A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman

4/10

From Publishers WeeklyOld pro Haldeman (Camouflage) has a gift for seeing issues in a sympathetic but dispassionate perspective, as shown by the 15 tales in this collection. How can we live as human beings in an uncaring universe? he asks. The title story returns to the conclusion of the Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel The Forever War as seen by another character, discovering uncomfortable but ultimately encouraging things about our capacity to adapt and endure. Other selections, such as "Finding My Shadow" and "Civil Disobedience," are much bleaker, as they angrily extrapolate trends in American politics and our abuse of the environment. Set on a far future Earth, "For White Hill" is one of the most memorable tragic love stories ever written as SF. While the book includes a few minor pieces, notably two early stories that contain the basis for Camouflage, Haldeman's work is never less than clever and sometimes much more. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Black Man by Richard K. Morgan

3/10 *Read Altered Carbon before even considering this.

One hundred years from now, and against all the odds, Earth has found a new stability; the political order has reached some sort of balance, and the new colony on Mars is growing. But the fraught years of the 21st century have left an uneasy legacy ... Genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century's wars have no wars to fight and are surplus to requirements. And a man bred and designed to fight is a dangerous man to have around in peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars but now one has come back and killed everyone else on the shuttle he returned in. Only one man, a genengineered ex-soldier himself, can hunt him down and so begins a frenetic man-hunt and a battle survival. And a search for the truth about what was really done with the world's last soldiers. BLACK MAN is an unstoppable SF thriller but it is also a novel about predjudice, about the ramifications of playing with our genetic blue-print. It is about our capacity for violence but more worrying, our capacity for deceit and corruption. This is another landmark of modern SF from one of its most exciting and commercial authors.

Africa Zero by Neal Asher

5/10

The novellas Africa Zero and Africa Plus One in one book. The Collector rampages across a far future Africa populated with gene-spliced vampires, resurrected mammoth, and nutters with APWs. But he can handle it.

The Engineer Reconditioned by Neal Asher

6/10

British author Asher is rapidly becoming one of the major figures in 21st-century SF, as shown by the 10 powerful and entertaining stories in this collection. In "The Engineer," an interstellar research vessel picks up an escape pod that has been drifting for millions of years. The alien it contains turns out to be the last of a long-extinct race of genetic engineers with terrifying capabilities. The gruesome "Spatterjay" is set on an alien world whose human colonists have been radically modified and made virtually indestructible, by the enormously hostile environment. "Proctors" and "The Owner" are part of a series in which human beings must come to terms with the universe being ruled by an inscrutable, virtually immortal alien with godlike powers. "The Thrake" concerns the fate of a Christian pseudoscientist who makes a near-fatal mistake while looking for signs of religious belief in the aliens he's studying. Though occasionally unpleasant (the author appears to have a thing about parasites) and often violent, these well-crafted tales provide plenty of high-concept scientific extrapolation.