I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Hey, anyone interested in beta'ing a relatively unserious HR Centaurs-era fic?

I need to talk about how much I identify with Shane Hollander for a bit.( my brave little autistic toaster )

James Islington, The Shadow of What Was Lost: I liked Islington’s Strength of the Many, but didn’t connect with this separate fantasy world, where people with psychic powers are bound not to resist people without them. Islington doesn’t lean very hard into the really negative consequences of that; instead there’s a lot of complicated factions, apparent time travel or time loops, and other interconnections.

Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep: Vinge writes at multiple scales—galactic Powers that can destroy entire civilizations and children orphaned by the crash of their spaceship and subsequent attack by the multiple-mind doglike entities on the world where they landed. It was ambitious and often interesting, but there was a lot to follow.

William Gibson & Pat Cadigan, Alien3: Novelization of unproduced script; it was basically ok for a novelization but didn’t have the kind of snap that the 80s novelizations sometimes had. There was too much repetition of the concededly great line “nuke it from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.” You can see why they wanted Joss Whedon to punch up the dialogue of the actual movie (which has a completely different plot).

Cara Marta Messina, Critical Fandom: Representations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Fan Fiction: ( third wave fan studies? )

Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome: ( cheap death )

Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI: ( who are you going to believe )


Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History: ( dress codes )

Sarah Rees Brennan, All Hail Chaos: Volume two: ( more isekai )

Cameron Reed, What We Are Seeking: ( stunning diversity )

Daryl Gregory, The Porcelain Sisters: ( creepy doll  )

Bob Proehl, The Nobody People: ( X-Men vols. 1 & 2 )

Meg Elison, Foundling Fathers: ( cloned Founders )

Kemi Ashing-Giwa, The Splinter in the Sky: ( f/f sf )

Matt Dinniman, A Parade of Horribles:( the beatings will continue until morale improves )

Martha Wells, Platform Decay: ( I love you, narrator Kevin R Free )

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Trade of Blood: ( Sherlock Holmes with leviathans )

Adrian Tchaikovsky,( Tyrant Philosophers and Dogs of War books )

T. Kingfisher, Wolf Worm: ( worms are big )

Charles Soule & Ryan Brown, Eight Billion Genies:( careful what you wish for )

Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: ( horror horror )
T. Kingfisher, Illuminations: ( fun for younger readers )

Dessa, Tits on the Moon: ( poetry )

Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped: ( romance on set )

Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author: ( racialized posthumanism )

Kai Butler, Shadow Throne King: ( assassin's need )

T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater: ( western approaches )

Laura Elliott, Awakened: ( grumpy review of apocalypse premise )

Tasha Suri, The Isle in the Silver Sea: ( excellent fantasy about stories )

Jim Butcher, Twelve Months: ( the saga continues )

Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me: ( isekai done just right for me )

Hi there--it's been a bit! The first day of school (which was also a snowstorm) involved me waking just before 7 to the sound of water pouring through my bathroom ceiling, followed shortly by electrical explosions and a fire that will have me out of my apartment for, apparently, at least a year. No one was hurt! That is very good. The rest, not so much. I've now moved all my clothes, shoes & jewelry to my office (which I might actually keep in place forever if I can manage the jewelry organization--turns out bookcases are also really good shoe racks, and they make pretty good clothes racks for cheap now). Anyway I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off; the apartment is now empty except for the stuff that was destroyed, which sadly includes two century-old curved glass windows. And I've acquired a place to nap in my office. I'm both grateful for the resources I have to get through this and still pretty overwhelmed given all the rest of the terrible stuff in the world.

Greer Stothers, Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die: ( fantasy about a cowardly knight and the wizard he seduces )

Aisling Rawle, The Compound: ( hell is reality tv )

Matt Dinniman, Operation Bounce House: ( the wargamers throw stones at frogs for sport but the frogs die in earnest )

Kimberly Belflower, John Proctor is the Villain:( great even as a script )

Aliya Whiteley, The Misheard World: ( an interrogation in a strange world )
Charles Stross, The Regicide Report: ( good night and good luck )

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting: ( fantasy about a knight and the man who loves her )

Constance Fay, ( two sf m/f romances )

Joanna Russ, The Female Man: ( the feminine shriek )
James S.A. Corey, The Faith of Beasts:( alien enslavers )

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Pretenders to the Throne of God: ( started as it meant to go on )

Kai Butler,( 2/3 of a fantasy trilogy about an assassin and his emperor-target-lover )

Kai Butler, The Inconvenient Count: ( space m/m regency )
Joe Hill, King Sorrow: ( playing in the King wheelhouse )

Uketsu, Strange Houses: ( floor plans )

Jim Butcher, Out Law: ( Harry helps out Marcone )

Freya Marske, Cinder House: ( ghost Cinderella )

Seanan McGuire, Through Gates of Garnet and Gold: ( Wayward children reunite )

Kai Butler, The Earl and the Executive: ( space Regency m/m romance )

Olga Ravn, The Employees: ( weird crew )

James Islington,( the first two books of an engaging trilogy about a Marty Stu )
Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry: ( yep, that's what I expected )

Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall: ( reincarnation sf )

Isaac R. Fellman, The Two Doctors Górski: ( Yeah, it's Dark Academia )

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, The Salvage Crew: ( a human in a ship's body but not Anne McCaffrey )
Barbara Truelove, Of Monsters and Mainframes: ( monsters in space )

Jim Hines, Slayers of Old:( BtVS, but retired )

Neal Shusterman, Scythe: ( remember that Star Trek episode where they wouldn't use birth control? )

Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right: ( it's always racism )

Corinne Low, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours: ( self-help from an economist )
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It: ( Doctorow in fine form )
Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity: ( Another account of enshittification )

Kim A. Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History: ( written by the victors )



Mary Roach, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy: ( strange but true )

Kelli Storm, Desolate: Mia is a witch in a world concealed from but intertwined with mundanes; her ADHD makes her powers unpredictable. When things are going badly for her at high school, she accidentally sends herself back in time, which creates further problems both magical and romantic. This was too YA-ish for me, but I think it could work for an actual teenager who would empathize more with the emotional stakes.

Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You: A memoir-ish thing about surviving covid with a brain injury, dealing with a husband’s illness, and trying to write a TV show based on her previous book Priestdaddy. It conveys the hallucinatory disjointedness of brain fog, but for that reason was mostly inaccessible to me.

KJ Charles, All of Us Murderers: In 1905, the reclusive heir to the family fortune calls his potential heirs to him, offering everything to whoever marries his young ward. One of the heirs has ADHD and thus has found it difficult to keep a job, especially after being discovered in flagrante with his lover—who turns out to be the heir’s personal secretary. Everyone else in the family is a nasty piece of work, and then strange things start happening in the gothic pile in which they are trapped by mists. It’s fast-moving and very (gayly) gothic.

Caitlin Rozakis, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association: After her five-year-old daughter is attacked and turned into a werewolf—a severe breach of werewolf law—the protagonist, her daughter, and her husband move to a tony Connecticut suburb full of magical creatures, where her daughter may be able to get an education among people who understand her. But the new school is full of traps—high-stakes testing, Mean Girl moms, financial shenanigans, and a pesky prophecy that might involve her baby girl. I liked the fact that the issues were driven not so much by magic but by people trying to game the system (as rich Connecticut denizens are known to do).

T. Kingfisher, What Stalks the Deep: Another short Alex Easton novel, this time set in America, where a strange sighting in an abandoned mine heralds something very creepy indeed. Avoid if “gelatinous” is a no-no for you.

Deborah Tomkins, Aerth: Novella about an underpopulated, cooling world that discovers Urth, on the other side of the sun, which has similar languages and human beings but is hot and overpopulated. The noninterventionist, consensus-based culture of Aerth seems healthier than the headlong rush to authoritarianism of Urth, but that doesn’t stop its inhabitants from feeling choked by their obligations, and there might be a few secrets in its past too, though Tomkins isn’t very interested in that except as background. It wasn’t for me.

The End of the World As We Know It, ed. Christopher Golden & Brian Keene: A collection of stories set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand. (They all seem to have agreed to go with the date of 1992 for the plague instead of the initial 1982; there are therefore fewer anomalies/more actual engagement with the world in 1992 than in the revised version of The Stand, though I did note a character who was not online using “FAQ,” for an anachronism in the other direction.) Most of the stories are set during the collapse and therefore don’t add a lot, and more of the stories than I’d hoped are set in the US. There’s one story set in Pakistan that is quite interesting—this is all Christian nonsense to them—and one UK story that really gets the vibe right.

Naomi Novik, The Summer War: Novella about a girl—daughter of an ambitious lord—who accidentally curses her brother when he leaves her behind after renouncing his family because of his father’s homophobia. In her attempt to fix the curse, she allies with her remaining brother and tries to navigate a political marriage, but otherworld politics complicate matters. It’s a pleasant variation on Novik’s core themes: Epic people can be very hard to live with; power must be used to serve others or it is bad; loving other people is the only thing that can save us.

T. Kingfisher, Hemlock and Silver: A king seeks out an expert on poisons to treat his daughter, Snow, who is mourning the deaths of her mother and sister Rose and keeps getting sicker. There are apples and mirrors and magic in the desert, as well as a little romance among the very practical people. It’s nice that the healer was a scientist even dealing with magic, and the imagery is genuinely creepy at times.

Melissa Caruso, The Defiant Heir: Second in a trilogy. Amalia, heir to an Italianate ruling family, continues to fight against the planned invasion of her empire by the neighboring mages. I could wish for a bit more Brandon Sanderson-style working out of the magic system, but it was still a fun read.

Freya Marske, Sword Crossed: Luca, a con man on the run, becomes the sword tutor of Matti, heir to a noble house. (This is romantasy without magic—just nonheterosexist family structures and different gods than were historically in place.) Their connection is problematic because Matti needs to get married to save his house, and he hired/blackmailed Luca into being his “second” in the expected challenge by a disappointed suitor. So falling in love with Luca is really inconvenient. Marske’s best work is handling the arranged marriage—they like each other fine and Matti’s intended has rejected the suitor who won’t take no for an answer. But I wanted magic! If you are fine without it, then this is probably more enjoyable.

Will Greatwich, House of the Rain King: Really interesting, unusual single-volume fantasy. In the valley, when the Rain King returns, the water rises until a princess comes from the birds to marry him (and die), and then they recede. A priest, an indentured servant, and a company of foreign mercenaries all get caught up in the struggle to make the Rain King’s wedding happen. There are also undead guarding treasure as well as fairies and marsh-men, who have their own roles to play.

Nghi Vo, The City in Glass: Short novel about a demon whose city is destroyed by angels; her parting curse sticks with one angel, who keeps hanging around as she slowly decides whether and how to build/love again. Dreamy and evocative.

Sara E. Wolf, Teaching Copyright: Practical Lesson Ideas and Instructional Resources: ( for non-legal educators who teach about (c) )

How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, ed. Frederik Juliaan Vervaet et al.: ( democratic decay: how does it work? )

Michelle Carr, Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind: ( I took a ton of notes )
Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People: ( Interesting )
Ko-Lin Chin, Counterfeited in China: The Operations of Illicit Businesses: ( also interesting )

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity: ( depressingly interesting )

Shoshana Walter, Rehab: An American Scandal: ( oh look more depressing )

I'm 2 episodes into s2 and I think I'm going to have to stop. She's not funny, she's not punching up, she's just selfish and mean. I think this might be the showrunners having no theory of how the Addamses fit into a larger supernatural universe. Sigh. On to Alien: Earth!

Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland: In South Dakota, people largely welcomed missiles but landowners often didn’t like giving up their land for them (NIMBYism for weapons of mass destruction). Heefner also tracks the persistence of antinuclear protest once it got started, and she makes the point that one reason the lack of success didn’t stop the hardcore protestors was religious faith—protest was an act of sacrifice and witness even if it didn’t have worldly effects.

Nathan Bomey, Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back: Newsy-ish account of Detroit’s bankruptcy. Bomey really doesn’t like unions; he’s more neutral about the interests of lender-creditors.

Grant Faulkner, The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story: Paean to the affordances of flash fiction, including drabbles and six-word stories, with exercises. Interesting read.

Tiya Miles, Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits: Another attempt to reconstruct a history of people who were mostly spoken about in the records we have. I didn’t think the speculation about what they felt and thought was very helpful, but it was a useful reminder that there was an active slave trade in Indians in the area for a long time, as well as African/African-American slavery. Michigan was supposedly free territory after the Northwest Ordinance, but that didn’t mean that slavery disappeared (despite opportunities that many took to cross borders to change status).

Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015: The premise here is that the disaster didn’t start in 2005. Most of the book is pre-hurricane explanations of why the city was so vulnerable. Greed and racism play their roles.

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution: Schama focuses on loyalist African-Americans who were forced out to Canada and then to Sierra Leone. While most whites were indifferent to their fate and willing to violate the promises that the Crown had made during the Revolutionary War, a few took their duties seriously, which is how the transitions were made. The first elected black government, and the first women voting for that government, was in Sierra Leone (though a subsequent white guy sent to replace the good one removed women’s ability to vote). It’s beautifully written as well as interesting.