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...

Recursion Tony Ballantyne Bantam, Jul 2006, $6.99 ISBN: 0553589288 In the year 2210 in direct violation of the Environmental Agency dictates, Herb used the self replicating Von Newman Machines (VNM) to create a city on an uncharted world without doing the mandatory pre-testing. When he returns...

Capacity Tony Ballantyne Bantam, Jan 2007, $6.99 ISBN: 0553589296 In the twenty-third century Helen is a personality construct, a human mind working on a computer existing in the digital virtual reality realm. There are many Helen personality constructs and the person responsible for that is...

Divergence Tony Ballantyne Bantam, May 2007, $6.99 ISBN: 055358930X Two centuries of rule by the seemingly all seeing Watcher has kept earth somewhat peaceful; however by 2242 one of the AI creators of the Watcher Chris decides that the AI is going too far with its plan to selectively alter 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...