Second paragraph of third story (“Demons in Levenshulme”, by Paul Magrs):
Yaz was used to this kind of sudden call-to-arms while with her time-travelling friend. ‘What is it?’
An anthology of sequels to broadcast Doctor Who stories. Some real jewels here, including the first one, “The Verge of Death”, a sequel to The Edge of Destruction credited to Carole Ann Ford, Rob Craine, and Beth Axford; “Demons in Levenshulme”, by Paul Magrs, which is a Thirteenth Doctor sequel to The Dæmons; “Take Our Breath Away”, credited to Katy Manning, a breathless what-happened-to-Jo-Grant story; “Harry Sullivan and the Chalice of Vengeance”, by Mark Griffiths, which is a Fourth Doctor sequel (sorta) to The Christmas Invasion; and “Afterlife”, by Alfie Shaw, expanding on the moving webcast P.S. by Chris Chibnall, about Rory’s father and son awkwardly bonding after the events of The Angels Take Manhattan. The fact that I’ve mentioned more than half of the eight stories as particularly good speaks for itself. You can get The Adventures After here.
I normally like to credit the editors of anthologies, but no editing credit is given here. BBC, please do let your talented editors emerge blinking into the light!
“The way ’e notices, you know. Never forgets so much as anything,” she would confide to other nurses as they pursued their way toward the gardens. “Knows ’is own mind, ’e does, and isn’t afraid to let you know it, either.”
I was moved to pick this up by a mention in Jon Pertwee’s autobiography that this was the book which established his father as a successful writer. I am not sure if that is true, but it’s definitely the case that it was published in 1919, the year that Jon was born. (Jon was the younger of two sons; his older brother Michael was an actor and screenwriter, whose most famous credit is probably adapting Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for the cinema.)
Our Wonderful Selves is not a great book, and having recently read all of H.G. Wells’ fictional output from the start of the twentieth century, I think I know what Roland Pertwee was trying and failing to match.
His protagonist is a really unpleasant writer, who manages through arrogance to get a big theatrical opportunity for his Art; he bullies and plans to betray his wife, who has dedicated herself to making it possible for him to promote his talents; and his much smarter uncle saves the day by reconciling them. Really, it’s not a very convincingly happy ending; he is unlikely to reform, and she would be much better off without him. Given the writer’s own shaky marriage, he may have been writing in part to work through his own demons.
Pertwee’s top book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Islanders (1951), for younger readers, about three boys who get to live by themselves on an island in Devon and fight off the Romani. I think I’ll give it a miss.
This was the non-genre novel that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton, but I will leave it until either I finish all the books acquired in 2022, or it bubbles to the top of my 2023 pile, which will probably happen first.
He turned from that at last, and made his way back inland. He felt empty and light-headed. He supposed he should try to find something to eat—it must be late morning, and he had vomited up the few sardines he had had. But the hunger which had been ravenous then was as markedly absent now. The feeling was something like drunkenness: he contemplated his state with mingled pity and grandeur. The last man left alive? The Robinson Crusoe of planet Earth? It might be so. The silence went on, and the sky stayed blue and vacant.
I had read this as a teenager, and spotted it in Buxton and decided to return to it. I feel it’s an overlooked classic, probably due to the success of the same author’s more optimistic The Death of Grass from a few years earlier.
The premise is that massive global earthquakes destroy civilisation; our protagonist finds himself one of the few survivors on Guernsey, and sets off on a quest to find his daughter in Sussex, made easier by the fact that the English Channel is now dry.
The depiction of the devastated landscape is vivid, but even more so the portrayal of a human society which has degenerated into straggling groups of survivors perpetrating rape and pillage on each other. It does take us some time before we meet a convincing woman character, and there’s a bit of a sense that the worst of the disaster is that the comfortable middle classes have been eradicated, leaving the world to the yobs, but all the same it’s a memorable picture. There were lines that I remembered well from thirty-plus years ago, and there are striking images that will linger with me for a long time.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Jordan under today’s boundaries.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Appointment with Death
Agatha Christie
68,580
4,513
Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life
Queen Noor
10,227
1,459
Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist
Dorothy Gilman
4,792
859
Married to a Bedouin
Marguerite van Geldermalsen
3,786
261
Forbidden Love / Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan
Norma Khouri
1,688
313
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril
Abdullah II of Jordan
935
169
Fencing with the King
Diana Abu-Jaber
1,088
83
Pillars of Salt
Fadia Faqir
710
110
Starting the year with a colonial adventure, in which Poirot is summoned to the rose-red city of Petra to solve the murder of a tourist. Agatha Christie also featured on the lists for Syria, Morocco and Iraq (twice), and topped the Egypt chart, though I disqualified her from Zimbabwe.
It is striking how many books on the list are about foreign women encountering Jordan. Queen Noor is an American who married a Jordanian in 1978, Marguerite van Geldermalsen is a New Zealander who also married a (less prominent) Jordanian in 1978, Norma Khouri is another American (and her supposedly factual book was exposed as a hoax), and Diana Abu-Jaber was also born and brought up in America to a Jordanian family. The fictional Mrs Pollifax is an American secret agent pretending to be a tourist.
The top author on the list who is actually from Jordan is King Abdullah II, and the top woman author from Jordan (given my caveats about the others) is Fadia Faqir.
I disqualified all of Robert Jordan’s books, which are frequently tagged “jordan” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. I also disqualified Six Days of War, by Michael Oren, because most of the then Jordanian territory where the 1967 war was fought is no longer regarded as Jordanian, including by the Jordanian government. There is additionally some confusion about other Middle Eastern countries, with books set in Syria and Lebanon (and possibly Saudi Arabia) popping up too.
Three of the next four countries will be Caribbean: we head to the Dominican Republic next week, then back to the Middle East for the U.A.E., then back over again for Honduras and Cuba.
I set myself a little project at the start of November: to post a list on Bluesky of my favorite book published each year since 1846, three a day, so covering the 60 days from 2 November to 31 December. Obviously I prepared the list several days in advance, and then published the posts usually along with my mid-morning coffee.
In almost every case, my choice for top book of the year is the one whose title makes me go “Oooh! I have good memories of reading that!” Often these are classics, because almost by definition a classic has provoked that reaction from a lot of readers. Sometimes they are books you may not have heard of, and maybe I’ll inspire you to give them a go.
To get the books for each year, I used a combination of sources.
The Wikipedia page for “Year X in Literature” was a starting point, but not always a good one. It gets longer and less useful the closer you get to the present.
Up to the end of the twentieth century, the most helpful source, nine years out of ten, was the Goodreads page for books tagged with each year by Goodreads users. This was not so good for years ending in 0, as there are enough Goodreads users who tag books by decade to swamp the signal in those cases.
In the most recent period, the really useful source was my own LibraryThing catalogue, sorted by year of publication and by my rating of the books published in that year. This still needed to be checked, as the majority of my books are not first editions but later reprints, and so the publication date of my own copy is often later than the date of first publication.
And speaking of the date of first publication, that’s not always easy to define. For a play, is it first performance or the first printing of the script for sale? For a nineteenth century novel published originally as a series, is it the date the series concluded or the date that the book was published as a book? For Middlemarch, I went with both and listed it twice. There is one other book that I give two years to because of its publication history. If you know me at all, you will not be surprised by which book it is.
In the early years, the choice was sometimes easy if there was only one book published that year that I had actually read. (For example Immensee, and Black Beauty.) Even so, I hate The Mill on the Floss, so I have left 1860 blank; there are a couple of others where I really don’t seem to have read anything from that year.
In later years, the problem was not too few but too many books, particularly (and this did surprise me though perhaps it shouldn’t have) in the last quarter of the twentieth century; the number of books that I have read from each year then drops a bit from the year 2000, though it’s still a lot higher than pre-1950.
When I got to the end, I realised that it’s too early to be sure what my favourite book published in 2024 or 2025 will be (and of course I reserve the right to change my mind about earlier years too). So the eventual list covers 178 of the last 180 years, starting in 1846 and ending in 2023.
I list books by the date of first publication in the original language, but use the English language title – except for Les Misérables, where the French title is better known in English. Likewise if the author is generally known by a variant of their name in English, I use the familiar version – Leo Tolstoy rather than Lev.
Each link in the list below links to my Bluesky post for that day. Each post includes a cover picture for each book, a link to my online review if I have written one, and shout outs to other books published in that year which I have read and like (which really mount up in the second half of the list). In general I skip books I didn’t like, though there are a couple of early years where I mention them to avoid leaving the year blank (eg 1849, 1875).
The list is more male and whiter than I would really like, but I guess it also reflects my years of reading voraciously. Having said that, the first two entries are by a writer of colour (Alexandre Dumas, grandson of an enslaved woman) and by a woman (Charlotte Brontë); and my most recent five are all by women, two of them women of colour.
The Doctor made a few half-hearted attempts to outmanoeuvre the complex restructuring the saboteur had made to the control units but he knew it would be to no avail. He shone the torch over the sealed magnetic systems box welded to the engine relays. The noise in here was incredible; the power stacks were primed well over maximum. Heat stole the oxygen from the depths of the ship.
Next in the sequence of Eighth Doctor books which I read years ago and failed to write up at the time. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji have slipped into a parallel universe where they encounter the mysterious Sabbath, once again, and get involved with a race that is more than it seems. I’m not a fan of the Sabbath arc, and the racing story has been done better elseWho; also Messingham uses first-person narration from both Fitz and Anji, and doesn’t really get convincing voices for either. Not very memorable, for me anyway. You can get The Infinity Race here (at a price).
For the last few years, I’ve succeeded in putting together a decent list, and sometimes even a video, of the sf works set in the year to come (with the caveat that they must have been published or released at least twenty years before). I started with 2020 (little did we know…), and went on to 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
2026 is surprisingly sparse for this project. There are small parts of two very well known novels set in this year; there is the framing narrative of a forgotten radio play; there is a very small part of a deservedly obscure film; there are two video games from the 1990s; there is also a very famous film based on a novel which is generally described as set in 2026; and there are three classic short stories by Ray Bradbury. You’ve probably read or seen several of these.
(I’ll add that AI research was pretty useless for this project, and threw up several false positives which I had to waste time checking, notably telling me that the later volumes of the well-known manga series Akira are set in 2026. They are not.)
Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars trilogy is mainly set many decades in the future. But its internal chronology begins (on page 30 of Red Mars, the first book, which was published in 1992) with the launch of a spaceship carrying the first wave of colonists from Earth, on 21 December 2026. The first manned landing on Mars was in 2020 in this timeline. In our timeline, there is no chance that we’ll be sending even one person to Mars this year, let alone a mixed crew of a hundred scientists mainly from the USA and Russia; human spaceflight has frankly not advanced much since 1992. You can get Red Mars here.
You don’t have to go to Mars by rocket. The 2005 film Doom, loosely based on the game and generally panned by critics, starts with Rosamund Pike as Samantha Grimm telling us, “In the year 2026, archaeologists working in the Nevada desert discovered a portal to an ancient city on Mars. They called this portal the Ark. Twenty years later, we’re still struggling to understand why it was built, and what happened to the civilisation that built it.” The rest of the film is set in 2046.
There is also a 1981 BBC radio play, Return from Mars, in which the legendary Jet Morgan and his crew turn up in Earth orbit in 2026, having been to Mars and another planet in the meantime, but most of the story is about their adventures elsewhere, with the framing narrative being their attempts to explain themselves to Space Traffic Control in 2026. You can listen to Return from Mars here.
Last but definitely not least, the three last stories of Ray Bradbury’s classic 1951 collection The Martian Chronicles are set in this coming year. “April 2026: The Long Years”, originally published in 1948, sees a rescue party finding a lost astronaut and his family, and realising that all is not as it seems. I’ll save the next story to the end, as it is set on Earth rather than Mars. But the final story, “October 2026: The Million Year Picnic”, originally published in 1946, is the one where one of the few surviving humans on Mars takes his wife and three sons to a canal to show them the Martians.
They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night. “I’ve always wanted to see a Martian,” said Michael. “Where are they, Dad? You promised.” “There they are,” said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down. The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver. The Martians were there–in the canal–reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water….
Dystopia
Fifty pages out of 330 in Octavia E. Butler’s classic Parable of the Sower (published in 1993) are set between June and December 2026. This is the grim section in which both the brother and father of Lauren, the protagonist, are killed by the forces of violent chaos lurking outside their fragile Californian community, in a USA which is disintegrating into anarchy. Lauren at least gets some action with her boyfriend, but their world is a very bad and decaying place, uncomfortably closer to our own than when it was written. You can get Parable of the Sower here and the graphic novel version here.
A different kind of dystopia is portrayed in the 1925 novel Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou, and in the 1927 film based on the book and directed by her husband Fritz Lang. Here, the workers are enslaved by the ruling classes and must service the monstrous machines that keep the city going, while the toffs party on. The son of the city’s ruler, and his more plebeian girlfriend, lead a cathartic process of social disruption and reconciliation, unwittingly triggered by the mad scientist who was originally responsible for the city’s growth through the use of the girl’s psychotic robot double. The film is spectacular and there is a happy ending, but, as one might have said in Germany in 1927, for how long? The machines are of course late industrial, but it’s difficult not to think of today’s techbros when watching it.
There are also two video games from the 1990s in which the player goes around a dystopian city of the year 2026, biffing the bad guys. In the 1991 arcade game Captain Commando (キャプテンコマンド), Captain Commando and his three buddies Fight Crime in Metro City. In the 1995 Sega Game Gear game Arena, Maze of Death, you’re fighting the evil corporation who control the population by broadcasting brainwashing propaganda. So two somewhat different takes.
Devastation
Most chillingly, Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, first published in 1950 and included in The Martian Chronicles under the title “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”, starts with the attempts of a house computer to wake up its humans.
“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”
But the humans will not wake up; along with most of Allendale, they were vaporised the previous afternoon by an atomic bomb, leaving only their silhouettes etched onto the outside wall. The house valiantly functions without them, but is destroyed in an accidental fire, leaving almost nothing behind:
Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”
5 August is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. (It was the morning of 6 August in Japan, but still 5 August in the USA.)
From the 1953 comic strip adaptation of the story by Wally Wood, colours added 1992 by Paul Rivoche
Travel to Mars through rocket launch or alien portal; social disintegration or rule by tech lords; dystopian urban combat; nuclear devastation. Take your pick. Let’s hope it works out.
