Shutt World .co.uk » Books

Apocalipse's Children

Stephen — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:43:32 +0000

This is the start of yet another series by Terry Brook.

Having hinted at an earlier advanced civilisation in some of his Shannara books this series is set some time after the events in his The Word and Void series, but before the Shannara series linking the two together.

The story follows a couple of nights of the word and a group of street kids, they nights are still struggling with their fights against demons and the kids are just trying to live in a world where the demons have wiped out most of humanity, and those few that survive are either in hiding, in small sanctuaries or slaves to the demons. Its not a very nice world and it looks like the demons are winning.

I did enjoy this book and it the series promises to explain how our world became the world used in the shannara serieses.

The Elder Gods

Stephen — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:16:33 +0000

This is the start of a new series by David and Leigh Eddings, as I’d read most of his others I thought I’d give it a try expecting it to be more of the same.

It wasn’t quite what I expected, There are 4 gods ruling over an isolated island, and they are being threatened by the beast that lives in the wasteland in the middle. As their people are mostly peaceful and a bit primitive they have to enlist help from outside.

This book covers an introduction to the gods and focuses on the just one, her quarter of the island and the battle there.

I found this quite an amusing book and a fun read, but at times things were just a little silly, the ending of the war was predictable as you’d expect but how it happened wasn’t really something I would have expected.

All in all I enjoyed the book and bought the next ones in the series

FAT – Rob Grant

Stephen — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:01:19 +0000

I bought this to get rid of some book vouchers and because his earlier books were pretty good so it seemed worth a try.

The story follows 3 people, a seriously fat TV chef with anger management issues, an average weight womanising PR guy, and an anorexic girl who goes to amazing lengths to hide her problem.

The story itself is split into sections, where the meals that are eaten are listed, its then further split into chapters (as most books are), each chapter follows a different characters life, which is fine.

I found the stories of the chef and the girl most entertaining the PR guy got just didn’t seem to get into as funny situations to me, and seemed to get bogged down in science a couple of times.

I’m not sure this is as good as his other books but its still pretty good and worth a read.

Hell Island – Matthew Reilly

Stephen — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 10:18:40 +0000

I should have paid more attention when I bought this book as it was a lot smaller than I expected, its a quick read book, I didn’t realise this means that its only 115 pages long in rather large text. Don’t let this stop you buying the book, if you’ve read any of Matthew Reilly’s books its exactly what you expect.

The first chapter is the kind of intro you’d expect in CSI, someone dies but you don’t know what killed him, the next chapter introduces the characters with a short bit of history, then its pretty much straight into the action and once it starts it pretty much doesn’t stop till the last page. Scarecrow and Mother cool as always with some new Marines, fighting against a fearless enemy that just happen to outnumber them about 70 to 1.

The book follows Reilly’s usual style, overwhelming odds and keeps you on the edge of your seat. Its a gripping read, just a shame its so short, but it ends how you’d expect, and leaves you wanting to read his next book.

Incompetence – Rob Grant

Stephen — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 10:13:40 +0000

After reading Colony and enjoying that I thought I’d give this book a try its set in the far too near future, in this future PC and the nanny state have gone mad, The police can beet you to death for endangering your health by smoking.

“Article 13199 of the Pan-European Constitution:
‘No person shall be prejudiced from employment in any capacity, at any level, by reason of age, race, creed, or incompitence.’”

Its now illegal to discriminate against anyone in anyway, so people totally unsuitable for a job are not only given the job but given promotions where people that actaulyl are good are overlooked because to promote them would be disciminating against the others. You also cant be fired for being bad at your job.

In this book we meet blind night club bouncers, octogenarian male bunny girls and airline pilots with vertigo.

Theres a killer on the loose and its up to Detective Harry Salt to find him, Salt has a problem: he’s actaully good at his job. And if he can work his way through hte mess of contaminated evidence, ineptly fild crime reports and witnesses with long term memory disorders, he might just find the killer.

This is a pretty good book, funny and intersting, we can only hope our world doesn’t get to be like the future world described in the book

Colony – Rob Grant

Stephen — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 10:03:20 +0000

Written by half the team that came up with Red Dwarf, I saw this book and thought it worth a try as the Red Dwarf books were good.

So anyway about the book, the main character is Eddie, Eddie’s one of those guys that plays it safe all his life, never acheives things and is infact the most unlucky person alive. The story starts Edie’s in a free hotel room, hes desparate for money to pay off a massive debt to “people like that” or he expects the rest of his life will consist of a short rerun of his life to date.

His luck turns (or so he thinks) and he ends up on a spaceship rocketing away from earth. After some time in what is essentially suspended animation he awakes after centuries to find the ship is crewed by idiots and he’s their only hope, oh and his body seems to be wired up wrong.

Put simply this is a funny story, its full of the kind of humour that made Red Dwarf what it was, if you liked Red Dwarf or the Red dwarf stories or any thing else by Rob Grant you’ll like this book. I recomend it to anyone that like a good laugh and an interesting story.

The Science of Discworld II the globe – Terry Pratchet

Stephen — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:00:56 +0000

I started reading this straight after the first one, I bought them both together, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, the story picks up a while after the events of the first book in discworld time anyway, in round world time it mostly follows human evolution, and the science is a look into what makes us human, how we evolved, how our minds and Minds evolved, it also covers intelligence and extelligence.

The science bits gets a bit complicated as a lot of its psychological rather than physical. Still its a good book again the stories worthy of the discworld title and the science is written in a way that entertains and teaches at the same time.

The Science of Discworld – Terry Pratchet

Stephen — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 18:40:28 +0000

I was put off buying this book because it sounds like its an encyclopaedia type of book along the lines of ‘the science of the X files’, or ‘the physics of star trek’, this book takes a different view on it and rather than describing the science of the world it describes, it uses the discworld to help understand our world. Describing the science behind discworld would probably be impossible anyway as it runs on magic and common sense not the rules of science.

The book is both educational(ish) and entertaining as you’d expect from a discworld book. The authors switch between a discworld story where they’re performing an experiment with magic, to a description of the real world version of what happened.

In theory you can skip all the real world stuff and just read the story but you’d be missing out on some interesting bits with some humor thrown in too.
So far a good book, worth reading for just the story or the science, put together its a suprisingly good combination.