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

Since these reviews aren't spoilery and I am sad, no cut tags.

Elaine U. Cho, Ocean’s Godori: In a Korean-dominated space culture, a disgraced pilot tries to follow her captain, but her captain’s unwise decisions lead to conflicts with pirates and with people out to kill a scion of an important industrialist—the pilot’s old friend/partial source of her disgrace. Also, a new member of the crew comes from a death-handling caste and may have trouble fitting in. I probably could have done with more time to breathe on the worldbuilding, but if you like not-totally-cohesive crew stories this might suit.

David Ignatius, Phantom Orbit: I thought this would be more sf-y, but it’s basically a thriller about nations interfering with satellites to gain advantage, with much of the action sparked by the invasion of Ukraine.

Genevieve Cogman, Elusive: I liked this more than the first book—Eleanor continues to work for the Scarlet Pimpernel, and returns to France, but she has more agency and doubts about the work of saving aristocrats from the French Revolution. She also learns more about her powers, the mage inhabiting her head, and the relationship between mages and vampires. A cliffhanger ending rounds it out.

Shelly Jay Shore, Rules for Ghosting: Ezra Friedman is a trans man whose problems mainly stem from his complicated Jewish family, its funeral business, and the fact that Ezra can see ghosts. Although he’s been a peacemaker all his life, the stress starts to get to him when a shocking Seder announcement disrupts the family, a main source of income disappears and he has to return to working at the family business, and the hot Jewish guy checking him out turns out to be the widower of a ghost that is behaving very unusually. This is very cozy—ghosts are not evil or tangible—and it reinforced for me that I’m no longer much of a romance reader, because the Jewish specificity wasn’t even doing it for me.

Virginia Black, No Shelter But the Stars: Kyran is the princess of a people who are trying to retake their lost planet after being forced out by a brutal empire; Davia is the emperor’s daughter who has tried to renounce politics in favor of spirituality. After a battle, they crash land and are forced to rely on each other to survive. It’s enemies-to-lovers, with the more experienced Davia teaching Kyran to calm her frantic soul. I thought the description of physical recovery from the serious injuries described was a bit unrealistic, but if you really like enemies-to-lovers, this might work for you.

Garth Nix, We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord: In 70s? Australia, the protagonist and his genius little sister are being raised by quirky parents who don’t allow things like TV. When his little sister finds a mysterious sphere that can talk in people’s heads and even change their behavior, he has to turn from his D&D games to saving the world. I think I would have enjoyed it as a middle-grade reader (it naturally seems slighter now).

Madeline Ashby, vN: Conscious, self-replicating Von Neumann machines are a controversial but significant part of the world; they have fail-safes that require them to love and not harm humans. Amy Peterson is a vN whose growth has been carefully constrained by food restriction so that her mother (another vN) and her father (a human) can raise her like a human child. But when she’s five, her grandmother shows up and attacks her mother for being a traitor. Amy reacts immediately—by eating her grandmother. Now she’s a lot larger, has her grandmother living in her consciousness, and lacks the fail-safe. Interesting stuff going on here; warning for sexual abuse of vN (not of Amy) as a motivating factor for several key points.

James S.A. Corey, Livesuit: Humanity’s in a war of extermination with aliens, and so some people sign up to do Forever War journeys, but with a twist: They’re put into exosuits that make them incredibly strong and improve their senses. It seems like a worthy mission. But is something deeply, terribly wrong? Creepy novella.

Holly Jackson, The Reappearance of Rachel Price: Sixteen years ago, Rachel Price disappeared, leaving her toddler in her car. Her family consents to a documentary about the case in order to get money to take care of an elderly relative with dementia. But, while the documentary is being filmed, Rachel Price reappears. Her daughter is suspicious; they were doing fine without her. A rather gothic plot unfolds. I see why people liked it, but I don’t think this is the variety of thriller for me.

Chuck Wendig, The Staircase in the Woods: In 1998, four loser kids and one golden boy were best friends—they called the bond between them the Covenant. But one night, drinking and doing drugs out in the woods, they came across a staircase standing alone in the woods, and the golden boy climbed it and disappeared, along with the staircase. Decades later, the one who stayed in their town calls the rest of them back, and leads them to another staircase. Trapped in an apparently unending house of horrors, can they survive and maybe find out what really happened? Effectively creepy in its use of trauma and the mundane; a few typos in the eARC.

Daryl Gregory, When We Were Real: Gregory seems endlessly inventive; this novel is set in a world with irrefutable proof that we live in a simulation, including Impossibles, which are phenomena that can’t be explained using physics (as well as a weekly text reminder that we are living in a simulation beamed to everyone’s brain—not clear what happens if the recipient can’t read). Some have responded with nihilism, considering everyone else (except perhaps fellow gun-toting, Matrix-loving incels) to be bots. On a tour of seven American Impossibles, a pregnant influencer, a rabbi, a nun (and accompanying novice), two German tourists, a would-be right-wing podcaster and his feckless son, a comic book writer, and his best friend, a retired engineer, join an inexperienced tour guide and seen-everything bus driver. But the trip gets more complicated when a fugitive joins them. Her mission is mysterious but urgent. Each of the characters has a distinctive perspective—the Engineer (“The thing is ridiculously oversized and out of scale, like a Koons Balloon Dog. He also doesn’t know how he feels when he looks at a Koons Balloon Dog.”), the Realist’s Son (“Why was anyone shocked that the world was not in our control, and that nothing we did mattered? The Simulators could hit reset at any time. Or climate change would kill us all. Same difference.”), and so on. I loved it.

The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters, ed. Anthony Francis: I’m not a big poetry fan, so the poems sprinkled throughout didn’t do much for me. Brian Starr’s The Interview engaged with the idea that, just because you’re not like other humans doesn’t mean that you have common interests with another entity who’s not like humans. Power fantasies (of which there were a number, where neurodiversity enables success) are fine and welcome, but I liked the challenge. Stewart C. Baker’s The List-Making Habits of Heartbroken Ships is likely to appeal to Murderbot fans for reasons suggested by the title.

Sung-il Kim, trans. Anton Hur, Blood of the Old Kings: A widow who lost her young child as well determines to rebel against the oppressive conquerors who killed them, and seeks out the defeated dragon that used to protect her country for help. Meanwhile, a young sorcerer determines to escape her fate of being used as an undead power generator for the same empire, and a young man seeks to find the murderer of his friend, no matter who he angers in the process. The widow, Loren, doesn’t spend too much narrative time contemplating what she’s lost, although she does share a few memories; she’s too busy finding out that politics are complicated even in a rebellion against a terrible enemy. Unusually for the fantasies I tend to read, there’s also no romance or really sexual energy at all.

Yes, IWTV is great! While waiting for the next season, might you consider Evil? The show follows a hot Catholic priest-in-training, the hot atheist shrink to whom he is desperately attracted, and their hot lapsed Muslim tech guy as they investigate and try to prove/disprove demonic possessions. It is incredibly, delightfully unhinged. Part of it is that the show started on network TV, then moved to streaming in its second season, leading to the absolute best evolution where characters who were reasonably well-behaved start spouting "fuck" at the drop of a hat in S2, including a delightful nearly silent episode that was actually filmed while they still thought they'd be on network, so after filming they replaced the "thought dialogue" onscreen that the actor thought he was filming with a stream of "fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck," to hilarious effect. There's body horror, Catholic guilt, an amazingly toxic mother (Christine Lahti, having the time of her life), four kids who have clearly been instructed to just yammer every time they are on screen together--making them more realistic than 80% of TV kids from the get-go--examination of misogyny and anti-Blackness, critiques of modern internet culture, and the occasional Wallace Shawn. Also, the tech guy is Aasif Mandvi and the hot priest is Mike Colter (Jessica Jones/Luke Cage). And the bad guy is Michael Emerson (Harold Finch), chewing scenery like he only gets paid by how much debris is left when he’s done.

Shorter rec: What if Hannibal and The X-Files had a deeply online baby? My one caveat is that this is a cynical show, which feels a little like watching Cabaret: It's a sick culture and the show is not interested in fixing it, only in displaying it pinned open on a table so we can poke at the nastiest parts.

Chuck Tingle, Bury Your Gays: ( queer joy/horror )
R. A. Sinn, A Second Chance for Yesterday: ( time travel romance )
Joy Demorra, Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites: Fluff and Fangs Edition: ( werewolf/vampire romance )
Stephen King, You Like It Darker: Stories: ( because they can )
Austin Grossman, Fight Me: ( cynical former supervillains )

Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Oracle: ( horror and spycraft )

Still way behind in blogging nonfiction, but I accumulated enough fiction to justify a new entry.


Dan Simmons, ( Hyperion duology; TW for rape )

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model: ( No bugs, only robots/humans )
Paul Cornell, ( a border fantasy that gets interesting with Brexit )

Max Gladstone, Wicked Problems: ( Craft and eldritch horror )
Naomi Novik, Buried Deep and Other Stories: Collection of stories, including from the worlds of Temeraire (Caesar, and also a Pride and Prejudice retelling), the Scholomance, and the in-progress world of (architectural) follies. Nicely representative.

M.R. Carey, Echo of Worlds: ( another many worlds duology )
Arkady Martine, Rose/House: ( AI house with murder )
Steven Brust, Lyorn: ( and here the random Earth memes did annoy me )
Waubgeshig Rice, The Moon of the Turning Leaves: ( Can apocalypse fiction be cozy? )
Jason Pargin, I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom:( always online, rarely in doubt )

Marc Scott Zicree & Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Magic Time: Angelfire:( magic returns )
John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In: ( body horror )
Frances Hardinge, Island of Whispers: ( illustrated story )
Ann Leckie, Lake of Souls: ( strangers on a planet )
Seanan McGuire, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known: ( addressing consequences of abuse )
Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard: ( apples of discord )
Caroline B. Cooney, Goddess of Yesterday: A Tale of Troy: ( fascinating YA fantasy )

Sacha Lamb, When the Angels Left the Old Country: ( highly recommended, kind fantasy )

Lauren Beukes, Bridge: ( world hoppers )
Herman Melville, Moby Dick:( yep, never read it before )
Sarah Monette, A Theory of Haunting: ( occult adventures )
Ilona Andrews, ( Kate Daniels-ish )
Emma Newman, Before, After, Alone: ( short stories )
T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge: ( fractured fairy tale )
Lavanya Lakshminarayan, The Ten Percent Thief: ( a different capitalist hellscape )
Cory Doctorow, Red Team Blues:( progressive male power fantasy )
Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup: ( new series; I'm in! )
Christopher Rowe, ( fascinating worldbuilding )

Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus: ( overall, I liked it! )

Daniel Abraham, Blade of Dream: This middle book of a planned trilogy is unusual for a fantasy because there are no real fantasy elements until three-fourths of the way through. Instead, the bulk of the book is Elaine a Sal, the new prince of Kithamar’s heir, dealing with the change in her status including her tryst with a random citizen. The tryst throws both their lives off track—the citizen leaves his merchant family and joins the city guard, while Elaine starts to consider what parts of her life she actually wants, while investigating what is making her father so upset and closed-off from her. (That’s connected to the magic of the first book, as is what happens when, late in the book, the Thread of Kithamar tries to regain its control of the city’s rulers.) I’m interested to see what happens next.

M.R. Carey, Infinity Gate: Across the multiverse, a Pandominion rules hundreds of earths with an iron fist; when it discovers a set of worlds run by machine intelligence, it reacts badly. Meanwhile, a scientist from a world only slightly more deteriorated than our own discovers how to shift universes. They’ll all collide, with a denouement that is pretty exciting and also sets up the sequel.

C.S. Friedman, Nightborn: Coldfire Rising: A “how it happened” narrative creating the background for earlier novels. Human colonists land on Erna and discover that there’s something that can apparently read their minds and manifest dreams and fears, which they label “fae.” The last quarter of the book jumps far ahead in time, to characters we’ve met before, tenuously linked to the first three-fourths. It didn’t seem necessary to enjoy the earlier novels, but I guess there’s a market for this kind of filling out the narrative.

Kate Elliott, Furious Heaven: Space opera on a grand scale, with an Alexander-like hero in Sun, who is still fighting palace politics to ensure her place as heir while preparing for a war against the Phene Empire. Elliott has thought of an interesting way to use physical limitations to get the commander on the front lines, which is otherwise a really dumb thing for a mechanized army that doesn’t work by hand signals. No one is particularly good, and luck plays an important role, but it is still epic.

Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir: Cal is a noir detective specializing in Titan problems. Titans are rich people who’ve gotten access to an expensive life-enhancing treatment that rolls back age but also makes people grow bigger—seven, eight, nine feet. They get stronger and harder to hurt, too, but somehow their hearts don’t give out—look, it’s a metaphor about wealth, ok? Anyway once you handwave the Titans, this is sf noir without much internet; after the beginning murder of a Titan, Cal pounds the street and looks at hard copy records, with the occasional file encoded into a [spoiler]. I liked it.

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Spare Man: Newlywed Tesla Crane wants to have a nice honeymoon cruise to Mars with her new spouse—a retired former detective—and her service dog. But someone keeps killing people and trying to blame it on her husband. Punctuated by cocktail recipes, this is an attempt at a classic Nick and Nora style mystery in spaaaace. I found it a bit too convoluted, but that is indeed classic, and it was interesting to have a main character with chronic pain issues (partially postponable with a deep brain implant, but only at a cost).

K.D. Edwards, The Eidolon: Apparently Edwards is planning a spinoff series focused on the kids, which seems completely reasonable though I also want to know what is happening to Rune. This book is set during the events of the previous book but focused on Max, Quinn, and Anna—the intro says it was actually begun when production limits forced the excision of a lot of material from that book. Anyway, it provides new information about what happened and what it’s like to be Quinn, who sees so many futures that he can have trouble dealing with the present.

Genevieve Cogman, Scarlet: The Scarlet Pimpernel, retold in a world with vampire aristocrats—sanguinocrats!—and maybe some leftover sorcery. Eleanor is a servant in an English vampire’s household when she’s recruited for a dangerous mission in France to rescue (she’s told) unjustly accused aristocrats. But she can’t help noticing that the Scarlet Pimpernel has a lot of assumptions about servants and nobility that don’t match her experience. And are vampires really as benevolent as she’s been raised to believe? I liked the Invisible Library series better, but this certainly has adventure and magic too.

David Gerrold, Hella: The main character is an autistic boy with a chip in his head that helps him navigate the world—which is a giant planet on which everything grows bigger than it does on Earth, though that doesn’t turn out to be as significant to the plot as you might have thought because the colonists are trying not to interact too much with the ecology for fear of disrupting it. But some colonists want to start colonizing and capitalizing, driving the conflict of the book, which also includes the protagonist starting to date and considering whether to transition back to being a girl. It felt like a bunch of interesting ideas both about humanity and about what “colonizing” really means were being squished under the YA format.

Ruthanna Emrys, Imperfect Commentaries: Short stories, including some details from her Cthulhu-derived universe, where she explains that one reason The Shadow over Innsmouth inspired her was that it starts with a government raid, meant to read as reassurance that the authorities were paying attention, but if you start talking raids and camps, “I’m going to have some default assumptions about who the bad guys are.”

Sara Beaman, Arlene Blakely, CS Cheely, K.D. Edwards, & Daniel Wood, Doom Days: After a pandemic wipes out most people, the survivors find ways to get by, mostly by scavenging or living in small farming communities. I have questions about the worldbuilding, but if you like “we have to escape the fascist enclaves and protect our small scale lives” then this is fine.

Steven Brust, Tsalmoth: Back in time, to the run-up to Vlad and Cawti’s wedding. Some of the events are surprising, because Vlad forgot them. He gets involved in a Tsalmoth conspiracy or two, runs up against a faction or two of the Left Hand, and experiences some surprising sorcerous attacks. It seemed like there were some boxes to check before the series finale, and mostly Vlad’s relative youth was shown by having him learn new words, but I still want to see how the last one goes.

Sharon Shinn and Molly Knox Ostertag, Shattered Warrior: Graphic novel about a young woman on a planet being exploited for its resources; although the loss of her family and position has left her wounded, finding her young niece as well as connections to rebels leads her to choose connection and dangerous sabotage attempts against the (larger, human-related) overlords. It’s fine but I mostly wanted new Ostertag.

Martha Wells, Witch King: Wells returns to fantasy with this story of a demon prince (aka witch king) that unfolds across two timelines: during a rebellion against the genocidal Heirarchs and long after, when some things have gone well and others haven’t. There was a lot to process—humans, witches, demons, Immortal Blessed, their constructs, and the Heirarchs were the key players, with lots of palace intrigue as well as fighting. I know it’s reasonable to fear descending into caricature when the market really likes one of your projects, but I confess I want more Murderbot instead.

Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard War: Final volume of the trilogy that deals with magic that destroys the ecology and also allows its practitioners to control other people with engraved bone shards. Actually tries to deal with the fact that "the most powerful magician should rule" is not a great principle, though the emperor arrives at this conclusion in a fairly abrupt manner.

Audrey Schulman, Theory of Bastards: In an increasingly fragile world, a researcher arrives at one of the last sanctuaries for apes and starts studying bonobos in order to further her theories about female sexual selection. She’s also recovering from surgery from endometriosis, the pain and medical neglect of which is described in detail. And she is navigating her own recovering body and her sexuality, including her relationship with the initially offputting but increasingly attractive researcher assigned to support her work. After a dust storm cuts them off from the rest of the world, things get pretty scary; the ending is ambiguous at best but it’s sf of feminist ideas in terms of the questions it considers important (especially: what does choice mean when we have these bodies evolved in specific ways?) and I found it engaging despite the terrible romance-novel cover it has on Scribd, which was staring at me every time I opened it.

Blair Braverman, Small Game:( general fiction )
Max Gladstone, Dead Country: ( Back to the Craft )
R.B. Lemberg, The Unbalancing: ( kind fantasy about bad things )
Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words: ( aliens make you drunk )
Samit Basu, The City Inside: ( future India )
Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few:( more cozy sf )
Barbara Hambly, The Iron Princess: ( old school fantasy )

(1) I wrote a Yuletide pinch hit that is completely obvious but means I can't talk about the thing I'm currently enjoying.
(2) Why hasn’t someone developed Steven Brust’s Dragaera for the screen?

Sascha Stronach, The Dawnhounds: ( fantasy city with gods fighting )
Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers: ( negative review of this map fantasy )
C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic:( trolls have different gender roles )
Fonda Lee, Jade War: ( political fantasy )
Kai Butler, The Heart’s Blood Arrow:( PI turned magic judge )
Nancy Kress & Robert Lanza, Observer: ( what if consciousness creates reality? )

David R. Slayton, White Trash Warlock: ( magic is disreputable )
Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit: ( and three more cozy sf books )

Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth: ( Fairly vague but still possibly spoilery? )
Stephen King, Fairy Tale: ( Very Stephen King )
Kai Butler, ( More San Amaro Investigations )

Charlie Adhara, Pack of Lies: ( werewolf m/m murder mystery )
Rebecca Roanhorse, Tread of Angels: ( lots of world, not a lot of building )
Best of British Science Fiction 2021, ed. Donna Bond: ( fine but unremarkable )

Beforeigners has disappeared from HBO! Tragedy. I guess that means no S3?

Out of the Ruins, ed. Preston Grassman: ( apocalypse stories )
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: ( everyday horrors of having a body )
Robert McGill, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life:( flattened people as methods of dying by suicide )
Tade Thompson, The Legacy of Molly Southborne: ( More mollies )
T. Kingfisher, Nettle and Bone: ( princess on a quest )

Ben Aaronovitch, Tales from the Folly:( lots of non-Peter POV )
K.D. Edwards, The Hourglass Throne: ( Glad this is finally out! )
Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections: ( trans vampire archivist romance )
Charlie Adhara, ( m/m romance where one is a shifter )

Naked City, ed. Ellen Datlow. ( urban fantasy )
Seanan McGuire, Seasonal Fears: ( followup to last year's archetypes book )
Fonda Lee, Jade City: ( new palace intrigue/magic series )
Justina Ireland, Rust in the Root: ( Depression-era magic )
Carrie Vaughn, Questland: ( island of tropes )
Holly Black, Doll Bones: ( not magical realism, more realistic magic )
Maya Deane, Wrath Goddess Sing: ( trans Achilles fights (with) gods )
Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters: ( really, they eat books )
Katherine Addison, The Grief of Stones:( not more Maia, sadly, but it will do )
Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent’s Wake: ( Tess and colonialism )
Kameron Hurley, Future Artifacts: Stories: ( grim, dark )