I really enjoyed Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War trilogy with its fantastic characters, sentient spaceships, and nightmarish aliens. Stars and Bones may be set in a completely different world, but it has all the hallmarks from Gareth’s previous trilogy. Plus a snarky talking cat! What’s not to love?

Now that I’ve seen Part Two, I thought I’d share my thoughts on these movies. Denis Villeneuve has been behind some of my favourite relatively recent sci-fi movies. Arrival was incredible, Blade Runner 2049 was an absolute masterclass, and Dune Part One really set my hopes high that he could do great things with this notoriously difficult series. I managed to read Frank Herbert’s first Dune book shortly before Villeneuve’s Part One came out in 2021, and I have since gone on to read Dune: Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune…

I knew the Dune saga started to get weird with Children of Dune, and I thought I was well prepared for the utter insanity of God Emperor of Dune, but I don’t think it’s possible to properly prepare yourself for it. You just have to dive right in. It’s so much weirder than you could possibly anticipate.

After having utterly devoured Dr Crunden’s SFINCS semi-finalist novella, Dust & Lightning, I knew I had to read more of her work. The Outlands Pentalogy is, as the name suggests, a completed series of five novels set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future. Normally, my sci-fi tastes lean more heavily towards the kind set in and around space, like the aforementioned novella, so I’m not remarkably well-read when it comes to post-apocalyptic or dystopian stories—Neuromancer excepted.

When I picked up Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, I wasn’t expecting the tale to remind me of the Shadeward Saga. But with its high fantasy setting amid a hard sci-fi backdrop, I was pleasantly surprised. This was a pretty quick read for me and I’m finding that novellas give me a rather satisfying feeling of progress for a normally slow reader such as I am. The cover art for Elder Race is absolutely gorgeous and depicts the Tower featured within beautifully.

I hate that my first thought when reading this book was of James Cameron and his damnable smurfs. I hate the fact that I thought about those movies at all while reading Le Guin. It feels like a real disservice. Don’t get me wrong here, the Avatar movies are good fun, with great visuals and set pieces of course, and I thought the second one was better than the first. But let’s be honest, we don’t watch them for their poignancy.

Here’s my totally irreverent, irrelevant, and worst ever annual “Books of the Year” list for 2023! This is a terrible list of books. I mean, most of them aren’t even books. Why did I make this? I could’ve been playing Final Fantasy XVI, or hanging up the laundry, or literally anything else. But instead I am pleased to present to you my totally irreverent, irrelevant, list of awards to mark the end of the grand old year of two-thousand-and-twenty-three. And of course, it’s in a top-ten format.

I’m pretty happy with the amount of books I managed to read and review this year! So many were indie books, too, which was my goal. All in all, I read and reviewed 25 books up to the time of writing this post. Whenever I review books, in addition to this blog, I usually post them to Goodreads and Amazon, as well as sharing the link to the review on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Facebook, and sometimes Instagram (if I remember).

An excellent eclectic short story collection from J. Dianne Dotson. After finishing the Questrison Saga, I knew I’d be forever picking up J. Dianne Dotson’s books, because they’re a great lot of fun. I think there’s only one more book out that’s under the J. Dianne Dotson pen name: The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, and from there on, her works will be published under the pseudonym Jendia Gammon.

I picked up Daros during one of the big indie sales and oh boy was it a fun read. It’s been difficult picking between all the different books I grabbed during that one sale, and I’ve only swamped my TBR even more since then! But this isn’t supposed to be about my ever-growing TBR, even though at my average reading speed, it’ll take me over 3 years to get through. This is about Daros by Dave Dobson.

A new book from Drew Wagar is always a cause for excitement. I cannot stress enough how good the Shadeward Saga is, and as you’ll have seen if you’ve been following these book reviews, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his other works, too. It feels like a long time since we first heard about Drew’s plans for the Hegira Saga, bringing more stories to the fantastic universe of Shadeward, and then it felt like the release date for this first novel, Contravention, came upon us so fast I hardly had time to think

Alan R. Paine has a particular style to his writing that is immediately apparent, but easy to underestimate. My first experience with his style of storytelling was his contributions in the fantastic sci-fi anthology, Nine Streams of Consciousness, and then later in his NaNoWriMo experiment Faraway Sky; Ocean Deep. His works all have a deeply anthropological feel to them—akin to Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing in many ways. There’s always deep explorations of aspects of humanity and the experience of life which are given so matter-of-factly that it can be a little uncomfortable at first.

Dust & Lightning is a futuristic standalone science fiction novella from Rebecca Crunden that also kind of blurs lines with the superhero genre, and it’s honestly a heck of a lot of fun and vibes. If you’re an indie writer and not already following Rebecca on the myriad socials, then you absolutely should.

Meghan Douglass’ short indie sci-fi horror that is dark, bleak, and utterly disturbing in all the right ways. Coming in at around the 50-page mark, I blasted through Humanity Lost really rather quickly. You might think that’s not enough time for a story to make your skin crawl, but, oh boy, this did exactly that.

Ringworld is one of those classic sci-fi books that curiously seems to fall into the same kind of subgenre as Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama—that of people exploring an awe-inspiring alien megastructure no-one’s ever seen before. I enjoyed that book a lot, and so I knew I had to give Ringworld a go, especially having heard good things about Larry Niven’s work generally. So this was my first delve into his Known Space universe, but the experience left me torn.

Oh my gosh, why did I put off reading this for so long? I’ve had Duckett & Dyer: Dicks for Hire sitting on the Kindle for ages, and I’d never gotten around to it until now. And it is hilarious. I haven’t read many comedies—only Hitchhiker’s Guide, some Discworld, and Terry Brooks’ Magic Kingdom For Sale. Sold! and that was quite a long time ago. So it was refreshing to read some more sci-fi comedy, and G.M. Nair’s novel was an absolute riot.

I know I’m always in for a good time when Drew Wagar releases a new book. The Elect Saga is an interesting series; not technically new, but newly released wide. Drew announced to us on his Discord that he was re-writing and re-editing the short fan-fiction series he’d written years ago for the Elite-inspired videogame, Oolite, removing any copyright offending content, and releasing it out into the wild for all to read.

This book had been sitting on my shelf for well over a year by the time I picked it up to actually read. Such is the way of the eternal TBR. I’m glad I finally did, though. I really love the cover art for this book, and those of its sequels Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, each one taken from a single painting by John Harris, split into triptych. And I have to admit, the cover is really what drew me to Ancillary Justice initially. Well, that, and an intense curiosity about such a highly-regarded space opera. So, let’s get into it.

Ever since university, I’ve kept in the back of my mind the idea of reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Why university? Because one of my lecturers was a Barsoom super-fan. One time, I wrote an essay for his class which was about writing the preamble to a constitution for a new human settlement on Mars under John Carter. The trouble was, it needed to be 500 words. Most preambles to constitutions are 150 - 200 words long. So, using my imagination, I came up with an entire story to fill out the word-count of how these people escaped the tyranny of Earth and established a settlement on Mars.

I’ve been saving this one up for a while. I really enjoyed reading through the first three books of the Questrison Saga, Heliopause, Ephemeris, and Accretion. Their blend of space opera and fantasy with intense action was a lot of fun, and those first three are relatively short.