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 …