Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia is as near perfect as fiction comes. It’s literary, intelligent and entertaining in equal measure. Rarely does a writer get it this right. Wilson’s characters are complex and believable, the prose is frequently beautiful, and he has an eye for original imagery wrapped up in an exquisitely apt turn of phrase: consider how the urbane but amoral Timothy Crane slides into the ranks of Washington’s elite “like a gilded suppository”.

You’ve got to smile.

Although Darwinia was a finalist in the 1999 Hugos, the award for Best SF novel that year went to Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog. Willis also took first place in the Locus Poll for Best SF Novel. Darwinia came second. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Well, almost always. Darwinia did take first place in the Aurora Awards, Canada’s award for Canadian writers of science fiction and fantasy. Wilson has lived in Canada since age 9.

Arthur C. Clarke, author of over 100 fiction and non-fiction books, has died at age 90. Regarded as one of science fiction's leading lights, Clarke is perhaps best known for the ground breaking 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on Clarke's short story The Sentinel.

"Sir Arthur passed away a short while ago at the Apollo Hospital," said Rohan de Silva, Clarke's personal assistant. "He had a cardio-respiratory attack."

Born in Minehead, Somerset, England on 16 December 1917, he had made Sri Lanka his home since 1956. Clarke had battled post-polio syndrome since the 1960s.

With a career spanning two decades, British writer Peter F. Hamilton is one of today’s most prominent authors in the science fiction field. He is renowned worldwide for his production of complex and vibrant space opera novels, and with over a dozen acclaimed books under his belt, he’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Hamilton was born in 1960 in England, where he still lives, and sold his first story in 1988 to Fear Magazine. His debut novel Mindstar Rising was published five years later. He then went on to write A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower.

The main protagonist in these three books is Greg Mandel, a detective with psychic powers. Filled with scientific inventions and strong political and social commentary, the novels (also known as the Greg Mandel Trilogy) received some criticism for their portrayal of a near-future Britain run by a left-wing authoritarian regime. Of course, these are far from the first novels to use such a background – for example, George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 as well as Alan Moore’s highly praised graphic novel V for Vendetta employ similar dystopic settings – and Hamilton explained in an interview with British SF magazine SFX that he chose the setting to make people question their presumptions, arguing that it would be simplistic to portray the former British government as authoritarian.

Bestselling British author Richard Morgan had been writing for a long time without seeing anything of his work in print, but when Gollancz published Altered Carbon Morgan was suddenly a major star on the spaceship-clogged sky of science fiction literature.

Altered Carbon is a titanium-coated murder mystery, with a noir, edgy atmosphere similar to the mood found in many works by William Gibson and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. Introducing protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, who reappears in other works by Morgan, this novel offers a bleak, violent future described in a streetwise yet poetic voice. Morgan’s various futuristic renderings of Earth (and other planets) are typically dystopic, with cruel and aggressive corporations in control of much of society. In addition, the merciless tactics and implications of military force are also addressed in many ways, often from a critical point of view. But while his work features many elements found in novels that glorify war and violence, Morgan’s work uses his characters to illustrate the atrocities of brutality from the inside. In that way, his books are compelling and insightful statements against violence...