tony ballantyne

Tony Ballantyne’s science fiction tends very much towards the hard side of things; his earlier AI trilogy looked at artificial intelligence and Von Neumann Machines, both their pros and their cons. Now this Penrose series, of which Blood and Iron is the second book, is very different but still...

Penrose is a world inhabited solely by sentient robots whose origins are so far distant they are no longer remembered. Like humans these robots are mortal, form relationships and produce offspring; this last being achieved by the ‘female’ robot ‘twisting’ metal from the ‘male’ to form the...

Unimaginative is not a word that could be applied to the next book I picked up; Dream London by Tony Ballantyne. It is set not long in the future, when something very strange has begun to happen to London; the proportions and even the locations of its buildings and open spaces have been...