Playing the Supplicant

Every time Donald Trump commits an outrage, he causes a comms nightmare for Downing Street. Keir Starmer cannot and will not ever risk publicly criticising the US president, never mind condemn his criminality. But even he's enough of a politician to realise that The Donald is less popular with the British public than he, and so backing Trump openly makes the chance of a polling come back even less likely. As such, Labour finds itself repeatedly in a horrible no-man's land. Starmer not only confirmed that the UK had no part in kidnapping Maduro, but that he hoped" to "have a phone call" with Trump to talk about it. "We need to establish all the facts", he said. Taking this as the cue, the always-annoying Darren Jones toured to TV studios to push the new improbable line. I.e. We care about the "international rules-based order", but it's not a government's job to pronounce on breaches of it. That's what the courts are for. The charges of hypocrisy almost write themselves.

Having lost their chief Trump whisperer to disgrace, nothing can be done to jeopardise cordial relations with the White House. In an uncharacteristic moment of honesty, the Prime Minister spelled it out on Sunday morning. That is the special relationship is maintaining Britain's status as Washington's favourite supplicant. The intelligence apparatus and the military are so thoroughly integrated into US operational command that, to all intents and purposes, the British state does not have sovereignty over deploying its forces. It always has to "inform", or to be accurate, ask the Pentagon for permission before taking action. Funny how the right in this country have never complained about this infringement of our independence.

Sundry liberals got a bit excited early in 2025 after Trump's initial bouts of rudeness. European governments realised that America was an unreliable ally and EU/NATO countries would have to look to themselves to fend off Russian subversion and aggression. This slice of cringe did numbers on social media as there was talk of "going alone" and positioning a nascent European superpower as the real bastion of liberty. But there were practical questions of collective security and these apply to Britain as well. Starmer's trumpeting of increases in military spending is a crowd pleaser to the Stop Russia Now sliver of elite opinion and allows them to believe Britain is heading in the same direction as the rest of Europe, but this is not so. There is nothing in the government's actions or comms to suggest they're looking at even slightly untangling themselves from the US "partnership".

The dominant section of the British ruling class - the commercial and financial capital of the City - is also closely intertwined with its US counterparts, and a plurality have long hitched their interests to the US as the guarantor for open markets around the world. It was therefore no surprise, considering his proximity to these parts of the British establishment, that Nigel Farage said "The American actions in Venezuela overnight are unorthodox and contrary to international law — but if they make China and Russia think twice, it may be a good thing. I hope the Venezuelan people can now turn a new leaf without Maduro." And, as we've seen, where the right goes Labour follows. Supplication and slavishness to the US is embedded in UK bourgeois culture, and that finds an echo in the common sense of "Atlanticism" in the Labour Party. And there are no crimes even the most extreme, reckless, and right wing American president in history can commit that would cause our country to step away from its subordination to Washington

. Image Credit

Trump's Venezuelan Oil Piracy

Donald Trump knows how to surprise. The bombing of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores was audacious. As a spectacle for the media, something the president has an intuitive grasp of, and the brazen contempt for international law. The US reminds us, again, that "the rules", special relationships and trusted allies, and the United Nations are so much flim-flam.

Maduro, like Hugo Chavez before him, has always been objectionable to sections of the US ruling class and their foreign policy establishment. Venezuelan socialism was always overstated, but that's beside the point. The US has been denied tribute since US oil firms were effectively turfed out in 2007 - unless they submitted to giving Petroleos de Venezuela, the state-owned national oil company, a controlling share of their operation. Exactly what Trump is insisting TikTok does as the price of doing business in "his" market. The "official" reason for Maduro and Flores's arrests and the bombing of Caracas - drug trafficking - is but a pretext, regardless of the evidence of Maduro presiding over a narco state. As this piece from November by a liberal think tank argues, regime change under American sponsorship is unlikely to stop the flow of drugs. Those of us with memories will recall that when Latin America was awash with right wing, Washington-backed caudillos they weren't much of a bulwark against the rush of cocaine to the north. Where would Trump's parties in the 1980s and 90s have been without it?

None of this needs second-guessing or hard thinking about shady motives. In Trump's press conference on Saturday morning, he said that "we", as in the US, will be selling Venezuelan oil. That "we" are going to make a lot of money, and that the US running the country won't cost anything because the cash to pay for any occupation, restructuring, and US oil interests "going in" will be met from the wealth pumped from the ground. He expects some kind of reparations as well for the "damage" Venezuela has caused the United States, and for good measure, he issued casual threats in the dircction of Cuba and Colombia.

What sundry liberals and centrists either side of the Atlantic are seeing is the US as it routinely behaved toward developing states throughout the post-war period. Trump forgoes the lip service and usual hypocrisies that attend military incursions because he's blunt about US interests, and because he knows no one is going to challenge him. The European states, which fancy themselves America's peers, have either prevaricated and avoided making a comment or fallen into line. Trump knows that when he says jump, the Europeans will do themselves a mischief trying to out-leap one another. And this is part of a pattern. The brute deployment of US firepower reflects the openness with which Trump enriches himself and the oligarchs around him. A government by and for billionaires, they don't try dressing up as anything else. And this is paralleled here too. Our own government cares little for democracy or ideas. If it collectively cares about anything, it's the future advancement of its senior members after politics. The Tories and Reform offer nothing else either, apart from more racism - which even here Labour has tried outflanking them on.

Trump's international piracy is, obviously, something he and his lackeys were agreed on. But it typifies a wider trend across the West: the assertion of authoritarianism and, with that, the open and unquestioned dictatorship of capital.

Image Credit

What is the "Stakeholder State"?

Paul Ovenden is someone we did not need to hear from again. He could have spent his time over Christmas reflecting on what cost him his job. But what disgraced former special advisor could resist the chance of redress in the pages of The Times? And at what has his spleen been vented at? The double whammy of cluelessness and cruelty that characterises the government he served? Don't be silly. The new bête noire is something called the "stakeholder state".

Picture the scene. A government is elected and wants to do things, but at every juncture they're besieged by lobbyists and campaigners. Some are from outside the state. But what is new is that within the institutions itself, even within a "neutral" civil service purposed to carry through the wishes of their political masters, there are networks of interest groups supporting and pushing issues they're exercised about. Particularly egregious are the quangos, those arms-length agencies of state that work to water down executive decisions they do not like. And where are the British people while this is going on? Nowhere. Voters don't get a look in. They're not the real stakeholders; a bloated establishment is. What they say goes, and for those inside government the weight of this machinery quickens a state-of-siege sensibility.

A couple of things about this. The stakeholder state stuff isn’t specific to Ovenden, or this government. Anyone familiar with politics memoirs will see shades of his complaints in former politicians' frustrations. It's also the inverse of the pluralist theory of politics. In the Marketplace of Ideas, different groups tussle for influence and policy. That is entirely what politics is, and parties have to build coalitions out of this to win and hold office. It's one of the first perspectives sixth form/FE students learn when studying politics. In other words, all he's stating is a banality.

The second point is this dovetails with every right wing, tin foil hat argument about the character of the state. Ovenden rightly says "It isn’t a grand conspiracy. There aren’t secret meetings or handshakes. Rather, it is a morbid symptom of a state that has got bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself." But the effect is the same. Nigel Farage's insincere whingeing about the liberal elite finds confirmation in these arguments. Liz Truss's ranting about the deep state and how it derailed her premiership is there, between Ovenden's lines. Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings's objections to "the blob" are echoed in the article's words.

What Ovenden doesn't talk about is how this form of the state came about. And, the truth of the matter is, this is what it has become after nearly 50 years of rebalancing labour and capital in the latter's favour. It was our old friend Margaret Thatcher who not only smashed and shackled the labour movement, but reconfigured the state away from a rough pyramid of clustered bureaucratic institutions to a looser collection of semi-autonomous bodies whose horizontal relationships were mediated by government-mandated markets. Business logic only works if there is competition. Meanwhile, the pre-existing expertise that existed within them was undermined and/or scrapped, and market thinking was granted the status of common sense. What happened to education, for example, in which local democracy, professional autonomy and independence, and the curriculum was done away with or reconfigured by government diktat typifies what Thatcher, the John Major government, and New Labour did to the state. But it wasn't just about creating new opportunities with a guaranteed return for (internationally uncompetitive) British capital. It was an issue of governance. In his memoir, John Major wrote with a sense of accomplishment about how shifting institutions to metric chasing and enforcing competition between departments to meet them improved the "customer experience". From a governance point of view, central government could just leave them to chase their tails. A case of winding them up and letting them go, while the relevant minister could spend their time on more interesting things outside of their brief.

Likewise, during the Thatcher years it became evident that government and governance could be outsourced. We're not talking just about the privatisations, but how the state became content to leave sectors to the province of "independent" regulators and watchdogs. This constellation became increasingly complex as charities and campaigning organisations engaged with and became embedded in a bewildering array of fields and sub-fields concerned with this or that aspect of social life. From here lobby outfits multiplied, to seemingly absurd outcomes where parts of the state lobby parts of the state. But crucially, what Thatcher enshrined and has been consolidated ever since is that government is the absolute sovereign, both as arbiter and the one point of the state that can unilaterally restructure everything else. Yet this appears to be a formality for those inside the system. Occasionally the Tories declare war on the quangos, but this same constellation structure with the executive at the centre persists. For anyone with a sense of history, its endurance as such might suggest an element of fit between contemporary politics and economics. It was all, after all, designed to be by the same sort of state functionaries now decrying it.

Ovenden finishes his article by saying it doesn't have to be like this. That is true. He talks about the power of government to change things and respond to democratic aspirations. And yet, this government, in case anyone needs reminding, has declared Palestinian solidarity protestors terrorists, wants to abolish jury trial for most court cases, is moving to shut down VPNs, and has legislated to officially scapegoat refugees and trans people. These were not in Labour's manifesto. It is true that Thatcher's restructuring of the state was minimising the democratic checks on capital, but - as it always has been - the main threat to liberty and democracy stems from the centre. Obviously, Ovenden cannot and will refuse to see it because he personifies this outlook.

Image Credit

Five Most Popular Posts in December

2025 is now history. Want to know something else that is? The posts made on this blog during December. Here's what the internet-travelling public found the most interesting during advent.

1. Going Beyond Corbynism
2. Delegitimating Labour
3. Wes Streeting's "Change of Course"
4. The Darkness of The Dark Forest
5. 10 Best Science Fiction Books Read in 2025

We began the month with something of a high - a sign that Your Party might be emerging from the cocoon of Corbynism. Subsequent developments suggest a successful emergence is far from guaranteed, seeing as the petty bureaucrats close to Jeremy have decreed that members of other parties aren't allowed to stand for the collective leadership. A ruling that clearly violates the spirit of the vote that was passed in conference. And they also decided to increase the size of the committee by two seats, subsequently rubber stamped by a barely noticed online referendum. It's all very tedious. Coming in second was a look at efforts by some sections of the right to completely delegitimise Labour. This goes beyond the usual moaning about tax and whatnot, but something that goes back to the party's foundation. I.e. That sections of the ruling class have never reconciled themselves to a party based on the labour movement, despite the supine character of Labourism its subordination of the many to the few. Rolling in at three is more Wes-for-leader shenanigans. Won't say any more for now because he's likely to feature here a few times in the year ahead. In at four was my take on The Dark Forest, one of the worst books I encountered this year. And bringing the quintet to a conclusion is the rundown of the best novels read during the year.

What am I hauling out for a second chance in the spotlight? Befitting the reflective mood, how about the most read posts of 2025 and, of course, my tunes of the year.

It's easy to get doomerist about the state of politics. The recklessness and incompetence of this government, the march of Reform, the descent of official politics into outright racism. It's all very disgusting. But at the same time, things are not going according to plan. The media's ramping up of extreme right wing talking points is happening precisely because the popular acceptance of their framing is slowly, unevenly slipping away - and this terrifies them. The long-term value shift toward social liberalism matches the changes to class composition often written about here, and the legitimacy of establishment politics relies more on inertia than active consent than at any time in recent times. The existence of a mass left-wing Green Party and, to a degree, Your Party are cracks in this unstable edifice. So yes, as 2026 breaks there are real reasons for cautious optimism. The tide of filth we saw last year can be turned. A new politics and a better future is both necessary and possible.

Image Credit

Top Ten Dance Songs 2025

The final business of 2025. The playlist to end all playlists, the hottest pot pourri of electronic beats of the year selected by your selector. The competition has been tough, but I've managed to whittle out the best tunes. Again, giving the blurb a rest this year and letting the tunes speak for themselves. Counting down ...

10. Duke Dumont, I Need You Now



9. Tiesto and David Puentez, M83 (Tiesto Birthday Treatment Remix)



8. J Ribbon, Lifetime



7. Ferry Corsten and Diandra Faye, Stay Awake



6. Einmusik, Solee, We Talk About Dreams



5. Digital Drift, I Don't Wanna (Extended Mix)



4. Corren Cavini, Valinhos



3. Albi, Sinead Harnett, If You Let Me



2. Miss Monique, Hrrtz, Jantine, Is Anyone There?



1. Ferry Corsten and Superstrings, Have Me (If You Want Me Too)

The Most Read 20 of 2025

That's enough about other people's writing, what about the words that were thrown down on this blog? It has been a quieter year than previously for a variety of reasons I won't entertain you with, but readership is up. How ironic - the less I say the more people are interested. Looking down the list of 2025's most popular, nearly all of it offers analysis of the Starmer/McSweeney implosion of the Labour Party, or what the hell is going on on the left - be it the frequently exasperating drama of Your Party, or the altogether impressive advance of the Green Party. And gazing into the crystal ball, sitting here 12 months hence I believe I'll be making broadly similar comments about what coverage attracted the clicks.

Buckle up.

1. The Politics of Noticing
2. Rachel Reeves's Pitiful Attack on Corbyn
3. The Your Party Debacle
4. Zack Polanski's Green-Left Populism
5. The Crisis in Your Party
6. The Case for Cautious Optimism
7. Going Beyond Corbynism
8. Reluctant Corbynism Revisited
9. Chamberlain Labour
10. Over for Ovenden
11. AI as an Apparatus of Capture
12. Why Labour Attacks the Disabled
13. Blue Labour and the Working Class
14. The Radicalisation of Young Women
15. Unravelling McSweeney
16. Keir Starmer Vs the Far Right
17. The Greens' Historic Opportunity
18. How Labour Could Beat Reform
19. After Angela Rayner
20. The Lure of the Racist Self-Own

And there we have it, the best of the posts as voted by the feet of this blog's viewing public. What might 2026 bring?

Image Credit

10 Best Science Fiction Books Read in 2025

We've had the bad stuff, so what makes the opposite - a great science fiction book? Despite the best efforts of literary establishments and genre gatekeepers there is no determinate criteria. Character, writing, plotting, what matters collectively shifts with the fashions, and for the individual it is as much about peccadilloes and mood as the wider field. And so sitting at the end of this year, the cuts below have been selected because of the favourable impression they made at the time and how they've (pleasantly, productively) played on my mind since. That means that while I read oft-acknowledged classics like Ursula K Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, Christopher Priest's Inverted World and the first volume of the Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer, these didn't stay with me in the same way - despite my expectations going in. There were a few near misses that did get their hooks into me. I enjoyed JG Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere, Nina Allan's The Rift, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (yes, really), M John Harrison's Light, and Ken MacLeod's Intrusion. So what edged out these great novels and made the mark in 2025? Expect something a little different to the usual best-of lists.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. A contender for the best novel I read this year, as I said at the time. A mash up of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Neil Barrett Jr's barely-remembered Through Darkest America, Bazterrica has confected a sparingly written and brutal meditation on the ultimate society of excess. When the animals are dead, why not put specially-bred human beings on the menu? Hugely hyped at the time of its translation, this is a rare work that justified all of it. The subtlety with which Bazterrica paints her horrific dystopia is a lesson more science fiction authors would do well to learn. And the story itself, with its utterly unsparing ending, is among the most impactful I've read in years. This comes with the strongest of recommends.

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett. This is Tender's immediate competition. It's some point in the future, and a couple of hundred humans are stranded on a sunless, wandering planet. Life is possible thanks to copious internal heating, a digestible biome, and a world lit up with bioluminescence. And our nascent society? All of them are descended from one pair of astronauts. Yuck. Yet Beckett handles the ick factor of in-breeding extremely well, and builds a believable setting of matriarchal social structures and fixed cultural symbolism coming under pressure from innovation, rebellion, and conflict. Dark can also be read as a meditation on the emergence of patriarchy and its reliance on physical violence, as well as the limited powers of tradition in dealing with disruption and social stagnation. This wouldn't be worth a hill of beans of the story wasn't any good, but Beckett provides his characters believable dilemmas and relatable motivations for doing what they do. Simply one of the best British science fiction novels of this century.

Bridge by Lauren Beukes. Another great book that got the review treatment. This is a drama of parallel worlds, a cross-reality hunt for the truth - and for new victims by a pitiless killer. The titular Bridge finds a weird stringy mass in her late mother's fridge. This is a dream worm, and eating its threads lets anyone drop into the lives of their alternate selves in other timelines. This might not sound especially original, but the doings Beukes embroils her characters in is a cut above. At the heart of Bridge is the tight rope Bridge has to walk between escaping her dissolute existence at the risk of greater disassociation and mental collapse, all the while riding a plot full of moral ambiguity and the uncertain stakes of potential catastrophe. Probably the cleverest of this year's reads.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F McHugh. Never met anyone who doesn't like this novel, China stands out on this list - and among SF generally - because nothing really happens. It's the near future and US power has been smashed by socialist revolution. China is the dominant world power, but we're still far from the society of associated producers Marx forecast. Zhang is a half-Han labourer in New York, and he knows his ethnicity can open doors for him. But he's also gay, which is strictly illegal. How he makes his way in this world, participating in the manned kite-racing scene, dealing with an unwanted betrothal, and surviving police raids, over the span of the novel Zhang is able to modestly advance up the pecking order. We also follow San-xiang, another American-born Chinese woman who undergoes cosmetic surgery, and Martine, a goat herder on a colonised Mars. Everything seems low stakes compared to others on this list, but what McHugh brilliantly realises is a sample of the everyday life that is hardly ever treated by a genre dominated by space opera and goodies vs baddies heroics. Believe me, this is not as dull as it sounds!

The Quiet War by Paul McAuley. Speaking of space opera, The Quiet War is spectacular. It's the near future and our colonisation efforts find most planets and moons garlanded with habitats, installations, and orbitals. This is a solar system recovering from a devastating Earth/Mars war, in which the home world emerged victorious but badly beaten. The three oligarchical big powers, Greater Brazil, the EU, and the Pacific Community variously compete for dominion and are looking for toeholds around Jupiter and Saturn. Meanwhile, the survivors of Mars migrated to these outer planets where they set up shop as Outers. Cue espionage, chases, exploding spaceships, speculative genetics, and clever plotting. Written before The Expanse, one might say some of its elements inspired what we saw later in that mammoth series. Except The Quiet War is its superior in every way - composition, character, political complexity, McAuley delivered a slice of space going SF that shows how it should be done.

Run, Come See Jerusalem! by Richard C Meredith. The oldest book on this list and we have a time travel story. Eugene Spillman works with time, and he's just been drawn into a conspiracy - to escape into the past and change history! Oh, we do love our paradoxes. Unfortunately, the plot has been rumbled by the tyrannical regime and agents are dispatched to stop the scheme. The action moves back to prehistoric North America, and then forward again to 19th century Chicago. Stumbling into the street injured, Spillman is taken in by wealthy good samaritans and nursed back to health. He then gets caught in the Great Fire of Chicago, and perhaps - if everything has gone to plan - an uncertain future. Time travel is hard to pull off well, and Meredith does not get too bogged down with silly paradoxes. This will not (nor did it) win any literary prizes, but the characters stand up on their own, and Meredith moves and down tempo as the plot requires. What results is an unshowy but satisfying timeline tapping bop.

The Kings of Eternity by Eric Brown. This just edged out his pub-based SF first contact tale, Kethani, Brown's Kings deserves a much wider audience. One leg of the book is in 1999 where reclusive author Daniel Langham is enjoying the fruits of literary success. But his voluntary exile on a Greek island has attracted the attention of a journalist looking for a scoop, and isn't afraid to use blackmail to get his story. 60-odd years earlier, his grandfather Jonathan Langham - a struggling novelist - is invited with successful SF writer Edward Vaughan to an old school friend's country pile. Their friend has discovered a zone in his grounds that is periodically visited by mysterious lights. One night, after a few swigs of scotch, they go to see what's happening. In Kings, Brown managed the tricky job of pulling off a cosy work without the cringe. His skilful rendering of character and dialogue suffuses it with genuine warmth and good vibes. You really care about the characters, and it's a mark of real craft that the pulpy elements are deftly woven in and don't come across as awkward grafts. An unsung hero of British SF.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. A huge chonker of a novel, the first in Willis's Oxford time travel sequence also comes in two halves: the "present", which is our near future, and the 14th century. Instead of getting into the business of excavating a series of small walls, the Dons are using time travel to aid their scholarly activity. Kivrin Engle is whisked back to the Oxford of 1320 just as everything goes to pot in the present. A wave of nasty flu rips through the country, hospitalising the time travel technician and shutting the country down, while Kivrin isn't entirely sure she's at the date she should be. Sadly, the two halves vary in quality. The present is, to be honest, quite boring, forced, and unnecessary. The technician, for instance, bursts into the pub unwell and tells the project team that something has gone wrong. But decides to run off before giving them specifics. He's then in and out of consciousness before finally letting them know what's happened. Oh dear. But where Doomsday shoots into the stratosphere is in the medieval narrative. The detail, the relationships, the bleakness and despair, it's impeccable. This works despite the so-so time travel stuff, and this half of the book alone is way above most of the things I've read this year.

Grass by Sheri S Tepper. The galaxy is in the grip of a plague. There's no known cure, but there's one curious fact. The people living on the world of Grass have not contracted it. The Sanctity, the church militant that rules human space send a husband-and-wife team to Grass to get to the bottom of it. They get a frosty reception from the locals and it takes a lot of coaxing to get the posh locals to admit them to society. The clans of the aristocratic ruling class organise their lives around the hunt. They ride the native alien hippae and use native "hounds" to hunt down the cunning and mysterious foxen. But it quickly becomes apparent that something isn't quite right. Young women disappear, and the needs of the aristos to go hunting borders on the pathological. What the hell is going on? Grass surprised me with its cleverness, tight plotting, and a sense of creeping dread as the mysteries of Grass are unravelled. There is plenty about the stupidity of patriarchal gender relations and the cynical use of ideology for personal gain. Rightly celebrated.

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. He made the list last year with the preceding volume, so I'm here to redress an injustice. Children of Time gets loads of praise, but I would suggest Children of Ruin is its equal. The humans and the spiders have made for a good symbiotic civilisation, so why not head off into the galaxy to see if the old, wrecked empire have left other offspring of Earth around other stars? The answer is yes. This book is about sapient cephalopods and the messy, chaotic society they build. But making things complicated is that, on the next planet over, an alien intelligence is stirring. All of Tchaikovsky's strengths are on show here. Speculative sociology, his ability to construct convincing non-human characters, and a pacey story with high stakes and thrills and spills aplenty. This demonstrates, against, why he's front rank.

Those were the 10 best science fiction novels read this year. But a shout out to a few other books. 2025 has been the first year I've read as many fantasy novels since I was a keen teenaged fan of the Fighting Fantasy game book series. The clear winner in the seven or so I read was Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone. The first in the rhizomatic Elric sequence, it had everything for someone coming back to genre fantasy after giving it a wide berth for many a year. Intelligent dialogue, complex relationships, cliche avoidance, just great stuff. From mainstream fiction, two novels vie with Bazterrica and Beckett for the best read of the year. There's Han Kang's 2021 novel, We Do Not Part, which was published in English this year. Haunting and beautifully written, its depiction of a snow storm is likely to leave you with frostbite. Believe the hype. And the second is much older, and that's Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion. I've always been a Bret Easton Ellis aficionado, and Play is the degree zero for Less Than Zero. A dead-inside young woman bounces through star-crossed marriages, bereavement, success, and mental collapse in a nihilistic masterpiece. Brilliant.

What have been your best reads of the year, science fiction or otherwise?

The Five Worst SF Books Read in 2025

My second year of binging on science fiction is nearly over, and it's pleasing to report that out of 107 SF novels and collections, I found only a handful of books that were properly annoying. Continuing the anti-festive spirit from last December, here's 2025's clutch of do-not-recommends arranged by the order I read them.

The Passage by Justin Cronin. I see this get praised a lot, and none of it is warranted. A clandestine subsection of the US government are experimenting on death row murderers and serial killers and turning them into super strength zombie/vampire monsters. Sounds like a good idea. And because of the mysterious mind powers they have, they are able to escape and more or less kill everyone. A post-apocalyptic story of survival with, of course, a special "chosen one", endless hundreds of pages are given over to cliches and characters prey to unnecessary/scarcely believable tensions that ends up imperilling them. Then there is the incredulous stupidity of the unleashed zombie/vampire virus killing everyone who lives outside of North America. A pretty dumb genuflection to US exceptionalism. If all this wasn't bad enough, the effort Cronin puts in to provide a science fictional conceit for this bloody-but-boring mess is undone by shoeing magic powers in toward the end. Terrible.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. This has such an interesting premise. It is the near future and the world is transitioning away from capitalism to some sort of eco-communism. States remain, but they're largely vestigial and ceremonial hold overs. And capitalism, as in turbo-charged faceless corporation capitalism, is confined to a few (literal) islands of influence. The main bulk of the population ignore their nonsense and live in decentralised communes organised on a geographical basis around watersheds - which makes for a thought-provoking suggestion for post-scarcity social organisation. Sadly, this is the best aspect of the novel. The appearance of cartoonish eco-conscious aliens and their organic ship that constantly shits their effluent into the Atlantic is not the ideal first contact scenario, and it doesn't get much better from there. Also, the characters always seem to be lecturing each other on pronouns, and thrown in are as many non-binary modes of address Emrys could think of. I don't want to dump too much on this book, as Emrys is attempting an empathetic SF here with genuinely different, if right-on aliens - but its earnestness does not make for a compelling story.

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber. Normally, it's his Hugo-winning The Wanderer that gets the brickbats. Alas, the absence of alien cat babes is this novel's only redeeming feature. Set around a temporal war where two factions battle over the course of history, Greta, a time-travel part-psychologist, part-comfort woman offers her ministrations to the troupe of soldiers that file through her end of a pocket universe. The Maintainer, a device that sustains this gap in reality, is stolen and someone threatens to set off an atomic bomb. All in a day's work for Greta! Sorry to say that if I could wind back time, I'd have spent the time reading this (mercifully) short work on another book. It's a complete mess and barely holds together. The problem is you get the sense Leiber is fizzing with ideas and wants to show off his distinction as an erudite writer, but here he lacks focus and falls short of a coherent and compelling novel. The definite tie for the worst novel to have crossed my eyeballs in 2025.

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. The Three-Body Problem juggernaut lands on this list. I wrote more about it earlier this month, and it gets worse the more I think about it. It's puzzling why Dark Forest makes so many best of lists. The writing is leaden, characters completely interchangeable, and human beings are by turns robotic, faddish, stupid, and hysterical. The aliens, the pulpy-sounding Trisolarians, are probably some of the worst realised in contemporary science fiction. But above all, the ideas if proffers - something which the series is often praised for - are hardly original, having been done many times before elsewhere. His "original" idea of Cosmic Sociology, a speculation about what alien societies might be like, is simply laughable and wouldn't be out of place in a collection of ravings by right-wing evolutionary psychologists. A book written to be thrown at the wall - more than once. Unfortunately, two-thirds in I'm likely to end up finishing the trilogy. So don't be surprised if Liu pops up here again this time next year.

Birthright: The Book of Man by Mike Resnick. Competing hard with Leiber for the worst-book-read-this-year award, Birthright was horribly out of date when it was published in 1982. Resnick's future history tells of the rise, fall, and eventual extinction of "Man". We are "treated" to a sprinkling of vignettes throughout that history to give a sense of how humanity conquered an empire, treated its subjects, underwent democratic revolution, and then slid into oblivion. Why we did so well was because humans were more special and imaginative than the thousands of other species we discover during our galactic rampage. All humans, like all aliens, are cut from the same essentialist cloth, and we're cast as aggressively expansionist and imperialist by nature. It's exactly the same sort of species-level dopiness Liu indulgences. But if anything, this is more badly written. Supposedly a critique of colonialism, it is not nuanced enough to even gesture in that direction. Instead it comes across as a clumsy and boring celebration of dominance, militaria, and the wily application of statecraft. Just a very, very poor book that was 40 years too late.

Rants are over. What were your worst reads of the year, be they science fiction and/non-sf or even non-fiction?

Baudrillard on Exchange

Reading quite a bit of this chap at the moment, so here's a nugget for sharing.

Merry Christmas Everyone!