That time of year, for a look back at what I’ve read since Last January 1. First a quick writing update:

Have gotten a fair amount of beta feedback on FORLORN TOYS and I have to say, it looks good. Some of the positive feedback I’ve received was about pace – several readers said “page turner”! Also the cast of characters and the multiple points-of-view structure of the book seem to be working. Now, the book is in the hands of my developmental editor. That process will look at the foundations of the book – worldbuilding, characters, plot – and will weigh in on how they can be improved. I expect to get that report a bit before Christmas, and then I’ll take stock on what updates/revisions to do.

Meanwhile I’ve already started work on the follow-on. Don’t want to say much so early, but I will give the title: THE HUNGRY JUDGES. It’s inspired by some lines from Pope:

… declining from the noon of day,
the sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
the hungry Judges soon the sentence sign,
and wretches hang that jury-men may dine.

– Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

Now, on to the books!

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Adam Roberts’ Lake of Darkness is a “concept” book. The blurb proclaims this, when it says “Good is a construct. Evil is a virus.” So, how did the concept read?

The book has big ideas that are pretty cool. The main plot is kicked off when two FTL spaceships meetup to investigate a black hole. Someone on one of the ships, without warning, murders all their crewmates. The crew of the second ship intervenes and among the things they find out is there are some sort of signals coming *from* the black hole – which of course, should not be possible. Another cool thing is a subplot about a thrill-seeking adventurer, kind of like a present-day YouTuber, who proposes to walk on the metallic core of a planet. This is an undertaking of mega-proportions, including excavations of tunnels leading to aforesaid core. Finally there’s lots of sciencey and social evolution stuff just thrown out there without much comment – for example, we learn that Nobel prizes are now handed out based on worldwide popular vote, and so there are tens of thousands of such prizes every year. Coming back to the “evil is a virus” thing, as the book unfolds we see that the compulsion to murder that seized the person from the first starship is a bit contagious.

How does all this work, as a book? I give it very high props for inventiveness but in the end the story did not bring me anywhere. Not that I expect or want a Hollywood ending with Hallmark-style moral, but when I reached the end I was disappointed the inventiveness did not say more.

One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson is a short work, 128 pages. It starts out on a colony planet, a hardscrabble place. A young girl, Ella, is on a fieldtrip with her schoolmates to the place where a spaceship landed everyone some years back. The setting is meadow and forest, and Ella claims to have seen a rabbit. But we immediately learn that all of this is a computer simulation, created by Ella’s Dad. And Ella knows more about what has happened to bring everyone there than other people know. Things are going wrong in the simulation – there used to be birds but now they’re gone, and the truck that took the class on the fieldtrip suddenly disappears. A mysterious “Technician” will soon arrive and supposedly they will fix everything.

I won’t recap the whole plot, I’ll just say a lot of it is about Daddy-issues – Ella is actually 60-some years old but her father has locked Ella’s simulation at about the 5 year-old level. The meaning of the book’s title is this: Ella discovers there’s simulations within simulations within simulations. And there’s a bit of a found family ending, with Ella exploring the multiverse with some new comrades. So pretty good SF worldbuilding and story, but I would have preferred less Daddy-issue stuff.

Speaking of found-family, You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo is 100% that. The subtitle of the book, “The Disco Space Opera Book 1”, totally proclaims what you’re going to get. The main character Niko Larson is a female former admiral in the space force of the “Hive Mind”, a kind of Borg-like galactic power. With Nico are a motley crew of former teammates, including: Dabry, an eight-foot-tall, four-armed alien with Iron Chef-level cooking skills; the squidlike Skidoo; and Thorn and Talon, twin were-lions. The title of the book is the name of the sentient ship that the gang commandeers and makes their own.

How to describe the book? Umm, stuff happens, I guess. A lot of stuff. The two biggest bits involve an exiled space princess and a vengeful space pirate. Come to think of it, there’s very little in this book that can’t be reasonably prefixed by the word “space”.

How to sum up? Lake of Darkness and One Level Down were big idea books – LoD especially – and they made my head hurt hunting for deep meanings. You Sexy Thing is as close as you’re going to get to a plain ‘ol fun SF read, no deep thinking required.

It’s hard to establish a new book series. Worldbuilding is more important, you need a setting and premise that readers will want to visit over and over again. Character is always important, but for a series you need to make sure your character(s) have enough room to change and grow over multiple books. Finally, story has to be there, but no more than in a standalone – in fact you want plots that leave lots of stuff unanswered, so you can have more to write about in books 2, 3 and beyond.

The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton aspires to start a series. I’m afraid it falls short. It puts forth a space opera world with two major powers: The Unity, and The Assembly. The main character, ex-soldier Dalton Greaves, is a human who is working for Unity on first-contact missions. The problem in the story is that the Assembly sends a first contact team to the same planet where Dalton is working. So Unity and Assembly are competitors, and over the course of the action we find the Assembly are more compassionate and egalitarian than Unity. The title of the book comes from how the planetary matriarch takes a shine to Dalton and names him her consort – she already has 3, so he is the 4th.

The problem with this book is it’s too shallow. Dalton has little in the way of aspirations or problems – he’s a slightly confused everyman who serves as a vehicle to learn all the facts about the aliens, and about Unity and Assembly. In the final chapters I was skimming bigger and bigger chunks. Don’t think that I’ll look at any subsequent books in this series.

Here’s another series: These Burning Stars, the debut novel from Bethany Jacobs, and book 1 of a trilogy; it came out in 2023, books 2 and 3 came out in 24 and 25 respectively. As the winner of the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award I had high hopes for this book.

Alas, it fell short. This is another space opera. The dominant polity is called the Kingdom, and it has 3 ruling castes: Clerics, Secretaries (technocrat types) and “Cloaksaan” – soldiers. Their respective attributes are: Righteousness, Cleverness, and Brutality. As you might guess, there’s a grimdark vibe in this book, which is not to my taste. Among the main characters is  Esek Nightfoot, a hyper-competent (I hate it more already) female cleric who is driven to dominate everything she encounters – politically, militarily, and sexually. Her seeming adversary is “Six” – in the Kingdom you have to earn your name and you’re referred to by a number until you’re 15 or so – or until you die. And – who would have seen this coming? – Six is the only being in the universe who can match Esek in skills, cunning and self-centeredness.

To which I say: Ho hum. There’s a zillion other characters in this book, and they are all defined by their relationship to Esek: fearful, worshipful, resentful and so on.

I did not finish These Burning Stars. It descended into one implausible encounter after another, so I guess you could say the burning stars fizzled.

Rivers of London is the first book in a very successful series of 10. The author Ben Aaronovitch has written for Doctor Who, Blakes 7 and other series, and was GOH at BOSKONE 2024. I had high expectations for this.

The worldbuilding in Rivers of London is tremendous. The idea of elves, faeries and animate spirits being real and hidden all around us has been used in many fantasy works, from War for the Oaks (which has a real claim as the first contemporary urban fantasy) to Harry Potter. Aaronovitch’s version has an earthiness to it, I think because his conception is so tightly tied to the places and vibe of London. On top, the notion that you have detectives who specialize in supernatural crime is also not new – “ghost detectives” have been a staple of Asian fiction for centuries. Again, bringing the idea into Scotland Yard and having rivalry with non-supernatural crime fighters made it fresh.

Now the bad news. This book desperately needs an edit. There are more than a few “traveloguey” sections of several pages where Aaronovitch waxes at length on the details of Covent Garden, or the decor of a river spirit’s flat. And the main character Peter Grant is not my fave, and in fact is kind of a jerk as his romantic interests oscillate between his human friend Lesley and various female animate spirits.

But still, I’m glad I read it. I can see why there were nine more after the intro.

I got Future’s Edge after reading a review in Locus, that said “Future’s Edge is a fun, generally fast-paced space opera.” Also the book’s blurb alluded to space archaeology, which also features in my work-in-progress FORLORN TOYS, so I thought I’d see this author’s take on it.

This turned out to be another story about a thrown-together band of plucky adventurers striving to save all life in the galaxy – no pressure, right? The archaeology was extremely light: sometime in the past the main character got exposed to a 50+ million year old alien artifact and something happened that essentially gave her super-powers. Now the plucky band is on a quest to get back to that artifact because it is the key to thwarting the “Cutters” – savage aliens bent on killing everything. One interesting fact: The main character, Ursula, has an ex-boyfriend, Jack, captain of the warship Crisis Actor. When Ursula meets up with Jack, he is now *married* to the Crisis Actor – it is an AI sentient ship that can manifest in a robotic humanoid body that, like Data from the Enterprise D, is clearly “programmed in multiple techniques”.

This book has a lot in common with You Sexy Thing. It could be that cozy Science Fiction is a bigger trend than I thought.

Next to last in SF & F is Slow Gods, by Claire North. I also came to this from reading a review in Locus, that ended “I hope Slow Gods will appear on awards bal­lots, best-ofs, and many to-be-read piles. I expect it to prove to be one of the best science fiction books of 2025.”

The book certainly lives up the the “slow” in its title. Now,  I don’t need firefights and amazing discoveries on every page, but you have to give me something. The main character is named  Mawukana na-Vdnaze, who thankfully goes by “Maw”. After some grim dealings on his home planet – there everything you do, including just being born, incurs debt – Maw is made to pilot a starship. Because of the way the author conceives of FTL travel, the brains of pilots rarely survive more than one trip. But something happens with Maw and it turns out he can survive and remember multiple trips. This makes him the natural vehicle to chronicle a slowly unfolding – over centuries, if not millennia – catastrophe of supernovae and the waves of destruction they project.

For me, all this chronicling is a major problem. I’m 33% into the book and I’ve yet to see Maw do anything. He sees, he relates what has happened, but not much else.

There is an aspect of the book I find maddening: tons of synthetic pronouns. Because there’s lots of alien species and lots of new, alien-specific genders, apparently he/her do not suffice. So we get sentences like “I looked to Rencki for advice, but whether because qe had none or qis processors were occupied elsewhere, qe said nothing.” Other formulations include xe, xer, xis, and te, ter, tis.

The Locus review pointed out cases of political allusion in the book. I’ve yet to really get that. The starting point of the society obsessed with debt is so heavy handed its more like a cartoon; I haven’t yet got to other political references. Regardless, I’m put in mind of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous dictum on the purpose of literature: “To entertain, and then to instruct.” So far, Slow Gods is not entertaining me.

Tales of Galactic Pest Control is 33 stories, mostly new, some old, and all about dealing with alien pests – or i should say, pests that are alien to the residents, as in a few stories it’s humans that are the pests. Here’s a sampling of what you get:

• David Gerrold explains how tribbles came to be and what they really mean.
• Stephen Chappell writes about Clyde and Ray from Acme Pest Control dealing with a transdimensional wuzzlesneus.
• In a story from 1950, Reginald Pretnor relates how gnurrs come out of the woodwork, and how they can be used in war.
• In the Slime of Life, Edward M. Lerner tells how a sentient planet deals with that most pernicious infestation, men.

This is old school SF story telling – much recommended.

Writing

When I got Future’s Edge by Gareth Powell, Amazon had a deal where I could get About Writing for free. This is a “craft” book – the category writers use for books about how to write.

For me personally it was not super-enlightening, but if I had read it  3 years ago, it would have had a much greater impact on me – it’s just that I’ve already absorbed a lot of what Powell writes about through other books and experiences. But if you are interested in writing and want to explore making a go of it, this is the most inclusive book I’ve encountered. The structure is great. It starts with practical advice on how to organize as a writer – for example you have to take a lot more notes than you probably think – Powell’s recommendation that note-taking and idea recording have to be part of your day-to-day is solid. Likewise, his emphasis on knowing what your book is about – the theme and the idea, as to opposed what happens in it – is spot on. Then the book goes on to more detailed topics: Knowing your genre; How to get published; Finding an agent; Working with editors; Marketing your book; and so on.

The book has lots of Powell’s own experiences and techniques, which makes it more real-seeming. One of those examples gave me the one really new thing I got out of this book: I’ve been seeking an agent for 2 years now. In that time I’ve got hundreds of rejections. Many say “I just didn’t fall in love with your book”. That made me grumpy – what is this, Valentine’s Day? But Powell pointed out that getting an agent who doesn’t love your book makes no sense – how can they wholeheartedly sell it otherwise? Now while those rejections still sting, its not the fall-in-love part that’s responsible.

Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, a 2025 Hugo winner, was an eye-opening book. You can’t be an  SF fan, much less an author, without having awareness of the connections the genre has to the far right: You probably know about sad puppies, that Heinlein had a strong affinity to right-wing tropes, or that Orson Scott Card is highly homophobic. But for all that, I always had the sense the genre, almost by definition, was inherently forward looking and would leave those negative ideas behind.

Speculative Whiteness paints a grimmer picture. On the 1st page you learn how the first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by an SF fan, who was in turn inspired by a far-right SF author. From there the book jumps to define metapolitics – a political model that leverages popular culture to build a sense of inevitability or inherent rightness behind a movement’s ideas. The book’s thesis is that the far-right connection to SF is a metapolitical strategy intended “to transform white nationalism from an unthinkable possibility into an inevitable future.” A critical bulwark of this strategy is the worldview that only white-people are mentally equipped to envisage the future. Every time a far right figure asserts that people of color are unable to plan rationally and can’t resist acting impulsively, they are laying claim to the idea that only white people can create meaningful SF.

The book has 4 sections: An introduction explaining metapolitics; “Invaders from the Future”, that covers Nick Land, the appropriation of geeks and nerds as natural alt-right members, and how genetics will eventually lead to a “marching morons” world that the nerds have abandoned ; “Whitey on the Moon” about the tension of NASA spending to send white people out to explore, vs. the ignored plight of non-white people; and a conclusion, “Tomorrow Belongs to Everyone,” a short piece that highlights recent progressive SF responses to the alt-right.

Speculative Whiteness could be “too much information” for the average fan. But if you care about the genre and/or intend to work in it, I would say it is an essential read.

Although Reverse Colonization, by David M. Higgins, is cited in Speculative Whiteness, that is not how I happened on the book. I came across it in this Substack, by Noah Berlatsky.

The subject of the book is stories where white people end up on the receiving end of being colonized. Probably the best well known such story is Wells’ War of the Worlds. Why do these stories exist? The book cites several drivers:

• By claiming the role of the victim, colonizing societies perceive justification for their actions.
• Through the acts of resistance typically presented, colonizers create a narrative of their own resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.

This is a dense book that examines its subject from many angles. For example the chapter “Victims of Entropy” looks at the writing of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, relative to the theme of imperial decay. Higgins asserts that Elric – sickly and weak – represents the British Empire and the his sword, StormBringer – black, vampiric and addictive – represents colonialism, which the Empire is trying to break away from but never totally can. Too florid of an analysis? Maybe, but I can’t deny it is thought provoking.

A data point on how relevant this is outside of SF: The Substack I linked to at the start of this bit is entitled “How Fascism Explains Trump’s Tariffs.” In the article Berlatsky notes how often Donald Trump says other countries are “ripping us off”, “making us look like fools”, and “they have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before … nobody’s ever seen anything like it.” What Trump is claiming is victimhood – just like the white characters in reverse-colonization stories are victims – to justify his tariffs.

This is not a book for fans, or even very many writers. But it is a great guide to the more esoteric underpinnings of the SF genre.

“Wonderful” is the literal best way I can describe Adam Roberts’ Fantasy: A Short History. Despite the qualifier in the title, the book is encyclopedic: it covers everything from Gilgamesh through Beowulf through Bunyan, the Victorian Era, the fantasy trends and sub-genres of the 20th century, and the same for the 21st. Through all that Roberts mostly keeps an intriguing thread: Despite the common wisdom that Fantasy is somehow “about the past” and Science Fiction “about the future”, Roberts contends the opposite is true. Over and over again SF takes something in the past – like WW2 – and projects those same circumstances onto an imagined future; while Fantasy concerns itself with worlds that never have been, but could be. Some highlights:

• The seminal influence of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
• The relationship of WW1 not only to Lewis’ Narnia Books and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but to The King of Elfland’s Daughter, The Worm Ourobouros, and more.
• The Ballantine and DAW Books Fantasy “boom” of the 70s and 80s.
• Romantasy, Grimdark, and Video Games.

This is a scholarly book, but highly readable. Recommended for authors and fans alike.

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a book in the mold of Fantasy: A Short History – though I should say the other way round, as Fussell’s book preceded Roberts’ by decades, and takes on a culturally much more significant topic.

The “modern” in the title means much more than “recent” or “up to date”. It is an attempt to capture how different an effect the Great War had on the psyche than previous wars. The pre-modern memory would recall wars as epic, tragic, ennobling, or any other of many grand literary themes. For Fussell, the memories his war invoked were ironic, futile, pathetic. The Great War was not merely larger in scope – it was an entirely different thing than any war that had come before.

Literature is Fussell’s context to examine these memories. The range he covers is vast: the troglodyte metaphors of the trenches; the naming of the enemy, “he”, while the British are always “we”; mythic appearances, like the Angels of Mons; the “theater” of war as both reality and farce; and the pastoral homoeroticism of “soldier boy” stories.

I can’t convey in this little space what an affecting book this was for me. Anyone who proposes to write about war in any fashion must read this book – along with, I would say, John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, published in 1976, a year after The Great War and Modern Memory.

In the late 90’s, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, long time stalwarts of the SF genre, started a regular column in the SFWA Bulletin about the business aspects of writing. Ultimately they put out 47 such columns, most of which are compiled in The Business of Science Fiction.

The articles here date from 1998 to 2010, so this is a bit of an historical document. Even in 2007 Resnick and Malzberg were skeptical on e-books, holding that while they would eventually become popular it would take a long time. That very year the Kindle was introduced. In 2007 the global ebook market was $33 million. In 2024, it was $20-40 billion.

Yet other of their observations seem to me very relevant. Resnick had a great example on differences between agents: His first agent always sold to the same publisher and never made any foreign rights sales; he switched to a new agent that ran auctions for his books, and made 31 foreign sales in 18 months. I’d love to have problems like those – hope I get there.

Their take on conventions was interesting (Malzberg anti, Resnick pro) and their collective advice on professionalism seemed to me spot-on. One chapter titled “False Doctrines” seemed a good take on how wrong common wisdom can be. Example, in 2008 they both advised to skip the common-wisdom first step of selling a bunch of short works to magazines and then start trying to do novels. Even then the short fiction market was radically shrinking and they were right to call this out.

But in the end I have to say this was mostly a nostalgic look at a world that has since radically changed.

Non-Fiction

The first presidential election I voted in was 1980. I recall the decade as perplexing. Inflation was high – 13% – but Volcker got it down to 1% by 86. Reagan fired air traffic controllers, cut taxes, was important in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Myself, my wife and lots of our friends didn’t agree with what was happening, but all in all things didn’t seem so terrible. I daresay the years since have made clear a different conclusion.

It is the late Reagan era where John Ganz’ book, When The Clock Broke, begins. In it we learn how all the things that are so radically, tragically wrong today had their seeds in the late 80s and early 90s. Among the characters Ganz profiles:

• David Duke, avowed KKK member and author of a sex-help book for women. While he won only a single election, for Louisiana State Representative (he served 2 years,) over time he ended up normalizing white supremacy as a political position.
• Ross Perot, loopy populist billionaire (sound familiar?) who actually wanted to increase taxes on the rich (*not* familiar).
• Pat Buchanan, anti-foreign intervention, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and likely anti-semite.
• Newt Gingrich, one of the originators of winner-take-all, zero-compromise politics.

The book ends with the election of Clinton, the very year that The End of History was published, arguing that liberalism would be the dominant political theme of the years to come. That didn’t quite happen, though today various pundits and politicians are talking about “what comes after” Trump and MAGA. When The Clock Broke shows how the roots of the MAGA movement are deeper than just Trump … in that light, the MAGA movement may last longer than expected.

If you are interested in politics, this is highly recommended.

Abundance by NYT columnist Ezra Klein and contributing writer at The Atlantic Derek Thompson has been the subject of mixed responses from Progressives. On one hand many like it because it optimistically echoes the big goals of the New Deal era; on the other, many condemn it as inherently elitist and non-responsive to the most important injustices in the US. So, what is “abundance”?

The core idea is that the origin of many of our most pressing problems, around housing, energy and transportation to name a few, is in scarcity. Housing is super-expensive because there is not enough of it. Same for energy. The argument Klein and Thompson make is this scarcity is an unintended consequence of government policies – many of them supported by progressives – that individually are reasonable but in the aggregate create major roadblocks to making new stuff. An oft-cited example in the book is the California High-Speed Rail Project. Originally conceived in 1996, the idea floundered for years without a clear vision. In 2008, voters approved $33 billion for it. In 2011 when Jerry Brown returned to the governorship, he made it his signature project. The Obama administration strongly supported the project. But in 2018 Brown started lowering expectations, and Newsom, governor since 2019, dinged the project as too costly and taking too long. Today construction is active on only 119 miles of track, out of a total length of 776 miles.

The cause of this non-progress? The book submits it is the massive amount of negotiation – over eminent domain, over environmental impact, with unions, and more – that holds everything back. While many might debate the conclusion, its hard to get over the fact that in Canada – which has laws, government, and unions much as we  do – builds a kilometer of rail for $295 million, while in the US it costs $609 million.

Abundance by itself is not the answer we need. But ignoring its arguments risks condemning us to the same old/same old. Highly recommended.

The Notebook, by Roland Allen, is a kind of book I love: Exploration of a workaday, overlooked bit of history that has had unexpected impact over centuries. The title tells you what it is about. Some highlights:

• Paper first was manufactured in volume in 13th century Italy. Empty ledgers were among the very first things made from the paper.
• Ink can easily be scraped off parchment, but it sinks permanently into paper and can’t be erased. Italian merchants seized on this property and starting recording financial information in notebooks. Around this time they invented double-entry bookkeeping.
• In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer was an English diplomat in the court of Genoa. There he learned about Italian commercial innovations, read the Decameron, and became a convert to the Italian practice of zibaldone – a vernacular journal where one copied passages from books you read, before the valuable book was returned to its owner.

This book encompasses a lot – police notebooks, author’s notebooks, journaling as self-care, naturalists notebooks and too much more to list. If you have an interest in the important minutiae of history, this book is for you.

I’m reviewing Farewell To Reality and The Ant Mill together because they are both about the same thing: The state of theoretical physics today and how it got there. I read these books because in THE HUNGRY JUDGES, theoretical physics plays a part, and I want to get a sense of the terrain.

I daresay most SF fans have at least heard of The Standard Model, String Theory or possibly Quantum Gravity. The Standard Model is the framework of particles, forces and their interactions that make up matter and energy: protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, bosons, fermions, electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, stuff like that. The Standard Model doesn’t have a good answer for gravity – it postulates gravity is “transmitted” by a particle, the graviton, but this has not yet been proven. The first bits of the Standard Model date from the 1920’s, and its greater part was in place by the late 80s. In 2013 the Higgs Boson was confirmed.

The Standard Model explains a lot but not everything. So for decades that is exactly what many physicists have been pursuing – a Theory of Everything that unifies Relativity and what it says about space and gravity with the Standard Model. String Theory first emerged in the late 1960s and has been through too many iterations and side-branches to count. Quantum Gravity is more of a category that encompasses many discrete theories, like Loop Quantum Gravity, M Theory, or Noncommutative Geometry.

Jim Baggot and Jesper Grimstrup in their respective books cover the landscape I’ve outlined. But their purpose is not purely informational; they jointly make the same case, that, for decades theoretical physics has been stuck in a closed loop, making no progress. The crux of this is how these candidate theories are virtually pure mathematics – while the relevant super-complex equations may balance out, there’s no way to experimentally prove their assertions. Without the pressure and confirmation of experiment, this work devolves into a kind of navel-gazing tribal activity – Grimstrup cites personal experiences of how certain conferences are informally “String Theory only” while others are “Loop Quantum Gravity only.”  Researchers work on papers that are increasingly small refinements of their chosen tribal theory. And they have many co-authors, because in the physics science establishment, numbers of publications and numbers of citations all add up to more grant money.

If you are interested in this, YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist herself, has many videos on the topic.

So in my layman’s reading, the human race is not much closer to a “Theory of Everything” than it was 30 years ago. Maybe for me as an SF writer that’s good – since the specific answers to this stuff are not known, then I can just make stuff up! My main candidate to steal from is The Information Theoretic Universe.

And The Winner Is …

My favorite book of 2025 is not going to win a Hugo, be a bestseller, or even a medium-seller. It’s a Fantasy story with likeable, grounded characters, enough of a plot to keep you reading, an easy-going style, and *not* grimdark but with an optimistic message. It is a very authentic book, that is no more than it needs to be.

The book is Whisperlights, by Canadian Philosophy professor/Author Brendan Myers. In it we meet the twelve year-old Athena Kildare, her mother and father, and mysterious wizard/mentor Dubhdarra, who Athena claims materialized into a man out of a flock of birds. Dubhdarra gives Athena a magic token that will allow her to call upon him three times, then departs into mists. Not long after, Athena her parents, and her whole village are abducted by soldiers, as laborers or conscripts.

This is where the journey begins. Athena must abide her captivity a while, growing and learning. When the time is right, she breaks free. Then, aided by chance companions and sporadically guided by the faerie-like whisperlights, she seeks the Scatterlands,  which contain the Gates of Morning. There, Athena will demand of the gods why they allow so much injustice in the world.

No, it is not a super-philosophical, allegorical kind of book, and that’s one of the reasons I like it. Myers keeps a light touch on his theme, with a good flow of action and rest, success and betrayal, all the stuff a good genre story should deliver. And the ending, I daresay very true to his Canadian outlook, is entirely common-sensical.

I’m looking forward to this author’s next books – I hope others will check him out.

Whew! A longish post, to be sure, hope people will get something out of it. Let me close with a snippet from the just-started THE HUNGRY JUDGES, where one of our heroes, Promakos, is talking with their aide de camp Andrew:

“It took some doing, but I have contrived a shipment for Vargas Station, fifty-four containers classed as ‘repair components’. At the same time, I have completed arrangements with the factor on Zerua for twelve kilograms of plutonium 239, also to be delivered to Vargas. Finally, all non-Hellenic operations on the station have terminated, everyone not an H-S employee has vacated.”

Promakos inclined their head gently.

“Excellent! No one can do logistics like a soldier – you have my thanks.”

Andrew blew out their cheeks.

“Don’t thank me yet. The time may come when you wish I had not enabled you to build three fusion bombs.”

“Four, or possibly five,” Promakos corrected. “I believe we can improve on standard designs and use less plutonium per package.”

“I wonder why we even need one,” Andrew gave back, almost wistful in his tone.

“Andrew, I daresay when we are certain of the need, it will be too late to build that one bomb.”

Till next time …

This weekend past Kim and I attended BOSKONE 61, at the Westin in Boston’s Seaport District. Seeing as it’s been 40+ years since I went to one – my spotty memory tells me I saw the trailer for STAR WARS at the 1977 con – it felt like I was due. And more to the point of something, since now writing (and hopefully selling) SF books is my job, this was an opportunity to reconnect with today’s SF & Fantasy zeitgeist, as it were. Below are my scattered observations and reflections on the whole thing.

The Vibe

I had no set expectation of the what the atmosphere would be like, other than vaguely nerdy. The nerd was definitely there – gents sporting steampunk kilts is a strong indicator. Overall though the feeling to me was pretty quiet. Maybe all of us wearing masks cut down on ad hoc conversation, or pushed it to the food and drink areas? Hard to guess at attendance, my estimate was 1,000 – 1,200. Since we were there only for the daytime program, maybe we undercounted?

A definite thing both Kim and I saw right off was that con-goers were definitely on the gray side, in which we include ourselves of course. I think this is a well-known thing, as documented here; in the 1950’s the average SF reader was in their 20s, today that average is in the 40’s.

My experience was people were friendly, orderly in queues, and all clearly happy to be there – since my most recent experiences with convention-events have all been in the high-tech world (cutthroat is not an inapplicable word there) that was a welcome and enjoyable difference.

The Panels

This was my focus at BOSKONE. I attended seven panels and two “kaffeeklatsches” – roundtables with 8-9 participants. Everything I took in was writing- and publishing-oriented, but for one science-themed panel.

General observation: Far and away the most common answer panelists would offer to questions, either from the moderator or the audience was (wait for it ….) “It depends.” I get that every story is different, in some way at least, and that there’s no magic formulae for things like getting an agent or being traditionally published (otherwise we’d all have agents, right?) but, c’mon. I would have liked to hear more of the panelists’ personal views on the things that got raised.

That to the side I got value out of pretty much every panel. All About Chapters was discussion about, well, chapters – how long, how many, how to start and end and so on. Reasonable observations there on how when chapters rarely end in cliffhangers, a book feels too slow paced, but when there are too many cliffhangers, the books seems one-note and unconvincing. Your Editor is a Monster (For Your Own Good) was about working with editors. This panel included guest of honor Ben Aaronovitch; I found him informative and funny on this and another panel he was on. For example Ben reflected how he’d gotten to the point as a writer where he has the knowledge, and power, to ignore his editors, and he cited some instances how that wasn’t a good choice. Big message to the session was partnership with an editor, and reining in one’s ego.

The editor-panel was one where I asked a question. (Aside, I made a point in being upfront in all panels and I was the first audience questioner in all my sessions – so I got that going for me.) Anyway my question was about developmental edits, and how you can determine when that is a good investment. This was one of those “it depends” answers, though they did reflect on how if your book has few or no “in love with it” supporters, it’s probably not a good use of resources.

The Alternative Publishing panel was super-informative for me. Going into this I thought of alternatives as primarily self-publishing, with a tiny bit of so-called small press – publishers, many of them decades old, that are like the big houses but focus on the SF genre and its sub-genres. What I found is there’s an eco-system of three-four person “presses” that outsource a lot and focus on a really small number of titles. Such a concern might be two authors, an editor, and a jack-of-all-trades, all working part-time.

Last panel I’ll highlight was Story Structures Other Than the Hero’s Journey. If that’s new to you, quick summary: Joseph Campbell synthesized an idea of a “mono-myth”, a universal template for heroic stories that many myths and fables employ, and that gets endemically used in storytelling today. Example: Luke Skywalker is told by Obi-Wan he should go off and fight the Empire; Luke declines, saying he already has a life; His aunt and uncle are killed and Luke takes on the quest; Luke finds his helpers in Han, Chewy and Leia, and also has the talisman of the lightsaber; Yoda becomes Luke’s mystic mentor and also tests Luke in the cave … I won’t reiterate the whole plot of STAR WARS but every one of these is a hero’s journey step. IMDB lists thirty-five hero’s journey movies; Goodreads has twenty-seven books.

Problem is, as much as this story structure works and is generally satisfying, it’s predictable and frankly corny. The panel was supposed to be about alternatives to it.

I wished they dug into the topic more. There was a lot of critique of Campbell – he really cherry-picked myths to get to his “universal” conclusion. And there was a lot of cultural commentary, about how hero’s journey is “too western.” I guess I agree with that, but this part of the discussion was too much about cultural identity and not enough about story-telling.

My question to this panel: Are there examples from literary fiction, where hero’s journey is rare, that we can draw upon to write new SF & F stories? All the panelists but one were stumped by this, unable to name a single literary work, let alone discuss one. The outlier – Ben Aaronovitch, who suggested I look at The Salteaters, a book from 1980 about black faith-healers in a fictional southern city.

I’ll close this part with the kaffeeklatsches. I’ll do the second one first, hosted by Dana Cameron. Dana started writing mysteries, then went on to urban fantasy, and some horror, and now is developing a historical noir set in 18th century Salem. I really wanted to hear some tips and advice from an actual working author … and, as way back in the day I worked in tech with her husband James, I had a bit of an intro. Was a great talk, about things like maintaining focus while writing, books we’re reading, and goings-on in the publishing world. Also present there was Nicholas Kaufman, a mystery/fantasy/horror writer.

The first kaffeeklatsche I went to was with three agents, those divine beings with the power to elevate one to being, ah, “agented.” The lead was Joshua Bilmes, who has been working SF&F for forty years; with him were John Berlyne and Stevie Finegan of the Zeno Agency (UK); Joshua’s JABerwocky Agency does US-rights for Zeno authors. This  was a fantastic nuts-and-bolts talk, though not without its “it depends” moments. All nine of us at the table were authors, aspiring or low-midlist-ing, all eager to get quality advice. Some of the Q&A:

When should I follow-up on a query, is three weeks too soon? I was surprised at this, even I know the answer is, you don’t. Joshua made that plain when he said, “My preference for you to follow-up is never.” The agents did talk about how packed their days are; consider they may work with 20, 30 or more clients. While that work is very sporadic – clients spend most of their time writing – sometimes it gets intense.

I’ve self-published some books, is it possible to now get an agent and a traditional publisher? I was pleased to hear the answer, that while in the past the answer was “no”, today it is a clear “yes”. What matters is the quality of your work. There’s even a small advantage in self-publishing, in that it demonstrates ability to finish something, and to do things  like marketing on your own.

One of my questions, If after months you’re having no response/requests for more info in querying a book, is it better to revise the book and try again, or start fresh with a whole new book? There was some “it depends” waffling, but Stevie had the answer I wanted: “Every next book you write will be better than the previous. Better to push forward with the best possible product. And your previous books will still be there.” I may well face this very situation and I’ve started a new work – hearing this from someone in the biz upped my confidence in that path.

Final bonus nugget of wisdom, from John Berlyne in response to a question on query letters:

“Original” is a dirty word in this business, never put that in your query. Publishers don’t want original, they want things like what’s selling already. Besides, if your work is original is not for you to say.

The Art

The art show and auction was small (or so Kim tells me) in comparison to other cons she’s been to lately, like Anime Boston. We were able to see it all in thirty minutes I’d say. No major themes, I’d say fantasy art slightly predominated over SF. Only a small amount of spaceship art, it seemed robots, steampunk and aliens were more prevalent – that and dragons, krakens, and maidens stopping/strolling/ running through ethereal forests..

The three examples above are pieces we came away with.  The birds on either end were free giveaways, from the collection of Abby Cinii, an active and much-beloved fan who passed away in 2020.

The piece in the center we bought, it’s the work of Anne E.G. Nydam, a blockprint-artist and poet. Anne was on two of the panels I attended and her affection for her subject matter of animals and the natural world really impressed me. I’m looking at getting her bestiary, On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination.

The Books

I was amazed at the variety of books on offer, literally hundreds of titles you will never find in a bookstore. For me there seemed a lot of focus on specific audiences – for example, if you like books about gender-curious werewolves, well, there’s likely such books there. Which is all fine.

I selected the four books above partially at random, partially because they were authored by panelists. I wanted to both take advantage of the opportunity to get books I’d otherwise never see or consider, and to support the larger community – if Science Fiction and Fantasy gets reduced to just what you can get on Amazon, or what comes from traditional publishers, that would be a loss.

The Takeaway

So there it is. Now that I have this baseline, for future cons – not just future BOSKONEs but Readercons and I’m sure others – I can target what I see and do much better.

For BOSKONE 61, it was a great weekend and a valuable one. Maybe it’s over-confidence (not always bad) but I came away thinking, I can do this author thing. And I’m also confident that somewhere in all the myriad identities I saw in play,  there’s space for an irreverent, judo-expert, spaceship-piloting woman investigator, and her grumpy alien boss.

Till next time …

In the spirit of year-end stock-taking and new-year resolve, I thought I’d record some highlights of my reading from 2023. Non-fiction first …

David Leonhardt is a long-time NYT editorial writer. Ours Was the Shining Future is a survey of American political history and progress through the 20th century to today, specifically from the standpoint of the “American dream”, that our children will have better lives than us; I think most people believe that is no longer a guaranteed outcome. The ultimate conclusion of the book is the rise of a “far left” or “academic left” in the 1960s undermined the more bread-and-butter agenda around jobs, education, and core social support that was set in place by the New Deal – seeking the perfect of eliminating discrimination and redistributing wealth was the enemy of the good of union jobs and accessible  education. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the book is a valuable survey of how we got here.

Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist who studies and writes on the intersection between culture and economics in the modern world. In this work WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic. The US, Great Britain, and Western Europe are the main examples of WEIRD societies. So, there’s no real question that these countries are more prosperous and powerful than countries in the so-called “global south” and, while the gap is closing, WEIRD countries collectively still are “ahead” of the countries of Asia. No question but that the “whys” here are complex, the history of colonialism itself makes these raw comparisons highly flawed.

Still I think Henrich’s argument is intriguing. The nutshell version: Dictates from the Catholic Church from the 1st millennium AD, forbidding cousin marriage and promoting primogeniture, undermined the historical family-tribal model of European society and opened the door for individualism. Imagine being a Gallic or Germanic tribesman, circa 500 AD. Your life would be determined by your family, and you marrying your cousin is what your family would choose – that strengthens the family because, unlike an outsider, your cousin can be trusted. Your overlord has probably sired children with multiple women, all of whom have a stake in the overlord’s domain. Now when the church forbids all that, you have to marry an outsider. Your family is less and less able to control your life, so you start making your own decisions on who to marry and how to work. You might leave the farm, move to Wittenberg and join a guild. Meanwhile the overlord has to invest in alliances, accommodatio and politics, he can no longer rely on a pre-made army of sons with their respective armies to fight for him. Finally, the book is not just supposition, there’s lots of data and current studies, my favorite of which is embodied in this question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Spoiler: 2/3rds or more people in WEIRD societies answer that people *can* be trusted; in non-WEIRD societies, its only 1/3rd. This higher level of trust lets us form partnerships , make contracts and do all sorts of cooperative things more easily and at a higher rate. Anyway, cool book, highly recommended.

Mark Z. Jacobson’s No Miracles Needed is an exhaustive review of how with wind, solar, and green hydrogen, we have all the tech we need to respond to climate change. Someone on the interwebs telling you we absolutely must have carbon capture or we’re all dead? This book is the encyclopedic answer to how that ain’t so. Also covered here, something new to me when I read it, is the ongoing cost of air pollution – every year 7 million people die due to direct effects of combustion pollution. A must-have reference for anyone who wants to discuss this issue at a detail level.

Last in non-fiction, Ed Yong’s An Immense World. In keeping with its subject – how the five senses work for all manner of animals – this is a sensual, easy-flowing book. A concept Yong addresses early on is the flaws in thinking of senses in terms of “strength”. For example we generally assume and think that dogs’ sense of smell is “more powerful” than ours. This isn’t true as an all-encompassing statement; there are some odors dogs are unable to detect that humans sniff out pretty deftly. The discussion of pain as a sense was very thought provoking. Typically we think of sensing pain as requiring self-awareness; so fish, being obviously *not* self-aware, we conclude don’t feel pain. But fish have pain receptors similar to ours, and injuring a fish causes brain activity similar to our own. And injured fish exhibit behaviors consistent with “suffering”, like passing up food. The conclusion, pain for a fish is undoubtedly different than it is for us. That doesn’t mean it does not exist.

The book is a travelogue of animal sense, from mantis shrimp 12-color vision, to elephant infra-sounds, to octopus’ independently intelligent tentacles. Highly recommended.

Now on to fiction. I’ll start by touching on some less-than-favorites. First was Tough Guys Don’t Dance, by Norman Mailer. I picked this up in service of a goal to read important New England writers and this was on the list. And Mailer was famous for hanging out and writing in North Truro, where we have our beach place. In fact many of the settings in the book were familiar to me. Aside from that, book was junk – a more self-indulgent, joyless text you will never find. Every paragraph screamed, “I’m Norman Mailer so by definition this is great!” Yuck.

A goal in 2023 was to read more recent Fantasy and SF. To that end I got Babel, by R. F. Kuang. The story is about an alternate 19th century Oxford, where magic is real and is enacted by engraving text upon silver bars. The gimmick is the text is a phrase in a chosen language that embodies some idea or effect. Thus translators and linguists who understand the family trees of language are important. So the concept is clever and who doesn’t like Oxford? Babel has all the ingredients for classic fantasy of the cerebral sort in the vein of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Alas, while the writing was workmanlike, I found the story dull and the characters flat, mostly whining about trivial misfortunes while they possess unique powers to actually do things that they never really use. And I found the ending pointlessly bleak.

Last in the not-so-favorite bin was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers Book 1) by Becky Chambers. Speaking as an author (such as I am) this was a well-done book. It moved right along, the characters were differentiated and all had clever quirks and motivations, and the SF world-building was clearly thought out. But it was just not to my taste. It was kind of like a TV show – think Rodenberry’s Andromeda – with predictable characters and action. At the start a plucky heroine with a mysterious past becomes a crew member on a hyper-space bypass construction ship. The first forty pages are introductions to her new crew mates and its like the whole cast of Friends is there – there’s the brainy one, the grouchy one, the ditzy one, and so on. I am a bit amazed this won a Hugo; again its probably more about my taste than anything else.

Now on to my faves for fiction:

Also part of my what’s-current-in-SF reading were A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan Books 1 & 2) by Arkady Martine. I’m a big fan of culture as part of SF world building and Ms. Martine’s conception there is nuanced and completely credible. Galactic empires have existed since the Lensman series, if not before. Teixcalaan is an empire aware of its strength but conscious of its weaknesses. Its almost as if the leading characters sub-consciously sense the dangers of assuming a manifest destiny. A small example, the imperial police, who possess a group consciousness, are called The Sunlit. Sorry, but that is just plain cool.

The main characters are pretty good, exhibiting a gamut of moods and attitudes: funny, optimistic, inquisitive, disheartened, affectionate, and more. No one is an “epic” character, they are more ordinary people coping with extraordinary times, showing flashes of both strength and weakness in the process. For my part, this is a more credible Hugo winner.

Dragon Chaser by Tim Stretton was a fun read. Stretton was one of the drivers of the Vance Integral Edition, the preserved complete works of Jack Vance (my copy is shown at the top of this post.) So Stretton is very much a Vance fan and a writer who can emulate Vance’ voice in new, enjoyable ways. Dragon Chaser uses Vancian themes of sailing, abstruse sports, and magic, combined with a hero that is competent, tending towards the ironic, but ultimately honorable. Spoiler: No one in this story has a tragic backstory, everyone is personally responsible for their own flaws and strengths. Highly recommended.

Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell is a sort of book increasingly rare nowadays, for two reasons: First its a classic whudunit, being a story about a murder that is deductively solved by the detective; and second, it is an epistolary novel, i.e. the story is conveyed via letters read by the detective or to the detective.

These well-done structural elements are grand, but the book’s great achievement is the character of the detective, Oxford don Hilary Tamar. Hilary is witty, detached, precise, insightful, and polite less because of empathy to others but more because rudeness is inherently boorish. Last cool point: Hilary’s gender is never mentioned.

I read this before Babel – it must have set my bar for an Oxford novel higher than it otherwise would have been.

Last one to note today, Continental Drift by Russel Banks. This came from the same list of essential New England writers that gave me Mailer and Tough Guys Don’t Dance. And like Mailer, Banks is a “literary” author.

That’s the end of the similarities. Continental Drift is a heartbreaking book, the characters are flawed but hopeful, trapped by their pasts but constantly fleeing them – they’re ultimately doomed and we know it, but we have to read anyway. To all that Banks adds an almost magic scene-setting and sensuality, as the story moves from New Hampshire to Florida to further south in the Caribbean. The further south you go, the stronger voo doo becomes and the characters cannot escape its power.

I could not take a steady diet of this. But once a year or so, a book like this is a great reminder that writing needs to be about more than the three act grind with the Hollywood ending.

That’s all for now. Maybe next time I’ll share some updates on my own writing. Take care …

A big part of being a writer is reading, which you have to do on several levels. I find there’s no better source of ideas than reading, especially when you go outside your favorite categories. Four years ago I came across Gods of the Upper Air, about the early-20th century birth of anthropology as a science, transforming from an essentially racist point of view to one that strove to understand cultures instead of ranking them. This reading led to many ideas that are now part of my WIP Only’s End.

Of course there’s reading for pleasure. Some of this for me is re-reading, especially Jack Vance or Patrick O’Brian. A pleasant new discovery this year was Sarah Caudwell. Her Oxford don detective Hilary Tamar is a fresh take on the classic deductive sleuth.

But that overlaps on the third type of reading – reading for work. As Samuel Johnson put it, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” For a long time I’ve scamped keeping up with trends in my writing genres, and the past few months I’ve been looking at what is currently popular in SF and Fantasy. Writers should be telling stories out of their own vision, but at the same time ignoring what is successful in the marketplace can’t be a good idea.

Since July I’ve gone through nine or ten books, SF, fantasy and mystery. My takeaways thus far are part obvious, part puzzling. The obvious bit is how strongly character-driven genre books are today. I think of SF in particular as a “fiction of ideas”. Two examples for me as Zelazny’s Lord of Light and Zindell’s Neverness. (Hmm, maybe I should change my surname to Zalazar <g>) For both of those books what drew me in was not the protagonist’s backstory, but the richness of the idea: Technology that allows select humans to wield the power of gods and to make religion “real”, and Interstellar travel controlled by a guild of mathematical savants/adventurers. The characters in these books were powerful and well-drawn, but they were mainly vehicles to explore the idea.

The newer stuff I’ve looked always leads with the protagonist’s problem: They are on the run from some trouble, or they’re recovering from a failed romance or job, or they are struggling with prejudice and repression. I get that people have problems, and that problems make things interesting, but in my assessment these books have humdrum ideas as context. I get that not every book can have a world-shaking idea but c’mon – give me something.

The puzzling bit is how successful many of these books are, which brings me to reviews. I’m not going to name any names here but let me quote some reviews. The subject book has thousands, 79% were 5 or 4 stars, 2% 1 star. I bought the book because from the blurb it did have a big idea, something that sounded cool. Some snippets from the 5 star group:

This book is one of the finest I have ever read. There is a question, about loving someone who has hurt you so unimaginably, and an answer that made me ugly cry. I won’t spoil the ending, but you need to read this book. The language is gorgeous, and the characters are very finely drawn, and their growth is beautiful.

What … managed to do with this story is nothing short of mastery. With a narrative steeped in so much history …, one might think you are reading a reference book. However, by weaving in these amazingly diverse and complicated characters and the more fantastical elements the tale transforms into something completely new. There is emotion, double dealings, and the exploration of social constructs and race all wrapped up in a beautifully written package. This darkly … allows the reader to immerse themselves in the world the author created. The vivid descriptions, the richness of the language, and the eloquence make the experience even better.

I spent some time within these pages because I didn’t want to miss anything, absorbing the story for all it was. Every moment reading this, I would always push myself to read just one chapter more. … is truly an epic fantasy worth reading. I cannot wait to dive back in for a second read.

Sounds great, right? There’s thousands of similarly super-positive reviews for this book.

Now a look at the 1-stars:

I truly wanted to enjoy this book. Hat’s off to … for the marketing. And, there are moments where the author’s erudition nearly salvages the otherwise dull, slow-moving plot and plastic characters who, as others have pointed out, are entirely predictable, if not outright unoriginal. I waited for the hook to draw me in, but it never materialized. Meanwhile, the author’s lack of nuance and subtlety was aggravating. The mystery surrounding the plotline is betrayed by an incessant need to state the obvious. author clearly thinks very little of their readers. In the end, I absolutely *could* put it down.

After 163 pages I can honestly say there was nothing to encourage me to invest any more time because all in all the plot and the characters struck me as childish. I could not dredge up any interest in the fate of anyone and the hocus pocus of … was absurd. If you’re old enough to be out of high school read the free sample before making a purchase. I’m glad I got it on sale. Only the second book in 20 years that I read over 100 pages and did not finish and I’ve read a book a week for over 20 years. Very disappointing.

Where did I come down? Squarely in the 1-star category. The big idea fell flat, it really didn’t transform anything. The characters were stereotypes, the plot was predictable, there was a too much political commentary, and the ending was the most depressing, unsatisfying thing I can recall reading.

The puzzling thing is, there’s clearly vast numbers of people who like this. I can’t discount their opinions, but there’s nothing from their reviews I can take away to explain them. I also went back to look at the NYT and WaPo reviews of this book. Each was only a paragraph long, and I’m skeptical they were even written by the review byline author. Reviews by bloggers seem to be about 3 to 1 thumbs up / thumbs down.

If there’s any conclusion to be drawn here, it’s this: If it was possible to predict was the next bestseller is going to be, all of us would be Stephen King. Just have to keep reading and, or course, writing.

Till next time …