John Meaney's short stories in Interzone magazine gave him a reputation in SF circles for being highly promising. The promise is fulfilled in his debut novel To Hold Infinity, which has all the authentic flash and dazzle of cutting-edge SF. It's set on a colony world whose aristocracy of "Luculenti" are genuinely superior to the common herd, thanks to built-in brain enhancements which provide all-senses net communication and multi- tasking processing power. The implications are nicely explored, with characters manipulating the market and buying/selling companies during fleeting pauses in conversation. An utterly hissable serial-killer villain exploits fellow-Luculenti's permanent Net links to assimilate their minds using vampire software and steal their add-ons for himself—his mind is multiplied by hundreds of these "extra brains", while the legal limit is three. Others sense that something's wrong, and tough heroine Sunadomari Yoshiko from primitive old Earth becomes entangled in the invisible, multi-levelled struggle for people's souls. When the now megalomaniac killer goes too far in public, the hunt is on and Yoshiko will be the bait ... The book glows with biological and nanotechnological wonders, strange weapons and surprising perspectives. It is deservedly shortlisted for the 1999 British SF Association Award. —David Langford

John Meaney received much praise and a British SF Association Award shortlisting for his first novel To Hold Infinity (1998), full of clever new SF ideas and ingenious twists on old ones. Paradox is his second.

The setting is Nulapeiron, a many levelled world of exotic underground cities where the lower classes are literally kept below by a meritocracy of intellectual Lords. Change is forbidden, perhaps impossible: the barely human "Oracles", disconnected from time, provide snapshots from an unalterable, deterministic future. Chaos and uncertainty are dirty words and "I'll be heisenberged" a foul oath.

Young hero Tom—brought up in a deep-down bazaar—loses his mother to an Oracle's whim, his father to a cruelly self-fulfilling prediction, and his arm to the Lords' cruel justice. He's primed with hatred and inspired by a biographical data-crystal given him by an outlawed Pilot who's navigated the now forbidden fractal complexities of mu-space. Tom has enough mathematical genius to storm the pyramid of Nulapeiron's high society and perhaps gain power to take revenge—if he can also solve the paradox of how to kill an Oracle whose death date is fixed, known, and far off in time. Change would become possible...

Meaney's sustained inventiveness continues to dazzle. Paradox may be a little heavy on martial-arts action for some tastes, but the roller-coaster plot is full of unexpected twists, revelations, biotechnological oddities, changes of course and unlikely alliances. Crackling tension continues to the very end. Nice one. —David Langford

Context is a direct sequel to John Meaney's well-received SF novel Paradox, whose hero Tom Corcorigan sparked an impossible revolution in the teeming underground regimes of planet Nulapeiron. What next?

Tom's ingenious, paradoxical insight was how to short-circuit the ruling "Oracles" whose knowledge of unchangeable future facts held Nulapeiron frozen in slavery and stasis. Now it's AD 3418, and after that partly successful revolution, the logic of paradox rebounds on Tom. His lady love dies or seems to die, yet a Seer shows him a future in which he rescues her. His new path is shaped by the need to make this vision possible.

Meanwhile, an unpleasant force called the Dark Fire or Blight is grabbing power in one subterranean community after another. Initiates become non-people who work and fight with eerily perfect synchronisation. "They're part of the Blight, just components, and that means they're no longer human." Following his personal quest through the wonders and dangers of Nulapeiron's exotic deeps, Tom keeps colliding with the machinations of the Blight.

An alternate storyline in the far past, AD 2142, follows the early life of Ro—the first human Pilot to be born adapted for vision and flight in "mu-space". (Her mother Karyn's story formed a similar strand in Paradox.) This is partly a murder mystery featuring multiple assassins, a cryptic dying message, and the intriguing alien Zajinets from Beta Draconis 3 who know more about mu-space than they're letting on. Ro's father, lost in that strange continuum, may have become a kind of god...

Besides violence, battle, torture, martial-arts extravaganzas and nanotechnology, Context is pervaded by webs of mysticism. There seems to be another, more sinister man-made god behind the Dark Fire. A blue fire is central to the mystery of the Oracles—not to mention the Zajinets—and when Tom himself touched by this fire, the effects are awesome.

This is a big, demanding, compelling novel, full of rewarding complexities and alive with that quantum strangeness where hard science intersects with the unknowable. A third Nulapeiron volume is promised: Resolution. —David Langford

Like the author's 1998 debut book King Rat, this is an urban-gothic novel full of rich city squalor—but this time the setting isn't London but the grimy fantasy metropolis of New Crobuzon. The city sprawls like a mutant Gormenghast, contains strange ethnic minorities such as the khepris (women with huge scarab-beetles for heads), and seethes with seedy technology and thaumaturgy. There are Babbage engines, coke-powered robot "constructs", and an underclass of biomagically "Remade" victims of cruel justice who may be part-machine, part-animal or wholly nightmarish. A visiting garuda—a winged being now stripped of his wings—approaches the overweight, eccentric amateur scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in hope of buying back the power of flight, and the resulting research programme has accidental but monstrous consequences. Something appalling is loosed, a horror whose deadliness is underlined when New Crobuzon's corrupt government begs help from the Ambassador of Hell ... who refuses, because even the demons are frightened. Dealing with the flying terror becomes a job for Grimnebulin and a much-harried group of cronies—including his khepri lover, the garuda, a reporter for a brutally suppressed subversive newspaper, the group mind of New Crobuzon's constructs, a secret traitor, and one of the strangest giant spiders in fiction. A big, powerful, inventive, mesmerising and memorably horrid novel. —David Langford

The question was always: what would he do for an encore? China Mieville's third novel The Scar is set in the same world as his award-winning Perdido Street Station but is a very different book, set in a very different city. Where his New Crobuzon was an old metropolis of cruelty, oppression and glamour, the floating freebooter city Armada is a place of refuge even for those who experience it as a prison. Brilliant linguist Bellis Coldwine is on the run when she is press-ganged by pirates who turn out to be rather more; her abilities make her a valuable commodity and she finds herself intermittently useful to a project so ambitious that it takes her much of the book to comprehend fully. Mieville takes interesting chances by making Bellis his protagonist—she has an arrogant selfishness that at times makes one breathless—but her guts, determination and intermittent realism about herself gradually endear her to us. This is an intelligent book about how individuals and events influence each other and the meaning of freedom. Mieville has a sense of the sea as the place of a menace almost incomprehensibly huge; like Perdido Street Station, The Scar is full of breath-taking moments of wonder which are also moments of heart-stopping terror. —Roz Kaveney

Certain writers absolutely defy categorisation – and China Miéville is most definitely of that rarefied company. His prose is exhilarating, poetic, coruscating with ideas and atmosphere – and it has enhanced a body of work that has almost no parallels in modern writing. Heretofore, if Miéville has brushed shoulders with any identifiable genres, they are those of fantasy and science fiction – which makes his remarkable new book, The City and The City, such a surprise. The author’s publishers compare this novel to Philip K Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984 – which at least gives a series of corollaries for this book, however tentative. There are elements here of the crime thriller, but very much refracted through Miéville’s highly individual imagination.

The body of a murdered woman is discovered in the remarkable, crumbling European city of Besźel. Such a crime is par for the course for Inspector Tyador Borlú, who is the premier talent of the Extreme Crime Squad – until his investigations uncover evidence that bizarre and terrifying forces are at work – and soon both he and those around him will be in considerable peril. He must undertake an odyssey, a journey across borders both physical and psychical, to the city which is both a complement and rival to his own, that of Ul Qoma.

Like all of China Miéville’s work, The City and The City will not be to everyone’s taste – the very individuality of the prose and the surrealistic inventiveness will not attract those preferring more prosaic fare. But for readers who hanker after untrammelled imagination – and look for literary fare unlike anything they have read before (even, it has to be said, by Miéville himself), then this is a journey to be undertaken. But with caution, perhaps… —Barry Forshaw

Written and illustrated by Frank Miller; cover by Miller.

The most eagerly-awaited sequel in comics begins! Three years after the events in THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, Batman knows the world is nowhere near the perfect little place it pretends to be, and he sees the cracks in the system that have been neatly covered up. It's time to find where all the heroes have gone, and the Dark Knight is the right man for the job.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again is Frank Miller's follow-up to his hugely successful Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, one of the few comics that is widely recognized as not only reinventing the genre but also bringing it to a wider audience.Set three years after the events of The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again follows a similar structure: once again, Batman hauls himself out of his self-imposed retirement in order to set things right. However, where DKR was about him cleaning up his home city, Gotham, DKSA has him casting his net much wider: he's out to save the world. The thing is, most of the world doesn't realize that it needs to be saved—least of all Superman and Wonder Woman, who have become little more than superpowered enforcers of the status quo. So, the notoriously solitary Batman is forced to recruit some different superpowered allies. He also has his ever-present trusty sidekick, Robin, except that he is a she, and she is calling herself Catwoman. Together, these super-friends uncover a vast and far-reaching conspiracy that leads to the President of the United States (Lex Luthor) and beyond.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again is largely an entertaining comic, but much of what made The Dark Knight Returns so good just doesn't work here. Miller's gritty, untidy artwork was perfect for DKR's grim depiction of the dark and seedy Gotham City, but it jars a bit for DKSA, which is meant to depict an ultra-glossy, futuristic technocracy. Lynn Varley's garish coloring attempts to add a slicker sheen, but the artwork is ultimately let down by that which worked so well for DKR—this time around, it just feels sloppy and rushed. The same is true of the book's denouement, which happens so quickly that it leaves the reader reeling and looking for more of an explanation. Moreover, DKSA is packed full of characters who will mean little to those unfamiliar with the DC Comics universe (e.g., the Atom, the Elongated Man, the Question). Perhaps the book's biggest failing is that where The Dark Knight Returns gave comic book fans a base from which to evangelize to theuninitiated, The Dark Knight Strikes Again is just preaching to the converted. Comic book superhero fans will find much to enjoy here, but others would be better off sticking with the original. —Robert Burrow

The Dark Knight Strikes Again is Frank Miller's follow-up to his hugely successful Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, one of the few comics that is widely recognized as not only reinventing the genre but also bringing it to a wider audience.Set three years after the events of The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again follows a similar structure: once again, Batman hauls himself out of his self-imposed retirement in order to set things right. However, where DKR was about him cleaning up his home city, Gotham, DKSA has him casting his net much wider: he's out to save the world. The thing is, most of the world doesn't realize that it needs to be saved—least of all Superman and Wonder Woman, who have become little more than superpowered enforcers of the status quo. So, the notoriously solitary Batman is forced to recruit some different superpowered allies. He also has his ever-present trusty sidekick, Robin, except that he is a she, and she is calling herself Catwoman. Together, these super-friends uncover a vast and far-reaching conspiracy that leads to the President of the United States (Lex Luthor) and beyond.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again is largely an entertaining comic, but much of what made The Dark Knight Returns so good just doesn't work here. Miller's gritty, untidy artwork was perfect for DKR's grim depiction of the dark and seedy Gotham City, but it jars a bit for DKSA, which is meant to depict an ultra-glossy, futuristic technocracy. Lynn Varley's garish coloring attempts to add a slicker sheen, but the artwork is ultimately let down by that which worked so well for DKR—this time around, it just feels sloppy and rushed. The same is true of the book's denouement, which happens so quickly that it leaves the reader reeling and looking for more of an explanation. Moreover, DKSA is packed full of characters who will mean little to those unfamiliar with the DC Comics universe (e.g., the Atom, the Elongated Man, the Question). Perhaps the book's biggest failing is that where The Dark Knight Returns gave comic book fans a base from which to evangelize to theuninitiated, The Dark Knight Strikes Again is just preaching to the converted. Comic book superhero fans will find much to enjoy here, but others would be better off sticking with the original. —Robert Burrow

A publishing sensation upon its original publication in France, Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M is one of the most sexually explicit books ever written by a woman. Ostensibly a semi-autobiographical account of the sexual life of the author, the editor of an influential Parisian art magazine, the book is a frank and detailed account of Millet's development from an awkward, guilt-ridden Catholic teenager to sophisticated Parisian intellectual and enthusiastic member of the singles bars, orgies and public sex spaces of Paris.

The book has no sequential narrative. Instead, it offers a frank and extremely graphic celebration of the pursuit and gratification of sex. Millet praises the virtues of anonymous sex, admitting that "I can account for forty-nine men whose sexual organs have penetrated mine and to whom I can attribute a name or, at least, in a few cases, an identity. But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity". Nevertheless, she proceeds to offer page after page of exhausting descriptions of sexual couplings in groups in houses, car parks, offices, toilets, museums—the list and the permutations are endless, as are Millet's descriptions of her own sexual organs and her ability to perform oral sex. Millet wants to celebrate the personal freedom and physical pleasure that casual, anonymous sex offers a woman, but this is never fully explored beyond her assertion that "the certainty that I could have sexual relations in any situation with any willing party" was "the lungfuls of fresh air you inhale as you walk to the end of the pier". Much of the book's language is equally prosaic. Ultimately, this is a book about sexual fantasy, but as Millet herself admits, "sexual fantasies are far too personal for them ever really to be shared". Millet is too busy describing the literal nuts and bolts, the grunts and bumps of (resolutely heterosexual) sex to produce eroticism on a par with her obvious models, Pauline Reage's Story of O and Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, which leaves The Sexual Life of Catherine M feeling rather naughty, but strangely dated.—Jerry Brotton

This is A.A. Milne's second volume of verse about Christopher Robin and his friends. From short simple rhymes like "Solitude" to the longer poems, such as "King John's Christmas", there is a poem to suit any storytelling session. With E.H. Shepard's original illustrations in colour, this is an attractive and entertaining book for adults to share with young children. —Philippa Reece

This is the first volume of rhymes written especially for children by A.A. Milne. Although many of the rhymes refer to times past—not many of today's children have a nurse to look after them—the humour and simplicity of the rhymes make them as popular now as when they were first written. Accompanied by E.H. Shepard's original illustrations in colour, this is a handy volume to have on standby for reading to young children. —Philippa Reece

It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution—a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book—where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas—is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?)

Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism. —Travis Elborough

Elizabeth Moon is best known in Britain for her Paksennarion fantasies; Hunting Party (1993) is the first of her Serrano Legacy SF novels. Its heroine Heris Serrano has suffered a familiar military-SF predicament—forced to resign her command in the space navy thanks to the machinations of a wicked admiral. Her new life as captain of an eccentric lady aristocrat's private space-yacht is handled with originality, charm and a thoughtfulness about how things work that's reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein's better SF.

Both captain and owner emerge as interesting personalities. Following a voyage enlivened by various accidents plus sabotage attempts by a spoiled brat on board, Hunting Party lives up to its title with episodes of horsemanship and fox-hunting on a lord's planet-wide estate. Here, secretly, darker entertainment is also going on—a sadistic armed hunt for human quarry. As a former US Marines lieutenant, Moon is grimly plausible about guns and their effects. Perhaps a little less plausible are the coincidences that bring together numerous unexpected characters, including Heris's personal nemesis and an old flame, for satisfying final confrontations.

The story reads well and is self-contained: Heris's adventures continue in further novels, Sporting Chance and Winning Colours. —David Langford

As "Book Two of the Serrano Legacy", this is an immediate sequel to Elizabeth Moon's enjoyable SF Hunting Party—best read first, since the plot tangles of Sporting Chance emerge directly from the earlier story. Ex-Navy space-captain Heris Serrano is still commanding her eccentric but sharp old patron Cecelia de Marktos's luxury interstellar yacht, the new mission being to ferry home a misplaced sprig of galactic royalty after the first book's action. Something's wrong with this feckless prince, though, and carrying the bad news of possible poisoning makes the messenger a target for Borgia-like scheming among the royals. Very soon, one heroine is in near-death coma while the other's on the run through deep space—harried by Crown warships, the galactic mafia, a traitor crewperson and a plague of mutant cockroaches. Moon counterpoints space-operatic excitement (including one small but tense battle) with slow, agonising therapy as the woman trapped speechlessly within her own body is slowly brought to the point of fumbling communication. Eventually there are massive repercussions for the galaxy's sickly, scheming royalty, and although Sporting Chance ends satisfactorily— with the major villain getting a suitable comeuppance—it seems clear that something bigger and smellier is ready to hit the fan in book three, Winning Colours. Moon continues to entertain. —David Langford

Winning Colours concludes Elizabeth Moon's "Serrano Legacy" adventure-SF trilogy, whose previous novels are Hunting Party and Sporting Chance. Captain Heris and her cranky but highly acute patron Lady Cecelia are in their tightest corner yet, visiting a planet that's due to be torched by a raiding fleet from the villainous Benignity of the Compassionate Hand. Only their lightly armed space-yacht Sweet Delight stands in the way: the official defence force is commanded by traitors. Of course resourceful Heris contrives a daring last-ditch scheme, but still seems doomed ... Another storyline features the various young, foolhardy offspring of merchant princes and clones of royal scions who repeatedly risked their necks in previous books, and here tangle with revolutionaries enraged by the concentration of galactic power in the hands of repeatedly rejuvenated oldies. En route there's a fair bit about horse-breeding, and a tongue-in-cheek justification for sound effects during space-battles in vacuum. After subjecting her characters to nail-biting peril (with one small mystery frustratingly unresolved), Moon dishes out happy endings with a touch of sentiment that goes down well—since we've come to like most of these people. And, just as in P.G. Wodehouse, the prime motive force in the galaxy turns out to be aunts. Enjoyable reading. —David Langford

"The Serrano Legacy", an entertaining SF sequence with strong female leads and a realistic space-military flavour, began with Hunting Party (1993). Young lieutenant Esmay Suiza came to stage centre in book four: Rules of Engagement is book five, continuing her story.

Suiza may be a fine leader and tactician, but she doesn't know how to handle falling for Ensign Barin Serrano, a man she outranks. Frictions in command training school worsen when well-born beauty Brun makes a play for Serrano: Suiza's explosion of temper blights her career. Then Brun falls into the hands of the series' most plausibly nasty villains to date, a murderous, Bible-thumping militia that controls several planets where women are kept well down and—if they protest—surgically deprived of their voices. Moon remarks: ... it would be not only useless but dishonest to pretend that the New Texas God-fearing Militia did not derive its nature from elements all too close to home, in Waco, Fort Davis and even Oklahoma City. The "Nutex" have also grabbed a nuclear arms cache for Oklahoma-style terrorist bombing in Familias space, home of the Fleet in which Suiza and Serrano are officers. Multiple storylines cover Suiza's wrestle with her public and private life, Brun's sufferings and determination, Serrano's ups and downs with unwritten rules of command, and eventually a risky rescue mission into a Nutex solar system. Things work out excitingly and as they should. This is an enjoyable interstellar adventure, more harrowing than previous episodes. The next and final volume is Change of Command. —David Langford