Jonathan Cowie reviews two Pyr titles for Concatenation. Of Adam Roberts’ Gradisil
“Gradisil is a solidly written hard SF tale that has enough nice touches to
elevate it above many similar offerings. …interesting takes on world development. As well as some good SFnal set pieces… Given that a lot of the ‘high frontier’ novels since the 1970s had the action taking place in the asteroid belt with its raw materials, Adam Roberts has pursued what some might consider as a surprising route of centring the action in close Earth orbit. Well not entirely surprising given that since the 1970s much of the action in space (space probes aside) has taken place either in geostationary or lower. Yet Roberts is one of the few to have had the nous to capitalise on this. Taking all this, and that it is a sound read, and Gradisil is certainly one for hard SF and space opera fans.”
Turning to Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real,
“…delightfully over-the-top action romp…. Keeping it Real is a gung-ho, ripping, science-fantasy adventure. Fast-paced and sassy, it bolts along at a cracking pace with the heroine stopping for nothing, save the occasional magically enhanced blow to her derring-do. …a fun genre action novel that, unlike many from that stable, is coherently told with colour. More than this it is not afraid of using genre tropes in a confidently casual but authoritative way to carry the reader along the novel’s high-dive ride of a plot. The protagonist also approppriately high-powered being, if you will, a modern day Tara King type terminator hybridising with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
I heard the adventures in sci-fi podcast interview. Nice description of Keeping It Real, definitely makes me want to get that one.
Good!
I’m doing another interview with tehm later this week, too, in fact.
Great. Being able to listen to this sort of thing is very cool, especially seeing there are not half a million science fiction etc. conventions here, and the odd one they have it seems 2/3 of the people pull out of, so being all to hear all the authors etc. is great.
It is also especially interesting to hear editors and publishers and other people talk about that side of it, something that is pretty invisible otherwise.
Their podcast with Kay Kenyon just went up, then, if I can recommend another.
Yep, I have listened to all theirs now. 🙂
As have I!