Classic SF with Andy Johnson

Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel, Excession (1996) is the fourth novel in Iain M. Banks ever-popular Culture series of SF novels. In this entry, the awesome power of the post-scarcity Culture …

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, published in 1970, is a landmark of hard SF which pushes out far further, beyond the Milky Way and into the frightening emptiness of intergalactic space. It also deals memor…

The Garments of Caean is a science fiction novel by the British author Barrington J. Bayley (1937 - 2008). It forms a part of his classic run of unusual and energetic books in the mid-1970s, and is i…

American fantasy in the 1980s is often associated with big, bloated series of novels steeped in Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons. The Falling Woman is something very different. It isn't set in some i…

Imperial Earth is the second of three novels Arthur C. Clarke published during the 1970s - and of those three, it is the least well-known. The main focus of this episode is to assess this tale of 227…

Use of Weapons (1990) is the third novel in the Culture series of science fiction novels by the much-missed author Iain M. Banks. Originally drafted in 1974, the book follows the interstellar superso…

Maureen F. McHugh published her debut novel China Mountain Zhang in 1992 and it went on to win multiple awards. An impactful social science fiction story, the book is set in a 22nd century world in w…

In 2006, Spanish developers Pyro Studios had big hopes for the fourth entry in the successful Commandos series. Strike Force was intended to help them break into the World War II shooter market, and …

In 1998, Madrid-based videogame developers Pyro Studios produced a shock hit with their landmark game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. It shifted 900,000 copies, and did particularly well in the UK and…

American science fiction author Greg Bear, who passed away in 2022, had a major success with his 1985 novel Blood Music. An expansion of his award-winning 1983 short story, the novel is themed around…

Welcome to episode 100! Thank you so much to everyone who has listened to this humble podcast project, an extension of my site andyjohnson.xyz. This episode begins with a brief reflection on this mil…

The Player of Games is the second novel to be published in Iain M. Banks’ revered Culture cycle, following Consider Phlebas (1987). It is often thought to be one of the most popular of the books, and…

In August 2023, id Software’s 1997 first-person shooter Quake II was updated to a new, enhanced version. This was no surprise - it had been rumoured for some time, and seemed inevitable after the 202…

This latest roundup of the games I've played covers May 2023, and features two new and two older releases:

• Miasma Chronicles (2023)
• Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun (2023)
• Mafia III: Definitive Edition (2016/2…

In 1966, New Worlds magazine published the story "Behold the Man", by its editor Michael Moorcock. This sacrilegious tale of a man who travels back in time to replace Jesus won Moorcock the Nebula Aw…

Continuing our look at Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series, this episode covers the fifth standalone novel: Sentenced to Prism (1985). Corporate troubleshooter Evan Orgell finds himself on …

The 2020 "definitive editions" of Mafia and Mafia II are the stars of the show in this latest overview of the games I've played recently. This bumper instalment features:

• Supplice [Early Access] (2023…

This second episode in a series on Iain M. Banks' Culture series of science fiction books covers the first novel, Consider Phlebas (1987). In this subversive take on the space opera, Banks introduces…

An expansion of her 1974 novella, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is Kate Wilhelm's best-known work in the science fiction genre. Winner of three major awards for Best Novel in 1977, it is often call…

The anime-inspired third-person action game Oni is often thought of mainly as "Bungie's forgotten game". But in fact, this classic deserves to be recognised as something much more than just a footnot…