Chia Siew Pang Goh Ewe Hock

David Eddings

Clifford D. Simak

Lucia Alvarez de Toledo Ernesto Guevara Looking back on the life of his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara in his introduction to the Bolivian Diary, Fidel Castro claims that "rarely, if ever, in history has one man's image, name and example spread so rapidly and so completely". Ernesto Guevara de la Sema is the ultimate revolutionary, an icon who spawned a million T-shirts, and whose death in 1967 whilst fermenting revolution in Bolivia enshrined him as a martyr of the radical Left. In his short life Che Guevara led military revolutions in Mexico, the Congo and, most famously, Cuba, before heading to Bolivia in 1966 to establish a guerrilla movement in an attempt to overthrow the Bolivian military dictatorship.

His Bolivian Diary, first published in Cuba in 1968, is the remarkable and ultimately tragic first-hand account of Che's formation of a tiny band of revolutionaries, his attempt to proselytise the local peasants, his skirmishes with the Bolivian army, and his final shootout and cold-blooded execution at the hands of the military in October 1967. Stripped of the romantic idealism usually associated with Che, the diary is a sobering account of the drudgery, fear and monotony of guerrilla warfare. Much of the diary is taken up with the preoccupations of basic survival in the primitive conditions of the Bolivian mountains, whilst playing a tense and often ineffective game of hit and run with the Bolivian army. There are some wonderful moments, such as Che breaking off from military preparations to remember that, "I must write some letters to Sartre and Bertrand Russell..." or commandeering a jeep and running it on the urine of his guerrillas. Ultimately this is a tough, uncompromising portrait of a ruthlessly disciplined and single-minded man, relishing a conflict which "gives us the opportunity to turn ourselves into revolutionaries, the highest state of the human species". —Jerry Brotton

Jonathan Coe

Phillip Knightley Caroline Kennedy

Jon Bentley This reviewer still has the original edition of Bentley's book, 14-years-old now. Bentley's influential and eponymous columns first appeared in Communications of the ACM. Programming Pearls contains 15 of these—now updated—columns.

In his book Bentley assumes little more than a working knowledge of C, but it's in no way a guide to C. Rather, it approaches programming in the same way William Morris approached design—as a creative act founded on knowledge of the craft. From the first essay, Bentley emphasises the importance of accurately defining the problem in arriving at a fast, robust and efficient solution. He gives a number of examples that show how real understanding can reduce programming time, increase accuracy and reduce bugs.

The essays are divided into three alliteratively named sections: Preliminaries, Performance and Product. The first section covers writing a program that's correct for the programmer and the client. The second addresses efficiency, code tuning and performance. The last is a little unfocussed, albeit still interesting: it covers sorts, searches and heaps among other subjects. Take note, though: the solutions in the appendices are, in true C fashion, pointers to solutions. Programming Pearls is such a delight, you're likely to find yourself reading it in the bath. —Steve Patient

William Green

Doris May Lessing

Nancy Kress

Irvine Welsh Irvine Welsh has produced more than his share of revolting characters in his short yet spectacular writing career, but in the creation of Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson he has surpassed himself. The protagonist of Filth is, both personally and professionally, utterly corrupt; a thief, drug user, misogynist and racist, with standards of appearance and personal hygiene that are simply beyond belief. It goes without saying that his wife and children have left him but, oddly, he still has few drinking mates, and even some of the women he so hideously abuses are still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. "The undeniable sexuality which is part and parcel of the complete dominance over another human being", opines the viciously selfish Robertson, is just part of what makes, "poliswork such a satisfying career." But, strangely, as we chart his inevitable decline...from what is admittedly a very low baseline—a solid, almost conventional, underlying morality begins to assert itself. Amid the degradation we come across a hint of reason as Welsh's stunningly direct dialogue and hideously imaginative plot combine in a thrilling, undeniably unsettling novel. —Nick Wroe

Brian Peter Brindle

John Harvey

Isaac Asimov

Haruki Murakami

Alastair Reynolds In Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds revisits the noir universe of his debut SF blockbuster Revelation Space with a suspenseful, convoluted pursuit story. Its dizzying reversals and games of disguise are reminiscent of Iain M Banks at his trickiest.

The main narrative stars trained killer Tanner Mirabel, a man hell-bent on revenge, who stalks his enemy Reivich from the world Sky's Edge across a 15-year interstellar gap to the gaudy, poisoned melting pot of Chasm City. Flashbacks reveal the violent events and worse repercussions that so badly twisted Mirabel and others. Virus-induced dreams provide a third story line from inside the head of legendary traitor-messiah Sky Haussmann, who long ago shaped the original colonisation of Sky's Edge and whose real story never got into the history books.

Chasm City's complications include spectacular space-elevator sabotage, faulty antimatter drives, hidden aliens, mystery drugs, exotic bio-modification, tailored disease, high-tech weaponry, a new and deadlier form of bungee-jumping, and that traditional SF symptom of decadence: organised hunts with human prey. Violent death is never far off, but our protagonist has deeper worries in that his own motives and memories, even his identity, don't seem to add up quite as they should ...

After many chases, captures and escapes, these tangled plot strands are satisfyingly resolved. Masks are stripped away, and webs of lies exposed. Revelations range from the origin of the dread Melding Plague (which once nightmarishly merged Chasm City's people, machines and buildings) to the reason for an irrational fear of alcoves. An enjoyably tense, tortuous SF thriller. —David Langford

L.Ron Hubbard

C J Cherryh

Doris Lessing

Peter Hoeg

Haruki Murakami Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. —Simon Leake, Amazon.com

Iain Banks

Tim Powers

Kahlil Gibran

Peter Carey In True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey returns to the harsh, brutal world of Australian history, so brilliantly evoked in earlier novels such as Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda. Set in the desolate settler communities north of Melbourne in the late 19th century, the novel is told in the form of a journal, written by the famous outlaw and "bushranger" Ned Kelly, to a daughter he will never see. As Kelly explains, "I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lies may I burn in hell if I speak false".

The salty, colloquial, unpunctuated style of Kelly's journal is reproduced with great skill, as Carey recounts the outlaw's early life with a cross-dressing, Irish immigrant sheep worker, and a beautiful but headstrong mother, always on the wrong side of the law. Inadvertently causing the arrest and death of his father, Ned realises that "there were a drought and nothing flourishing there but misery I were the oldest son I thought it time to earn my place", a decision that ultimately leads him into conflict with the law, and to form the notorious Kelly Gang.

The novel contains some wonderfully lyrical and deeply moving moments, as Ned struggles to articulate the harsh injustice of the world around him, but some readers might find Carey's epistolary style rather restrictive and colourless after the first 100 pages, and lacking in the imaginative excitement of Carey's earlier novels. —Jerry Brotton

T.H. White

J. G. Ballard

Tad Williams Tad Williams made his name in fantasy with the immense "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" trilogy (1988-93). His "Otherland" quartet, opening with City of Golden Shadow (1996), is mid-21st-century SF set in an ultra-sophisticated software universe containing countless worlds. This episode features a deadly nature reserve of giant insects, a poisoned Oz, a madcap cartoon reality, London as in The War of the Worlds, 16th-century Venice, Xanadu, ancient Egypt, the Odyssey's Ithaca and the Drones Club. Otherland is the playground of the monstrously rich and unscrupulous Grail Brotherhood, who hope for on-line immortality and are abducting children's souls into their VR system. Opposing them is the enigmatic "Circle", plus a handful of ordinary folk who've penetrated Otherland and are trapped there, floating from world to world on the digital river of the title. There's a spy in this group, though; Otherland's operating system is becoming unstable; the Nemesis program that hunts down software anomalies seems murderously out of control...

Williams writes fluently and evocatively, conjuring up a vivid succession of virtual realities as he manipulates numerous storylines inside and outside Otherland, climaxing with multiple cliffhangers. It's slightly frustrating, though, that halfway through the series we've learned little more—especially about the tantalizing suggestion that Otherland is a metaphysical threat to "real" reality—than emerged in book 1. Next volume: Mountain of Black Glass. —David Langford

Alan Bennett

Will Self Will Self's tabloid-friendly reputation as a connoisseur of proscribed substances should not obscure the fact that he can write many of his contemporaries under the table. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, is filled with typically Selfish confections: gritty chunks of reality wrapped in a sweet shell of exquisitely funny and intelligent writing. Admittedly, some of the stories here feel a little underdeveloped, as if the author were flexing his literary muscles and showing how easily he can make highbrow style dirty-dance with his lowbrow obsessions, but even the least of them is a bravura performance by an expert wordsmith. Self's obvious pleasure in bringing his extraordinary talents to bear on the seamiest of subjects is irresistible: the description of a crack cocaine rush that closes the first story, for example, is quite possibly more intoxicating than the drug itself.

But the greater part of the book complements that dazzling style with deeper pleasures. As he ranges from the hilarious tale of a remarkable infant who babbles in business German ("Bemess-bemess-bemessungsgrundlage!") to a troubled psychiatrist's journey toward the abyss, Self shows an uncanny knack for mixing realism and absurdity. The closing piece, a short novella about a wrongly convicted sex offender's attempt to win a short-story prize, is the most assured of all. In this author's hands, the barely articulate conversations of career criminals are transformed into poetry, and the struggles of the central character are both moving and wickedly funny:

In prison, in the English winter, the word crepuscular acquires new resonance, new intensity. For here and now is an eternity of forty-watt bulbs, an Empty Quarter of linoleum and a lost world of distempered walls. It's an environment of corridors and walkways, a space that taunts with the idea of progression towards arrival; then delivers only a TV room full of modular plastic chairs and Styrofoam beakers napalmed by fag ends.

In Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys Will Self shows once again that he's someone to be reckoned with. The kind of writer a society needs, he uses his wit as a crowbar to pry open the cracks in our culture. —Simon Leake

Thomas Keneally

Julian Barnes

Sara Paretsky

Alastair Reynolds Redemption Ark is Alastair Reynolds's third hefty SF novel, a direct sequel to his debut book Revelation Space, and also linked with Chasm City, which won the British SF Association Award. Gripping high-tech action features various groups struggling for control of a cache of "hell-class weapons", while the alien Inhibitors—who stamp out space-going intelligence wherever they find it—are busy dismantling planets to build a doomsday engine of awesome size.

Building on the previous books, the interstellar situation is exhilaratingly complex. Major players from Revelation Space are still at large in the solar system containing the new Inhibitor construction site, the vast old starship Nostalgia for Infinity (hideously transformed and merged with its captain by "Melding Plague"), the hell-weapons, and the colonized planet Resurgam—which may need to be evacuated at speed.

Many light years away, the mechanically enhanced human Conjoiners are fighting a space war around Yellowstone, the world of Chasm City. Although victory approaches, the Conjoiners are frantically building advanced starships and planning to run for their lives, thanks to an incredibly dangerous project that sucked information from the future—including news of the Inhibitors. The Conjoiners have their own internal factions, at least one of which isn't what it seems, and a fresh split leads to a tense relativistic race for the Resurgam system and those coveted hell-weapons. Booby-traps and deadly strategems enliven the desperate journey.

Other, non-Conjoiner humans—not to mention machine intelligences and genetically engineered man-pig chimeras—are caught up in the intrigue and violence. Many members of this large cast have inner secrets, other identities, painful relationships, long-concealed guilt. As at last they converge on the Resurgam system, there are jolting surprises.

Meanwhile, the immense past and future of Reynolds' universe becomes clearer, a cosmic tapestry with the deep-time scope of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee series, ranging from the Dawn War in the early aeons of galactic life to a cataclysmic event still three billion years in the future. A disaster which the loathed robotic Inhibitors are working patiently to minimise....

Despite minor glitches in story logic, Redemption Ark is a hugely enjoyable and ambitious interstellar epic, a must-read for fans of SF that operates on a truly colossal scale. —David Langford

Justina Robson Paced like a cheetah and clever as anything, Justina Robson's second novel Mappa Mundi offers us a particularly scary take on the possibilities of technology, on what it is to be, and to remain. Half-Cheyenne FBI man Jude tracks down criminal masterminds who play with genetic perfection; his supposed partner Mary is there to stop him getting too close to those illegal experiments the US government wants to succeed. Disturbed psychologist Natalie is caught up with attempts to re-engineer sanity in human brains, horridly aware of the possibility that this new technology might be misused and anxious about her feckless drug-using flatmate and best friend.

This is a book that endlessly spins off intelligent ideas and keeps its momentum without ever bogging down in dumps of crude information. Justina Robson has a solid sense of where her characters come from, both geographically and emotionally, and even her villainess Mary is credibly motivated in every last shabby thing she does. Mappa Mundi asks some terrifying questions about technology—there are some things that cannot be uninvented, and, invented, are going to be used for good or ill. Justina Robson's first novel Silver Screen demonstrated her skill and intelligence; Mappa Mundi reveals her entire emotional and intellectual maturity. —Roz Kaveney

Mappa Mundi is joint winner of the Amazon.co.uk Writers' Bursaries 2000

Raymond E. Feist

Michael Frayn In Michael Frayn's novel Spies an old man returns to the scene of his seemingly ordinary suburban childhood. Stephen Wheatley is unsure of what he is seeking but, as he walks once-familiar streets he hasn't seen in 50 years, he unfolds a story of childish games colliding cruelly with adult realities. It is wartime and Stephen's friend Keith makes the momentous announcement that his mother is a German spy. The two boys begin to spy on the supposed spy, following her on her trips to the shops and to the post, and reading her diary. Keith's mother does have secrets to conceal but they are not the ones the boys suspect. Frayn skilfully manipulates his plot so that the reader's growing awareness of the truth remains just a few steps beyond Stephen's dawning realisation that he is trespassing on painful and dangerous territory. The only false notes occur in the final chapter when the central revelation (already cleverly signposted) is too swiftly followed by further disclosures about Stephen and his family that seem somehow unnecessary and make the denouement less satisfyingly conclusive. This is a much sparer and less expansive book than Headlong, Frayn's Booker Prize-shortlisted 1999 novel, more understated in its wit, but it is, in many ways, more compelling.—Nick Rennison

Stephen Fry

Whitley Strieber

A A Attanasio

Greg Bear

Louise Cooper

Ernest Hemingway

David Wingrove

Ian Irvine Magic pathways from world to world were a curse, making possible invasion and enslavement, and long ago those paths were closed leaving three worlds and the void between them a hopeless jumble of what had been and what is now. Ian Irvine's A Shadow on the Glass, first volume of his fantasy quartet "The View from the Mirror", takes us to one of those worlds and to two adventurers, a scholar and a psychic, who find themselves dragged into the conflicts of the mighty and the ambitious. Karan is blackmailed into helping steal a magic mirror, and finds herself on the run from warlords and warlocks; all that Llian wanted to do was find a great story to tell, and clarify some minor ambiguities in the archives of the college of storytellers—but he finds himself expelled and ostracised, and accompanying Karan on her breakneck journeys on high barrens and treacherous rivers. What Irvine brings to the mix is a sense of irony and some intelligent observation of character: Llian and Karan are not your average squeaky clean hero and heroine, and their opponents are hardly villainous, just people acting out the planned treacheries that seemed like a good idea. —Roz Kaveney

Russell Griffin

Val McDermid Val McDermid's The Distant Echo is, even more so than with her previous work, a masterpiece of trickery and misdirection. In 1978, four male students find the body of Rosie Duff half-buried in the snow and their lives are variously damaged by the suspicion that falls on them when the murder is never solved; a quarter of a century later, the case is reopened and suddenly the quartet start to be killed one after the other.

This is an effective thriller because it is so intelligent about the ways in which time changes things—secrets that seemed important become trivial and investigative techniques become ever more accurate. It is also intelligent about the ways in which things do not change—the friendships of the four men persist even when one becomes a fundamentalist preacher and another a post-modern literary theorist. Unusually for McDermid, this is a very Scots book as well—the investigating officers Maclennan and Lawson are very much men of a particular time and place. McDermid has a real sense of how to make forensic details count in a murder story—she also, more importantly, has a heart—this is a novel that makes us care passionately about victims and suspects alike. —Roz Kaveney

Len Deighton

P.D. James

Christopher Wills

Geoffrey Ashe

Ivan Bratko

Carol Queen

Douglas Coupland Microserfs is not about Microsoft—it—it's about programmers who are searching for lives. A hilarious but frighteningly real look at geek life in the nineties, Coupland's book manifests a peculiar sense of how technology affects the human race and how it will continue to affect all of us. Microserfs is the hilarious journal of Dan, an ex-Microsoft programmer who, with his coder comrades, is on a quest to find purpose in life. This isn't just fodder for techies. The thoughts and fears of the not-so-stereotypical characters are easy for any of us to relate to, and their witty conversations and quirky view of the world make this a surprisingly thought-provoking book.

"... just think about the way high-tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s," muses one programmer. "I mean, all those Nerf toys and free beverages! And the way tech firms won't even call work 'the office,' but instead, 'the campus'. It's sick and evil." END

Darren O'Shaughnessy This is the author's first novel and it's a very strange one. Brash young Capac Raimi, a man with no past, comes to join his uncle's gangster organisation in a big, unnamed city. (Though telling a complete story, the book's billed as "The City: Book 1".) Very soon he's sucked into the empire of The Cardinal, the top crime lord who dominates the city and, it seems, may be looking for a young heir ... Jolts, surprises and dizzying gear changes follow: Ayuamarca offers not just unexpected twists but unexpected kinds of twist. Capac encounters love (or at any rate sex) at first sight, an unstoppable assassin, puzzling advisers, blind men with a strange vision and an aging woman who has the perfect face of a teenager. People on the mysterious Ayuamarca List—which includes Capac's name—tend to vanish from life, from official records and hidden files, even from others' memories. The Cardinal, by turns capricious, violent, charming, gross and deadly, has a fantastic secret rooted in the long-ago magic of the Incas. Before Capac is allowed to learn this, he must make various terrible discoveries about himself and those close to him, including his own lady-love. Violent, black and startlingly original. —David Langford

Ken Rolston

David Arscott David Marl

Tom Moldvay Jean Wells

Alastair Reynolds Alastair Reynolds's first novel is "hard" SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old—when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.

Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defences: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby-trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.

Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas—Khouri the reluctant contract-assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity—and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal and ingenious lies.

The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defences to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.

At the heart of this artefact, the final revelations detonate—most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. —David Langford

Evelyn Waugh

Dana Shapiro

Samuel Pepys

Philip K Dick

James Lovegrove The right amount of credit on your card will buy you anything—a rare matchbook, an albino tiger, the women in the Pleasure department. Days is the grandest of department stores, whose security men are licensed to kill and whose seven owners, a group of very different brothers, brood in a penthouse, fetched endless vast meals by a grumpy butler. James Lovegrove's novel inhabits that realm where satire borders on allegory and realism is full of wild magic; it was, nonetheless, shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke prize. Security man Frank has reached a point of alienation such that he can no longer see himself in the mirror; Gordon and Linda have just got their first Days storecard, and are keen to undergo the Days experience; the Book Department's feud for space with their neighbours in Computers is about to enter a new phase. There are flash sales in Ties and Dolls, and a riot in Third World Musical Instruments. And who is sleeping in the Bed Department's four- poster? Endlessly inventive and savage in its humour, Lovegrove's novel will change for ever the way you feel about superstores, and gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "shop till you drop". —Roz Kaveney

Brian Wilson Aldiss

Nikolai Tolstoy

Nick Hornby

Greg Bear

Gayle Rivers

Alan Douglas Sid Astley

Robert Silverberg Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city, and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats; gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise... Lord Valentine's Castle was the first of Robert Silverberg's novels about Majipoor, in which he has for two decades explored the question of responsibility and authority; much SF and fantasy plays with constructed dreams of feudalism, but Silverberg asks the important questions of how a ruler can be a good person, and how can the person who rules all be free themselves. Inventively, Valentine's learned skills as a juggler become a fruitful metaphor for much of what he needs to know as he campaigns to reclaim his throne from a usurping imposter: Silverberg explores the implications of what might have been a mere narrative cliché. His portrayal of a huge light world where technology and magic have blended, and where different species and cultures have engineered a diverse harmony, is not the least attractive of SF's utopias; the sheer scale of the canvas gives Valentine's wanderings their own wild poetry. —Roz Kaveney

Iain Banks

Christopher Brookmyre

Glenda Noramly The eight areas of stability in an otherwise endlessly changeable landscape are slowly eroding, and attempts by the church authorities to keep everything from changing— hereditary employment, laws against new fashions—are proving futile. As people travel from Stability to Stability for trade or pilgrimage, they need maps, accurate maps; and a map that changes with the landscape is the most prized of all, something men and demons will kill for. Keris inherits such a map from her murdered father, and goes on the run for the crime of rejecting a suitor and being good at the unwomanly occupation of mapmaking. Soon she finds herself involved with the gloomy Davron, a guide whose relationship with the demon lord Carasma is not what the pious might wish. Noramly's first novel takes a number of the stock assumptions of genre fantasy and does the welcome job of actually thinking about them. Both the way magic works here, and the effect it has on her characters, are fresh; she takes what might have been clichés and polishes them up all shiny and new. Ironies abound and reader expectations are constantly forced to shift to new ground; Noramly has made herself, with her first novel, a name to watch. —Roz Kaveney

John Barnes