on the science that underpins it, known as soft science fiction. Other books are far more concerned with the science and gismos that will actually power and run our future worlds – the hard science fiction. Egan, as a physicist, has always been on the harder side of the genre, but the important difference – for me – is that he is also able to write convincing characters into the bargain.

However, this time around he has produced a truly different world – one where the laws of physics as we know them no longer work. As he explains on his website – along with a series of diagrams – this fictional world he’s invented where light travels at differing speeds is due to changing a minus sign to a plus sign in a mathematical formula that governs the geometry of space-time. He calls this a Riemannian universe as opposed to the Lorentzian version we inhabit. In Egan’s world, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity simply doesn’t make sense. Further, the basic humanoid template, so prevalent in most space opera adventures, is also off the table. Egan demonstrates a head-swivelling leap of imagination by producing a race of beings who don’t look like us, don’t breed like us… It’s an awesome achievement.

However, is it readable? Does it provide entertaining fiction?

In Yalda’s universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy. In Yalda’s universe, plants make food by emitting their own light into the night sky. As a child, Yalda witnesses one of a series of strange meteors, the Hurtlers, that is entering the planetary system at an immense, unprecedented speed. It becomes apparent that her world is in imminent danger—and that the task of dealing with the Hurtlers will require knowledge and technology far beyond anything her civilization has yet achieved.

I’m not going to tie up the rest of this review by plunging any further into the science that underpins the book, fascinating though it is. This is, after all, an analysis of whether this book actually works as a piece of fiction.

This is one of the most exciting books to be produced in the genre for years – I cannot think of another story that equals the sheer inventive genius displayed by Egan. Readers can take on board as much or as little of the physics as they wish – but his cleverness would be beside the point if the narrative was so hampered by the long passages describing the world that we all ceased to care whether the heroine prevailed or not. However, Yalda’s story gripped me from the start and didn’t let go. We first meet her working on her family’s farm. In a world where mothers’ bodies break down and normally divide into four to provide two sets of twins – two co’s – Yalda is different. She doesn’t have a male twin, so is larger than normal and she has also encountered a fair amount of prejudice in her short life over her unusual beginning, often regarded as a freak.

We follow her adventures – both physical and intellectual – as she strives to make sense of the world around her, despite being hampered by the ever-present threat of her biological imperative. Which creates social tensions – women effectively cease to be once their children are born and some rebel against losing their lives, while the conservatives in power, inevitably male, strive to ensure that women can’t get hold of the drugs that the prevent this process.

Against these social frictions looms a far more pressing problem – when the scientists observing the Hurtlers lighting up the sky come to the conclusion that they pose a major risk to their own world and decide to build a rocket to investigate the problem and see if they can fix it, before their own planet is annihilated.

The rest of the novel is taken up with series of challenges posed by such a project. The concept of an interstellar ark is an oft-trodden theme within the genre, but the unique physiology of Egan’s beings immediately provides sufficient novelty – and Yalda’s strong personality certainly ensured that I kept turning the pages, completely hooked.

This is a wonderful book – and yes, there are chunks of physics, complete with diagrams within the narrative. You have the option of slowing down and fully absorbing Egan’s invented work, or skimming over the scientific details and getting on with the story. One way or another, I think this ambitious and remarkable series will still be regarded as a major benchmark in science fiction for years to come and I look forward to reading the rest of the books just as soon as I can get my hands on them.
10/10

Review of The Xenocide Mission – Book 2 of The Ark series by Ben Jeapes

Lieutenant Joel Gilmore is part of a multi-species space observation team stationed in a distant solar system, who find themselves attacked by the very aliens they were supposed to be watching. Now Joel and his allies, the enigmatic Rusties, explore the parameters of trust in a lethal confrontation with a deeply alien third species: one with a nasty predilection for mass murder on a planetary scale.

This book was marketed as a YA science fiction, but I had no trouble getting fully engrossed in the story which started with a bang and kept going right to the end, despite the fact that I hadn’t read the first book, His Majesty’s Starship. The story is told in multiple viewpoint – and Jeapes joins that select handful of science fiction writers who are brave enough to have a serious stab at writing from an alien point of view. In fact, there are two major alien species in this adventure. The vicious variety with teeth, talons and a propensity for ripping apart anyone who seriously upsets them – and the Rusties, who have formed a coalition with humans. So, the question has to be – does Jeapes pull it off?

As far as the bad guys, known as Xenocides, are concerned, the depiction is excellent. We get a really good slice of their political and cultural life without any info-dumps silting up the narrative pace, which is always a lot harder to achieve than it looks. There is even some humour in there and I particularly enjoyed Oomoing, who had the job of evaluating the captured human. The twist near the end of the story was one I didn’t see coming and thoroughly enjoyed. By the end of the novel, I had a really good sense of what they looked like and how their society ran. But the overall impression of how the other species – the First Breed – operated, their appearance, and their relationship with the humans was a lot less sharp. However, I am also aware that this is the second book in a series and I got the feeling that the storyline featuring this particular species was highlighted in His Majesty’s Starship.

As far as the main human story running through the book, Joel makes a solidly convincing hero as someone who reacts quickly and selflessly when the unthinkable happened – and then finds himself up to his neck in trouble as a consequence. He manages to care about issues like honour, duty and loyalty without coming across as some lantern-jawed dummy, which also demonstrates Jeapes’ skill as an able, technically gifted writer. His relationship with Boon Round, the First Breed also caught up alongside him, is nicely sharp.

The ending is well executed, with all the lose threads across all three main species satisfyingly tied up. Overall, this slickly convincing multi-species adventure story is a really good read – and I’m going to be looking out for more of Jeapes’ writing.
9/10

Review of Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

I picked up this copy of the book as an SF Masterworks because as a solid fan of many women fantasy and science fiction writers, I had never read her work and I discovered it was a Hugo Award winner. I’m so glad I did…

When Kivrin Engle travels back through time to complete her doctoral thesis, due to an accident she lands in the middle of a major crisis her Faculty were struggling to avoid. Meanwhile the Oxford she left behind is laid low by a mysterious strain of influenza and, with no one willing to risk arranging her rescue, time is running out…

This book, indeed, deserves to be part of the SF Masterworks series – from the moment I opened the first page I knew I was in the hands of a great writer at the top of her game. Willis sets the scene in Oxford’s near future with deft dexterity, her characters crackle with humanity and there is a bone-dry humour running through the whole story that helps to make the grim adventure Kivrin endures bearable.

Mr Dunsworthy – who opposed the whole hare-brained notion of Kivrin going back to this particular time, yet somehow found himself caught up in helping her – is an outstanding character. The book is largely in his and Kivrin’s viewpoint and as the situation in both timelines slides away into chaos, it is these two main characters on whom the whole story arc rests. Willis lays bare the internecine struggles within the famous University with a sense of gentleness that is refreshing in a genre which often exposes human frailty with ruthless savagery. There are a couple of characters who resort to petty rule-hugging in order to protect themselves, but most of the people depicted step up and do their best in increasingly awful circumstances.

Be warned though – Willis can lull you into a false sense of security. While the writing style can seem gentle, she is unflinching in her depiction of one of the worst tragedies in human history. Part of the ironic humour is the academic studies – with often ludicrous pontificating by esteemed members of the History Faculty – set against the terrible reality that confronts Kivrin. Willis manages to make the medieval family that takes Kivrin in, entirely plausible – despite her initial struggles with the translating device that doesn’t work as planned – and we get to know them well, from the curious and bright five year old Agnes right through to the rigidly proper mother-in-law from Hell… And if anyone is in any doubt that this is the best Time to have been born, especially for a woman, then read the account of a small village on the outskirts of Oxford struggling to survive a harsh winter. Personally, I snuggled under the covers of my electrically heated bed and offered up silent thanks.

I have a soft spot for time travelling books – when done well, as in Kage Baker’s Company novels, they take a lot of beating. This offering from Connie Willis is right up there with the best of them and if you come across a copy, pick it up. Better still, give yourself a treat and actively hunt down this book – you won’t regret it.
10/10

Review of Shift by Kim Curran

When your average loser, Scott Tyler, meets the beautiful and mysterious Aubrey Jones, he learns he’s not so average after all. Turns out he’s a ‘Shifter’ – he has the power to undo any decision he’s ever made.

At first, he thinks the power to Shift is pretty cool. But as his world quickly starts to unravel around him he realises that each time he uses his power, it has terrible unforeseen consequences. In a world where anything can change with a single thought, Scott has to decide exactly where he stands.

And that’s the blurb – hats off to Strange Chemistry for not blurting a slew of spoilers in their back jacket sales pitch – it’s a refreshing change, these days. So… a young male protagonist written by a female author. Does she pull this off? And does the engaging concept and cool cover signal that newcomer Strange Chemistry is a publisher with the same solid credentials as parent company Angry Robot?

This is a rite of passage novel with geeky Scott an outsider – until he gets a rush of blood to the head and attempts a stupid stunt that goes badly wrong to impress a beautiful girl and finds himself Shifting… And before you know it, he’s pitchforked into a weird parallel world where he is learning skills he’d never dreamed of. However, these skills have downsides – big ones. There are a raft of unpleasant, highly dangerous folks out there, and this book may be YA, but it’s very much at the crossover end of that age range – there’s a fair amount of graphic violence.

Scott is a solidly satisfying protagonist – he has sufficient vulnerability and bloody-minded spikiness to be appealing without coming across as unrealistically ‘special’. The book’s pace whips along at a fair rate. In the initial chapters, I’d pegged it as a college coming-of-age story, but it soon morphed into a broader storyline. Curran manages to set the parameters of her world, while the bodies start stacking up and Scott finds himself in the middle of the action, without easing up on the whirlwind pace or dropping the tension. I sat down, intending to dip into the book during a free half-hour – and became hooked.

Curran has a gift for writing characters you care about – I also thoroughly enjoyed reading about Aubrey. One of the rules about Shifters is that the ability manifests itself when they are children, but once they become adults, they lose it. So this secret organisation, charged with some highly secret and responsible tasks, is reliant on children and young teenagers – it really is a very enjoyable concept that I’m hoping Curran will continue to expand in future books.

There was a lot that could have gone badly wrong in a book packed with action, with a science fiction twist on teleporting that has certainly been done before in the likes of Stephen Gould’s Jumper. The fact that Curran manages to produce her own version of this concept with such authority and verve is a testament to her skill as an author. If you enjoyed urban fantasy, but are now heartily sick of vampires, wolves and various supernatural beings, give Shift a go. There may not be a space ship in sight, but this science fiction adventure is great fun – and you don’t have to be a teenager to thoroughly enjoy it.
8/10

Review of The Bridge by Janine Ellen Young

This book was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award – and after reading it, I can see why…

When the Ring aliens first thought to contact other worlds, they gave no consideration to the fact that other species might be constructed differently from them. Deep-space dwellers, more like large and complex bundles of genetic information than physical entities, they sent their probes off into the night hoping to build a bridge between their dark and beautiful society and others. Most probes vanished into the infinite ways of space, but one found Earth. And one was all it took to utterly disrupt life as we know it for all time…

And that’s all I’m going to give you of the very chatty blurb – because after this point we are into serious Spoiler territory. No point in ranting about it in the hope that the publisher might change their ways, though – Earthlight no longer exists.

Suffice to say that after the probe lands, Humanity is left completely altered by the experience and a portion of the survivors emerge with an unswerving drive to respond to the aliens’ invitation and build a star vessel capable of reaching them. While others come through the upheaval with a very different agenda, and want nothing more than to try and reclaim normality as best they can.

Young charts the lives of her main characters and shows how they are shaped by what befalls them. Of necessity, this book is written in multiple viewpoint and given the span of years and distance she is covering, there are big leaps in the narrative time where the characters have moved on. Despite my strong preference for in-depth characters in first person viewpoint (I), this book gripped me to the end. Young is a highly talented writer with an amazing ability to provide a big emotional wallop to her characters in a relatively small scene. Jude’s helpless, desperate love for Valerie, his best friend’s wife, is visceral – which matters as this drives a lot of his motivation through the rest of the story. I also found Varouna absolutely riveting in the early stages of the book – and would have liked a few more scenes in her viewpoint later in the book near the climax, although I do accept that Young had to make some hard choices in order to keep this book from developing into a sprawling, unwieldy mess, which it never does.

In fact, given the epic subject and the scale on which she is operating, the structure is very tightly focused on her viewpoint characters. Through them, we get some fascinating glimpses of how human society has changed after the probe landed, and I have read some readers grumbling that they wanted her to enlarge this aspect of the book. But this book isn’t focused on what happens on Earth, it is all about the building of the Bridge.

So, does Young succeed in adequately covering her subject and give us a sufficiently complex and plausible experience in this very ambitious novel? In my opinion, yes she does. This is why science fiction really is my favourite genre – at its best, it poses mind-expanding ‘what if’ scenarios and then goes on to explore them, weaving contemporary concerns and issues into an entertaining storyline. Young’s ‘what if’ is how our world could unite sufficiently to provide the huge resources necessary to build a deep-space vessel. If you enjoy an intelligently written epic science fiction story peopled with some memorable characters, keep a look out for The Bridge – it’s a cracking read.
9/10

Review of Earthgirl by Janet Edwards

I met up with Janet Edwards at last year’s Fantasycon, when she told me that Earthgirl was due to come out in the coming year and we also exchanged a few words at Eastercon, when I heard enough about the book to put it onto my reading list. So I loaded it onto my Kindle for the journey to Brighton for this year’s Fantasycon.

In the far future, the universe is divided into two different groups: the Norms, who can portal between planets, and people like Jarra, the one in a thousand born with an immune system that doesn’t allow them to survive anywhere but Earth.  Norms come back to Earth for one reason: to study human history – like the ruins of what was once New York City. But only if they don’t have to interact with any Apes along the way. 18-year-old Jarra has a plan to change that.

This debut novel is a delight – it is marketed as YA, but this adult science fiction fan found it completely engrossing, as did my husband. Jarra is a strong protagonist – spiky, yet believably vulnerable. About halfway through the novel, there is an episode that appears to have split Earthgirl readers into those who feel that it is unrealistic and those who don’t. I’m in the latter camp. The series of events leading up to the shock that catapults Jarra into behaving as she does is entirely convincing – as is her reaction.

So Edwards has set up a strong female character and an intriguing situation – has she also managed to depict a sufficiently detailed and complex future? Absolutely. One of the characteristics of YA fiction – which is probably why you see a lot more Urban Fantasy, rather than Science Fiction in this genre – is that it is generally fast-paced. So it is a big ask for authors working with a primary world where the surroundings and customs are significantly different from our own time – unlike most urban fantasy offerings which are mostly set in modern cities with a few extra supernatural touches laid over the familiar landscape – to produce a satisfactory setting without holding up the narrative drive.

Edwards manages to provide plenty of interesting insights into her future world as part of the plot progression – an achievement a whole lot more difficult than the author makes it look. In fact, the world and the reasons why archaeological teams are frantically mining these decaying cities was – for me – one of the main treats of this book.

Any grizzles? Well – it is a minor niggle, but I did feel that I would have liked the ending to be slightly less… tidy. But that observation doesn’t detract from the fact that Earthgirl is a thoroughly engrossing read by a talented author, who is definitely One to Watch.
9/10

Review of Downside Girls – short story collection by Jaine Fenn

This collection of four standalone stories, with a foreword by Alistair Reynolds, features some of characters from Fenn’s debut novel, Principles of Angels. It isn’t a surprise that someone has jumped at the opportunity to publish further stories in this fascinating world, where the Angels are augmented female assassins principally employed to kill politicians that the electorate have judged to be inadequate. One of the ironies in Fenn’s world is that the Angels are taken from the feral underclass who eke out a living on the underside of the floating Kesh City, most of whom are far too busy trying to survive to bother with voting…

I read Principles of Angels, the first book in her Hidden Empire series, after meeting Jaine Fenn at Bristolcon last year and while I enjoyed the story, it is her world that has lodged in my head ever since. Her clean, unfussy writing style belies the layered intricacy of her worldbuilding, where her protagonists are completely ringfenced by their extraordinary environment which Fenn manages to depict as entirely normal. It’s a neat trick to pull off and a lot harder than Fenn makes it look. The slightest sense of flourish on the author’s part would have immediately undermined the gritty edge of reality confronting her characters.

This collection can be read without having ever picked up a Jaine Fenn book – in fact provides an excellent introduction to Fenn’s writing and the world.

Collateral Damage – When Vanna Agriet accidentally spills her drink over an Angel it could spell death, but instead it leads to a rather peculiar friendship. This story provides an insight into the life of an Angel, and their unique role within society is explored from an enjoyably oblique angle, compared to the political machinations that drove the plot in Principles of Angels. I particularly enjoyed the twist at the end.

Death on Elsewhere Street – The downsider Geal hopes for a better life topside, only to find herself embroiled in a ‘removal’ by the Angel Thiera. This is another story that explores the role of Angels – and what the consequences of becoming society’s official assassins can be for those involved. I found it all the more powerful that it was told from the viewpoint of someone else caught up in the action.

Angel Dust – Downside, Isha’s brother Rakul brings a little black box home with him, and sets Isha on a journey that takes her to a meeting with the most powerful man in Kesh City. This story is the one in the collection that highlights the grim conditions in Downside as Isha struggles to deal with the fallout when her brother becomes embroiled in one of the gangs. I particularly enjoyed the incident where Isha narrowly avoids death when she’s drawn to the ornamental fountain playing Topside, only to receive an urgent warning that it is poisoned to prevent citizens from drinking free water…

The Three Temptations of Larnia Mier – Larnia Mier, a talented topside musician and instructor, is injured after witnessing a removal first-hand. As her abilities diminish, new possibilities open up. This is the odd one out. Larnia Mier comes from the privileged part of Kesh City – Topside. No gritted, giddying journeys for her to gather sufficient water, hopping over holes in the walkways that could plunge you to your death…

The other interesting difference with this story is that it is told in third person point of view, whereas the others are all narrated in first person viewpoint. Yet, it’s my favourite… I’m still trying to figure out why – I’m a sucker for gutsy heroines from hard backgrounds and first person pov is always the one I’m attracted to, both as writer and reader. I found her fascinating in Principles of Angels, too. Fenn has her brittle, solitary personality absolutely nailed, and I think she leaps off the page. I also very much enjoyed the ending – initially, I figured this was going somewhere more predictable and less tricky and hats off to Fenn for giving us this less tidy, yet far more convincing conclusion to this story.

As Reynolds mentions in the Foreword, short story writing is demanding in ways that novel writing isn’t, and in order to produce an anthology of successful short stories takes a high degree of writing skill. Fenn’s Downside Girls not only is a great addition to her list of published books, but also demonstrates her talent.
9/10

Review of We Can Be Heroes by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

This YA crossover science fiction techno-thriller (you may have gathered it’s something of a genre mash-up…) is the first of Gray’s work I’ve read – although it didn’t take long to realise We Can Be Heroes is the work of a fluent, experienced writer.

If you press them, anyone who games will admit to some variation on the idea of how they’d love to be the hero for real, just once. Just for one day. But right now, I’m on an empty street five hundred kilometers from home, barely able to walk. I’m soaked and shivering, wearing someone else’s clothes, and with way too many memories of almost dying rattling around in my head. And right here, right now, all I can think about is what I’d say if anybody asked me how much I want to be a hero…

This short paragraph gives a small slice of the narrative voice by űber-stroppy teenager, Scott Gray, sometime gamer and conspiracy theorist teetering on the edge of dropping out of school. Like an increasing number of books, it is written in present tense which works well – particularly once it gets going.

If you track down this book, my first piece of advice is – keep reading, it gets a whole lot better. I understand why Gray wanted to take time to fully establish his character, setting and situation – but in my opinion, his approach is just a tad too leisurely for the genre and subject matter. However, once this book hit its stride, I was gripped.

This story isn’t just about Scott, it is also about his gaming team – Mitchell, Breanne, Rico and Molly. I liked the fact that there were two girls in there and was impressed that Gray managed to keep all five main protagonists fully engaged and developing throughout the mayhem – a feat far more technically demanding than Gray made it look. I wondered about having a team of five, rather than three or four, but came to the conclusion that using five quite different personalities, Gray was able to fully explore the notion of heroism and how it plays out in a variety of ways. Over-arching the whole narrative, though, is the self-absorbed, arrogant yet vulnerable persona of young Scott. The voice is a joy – those of us who have had the misfortune/privilege to have lived alongside an overly bright sixteen year old male will be forcibly reminded of the experience halfway down the first page. I even confess to sneaking feelings of sympathy for Seth, his permanently enraged father… Does this mean that my allegiance to Scott wavered? Nope. Not even at his most obnoxious. I am a sucker for a strongly written, complex first person narrator and Gray certainly delivered. Unlike so many techie-minded male authors, Gray manages to write his main character with depth and humanity.

In addition to exploring the idea of heroism, Gray also has his protagonist musing on the nature of isolationism, what defines humanity, as well as confronting him with the fallout when someone unexpectedly dies. All this without letting the narrative pace fall below frenetic once the action starts kicking off…

Other than my one niggle about the book being a bit slow at the beginning, I found this an engrossing, highly enjoyable and accomplished read and have marked Scott Fitzgerald Gray as One To Watch. I’ll be hunting down his back catalogue – in the meantime, I suggest you upload We Can Be Heroes, or order a print copy. Now that the summer is rapidly drawing to a close, you’ll need a bit of action to keep you warm – and this book has it in spades…
9/10