Here we go, time to go through the list of books read during the last quarter. And, warning, it's quite the tally.
Science Fiction in the Real World by Norman Spinrad
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock
Kala by Colin Welsh
Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
Disaster Nationalism by Richard Seymour
The Inheritors by William Golding
Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Daedalus 1: The Florians by Brian Stableford
NATO 2099 by Jaouen Salaun, Florence Gaub, Nicholas Minvielle, and Roxane Montfort
The Rift by Nina Allan
Justine by the Marquis de Sade
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Involution Ocean by Bruce Sterling
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
Tin Man by Sarah Winman
Hard Landing by Algis Budrys
The Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi
The Traveller in Black by John Brunner
Cultural Backlash by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Impact by Adam Baker
The Void Captain's Tale by Norman Spinrad
The Wind from Nowhere by JG Ballard
Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Kethani by Eric Brown
Through Darkest America by Neal Barrett Jr
Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster
The Garments of Caean by Barrington J Bayley
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
Blood Music by Greg Bear
Green Eyes by Lucius Shepard
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
After London by Richard Jeffries
Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M Lerner
Because I am reading so much, there's no chance of getting the time to write about a decent chunk of them. So from the end of April this place will shift from quarterly to monthly updates. Makes things a touch more manageable.
Following my science fiction declaration and getting nowhere fast through the vast pile of to-be-reads, thus far 2025's content (with a handful of exceptions) has been almost entirely SF. And, I'm pleased to say, it's been fair to excellent in quality. With the exception of Cronin's The Passage, that just might make 2025's list of worst SF reads for reasons that will be divulged in due course. I suppose the most surprising was Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Having read his celebrated A Fire Upon the Deep and liking it less the more time passes, I was pleased that this chonker of a prequel tome was much, much better. Perhaps a bit too long, this story of humans marooned near a world inhabited by alien spiders made for a great world-building space-based yarn, and one that has had obvious influences over Alastair Reynolds's House of Suns and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. Though I would say this is for the more committed SF fan than someone who swings in and out of genre fiction.
Quick shout outs to Brown's Kethani, the only SF novel I've ever read that spends more time in the pub than with the expected tropes. But don't let that put you off - it's great. Tesh's Some Desperate Glory looks, at first glance, like another boringly unoriginal military YA-adjacent space romp, but turns out to be something a lot more interesting and enjoyable. Anderson's Tau Zero is treated as something of an SF classic - the story of relativistic travel to a nearby star, but the ship can't stop - so where does it end up? Definitely one more about ideas that requires overlooking some awkward characterisation and dated gender themes, and in my view is worth a read. Especially given extremely recent measurements of the expansion of the universe, which might suggest the physics of the novel are not antiquarian after all. A slight disappointment was Aldiss's Non-Stop which wasn't as great as I was expecting. Still good, but not an eternal great. I also rated Allan's The Rift. We do like literary SF around these parts and that's up there with the best offerings of the 21st century.
Non-SF-wise, Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism is grimmer than any of the dark novels on this list, considering it's non fiction. I have no issues with his account of the rise of the extreme right nor with his approach to its material base, but I do think the phenomena he describes could do with a sharper term than the 'disaster nationalism' he uses. Also on the list is Sade's Justine. Ostensibly a gothic novel in the mode this blog has come to appreciate, it is violently pornographic cast over with the thinnest of veils weaved by Sade's flowery language. It is probably the most extreme work of fiction I've read, and I found it more difficult to get along with than Crash. Reader beware. But book-of-the-quarter goes to the late Joan Didion and her Play It As It Lays. A story of a fading starlet, I found the writing captivating. In Maria Wyeth we have a character disassociating from her life who dissects her experiences and relationships with wry detachment. There's a reason why Bret Easton Ellis is a big fan - effectively his entire oeuvre copies the style and sensibility Didion sets down here, and works with it up to monstrous (American Psycho, The Shards) and ludicrous (Glamorama, Lunar Park) extremes. Play It is ground zero for this jaundiced, cynical, and empty view of the world - what might be called the vacuity of literary affluenza. And I love it.
These are just a handful of titles from the list. What have you been reading recently?
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2 comments:
SF books I've read recently that you might like: Julia, by Sandra Newman, gives us the events -- and even some the dialogue -- of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the POV of Julia. It's consistent with what we actually know about the world of the book, but there's a lot going on that poor Winston Smith doesn't know. By making the true situation more realistic and realised than Orwell did, it's even more anti-socialist than the original.
Just published, and blurbed by me: For Emma by Ewan Morrison has a gripping conceit -- the video diary of a suicide bomber, counting down to the day -- and a lot to say about tech billionaire transhumanism, AI, surveillance etc. Very topical. Emotional content warning: grief and loss and regret/guilt are major themes.
Rosewater by Tade Thomson: a highly original alien contact/invasion novel, set in Nigeria. It has an almost technothriller feel, and much that seems like fantasy becomes science fiction as the story progresses, with an engaging and flawed protagonist. It won the Nommo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Its two sequels, which I haven't read, have also been well received.
Been reading Seymour too - I’m always here for his Freud-friendly Marxism. It seems to capture much that the left’s habitual economism prefers to elide. I had similar qualms about the title funnily enough. But given he (rightly) wants to avoid (simple) analogies with ‘30s fascism, I’m hard-pressed to come up with better. “Nationalism” seems essential, but what else? Also revisiting (appropriately, I suppose) Robert Fink’s “Repeating Ourselves”. Not sure if you like Reich, Glass, Riley etc as I do, but at least some of Fink’s take on “repetitive music”/“pulse-process” minimalism/disco seems to have a fair bit of relevance to the EDM you seem to like. Plus there’s Donna Summer, Baudrillard, and advertising theory! You might like it.
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