Whether you’re heading off on a luxury two week beach holiday with the other half, taking in a weekend break by the sea, or trying to squeeze in five minutes of peace and quiet as the kids run amok on your family trip to Butlins, you’ll no doubt need a good book to help you unwind and relax as you put life stuff on the back burner, for a short while at least.
In typical MALESTROM fashion, we’ve got a mix of twisted, thrilling, dystopic reads that’ll leave you well and truly on the edge of your pool lounger. Here’s four of the best beach reads this summer.
Exciting thriller with near future technology and AI
My rating: 5 out of 5
A woman goes missing, which is impossible given the technological advances in place. Can she be found, and the technological glitches resolved? Or is there something more sinister happening?
A brilliant thriller where the nanny state is enhancing the freedom of citizens, or controlling them, depending on your point of view. DI Lussac (who prefers the old freedoms) and his young DC (who loves the new technology) are trying to track down the missing woman, and begin to discover some unsettling truths…
I built a world that I would hate in live in. Thankfully it’s a fictional world, and like now it has both positives and negatives, but I worry that the world of Proximity is coming. And soon.
It is my personal sense of immediacy, along with how much of the technology is already available, that inspired the world of the story. I want readers to believe that it could be their world.
In fantasy fiction or a deep-space sci-fi story, the reader is already prepared to believe that extraordinary things are possible in the world described. Whether it be magic, or warp-speed travel, they don’t…
Overall rating: An enjoyable and somewhat unnerving peek at what technology could be like in our future. “Proximity” is fast-paced, imaginative and could easily be featured as the next episode of “Black Mirror”. It’s a big 5 stars from me!
“Proximity” is set in the future, when having an embedded ‘iMe’ is a compulsory requirement. An ‘iMe’ is a clever piece of technology which has the power to control your life. It can make recommendations about your health and diet (just like the IPEA implant in Black Matter), you can use it to make calls and read messages, make payments, read the news,…
The novel’s plot was one of such a uniquely original and fascinating idea that I just knew it would be a hit. Jem is a skilled writer and I could see at once that this was a truly creative, original idea that was in capable hands.
The premise is a simple one: in the future, people are embedded with technology that tracks where they are and what they do. As such, crimes are pretty much gone, as anything that happens can be tracked and the culprits apprehended.
In Proximity, everyone is accountable for their actions, and every aspect of their lives, from the food they consume through to…