Tony Harmsworth

Independent British author Tony Harmsworth says that he writes hard science fiction in the style of the masters, by which I suspect he means Arthur C. Clarke. He lacks Clarke’s imaginative genius, but to give him his due, he does write a credible near-future story that sticks close to known and plausible science. In The Visitor, he tells the story of a Euro-Russian mission to clean up some of the junk cluttering up near-Earth orbit. His heroine, Eve, is an unlikely astronaut because her doctorate is in psychology. But never mind. She and her crew become the center of world attention when they discover a damaged alien probe that seems to have been in orbit for eons. It is the sort of premise Clarke would have loved. The plot takes a sappy turn at the end, but Clarke’s plots were sometimes guilty of that as well.… (mehr)

Sometimes, a magic portal is more interesting than the place it leads. In Tony Harmsworth's short novel, The Door, a man walking his dog in an English village sees an old wooden door set in a wall surrounding an abandoned convent. When he turns around, the door isn’t there. He wants to know more, so he does what any 21st-century guy would do—he buys a drone to get some aerial video. He eventually finds his way in, but it would be too much of a spoiler to say what he discovers. Suffice it that I was underwhelmed.… (mehr)

Tony Harmsworth is an independently published writer living in England. Mindslip is a book with an intriguing premise that does not live up to its promises. A nova in a nearby star system unmoors all the minds on Earth and swaps them into other bodies in an unpredictable pattern. After a momentary blackout, one wakes to find one’s mind is now in another body, which may be of a different sex, age, or species. Harmsworth has a good time detailing some of the social disruptions the event causes, but I wish this premise were in the hands of a writer like Robert J. Sawyer. Sawyer would care more about the science and less about the commuting issues.… (mehr)