Our reads in January 2026.

New Year,same old HUUUGE TBR that needs reduction. Share your reading plans for a cold cold January.
Hope you did well in getting new intriguing books for Xmas.

Dusty's TBR for January
Robert Jackson Bennett - A Drop of Corruption✔
Jim Butcher - Twelve Months
Poul Anderson - Tau Zero
Ben Aaronovitch - Masquerades of Spring✔
Ben Aaronovitch - Stone and Sky✔
Ben Aaronovitch - The October Man✔
Richie Tankersley - Buffy the Vampire Slayer✔

Planned SF&F reads for January:

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
A Talent For War by Jack McDevitt
Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Completed
Night Lamp by Jack Vance
Lone Sloane Delirius by Phillipe Druillet

Currently Reading
The Best of Lester del Rey

On Deck
Manhounds of Antares by Kenneth Bulmer
The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

Ordered/Requested
BLAME!, Vol. 1

Happy New Year folks! I am currently reading Limits of Power by Elizabeth Moon.

In progress
Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World by Alex Neve (should finish today)

On deck
The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker

In terms of reading goals for the year. These are the books in my TBR pile I hope to finally get to.
Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History by William Gibson
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

And there are lots of others that I will decide when the time comes. I really want to get to Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle having read only The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. We will see if I get to that in 2026. All of those books have been sitting on my book shelf saying “read me” for the past couple of years.

>6 Neil_Luvs_Books: Ooh, Robinson's Mars! That's great stuff, enjoy.

>7 paradoxosalpha: Yes! I have read so many good reviews of Robinson’s Mars Trilogy plus so many good reviews of Robinson’s writing. I have never read anything by him so I am really looking forward to finally reading this.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

Having just run through Quatermass films this week, I'm on a roll looking for books in a similar vein. So far I've dug out;

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Fungus by Harry Adam Knight
and possibly a John Blackburn I haven't read

>8 Neil_Luvs_Books: One strand of my reading is to take a trilogy or series and work through them (with suitable breaks) in fairly quick order, rather than reading the individual books as they are published, which usually means one per year, or then possibly with a longer gap as other, more recent purchases elbow their way higher up into the TBR pile.

So once I finish The Last Dangerous Visions, I shall be picking up Red Mars, which will be a re-read, as preparation to a first time read of Blue Mars and Green Mars, which I have had since publication but which have somehow avoided being read. (Well, I started Blue Mars once when I was out on a job with a fair amount of down-time, but I only got a few pages in before a colleague decided that they wanted to chat instead of seeing me read. I never picked it up again, though I hope to finally correct this during 2026.

I'm already close to wrapping up The Devils (not sure it's really grabbing me). Also in hand are The Ganymedan, An Instruction in Shadow, Transmentation|Transience, and The Shattering Peace.

Very interesting to see just how many people are going back to old SF now. Poul Anderson,Jack Vance,Kenneth Bulmer,Isaac Asimov,Gene Wolfe,John Wyndham,Wilson Tucker.all on the groups radar this month.Its a bit odd to class the Mars trilogy as old,published early to mid 90s so 30 years old,but I remember when EVERYONE was reading it.lol.It was great to see him do so well with Ministry for the Future in 2020,a last hurrah for his career I expect.
I'm about 30% of the way throughA Drop of Corruptionthe follow up to The Tainted Cup and enjoying it a lot. Biopunk (horrible name!) is much more enjoyable tome than cyberpunk or whatever . Great character work and superior worldbuilding.
Itching to settle down with it while smugly smiling at the falling snow 6 inches piling up on the windowsill but got to cook and do chores and tend Mr Dusty and sit with mouth agape at the latest world news. Crackers in Caracas,people

>6 Neil_Luvs_Books: you've got some superior reading ahead of you this year!

>12 dustydigger: that's the first reference that I have heard to "Biopunk" as a genre. Thanks. Oh, and crackers, indeed.

I'm re-reading The Tommyknockers and enjoying it so far :-)

>13 vwinsloe: Paul Di Filipo tried to float the term "Ribofunk" back in the 1990s.

As mentioned yesterday I was close to finishing up The Devils, or at least I did due to some skimming as I have to get it back to the library like right now. Granted that I probably didn't give the novel quite as much attention as it deserved, I'm not sure that it would have made a difference in my opinion. My suspicion is that Abercrombie has too many characters running around in this book to really develop them, even with a hefty page-count. Perhaps this will play out over the succeeding books.

>15 Shrike58: Glad that term didn't catch on!

I read through all of Automatic Noodle yesterday between work tasks, and since my only reading goal this year is to review what I read, I'm considering what I think about it. I'm more positive than not--shoving that many "history rhymes" points so close together is a good way to make your point, and I can't say no to a book including robot top surgery, but I think another 50-75 pages would have made a big difference in making me feel the problems of a four-person main cast.

Actually, that's a pretty solid core of a review, there, go me.

>12 dustydigger: I’ll be reading what might be considered vintage Sci Fi for some time. A long term reading goal of mine is to read all volumes in the Masterpieces of Science Fiction series published by the Easton Press. Of course many will debate the choices made by James Gunn in advising the Easton Press what to publish in a MoSF series, but I think it is still worth considering to get a sense of where the genre has been and where it might be going.

There is some really great reading to be had in this collection. I think I am not quite half way through all the volumes in EP’s MoSF. And now that EP has started a 2nd series of MoSF a couple of years ago, the list is growing.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mwKjBzSNtKYSgWw2ImAFgfuIKkd64vAVJp0lN5sH...

EDIT:Hmph! I have read more of these volumes than I thought. I have read 73 of the 140+ volumes in the MoSF from EP. Between 1986 and 2002 they published 139 different titles (according to this website https://www.listchallenges.com/masterpieces-of-science-fiction-easton-press ) but in the 2nd series started in 2023, I think they have added 3 or 4 titles so far that were not included in the first series.

>19 Neil_Luvs_Books: Yeah its quite a fun list,a little less highbrow and more broadly based than some WWEnd lists. I've read 106 books on the list,but I'm focusing mostly on rereads this year so I'll only manage a few including
Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net
Wilson Tucker - Year of the Quiet Sun
George Zerbrowski - Brute Orbits
Charles L Harness - The Paradox Men
That will bring me up to 110. Better live till I'm 90 if I'm ever to finish the list at this rate!lol (78 end of this month)
Just checked and was surprised to find I am #1 on the List Challenge list
I have great fun ticking off books on the site's challenges,I've done hundreds,just a fun useless sort of hobby! lol

>20 dustydigger: I love check lists!

Until I don’t…

Checklists make me feel like I’m accomplishing something in my life as I check a box.

But then I become less enamoured with them when those boxes remain unchecked in my iPhone Reminder app sitting there unchecked accusing me of not attending to what I had promised myself I would get done last Wednesday.

So I delete the task, delete the box and pretend I never intended to get to that task really…

Then I like my checklists again.

😅

Just got two novels from the library and started into R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before last night. Saw a reddit! thread recently that touted this as being Gene Wolfe-like. I may detect a bare echo of The New Sun in there somewhere but so far I'm not really feeling it. Early going though so we'll see... the ebook is listed at over 600 pages so there is plenty of room for development.

The other borrow is The City In Glass so that will be up next.

In print I will be starting my first collection of 2026: Caitlin R. Kiernan's To Charles Fort, With Love.

Currently reading Brave New World, I've not read this before and read the first 3 chapters and yes, ummm, crummmbbbbs!!!

>20 dustydigger: I enjoyed The Paradox Men, in a cautionary-tale sense.

>22 ScoLgo: I also have The City in Glass in my TBR on my Kindle. I may get to it soon.

>23 AnishaInkspill:
It is probably about forty years since I read Brave New World. I am sure I will get a lot more out of it if I were to read it again.

>25 pgmcc: There have been many books I have come back to it's completely different, if you do read this again I'd be interested to know.

>23 AnishaInkspill:, >25 pgmcc: The recent graphic novel adaptation was quite good.

Finished The Last Dangerous Visions and working on a review. I might be some time.

Now started a re-read of Red Mars as preparation for a first-time read of Blue and Green.

Started the year with Esperance which was a better mix of police procedural and SF than I expected.

>29 AnnieMod:
I think I will have to look into this book. Your post makes it very intriguing. And, yes, I do like both genres. :-)

>28 RobertDay: I purchased nice hardcover editions of the Mars trilogy recently & plan to do what you are doing soon.

Just finished The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which I enjoyed a great deal. Think "Groundhog Life" instead of "Groundhog Day." Very well written & suspenseful. These time loop stories can be trippy, but I thought it was handled well.

>32 ChrisG1: You may want to look into her Touch as well - while it sounds very different, the two novels play with immortality from different angles and almost feel like mirror images of each other. I liked Harry August more than Touch - but it was worse only in comparison with it.

>28 RobertDay: >31 ChrisG1: Maybe I should start my first time read of KSR’s Mars Trilogy early to read along with the two of you.

I just finished Asimov’s The End of Eternity and really enjoyed it. I was not expecting it to tie in so well with his Robots-Empire-Foundation series. That was a pleasant surprise. I am certain that he tied it in after the fact. Or do you think he was thinking of the relationships between these stories way back in the 1950s?

>29 AnnieMod:
As it happens, I was in a bookshop today. I looked for Esperance but they did not have a copy. they did have Braking Day by the same author. The blurb intrigued me so I bought the book. Thank you for pointing me towards this author.

>35 pgmcc: That happened to me, too!

>36 RobertDay: Well, at least I got the book that was a namesake of yours.

I don't think it's sf, but I think it would appeal to sf fans: I'm working my way through Doug Dorst's S..

Knocked off The Ganymedan. A respectable first novel in the sense that the author seems to write with ambition. Overshadowed on the other hand in that other authors have done this sort of thing better.

>30 pgmcc: This one sounds intriguing to me as well. The description in >29 AnnieMod:'s review gives me Brasyl vibes.

Nice! My library offers it as an e-borrow. Onto the list it goes...

>34 Neil_Luvs_Books: I've not read The End of Eternity yet. I finished a read-thru of the Robot-Empire-Foundation sequence last year. Sounds like I should check it out.

>40 ScoLgo:
I loved Brasyl. The review did not make me think of it, but it is a long time since I read Brasyl.

>40 ScoLgo: >42 pgmcc: Haven't read Brasyl yet so no idea if they are similar... :)

>35 pgmcc: Have fun :) I plan to read that one as well at some point - the only reason I started with his latest novel is because it was staring at me from the 'new' shelf of my library.

This year I am reading novels published in 1970 and this month I hope to get to:

Nine Hundred Grandmothers - R A Lafferty
The Bodyguard - Adrian Mitchell

>42 pgmcc: >43 AnnieMod: It is the described convergence of timelines that gives me echoes of Brasyl. I suppose there are lots of books that explore this type of thing, and I'm sure this is a very different novel than McDonald's, but something about the description gave me that frisson... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I finally started Cryptonomicon. Love the WWII detail and dual-timeline structure so far. Snow Crash was a favorite of mine but everyone tells me Cryptonomicon is the best Stephenson. I'm also curious about Anathem but I'm not sure I like the idea of alternative history.

Partway through The End of Eternity myself.

>46 longarcpress: Anathem's great! Don't think about it as alternate history, think of it as multiverse!

>45 ScoLgo: It reminded me that I really need to get back to McDonald's work - I tend to like him a lot and because of them I also tend to keep him for a rainy day... which never comes. :) And I understand what you mean - I've had cases like that where a minor detail in a totally different book makes me think of another unrelated one...

I'm also thinking I had better quickly read Project Hail Mary since I see there's a movie coming out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary_(film)

I *loved* The Martian but didn't like Artemis.

With Artemis, Weir essentially takes the Mark Watney character from the Martian - speech mannerisms and guy humor and all - and transplants him into a female main character's body, even making sure the dorky, overweight friend character the guys will identify with gets to have sex with her at the end. It is quite comical and absurd. I see a lot of Amazon reviewers giving Weir a hard time for all the attention he devotes to the metals chemistry of how the moon space station of Artemis operates to generate oxygen, calling it boring, but that is actually quite cool and was probably the hardest part for him in writing that novel as his proposal is 100% scientifically plausible.

>46 longarcpress: In my opinion, Cryptonomicon, and the prequel trilogy (octalogy?) is more of an alt history, or even secret history, tale than Anathem, which only feels like alt history at first. Where the story ends up going is actually pretty mind-blowing.

Overall, I think the book you are reading now, along with The Baroque Cycle, is Stephenson's best work. But I do have a soft spot for The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer as well. That said, I really enjoyed Anathem as well.

>51 ScoLgo: Cool, thanks for this! I was wondering about Diamond Age, it seems perhaps the definitive take on nanotech? Has gone out of style as a subject I guess. Also do you have any take on Reamde?

>51 ScoLgo: I agree with you on Anathem - it starts sounding like an alt history (and not very engaging at that) but if you stick with it, it pays off in a big way. It is probably my favorite Stephenson novel - while I know why the Baroque Cycle is technically better and what's not, Anathem worked much better for me.

>44 baswood:

Nine Hundred Grandmothers isn't a novel, but it is a wonderful book.

>49 AnnieMod: Have you read Hopeland? I really enjoyed that one. But then, I have yet to read a clunker from McDonald. River of Gods and The Dervish House are both excellent. One of my Halloween reads this past October was his latest, The Wilding, the premise of which is The God Pan deciding to make his own Area X somewhere on the British Moors. It's a pretty good ride but a bit of a departure from McDonald's usual fare.

edit: >58 paradoxosalpha: So they are were. Thank you!

>52 longarcpress:
Readme is excellent. I have found that people speed through it very quickly. It keeps the tempo up.

>52 longarcpress: Reamde was fun but it's more of a contemporary thriller than SF. I happen to live in the Seattle area and am somewhat familiar with the Eastern Washington locations in the book so that helped my enjoyment quite a bit. I haven't read the sequel yet so have no opinion on that.

The Diamond Age does feature quite a bit of nanotech. I just re-read it a couple of months ago and the story still holds up pretty well. I had forgotten that Stephenson did the whole 'no national boundaries because societies have stratified' thing long before Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota - but, despite my love for TDA, Palmer's story is superior by almost any metric, (that's just my opinion talking ;).

>55 ScoLgo: (Your touchstones are off for River of Gods and The Wilding.)

McDonald has never disappointed me either. His New World Order books are so fine that they often make people overlook his earlier work. The Mars books Desolation Road and Ares Express are delightful. I'm also a fan of Terminal Cafe (orig. Necroville). For all that, I'm not sure he's ever written anything that quite surpasses River of Gods, and it's (still?) a book for our moment.

He appears to have written a single fairy fantasy, and it's on my wishlist: King of Morning, Queen of Day.

>52 longarcpress:

I finally got around to The Diamond Age after my Other Reader had been urging it on me for two decades. It's pretty great. Also, I read Seveneves last year, and while I would maybe not rate it as highly as other Stephenson for literary quality, it still had some grand ideas.

>55 ScoLgo: Not yet. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve read River of Gods (a very long time ago and I think it may be worth rereading) and the first of the Luna books. Plus some of his shorter works. I have the bad tendency not to read the authors I really like and to keep pushing their books for later (trying to change that). :)

Switched my reading plan and started reading Red Mars. Really enjoying it so far.

Nice to see folks reading The End of Eternity First time I read it I found it a bit stodgy and dull,but with a fascinating ending. As time as gone on its a book that repeatedly come to mind and I am intending to do a reread this year as part of Year of the Rereads.

I was late to Neal Stephenson, but read, enjoyed and reviewed Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Shortly after finishing that last-named, I was watching a tv show, Abandoned Engineering (in the UK, on one of the digital channels) and was boggled to see the coastal fort in the Philippines that plays a part in the novel featured!

I, too, caught the idea of cadres replacing nation states as something The Diamond Age had in common with Terra Ignota, though the latter series has a lot more to get your intellectual teeth into.

I have rated Ian McDonald's work for some time; I think he is probably one of the best writers of any sort we have at the moment. But I am not yet up to River of Gods or Brazyl, so I suspect I still have pleasures to come.

Finished In Ascension, about to start The Lord of Opium.

I've now added my review of The Last Dangerous Visions.

>65 RobertDay: Nicely done.

Hi,

It seems everyone's reading cool stuff this year!

Stephenson:
I used to read his works almost as they came out.
I really liked Snow Crash and the Diamond Age - read them when I was young and they suited that.
I then absolutely loved Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle - some of my all-time favourite books - they're a lot slower and more meandering though, and some friends who often have similar reading tastes as me couldn't make it through them.
I also read and liked his thriller Cobweb.
His works after 2010 are more of a mixed bag. I did not enjoy Reamde and Fall or Dodge in Hell (found them bland and slow, though of course with cool ideas thrown in). I quite liked SevenEves (unlike many). I enjoyed The Mongoliad (pulpy fun).
I haven't read his last few books, though I probably will at some point.

Ian McDonald:
I've only read some of his short stories. Mostly good. I hope to get to the New World Order series at some point.

KSR
The Mars Trilogy are also all time favourites. Also way too slow for many. I think a reread won't happen until I retire...

Dangerous Visions: also one day...

If only there was more time to read :)

edit: grammar

>14 bnielsen: As a whole I didn't love The Tommyknockers, but it definitely had some great moments.

I finished my first book of 2026.

>69 paradoxosalpha: I'm often tickled by where sf writers get some of their names from. The Isle of Thanet, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Thanet

>70 RobertDay:

I learned today that the D&D apex monster Vecna (a "litch" or undead mage), now notorious through the Stranger Things television series, got his name as an anagram of VANCE.

>71 paradoxosalpha:

!!!

I just read The Descent by Jeff Long and I'm now partway through its sequel, Deeper. I really wasn't expecting much from these books beyond some cool underground vibes and gory scenes of C.H.U.D.s eating people, but they ended up being really fantastic sci-fi-ish epics about exploring the remains of a mostly dead civilisation and the Inner-Earth as a new colonial frontier—it's almost like Michael Crichton doing horror.

Once I finish Deeper, I'll probably get started on a PKD novel to round out the month (and tick off another square on my Book Bingo sheet)—I'm currently thinking Martian Time Slip, but I also have my eye on the short story collections.

>46 longarcpress: Enjoy! I thought Cryptonomicon was great. I also hope you enjoy Project Hail Mary, to me it is truly one of the great scifi or just plain novels of all time.

>67 igorken: Hi and welcome. I have had much the same experience with Stephenson's books, though I do have Polostan on my TBR pile. Not a big fan of the Mars series by KSR, though I sort of want to revisit the first one someday.

>71 paradoxosalpha: That's some great information to know.

I have not been reading much sf lately (mostly comics, some tie-ins) but I did just post an sf review, Cordwainer Smith's one sf novel, Norstrilia.

I'm still reading Brave New World and have finished:

I'm still making a slow start of The Best of Lester del Rey, but I've enriched my reading with the psychedelic space opera graphic album Lone Sloane: Delirius. I've got to get through that one promptly, because now I've interested my artist daughter in Druillet. It's slow going though, with crazy dense compositions and tiny hand-lettered text.

>78 AnishaInkspill: I read that story last year and I thought it was excellent.

Finished the excellent A Drop of Corruption Robert Jackson Benett's sequel to The Tainted Cup. Great character work,adequate mystery story but like with Tainted Cup it was the striking world settings that fascinated me the most,so fresh and unusual,and I really enjoyed seeing more of the biotech cum magic rather than the more military setting of the first book.I really felt that this was a rich very diverse world,not one standard cultural scenario.
The whole milieu is interesting. Is this our future world if biotech developed strongly in a barely post mediaeval time.Or is it more like a dying earth type of world where high sophisticated society is long gone,even millennia gone much like a Gene Wolfe/Jack Vance tale. Or is it just a different world,those Leviathans dont sound very earthly! lol.I went from one opinion to another as I read. Nice to have a book for once that has something to mull over while enjoying an old fashioned mystery tale.

>81 dustydigger: Good description of A Drop of Corruption, I enjoyed it too.

I finished Red Mars this afternoon. That was an excellent read. Part way through it, when Boone is doing his long trek across the Martian surface it got to be a bit of a slog, but at the same time I appreciated KSR’s imaginative ability to paint an alien landscape as it slowly unfolded with Boone’s travels. Red Mars also reminded me of Moby Dick in a way with its very detailed description of how terraforming could happen. It seemed to me to be in the same spirit of Melville’s description of whales and whaling. Of course, I thought KSR did a better job of interweaving these technical descriptions into the narrative compared to Melville simply stopping the narrative and devoting entire chapters to what was then understood about whales and how they were hunted.

On to Green Mars.

>83 Neil_Luvs_Books:

I'm inferring from something he said in an interview, but I'm pretty sure KSR was directly inspired by Melville in that approach.

I enjoyed Ben Aaronovitch's Masquerades of Spring,a tale of a Rivers of London character set in the Jazz Age in New York.which was surprising but very interesting. I learned a lot about NY life in the 1920s especially the demi-monde and how inter racial mixing took place,often difficult and dangerous a especially complicated by same sex relationships. Add some jazz,weird musical instruments that affect their owners,gangsters and a fun look at a much younger Thomas Nightingale,and it all made for a pleasant read on a wet miserable day outside, a warm cosy home indoors. Good stuff
Straight on to Stone and Sky to bring my Rivers of London series to completion.Was delighted with a book deal.the whole series of 9 books and 4 novellas for only £35,great :0)

Finished The Lord of Opium, starting The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights.

>85 dustydigger: Was delighted with a book deal.

Love when happenstance brings one of those my way. Was it secondhand or a bookshop deal for new? Ah, or maybe it's an ebook thing. I'm a bit surprised at myself but still haven't shifted into ebook reading, despite my copious amounts of PDFs on desktops and so forth.

>87 elenchus: real paperbacks not ebooks. I have been reading a lot of ebooks these days. Taking care of Mr Dusty means being housebound really cant get to the library 2 miles away by bus so I read online especially in the last year while waiting for cataract op when I couldnt see print but online could zoom in. Now post op and new specs I can read a bit more on paper. :0)
Still not going to library but this is the Year of the Rereads so I can return to old faves on my bookcase..
at the time reading ebooks feels pleasant enough and certainly a boon for my arthritic old hands,but I hardly retain ay of it later! lol. Theres something enjoyable about a paper book. You know how far you are into the story and are not just locked into one small perhaps half page but feel anchored in the whole book. Not easy to quickly check up on something on a kindle,all that tedious tapping. And as I say I dont retain much for some unknown reason! lol.

It ended up being more work than I had anticipated to read Loan Sloane: Delirius.

>88 dustydigger: It’s really hard to beat the technology of the paper book. So easy to navigate and no need to recharge batteries. Plus, relatively cheap with no need for the initial investment in a piece of reader technology.

But I also do appreciate the compactness and relative lightness of eReaders. They are great for travelling and when snowbound.

>84 paradoxosalpha: Thanks for that info, I did not know that! It’s easy to see how KSR was inspired by Melville. I’ll have to see if I can locate some interviews with KSR. I’ve only read his interviews when Ministry for the Future was published a few years ago. Which I still would like to read.

>83 Neil_Luvs_Books: I, also, finished Red Mars this morning. As I see it, Mars is a character, and the interplay of the planet, the human characters and the politics driving them are an integral part of the way Mars changes those who settle there.

The amount of work needed to live on Mars, let alone terraform it, is very clearly set out (and as a Facebook correspondent said, KSR shortened the timescale by a factor of two and also had to introduce the longevity treatments to make the novel work as a novel). Young Mr. Musk claims to have read this in his quest to seek to settle Mars; I suspect very much that one Starship full of colonists and whatever they can pack in the payload bay isn't going to cut it.

I shall allow this book some time to mature in my mind before writing a review, and I shall leave a decent interval (as I have other books to read) before moving on to Green Mars.

>91 Neil_Luvs_Books:

I was referencing The Lucky Strike, which includes an interview of KSR by Terry Bisson.

So the word "infodump" is like a red flag to me, it's a Thought Police command saying "Dumb it down, quit talking about the world, people don't have attention spans, blah blah blah blah." No. I say, go read Moby Dick, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez, Jameson, Bahktin, Joyce, Sterne--learn a little bit about what fiction can do and come back to me when you're done. That would be never and I could go about my work in peace. (87)

>93 paradoxosalpha: I was unaware of The Lucky Strike, and have added it to my wishlist.

One of the cool things that I remember about The Mars Trilogy is that the ideas in it pop up in other media, like a history of things that have actually occurred. For me, that is the hallmark of really good science fiction.

>29 AnnieMod: Finished Esperance last night and had a great time with it. Thank you for putting this title - and author - on my radar, @AnnieMod!

>92 RobertDay: That’s an interesting point to consider Mars as a character in Red Mars. That’s akin to considering Earth as Gaia, a complex living organism. I’ve started Green Mars and that is now going to affect my reading of it. Which is KSR’s point with aeroformation, the planet affects the colonizers as much as the colonizers affect the planet.

>93 paradoxosalpha: Thanks for the reference. I’ll see if our library has The Lucky Strike.

>95 ScoLgo:
I think the touchstone has led you astray.

>98 pgmcc: Fixed. Thank you.

>93 paradoxosalpha: I don't mind infodumps by the author. It's the author's call on how much time to spend on background. It's when the infodump is one character lecturing another character for several pages that drives me crazy.

I am finding it interesting to read KSR’s Mars Trilogy in light of current events. Replacing the name “Mars” with “Greenland” really makes this two decade old narrative current in today’s world affairs.

>101 Neil_Luvs_Books: Yes, I've been getting that, too.

Brave New World I'm still reading it, I haven't read it before but the whole set-up was reminded me of the movie Demolition Man, the main characters are Lenina Huxley and John Spartan, maybe it's a coincidence but there's so much here (but everything) that makes me think of this movie.

I've now completed my review of Red Mars:

>104 RobertDay: great review!

I didnt much like Red Mars/ I loved trekking through that massive wild land,it felt very real indeed,but from the start I couldnt accept the hidden conspiracy,things that occurred on the way to Mars etc.It just seemed too improbable to me so i was at odds with many of the events of the developing story. Also being informed hundreds of pages ahead of the fate one of the few outstanding and likeable characters just upset and sort of unnerved me as I kept bracing myself for the demise..I am so not a fan of political conspiracy plots at the best of times and so many of the plot development annoyed or upset me from the start. What started out as hopefully a great book about the stalwart work of united colonists terraforming this wild and awesome planet went off in predictable boring (to me)ways. I dragged through Red Mars {read 2012}and delayed reading the others for years (Blue 2017,Green 2018)simply because of my disappointment with the first book. But those scenes of exploring this new planet were exciting and impressive and what has stayed in my mind since.

>95 ScoLgo: Glad you liked it.

Meanwhile another mixed genres novel (SF and historical this time): a parallel universes novel by an author I discovered last year with his stories (There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven is a very good collection and is mostly speculative). The novel is a bit raw - it is a first novel and it shows and the machine that make the parallel worlds work is handled with a bit of a heavy hand but I enjoyed the novel (possibly more for the what-ifs and the historical part but still)...

Knocked off Transmentation | Transience. File under kinda of clever, but not as clever as the authorial collective responsible thinks. Will probably give the follow-on book a chance.

Has anyone here been listening to the podcast, "It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton"? Every week he reads a short story out of the pages of speculative fiction magazines like Uncanny and Lightspeed. Most folks here know what an excellent reader Wheaton is from his audiobook narrations of John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow books.

I mention it here because I have wishlisted some short story collections based on stories that he has narrated on the podcast, and I wonder whether others have had a similar experience.

>109 vwinsloe: Thanks for the tip! I wasn't familiar with it, but it looks very interesting!

I should probably mention that I also knocked off An Instruction in Shadow, but I found it rather underwhelming at best. It best illustrates that "RPG Lit" is not my thing. Not helping matters is that the main character is an accurate depiction of a twenty-something guy who really doesn't get it; been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

>112 Shrike58: Yeah - something in this series is just off - I am willing to give Jacka enough leeway to get the series going properly on the strength of Verus but...

I just finished The People's Library, a future science fiction scenario where historical figures virtual personalities can be checked out for conversations. There's an organization against the library (and all AI) and a plot element exploring entering the virtual world to interact with the "virtus" in their own territory. I enjoyed it a great deal.

>114 elorin: I was looking at it the other day and it gave me some A Borrowed Man vibes based on the description and some reviews. I’d probably read it at some point…

>115 AnnieMod: I concur: The People's Library sounds similar to A Borrowed Man and Interlibrary Loan. I enjoyed both but Borrowed was a bit easier to follow than Interlibrary. On the other hand, it is Gene Wolfe, so gotta expect some work in following what is going on with the characters and plot.

If you like reading about fictional libraries, I suggest the short story Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel by Shaenon K. Garrity published in Strange Horizons back in 2011. I found it hilarious!

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/librarians-in-the-branch-library-o...

>116 Neil_Luvs_Books: I liked both Wolfe novels - I know that a lot of people were disappointed in them but I enjoyed them a lot.

Haven’t seen this story - thanks for the pointer. Will add it to my list of stories to read shortly. :)

>116 Neil_Luvs_Books: I suggest the short story

So appreciate the suggestion. Unknown to me and quite worth the read.

Over time, working at the Branch Library, I came to think of all books as just misprinted editions of Moby-Dick.

Indeed.

I've started Death of the author by Nnedi Okorafor which I am loving so far.

>116 Neil_Luvs_Books: Thanks for the link, Neil! It was a fun read. So much of it was on target with a library science mentality that I was assuming the author is a librarian -- until I looked at the author info at the end.

>118 elenchus: >120 rshart3: I laughed at the idea of librarians getting lost forever as they explored the infinite library. And that this particular branch (which is also infinite) contains nothing but different editions of Moby Dick.
😅

Finished Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist. One of the more popular epic fantasy series that emerged in the wake of The Lord of the Rings. I had never gotten around to it - until now. Like many others in this time period, it can be criticized for being highly derivative of TLOTR, but I enjoyed the writing & storytelling & I will certainly continue with the series. Recommended for epic fantasy fans.

Just about to start Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage; I got given the last volume in his Book of Dust trilogy for Christmas, so I thought I'd better make a start on the whole thing...

>123 RobertDay: I look forward to your review. The Book of Dust is on my TBR list since my daughter started reading it years ago when the first volume was published. She thinks it every bit as good as the original His Dark Materials trilogy.

I recently read The City in Glass, which is definitely fantasy. It was certainly creative.

While looking for something to read from my TBR list, I settled on Sassinak, by McCaffrey and Moon. I've read the two books the come before it, but it seems like they are only loosely connected.

I enjoyed Ben Aaronovitch's holiday away from London in Aberdeen of all places complete with his water goddess wife, his parents,his 2 yr old twin girls,his wizard apprentice cousin and his boss . Some holiday! Stone and Sky is another fun romp in the Rivers of London series.
A wyvern,a huge vicious bird and selkies all have a go at him not to mention another wizard and lots of nefarious oilmen on their oil platform out on the wild North Sea.Add talking foes and Abigail gaining a lover and its all just pure fun. Much neededas a boost to the spirit in a incredibly bad beginning to the year 2026 on the world stage. January feels as if it has lasted 27 weeks instead of 27 days.:0(
Have started the latest Harry Dresden book,Twelve Months but the book and Harry are both incredibly sad,so I am putting it aside till February. I am going to read The October Man a Rivers of London spinoff.
Its been a bit of a fraught month tending my husband so the TBR has just been nibbled round the edges,hopefully February reading will achieve more but I have enjoyed the small number of books read,so no problem

>43 AnnieMod:
I happened to see the Kindle edition of Esperance on sale for £3.46. What was I to day. Anyway, it now rests patiently on my Kindle. :-)

Just saw that paperback pocket books have been killed off. I guess we are left with trade paperbacks, which can't easily be stuffed in a coat pocket, take up too much room on the bookshelf and cost twice as much. Ebooks don't quite do it for me, if nothing else you don't really get the sometimes cool cover art. I am hanging on to my remaining Ace science fiction paperbacks from my youth.

>128 wbf2nd:
I saw that fateful news last evening. Thankfully it only appears to apply to North America for the moment. As it is probably based on profit maximisation principles it will not be too long before it hits this side of the Atlantic. Such a shame.

Publishers already had been tinkering with the format, making them taller. At one point back in the 20th century, I purged nearly all the mass market paperbacks from my library, considering them to be cheap and inferior. As a commuter, I rediscovered their value. A lot of genre fiction had its first and only appearance in paperback, of course.

Finished The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, leaving SF&F for a book for Grafton's penultimate Alphabet mystery, X.

>130 paradoxosalpha:
I read a case study some years ago about the move to very thick novels that were still the height and width of mass market paperbacks. Apparently at the time the industry, i.e. publishing industry, was looking to increase revenue. Their research indicated that charging more for books would only be acceptable to the public if the books were longer, i.e. contained more words. Research was done about how to accommodate the extra words. It was during a period when a significant number of books were sold via supermarkets. The supermarkets, Walmart in particular, had shelfs that were designed to hold books of the size already on sale. Walmart stated they would not stock books that were any taller; they were not going to pay for redesigning and installing their book display shelving. The result was the super thick novels.

I can see the logic of the accountants in the publishing and distribution companies. The sale of books through supermarkets is likely to have been hard hit by e-books, hence the supermarket channel was no longer as important. Bookshops, sorry bookstores, are better equipped to handle taller books. Publishers would like to reduce production costs by standardising the book size. If publishing a new book they can print X book blocks and bind the first number of books released in hardback. If sales are going well then they can bind some more in hardback. If not they can bind the rest in softback and sell them at the same size without having to retool and print more books in a different format. They may also want to lean more on Print On Demand for the paperback edition.

The net effect is a reduction in overall production costs for a title; pushing people to buy books soon after the release date rather than waiting for the cheaper paperback that they will soon come to understand will be an inferior quality PoD book. This will increase revenue and pull revenue forward for the publisher. Win-win for the publisher and a reduction in choice for the reader.

>130 paradoxosalpha: There had been a few publishers that were still publishing regularly sized ones... but they had been dwindling and the "high mass market paperback" is a travesty - I do not think we saw that many of them in the genre but thrillers had been using them a lot and they are... weird.

>132 pgmcc: And then you get Ken MacLeod's publisher, who didnlt bother with a hardback edition of his most recent novels Lightspeed, but went straight to trade paperback. Which I couldn't figure out at all, especially as Ken is one of the authors I collect in hardback and was willing to pay good money for.

>134 RobertDay:
Yes, I noticed that.

Ken’s books never disappoint.

>134 RobertDay: Maybe there will be hardcover later? Some publishers seem to be switching to this kind of model for some reason (pricing? Seeing what may make sense?)

I am part of the club puzzled and frustrated by the trade-paper-only release of the Lightspeed Trilogy. Maybe it was already a compromise to break it into three books? It read like a single novel to me.

Starting Splice by ZZ Adams. Has anyone read these novels? I believe the series name is Zero Point Awakening

I remember reading on LE Modesitt’s blog a couple years ago where he responded to his fans complaint that they were having trouble locating a mass market paperback copy of his latest Magic of Recluce novel. His response was that he had observed sales of paperbacks declining over the last decade and expected publishers to stop providing paperbacks and publishing only hardbacks and ebooks.

So at least we still have trade paperbacks at this point.

Just finished Green Mars. That was an excellent read though like Red Mars there were long travel passages with detailed descriptions of the changing landscape resulting from the terraforming of Mars. As I wrote in my review I appreciated KSR’s creative imagination in describing these landscapes but my own imagination had difficulties grasping the immensity of the scale of height, distance, volume involved with these terraforming changes. So it was necessary sometimes for me to pause my reading and concentrate what I could see in my minds eye what the characters were experiencing. Understanding the scope of the experience helped me understand the characters responses to their relationships and the social and political upheaval that is documented in the narrative. I greatly enjoyed this novel.

I am going to take about a week long break from the Mars Trilogy before starting the last volume, Blue Mars. I have a couple of short John Steinbeck novels I will use to cleanse my palette first: The Moon is Down and Cannery Row which have been sitting on my bookshelf since my university days. I think they were novels I was supposed to read for an English course and never got around to them. I got through the course without them somehow.

A 3rd novel I will also fit into this pause is genre-adjacent I guess you would say: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency which was loaned to me by a friend in the late 1980s that somehow made it into my own library when I moved for my first job. Guess I should read it! I really enjoyed the TV adaptation with Elijah Wood a few years ago.

>140 Neil_Luvs_Books: Do you plan to read the short story collection (The Martians) that expanded the trilogy a bit further? I remember liking it a lot when I read the trilogy (not on its own though I'd say - it really works only as an addition to the trilogy).

>141 AnnieMod: I hadn’t planned on reading The Martians. But I’ll look for it in our local used bookshops based on your recommendation. Do the stories take place after Blue Mars or are they interspersed among the timeline of the trilogy?

>134 RobertDay: "Ken is one of the authors I collect in hardback and was willing to pay good money for."

Oh, you too? I have seventeen Macleod hardbacks on my shelf and am still a bit salty I could only buy Lightspeed Trilogy in Trade. I also found it a bit strange that his Corporation Wars hardbacks are barely larger than MMPs. They're cool-looking books, with the artwork printed directly on the glossy covers - but they are little! LOL.

>140 Neil_Luvs_Books: I've found that if I plough through a trilogy - or worse, a series - sequentially, I find myself getting jaded with characters or the author's literary tics by the time I get to the third volume. So I shalln't be picking up Green Mars for a while yet, though the physical copy of the book is now in place in the real-life TBR pile, where it will gradually work its way to the top.

I, too, have The Martians in said TBR pile. I shall read that as part of the Mars Trilogy read. I understand that the stories are spaced throughout the trilogy's timeline, though some of them pre-date KSR's work on the trilogy proper, representing earlier thoughts. I also have the dilemma of Antarctica; I got the impression that KSR had done the research for the book because of having Red Mars' First Hundred go there for their training, and then wrote the novel to avoid wasted effort, and I also understand it has a near-future setting. So I shall have to decide whether to schedule a read of it sooner, or later. Decisions, decisions!

>143 ScoLgo: Yes, I have The Corporation Wars and thought that the publisher had made an odd choice, too. It's a long time since I've seen a mass-market hardback without a dj, let alone three in a row, and my inner collector found them strange but satisfying. But no hardback for Lightspeed? That's a big no from me.

>125 Karlstar: I just finished The City in Glass a couple of days ago. It didn't really work for me. Vo's writing is quite good but the lack of substantial plot coupled with a generations-long timeline that saw human characters come and go made for a boring read. The love/hate relationship between Vitrine and the angel was also a minus for me. I really like Vo's Singing Hills cycle of novellas/short stories but I have found her novel-length works to be mostly a miss, (have only read this one and Siren Queen so that may not be a 100% fair assessment).

>127 pgmcc: As noted in >95 ScoLgo:, I read and enjoyed Esperance as a library e-borrow a couple of weeks ago. A few days ago, I noticed the hardback of Braking Day on sale at Amazon.com for less than $10.00 USD. So what did I do you ask? Well... it is expected to arrive here this evening.

>142 Neil_Luvs_Books: Mostly interspersed - some backgrounds, some expanding, some "might have been" stories (there is something to be said about alternate history of a fictional world). I don't remember if there was anything post Blue Mars ones - sorry, it had been awhile since I read it. There are some experimental pieces in there (fictional essays, poems and what's not) but most of it is stories (and pretty solid at that). It is not crucial to read it - but I tend to miss a fictional world once I leave it so it was a nice addition when I discovered it a few years after I read the trilogy :)

>127 pgmcc: >146 ScoLgo:
Word of mouth at its best... ;)

Meanwhile I grabbed Braking Day from the library the other day and it is now patiently waiting for me to get to it.

I read The Martians nearly a decade after I read Blue Mars. I enjoyed it, but I'm sure I would have gotten more out of it if I had read it more closely on the heels of the trilogy. It has deviations from the narrative continuity of the series, but it also uses the characters and situations developed there.

>145 ScoLgo: I enjoyed the creativity, but I agree with your assessment otherwise.

>140 Neil_Luvs_Books: I just finished (and enjoyed) Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. The only other Steinbeck I've read was my mother's copy of The Moon is Down 50 years ago or more, and The Red Pony before that that might have been assigned reading.

Knocked off The Shattering Peace. I'm not sure that John Scalzi needed to return to this milieu, but I enjoyed it more than the other novels I read this month.

Just finished The Moon is Down. Wow… talk about a timely story. A narrative depicting ordinary people behaving heroically in their resistance to oppression despite the risk to their lives. I’m seeing this in the news every day these days.

>154 Neil_Luvs_Books: I just sold my copy of Klaus Mann's Mephisto because I thought it was important for somebody else to read it right now. As I observed in my review, it's about the other side of the coin: a withering assessment of the integrity of those who "adapted themselves" to tyranny.

>155 paradoxosalpha: That’s a very good review. Thanks for writing that.

Just squeezed into January 2026, a book from 1970

Finished Ben Aaronovitch's The October Man a novella about The Folly's magic practitioners counterparts in Germany.. Lots of interesting stuff about ancient germanic history,and winemaking made a nice change of place in the Rivers of London series,but I know no german at all so some of the titles and place names needed a bit of study to grasp,but a pleasant enough read.
That brings my Rivers of London titles to completion,but I havent reread any of the books. It would be fun to start again with that new recruit constable Peter Grant and watch his development through the series.The same thing with The Laundry Files too.
Now I go back to poor Harry Dresden and the rough year after the horrendous battle where he lost someone very close to him.
I have been doing very light reading this week. And its my 78th birthday today. From tomorrow must try to buckle down to some proper reading if I can fit it in.. The chaos on the world stage has consumed far too much of my time and focus in January. You couldnt make up some of the crazy stuff. It seems that crisis events went from once a week to once a day and now sometimes 2 or 3 things in one day! Madness.

>158 dustydigger: happy birthday! :)

>158 dustydigger:
Have a happy birthday. Put those unpleasant things out of your mind and enjoy today.

I finished Sassinak, which I thought was good. I moved on to the next one, The Death of Sleep, which so far is not nearly as good.

Finished The Ophiuchi Hotline. I enjoyed it. Not sure how I missed it as I read Steel Beach when it was published and really liked it.

>158 dustydigger: happy birthday!

>158 dustydigger: Happy belated birthday! I hope the year ahead is a good one.

Thanks for all the good wishes. Had a fun day,lots,er,too much chocolates and cake:0)

>158 dustydigger: Happy belated birthday!

The Death of Sleep was not very good, frankly. The writing was fine, if a little boring, but the characters and plot weren't good and there were some glaring errors. Moving on to the last book in the series, Generation Warriors.