The SF Site: Featured Reviews Archive

The reviews are sorted alphabetically by authors' last name -- one or more pages for each letter (plus one for Mc). All but some recent reviews are listed here. Links to those reviews appear on the Recent Feature Review Page.

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HARM by Brian W. Aldiss
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali is a young writer. His family is Moslem but he sees himself as wholly British (he has an Irish wife), and his novel, The Pied Piper of Hamnet, is conceived as being a light comic fantasy somewhat in the very English tradition of P.G. Wodehouse. Suddenly the nature of the work is transformed. The authorities, in their rigid proto-fascism, are blind to the humour, to the fantasy, to the very fictionality of the work. In their blinkered way they see only a Moslem advocating the assassination of the prime minister.

Cultural Breaks by Brian Aldiss
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
Brian Aldiss is a fabulous and frustrating writer. When he is on song, his prose is dynamic, disturbing and delectable. But he is a restless writer. He came into his own in the fervid and experimental atmosphere of the New Wave, and he has been driven to try the new and the different ever since. That he is still experimenting now, 50 years after his debut, is a measure of a man who has never been prepared to settle back on his laurels and rehash the same old, same old.

The Moment of Eclipse by Brian Aldiss
reviewed by Gabe Chouinard
Here, you will find 14 stories by this Grand Master of Science Fiction. You'll read him when he is at his best, as in "Orgy of the Living and the Dying," or "The Circulation of the Blood" and "The Worm That Flies." This volume also includes "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," the story which forms the basis for Steven Spielberg's new film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
reviewed by Rich Horton
In the far future of Earth, the Sun has expanded, and is nearly ready to go nova. The Earth and the Moon are now both in tide-locked orbits, so that each keeps one face continually toward the Sun. The bulk of Earth's sunward face is dominated by a huge jungle, mostly composed of a single banyan tree, which has been colonized by any number of weirdly evolved plants. Very few animal species remain, and the plant species have adapted to fill many animal niches. One of the few to survive is humans, in several much-altered forms.

Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss
reviewed by Rich Horton
The generation ship has broken down. After hundreds of years, most of the inhabitants have forgotten even that they are on a ship. They live nasty, brutish and short lives in the corridors of the ship, amid a tangle of hydroponics. Roy Complain, a hunter of the tribe of Greene, is recruited by a "priest" named Marapper to join a band of five people in a journey to "Forwards," the front of the ship (as the priest assures them it really is), to find the "control room." Their journey is full of incident: battles with evolved rats and with "Giants" and with the mysterious "outsiders"; discovery of the "swimming pool"; encounters with weightlessness.

The Twinkling of an Eye by Brian W. Aldiss
reviewed by Rich Horton
If you're a fan of the literary memoir and find something compelling about tracing the roots of a writer's imagination, pick up this asorbing and moving book. Even if Aldiss is a name which has not be central in your SF reading, this is a very worthwhile account of the life of a man in this century. And it may inspire you to read more of Aldiss' work.

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