Follow-up to The Atrocity Archives, in which Bob Howard finds himself turned into James Bond-style protagonist as a result of the Bad Guy using a peculiar geas to protect his evil plans from being foiled. Lovecraftian horror + big budget spy action = lots of fun.

Fascinating and scary first contact story that explores the nature of intelligence and consciousness in a way that leaves you questioning your own thought processes.

I was a disappointed by Century Rain, but The Prefect is a fantastic return to form. Great adventure in the Revelation Space universe.

Is it yet another borderline sociopathic protagonist from Richard Morgan? Yes it is. Carl Marsalis is a “Variant 13” – genetically engineered to match the profile of the aggressive hunter-gatherers before civilization took a proper hold on the hard-wired parts of our psyches. His job: to hunt down other Thirteens, who have been declared illegal. He is recruited by COLIN, the agency behind the Mars Colony Initiative, to hunt down a particularly nasty specimen who has managed to escape from Mars, and is now blazing a bloody trail across the Pacific Rim.

Yes, it’s all a bit screechingly brutal and violent, but I think this is deliberate on Morgan’s part: by stripping his protagonist of social conditioning, he creates a viewpoint with which to coldly evaluate and criticize behaviours and mores that have become acceptable, but maybe should not be.

Or maybe it’s just a balls-out futuristic action thriller with some great characters and spectacular plot twists. Hey, what do I know.

Simply essential. Ashamed that I hadn’t read it before now.

See also Richard Rutter’s project to bring the principles of the book to the web: webtypography.net

Good premiss, but the execution is lacking. Not as original as it would like to be.

A must-read for anyone who enjoys comics (or graphic novels, if you must), but curiously the book also has tremendous relevance for the Web, and people writing (and developing) for it. One of the fundamental points that McCloud makes is that comics are a medium of transitions. In comics, the space between panels is your mind takes over and fills in the blanks that are not explicitly shown. The web functions in a similar way: you can click on a hyperlink and be transported to the next page in a sequence, or into a completely different scene or context.

The book also features a chapter on mastery, that is equally applicable to to any craft, be it writing and drawing comics, or playing an instrument, or woodworking.

But it is mostly about comics. Three-panel funnies or multi-book series: they all speak a common language. McCloud picks this language apart, and breaks it down into parts that you will immediately recognize, but probably had never thought about before. By closely examining ubiquitious patterns, he shows just how complex and fascinating they are, and what kind of subtle cognitive leaps our minds make when we read comics or view infographics. A must-read if you are interested in visual arts, or even if you just enjoy reading Tintin.

I love Gibson’s style – his writing is sparse and cool, and he never misplaces a single word. Almost every sentence is finely crafted and judged to perfection. Spook Country is not science fiction, but it blurs the line between present and future by means of an avant-garde art form, which eventually has a bearing on the shadowy spy story that is plays out across LA, New York, and Vancouver. It’s subtle and wonderful – savour and enjoy.