I write for a living - big, hefty historical tomes - so when I read to relax I'm usually looking for something more light than heavyweight. I love Scalzi's stuff and this hits the spot: it's not great literature (he admits it himself) but it's fun, intriguing enough to keep me going intellectually without too much of that heavy lifting, and it's just a great read.
The Kaiju Preservation Society is John Scalzi's first standalone adventure since the conclusion of his New York Times bestselling Interdependency trilogy.
When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization.” Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on.
What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here…
K. J. Parker is one of Tom Holt's (many) pseudonyms. I really like the world he's created here with competing empires roughly comparable to our Roman, Persian and Chinese ones. It's cynical and witty, with cynical and witty characters.
From one of the most original voices in fantasy comes a twisted tale of murder, betrayal, and battlefield salvage.
There’s no formal training for battlefield salvage. You just have to pick things up as you go along. Swords, armour, arrows – and the bodies, of course.
Over the years, Saevus Corax has picked up a lot of things. Some of them have made him decent money, others have brought nothing but trouble. But it’s a living, and somebody has to deal with the dead.
Something else that Saevus has buried is his past. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite succeed.
I've been a Pratchett fan ever since I stumbled over The Colour of Magic as an undergraduate. Finding out more about the man, his life, and his writing from someone who knew him intimately made for a fascinating read.
WINNER OF THE 2023 LOCUS AWARD FOR NON-FICTION WINNER OF THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION
'Always readable, illuminating and honest. It made me miss the real Terry.' - Neil Gaiman
'Sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully, intimate . . . it is wonderful to have this closeup picture of the writer's working life.' - Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Observer
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At the time of his death in 2015, award-winning and bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett was working on his finest story yet - his own.
The creator of the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series, Terry Pratchett was known and loved around…
The rich and fascinating history of the scientific revolution of the Victorian Era, leading to transformative advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.
With their expert culture of accuracy and precision, they created telegraphs and telephones, electric trams and railways, built machines that could think, and devised engines that could reach for the skies. When Cyrus Field’s audacious plan to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic finally succeeded in 1866, it showed how science, properly disciplined, could make new worlds. As crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the exhibitions its success inaugurated, they came to see the future made fact—to see the future being built before their eyes.
In this rich and absorbing book, a distinguished historian of science tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage’s dream of mechanizing mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s tunnel beneath the Thames to George’s Cayley’s fantasies of powered flight and Nikola Tesla’s visions of an electrical world, it is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures—a rich tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took mankind to the Moon.
