Tag Archives: bookblog 2025

The last three NZ fantasies: Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams; Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert & William Dresden; The Crawling Wood, by Casey Lucas

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At the end of my list of books acquired in 2020 are these three from the Sir Julius Vogel Award packet; none of them particularly grabbed me, I’m afraid.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped:

What had happened? She’d left Ninky’s (at least she thought she had) and the Number Three had been carrying her forwards (at least she thought it was) and then there’d been someone … a merwoman who had asked in a concerned voice where she was headed … and without even waiting for her reply had taken her by the hand … dangerous, the oceans after dark, murmured the stranger … for one so young … and she’d felt relieved, rescued even, from untold horrors, as they sped forwards together.

Yet another fantasy that failed to grab me in the first fifty pages, so I put it down (well, closed the ebook file with no intention of reopening it). Derivative world-building, and uncertainty on my part as to whether it is aimed at a YA audience or not. You can get Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped here.

(Nice cover though.)

Second paragraph of third chapter of Light in my Blood:

Jack could still see the bioluminescent glow of the strange trees and flowers, the soft backlit atmosphere. Every glimmer. Every shimmer. The smell of Juliper and Bluebells as yet clung to the back of his nostrils.

I quite liked this to begin with – it’s a portal fantasy with teenagers from our world (from an anonymous suburban English-speaking country) becoming enmeshed in the magical and dynastic feuding of the world of Nön while navigating their own emotional connections, and even though it is the second of a series, I found it easy enough to get into and read it all.

But I rather went off it at the end; the continuing drip of minor but annoying typographic errors started getting to me; then there is a sudden yet inevitable betrayal; and then it turns out that we are left on a cliff-hanger to try and get us to buy the next book and find out what happens. I probably won’t. You can get Light in My Blood here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Crawling Wood:

“You still feeling good about this gig?” he asked Gaz with a tilt of his head. Gaz shrugged a single time, quiet.

I’m afraid that I am pretty jaded with secondary worlds by now, and gave this only a few dozen pages before I gave up. You can read the entire ongoing Into the Mire webseries here.

These were the very last unread books that I had acquired in 2020, only four months after I finished the last unread book that I had acquired in 2019. I have been deliberately accelerating in recent times (also I have been merciless about putting aside New Zealand fantasies that didn’t grab me).

Last books acquired in 2020, read in August 2025 (Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams; Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert & William Dresden; The Crawling Wood, by Casey Lucas)
Last book acquired in 2019, read in April 2025 (Joan and Peter)
Last book acquired in 2018, read in November 2024 (The Geraldines)
Last book acquired in 2017, read in January 2024 (Rule of Law: A Memoir)
Last book acquired in 2016, read in August 2023 (Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan)
Last book acquired in 2015, read in November 2022 (Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait)
Last books acquired in 2014, read in October 2021 (The Empire of Time and Crashland)
Last book acquired in 2013, read in October 2020 (Helen Waddell)
Last book acquired in 2012, read in May 2020 (A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese dialogue 2000-2003)
Last book acquired in 2011, read in October 2019 (Luck and the Irish)
Last book acquired in 2010, read in January 2019 (Heartspell)
Last book acquired in 2009, read in December 2016 (Last Exit to Babylon)

That takes me to the fairly small pile of unread books acquired in 2021; I have hopes of finishing them this calendar year. (The 2022 pile is much bigger though.) The 2021 books will start with:

  • The Dream House, by Lee Berridge (shortest)
  • London Centric: Tales of Future London, ed. Ian Whates (unread sf book longest on my shelves)
  • A Tall Man in a Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson (top unread book on LibraryThing, also unread non-fiction book longest on my shelves)
  • Black Mountain, by Gerry Adams (unread non-genre fiction book longest on my shelves)

There will be a bit of a gap as I deal with the holiday backlog.

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Kenning was right underneath their new visitor. What was she doing?

Emily Tesh again shows her extraordinary versatility, with a story of a queer teacher in charge of safeguarding vulnerable pupils at a magical boarding school against dark forces while securing her own back against bureaucratic enemies. This is contemporary Britain, but with demons and a professional structure for the magically talented people who control them; it’s also a Britain where our friends class and race are alive and well, especially in a school where some of the scholarship pupils are also orphans. There’s cracking emotional chemistry as well between Sapphire Walden, the damaged but still idealistic protagonist, and her love interests; and finely observed dynamics of how a small group of gifted teenagers interact with the outside world.

It’s brilliant stuff, and really it makes you realize how few of the well-known magic school stories, from Roke to Hogwarts to the Scholomance, tell the story from the viewpoint of the teachers rather than the pupils. (There’s Unseen University in Discworld, but it’s a third-level institution rather than school and it also seems to have very few students.) Of course there’s always mileage in a rite-of-passage story, but the children’s point of view sees only the part of the educational iceberg that is above the surface. If you see what I mean.

Anyway, you can get The Incandescent here, and you should.

2026 Hugos: Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Dramatic Presentation, Short Form | Professional Artist | Poem
Best Novel: The Incandescent | Shroud | The Raven Scholar
Best Graphic Story or Comic: The Invisible Parade | three more finalists | A Wizard of Earthsea
Best Related Work: Colourfields | The Cuddled Little Vice | Inventing the Renaissance
Lodestar: Holy Terrors | Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe
Where to get them | Goodreads/Librarything/StoryGraph stats

Deadfall, by Gary Russell

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The robarman, Charlie X, at the Witch and Whirlwind was keeping them nicely supplied with drink, so who could complain? And – she smiled at this – she had neatly convinced Professor Shingbourne that none of them needed to be in class until one thirty tomorrow afternoon. As her class automatically followed his, she could have a lie in until about three.

A curious Bernice Summerfield novel in that she’s not in it much; the real protagonist is her ex-husband Jason Kane, who gets mixed up in an archaeological dig gone wrong and also discovers the amnesiac Chris Cwej, a companion from the Seventh Doctor New Adventures novels. There’s also a planet which has got out of place, and Benny trying to work out what is happening at long distance (as are we all). Solid stuff; I see some rave reviews and some very negative, but I was simply satisfied. You can get Deadfall here.

Who Killed Nessie?, by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith

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Second frame of third page:

I encountered Rachael Smith in 2016, when I bought her early House Party from her at a Brussels Comic Con, and I have known Paul Cornell for decades. Here the two combine their talents for a story of a murder at a convention for cryptos and mythical creatures, solved by plucky heroine Lyndsay Grockle who is getting over a breakup and has been left in charge of the convention hotel for the weekend. Paul Cornell’s humane text combines with Rachael Smith’s unambiguous ligne claire style to make a short sweet tale. I got an advance copy – it will be published next month, and then you will be able to get Who Killed Nessie? here.

Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al

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Second frame of third issue:

Doctor!
Ah, There you are, Clara. About time too.

A tale of two parts, a one-shot by George Mann with a twist punchline that you can see coming from a mile off (apology for spoilers, but you probably weren’t going to read it anyway):

And a much better four-parter by Robbie Morrison, picking up the story of the sun-like Hyperion creatures from Fractures, featuring also a heroic fireman and a very venal (“I for one welcome…” politician. I felt that the art sometimes din’t quite get the Doctor and Clara, but otherwise quite enjoyed it.

You can get Hyperion here. Next up is The School of Death by Robbie Morrison et al.

Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by Freeman Wills Crofts

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

At his next visit, to the motor agency for which Victor Magill acted as representative, he drew almost as complete a blank. It was true that he did not expect to learn much. But as a matter of routine, it was necessary to see everyone who might in any way throw light on the case.

One of the very few novels with a Northern Ireland setting between 1921 and 1968 (see also: Odd Man Out, and er I think that’s it from my own reading in the last twenty-five years or so), this is a murder mystery published and set in 1930, in which an Ulster industrialist disappears on his way home after a long absence, and is soon found murdered. The Norn Iron bits are pretty much restricted to the East Antrim coast, though there are some nice bits of local colour, and there is also much exploration of the Scottish train line to Stranraer and the northwest English and southwest Scottish coasts.

The solution depends rather on an improbable set of motivations for the killing, and also an equally improbably carefully calculated set of timings for journeys by train, car and boat, to the point that the suspension of my disbelief became a bit eroded. But this was the high period of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, and I guess it was what the market expected of a detective story. (There is even a reference to Hercule Poirot in the novel.)

I had read elsewhere that this book rather whitewashed the new-ish devolved Northern Ireland government, given the author’s Ulster Protestant background. (Stormont itself was still being built in 1930.) I did not find this charge firmly substantiated. True, there’s no reflection at all about the sectarian basis of the statelet; but as I said earlier, the Norn Iron settings are mostly along the coast Carrickfergus and Ballygalley Head, with a couple of excursions to Cave Hill and into central Belfast, and one to Bangor, which doesn’t really take you into contested territory. (The victim is reportedly seen on Sandy Row, which is described as ‘more or less working class’.)

On the other hand, I got a sense that the author felt the smallness of the interlocking circles of government and industry in the province could be a problem rather than a solution. And as for Dublin,

He [Inspector French] had not been over since the troubles [ie 1920-22] and he was impressed by the air of smartness and prosperity which the city wore. It seemed cleaner than before and the new buildings made O’Connell Street a really imposing thoroughfare.

Not exactly the sentiments of a raving Unionist!

The plot of the book has a couple of eerie similarities with the real-life murder of Patricia Curran twenty-two years later, the victim being from a prominent local family, the body found in the grounds of their East Antrim home, and a close relative suspected of the crime. The differences are fairly significant too of course, and I suspect it’s unlikely that the 1952 murderer, whoever that was, took any inspiration from Crofts.

Anyway, as I said, the book is of interest for the period colour, if not completely satisfactory as a murder mystery. You can get Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey here.

House of Odysseus, by Claire North

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

These are the things the poets say she shall dream of.

Second of Claire North’s excellent Penelope trilogy, this time narrated by the goddess Aphrodite, with our heroine still waiting for her husband (who is dallying far away with the nymph Calypso), and also dealing with the desperately ill Orestes and the greedy Menelaus, kings of adjoining cities on the mainland whose quarrel is being played out in Ithaca. There is also a locked-room murder mystery for Penelope to solve, with the help of Helen who is vividly sketched as a character.

I was reading this at the same time as Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (review coming soon) but actually my mind kept turning to Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, told from the point of view of Nicostratus, Helen’s son by Menelaus who accompanied her to Troy at the start of the war. Nicostratus is a key character here as well, but North has him as Menelaus’ illegitimate son, full of resentment and an all round bad guy who is at the centre of the murder mystery. North’s characterization is very memorable, even of names who have been talked about for millennia.

You can get House of Odysseus here.

The Master, by Louise Cooper

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘You look tired, my love.’ Her voice was warm with concern. ‘You should take time to rest for a while – the world won’t stop turning while you sleep.’

Conclusion to Cooper’s Master trilogy, in which she successfully shifts the focus so that the Bad Guy protagonist and his cute sidekick, pursued separately by the forces of order, now engage our sympathy, and the society with which they are in conflict reveals its flaws so that we realise the Bad Guy may not have been so bad after all; meanwhile both are at the mercy of super-powerful supernatural forces. Dramatic and well-executed conclusion to an enjoyable series. You can get The Master here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is The Bone Woman, by Clea Koff.

Dark Winds Over Wellington: Chilling Tales of the Weird & the Strange, by TL Wood

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Second paragraph of third story (“Last Chapter”):

Jebediah Cole came mostly from a place of fiction; imagination touched by the hand of experience, and peppered with a dash of wistful desire. A pastiche of the many strange and dodgy people Maurice once had the misfortune to know. An ex-armed-forces, ex-law-enforcement, leather-faced, battle-worn bounty hunter; he was a solid, deliberate, hulk of a man. Despite his rough edges, arrogance, and sexist attitude — and the fact that he was really little more than a walking cliché —his readers seemed to find the bloke endearing. His fans clamoured to hear more.

I’ve been zooming through my stash of New Zealand fantasy books acquired in 2020 with some disappointment at the rather unoriginal generic secondary world settings, but this one made me sit up and pay attention: these are almost all tales of fantastic intrusion, where the normal world of Wellington, which is realized in rich detail, becomes the unwilling host of something or some things more weird and awful. Most of the stories are very short (thirteen of them in 180 pages), so each basically represents one idea developed as far as it will go. There are a few recurrent themes – manipulative older men, ex-boyfriends named Joshua – but overall I was impressed by the number of different twists that Wood was able to put on a basic structure. Rather a delight. You can get Dark Winds Over Wellington here.

(Posting this early so that New Zealanders will see it.)

This was the shortest unread book of those I had acquired in 2020. Next on that pile, indeed on all three of my 2020 piles, is Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams.

Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs

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Second paragraph of Chapter 3:

Michael [Troughton], however, was to see very little of his father as he grew up. While he was still a baby, Patrick set up a second home in south London, near Kew, with his girlfriend Ethel ‘Bunny’ Nuens. Patrick and Bunny would go on to have three children together, but Patrick and his wife Margaret never announced a separation. The couple kept up the pretence that they still had a normal marriage. Patrick’s long absences from the family home were explained away as his having to work away from home, due to the nature of the acting profession. When Patrick’s mother died twenty-four years later, in 1979, she was still unaware of the separation. Patrick and his original family had kept up the façade by visiting her every Christmas Day and pretending that nothing had happened. She never knew she had three more grandchildren.

This is a nice chunky book about the history of Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2024, by the author of the book about Watling Street which I enjoyed a few years ago. It takes an interesting approach: a chapter per Doctor (two for the First and Fourth Doctors), looking very much at the story behind the scenes, why particular decisions were made, why particular people were hired and fired, and treating the sixty years of the show as a whole, single phenomenon to be explained as a whole.

A lot of the material was familiar (indeed the Second Doctor chapter seemed very familiar to me, though others seemed more original). I wished also that a bit more space had been given to the spinoff series (sadly neither The Curse of Fatal Death nor The Scream of the Shalka is mentioned), and to the comics, books and audios (and indeed games); although the TV series is by definition the core, there’s a lot more Whoniverse out there.

(Also, it is not entirely Higgs’ fault, but I cannot completely forgive him for inspiring me to seek out Jon Pertwee’s two scenes in the 1977 sex comedy Adventures of a Private Eye. I urge you not to look for them. Some things are better left in well-deserved obscurity.)

However, Higgs brings a lot of good stuff here. His analysis of how the show got created in the first place in 1962-63 is one of the best of the many that I have read, bringing in some new facts and circumstantial material. I think he is also right to split the First and Fourth Doctor eras; the case for treating Four/Hinchcliffe distinctly from Four/Williams+JNT is fairy obvious, but I have long felt that there’s a similar case for One/Lambert and One/Wiles+Lloyd, and Higgs just does it effortlessly.

It also feels to me like it’s fairly rare to take the holistic approach and treat Old Who just the same as New Who (and the Movie). Even within Old Who, we tend to treat the so-called black-and-white era separately from the color era. But in principle, there’s no reason not to apply the same analytical approach to all of it, and Higgs demonstrates that such an approach can be successful.

A particular sub theme that I will have to think about is Higgs’ insistence that some key stories should be seen as direct reflections of what was happening in the production history of the show at the time. So, the two trials of the Doctor in The War Games and in Season 23 reflect the pressures of potential cancellation of the entire show (as does The Greatest Show in the Galaxy). This only gets you so far, but it does get you a certain distance.

In the end, Higgs is entitled to write the book he wanted to write, which is not completely the book I wanted to read, but is certainly close enough to it to make this very worthwhile. It’s only just out, folks, so you may not have seen much hype around it – well worth getting, and I will nominate it for the BSFA Non-Fiction award next year. You can get Exterminate/Regenerate here.

Three New Zealand fantasies: We All Fall, by Helen Vivienne Fletcher; Tyrelia, by S.R. Manssen; Dragon Rift, by Eileen Mueller 

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Three more of the books that I had not got around to from the 2020 Sir Julius Vogel packet. One OK, two less so.

Second paragraph of third chapter of We All Fall:

Luca was there, waiting for me after not being able to talk last night. He grinned as he saw me, and I smiled, happy to have the distraction.

I thought this was OK. A short, effective story about a girl growing up in a circus family, getting to grips with disability, same-sex love and the paranormal stuff that seems to be happening around her. You can get We All Fall here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Tyrelia:

The Golden City was the capital of Medar and home to the Master. It was a conical mountain surrounded entirely by a moat and a tall, gleaming white wall. The only way in was via the drawbridge to the single gateway. The dwellings within the city were perched one above the other on the steep hillside, like decorations on an elaborate cake. Narrow roads wound their way between them. All the houses were whitewashed, with terracotta tiled roofs, and many had pots of brightly coloured geraniums hanging from the windowsills. The Master’s mansion, shrouded in cloud, crowned the city. It was said that it was covered in glittering gold.

This on the other hand failed to engage me and I put it down after fifty pages. The fourteen-year-old heroine is sent on a quest by rather nonchalant elders, and finds herself in a land of plenty which is obviously going to turn out as something more sinister. Possibly didn’t help that it’s the second book in a trilogy where I have not read the first. You can get Tyrelia here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Dragon Rift:

Ezaara was lost for words. Her mind spun. Roberto was captive. Surely Zens would kill him.

This is the third volume in a series of six, and I don’t think the other five would have helped convince me; it’s a world which is a knock-off of Pern with a few imports from Middle Earth, and lost me rather with the super-effective magical healing ointments. I just about managed fifty pages, but no more. You can get Dragon Rift here.

These three had all bubbled to the top of my rapidly dwindling stacks of books acquired in 2020. We All Fall was the shortest unread book acquired in that year, Tyrelia was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves and Dragon Rift was the most popular unread book acquired in 2020. The next shortest is Dark Winds Over Wellington, by TL Wood; the next on the other two piles is Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams.

Private Road, by Forrest Reid

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was towards the end of my business career that The Kingdom of Twilight appeared, and an early result was that I learned of the existence in Belfast of a very minor echo of the Dublin literary and dramatic movement. The Ulster Literary Theatre had been founded, and had produced two plays-The Reformers, by David Parkhill, and Brian of Banba, by Bulmer Hobson. The experiment was written up in the columns of The Whig by [J.W.] Good, and in another paper, The Evening Telegraph, by Rathcol (W. B. Reynolds). Moreover, in imitation of Yeats’s magazine Samhain, a literary quarterly called Ulad had been Started, under the joint editorship of Reynolds and Parkhill, and it was from the former that I received a note asking me to call upon him.

This is the second volume of Belfast-born writer Forrest Reid’s autobiography, published in 1940, fourteen years after Apostate, the first volume. I did not find Private Road as interesting; a lot of it is about the back-story behind each of Reid’s novels (more than a dozen at that stage), and as I haven’t read any of them, I did not learn much. There are however some interesting chapters about his education, at Inst and then at Christ’s, Cambridge, and about the rather small circle of literary enthusiasts in Belfast in the early 1900s; and there’s also a rather moving chapter about his love for his dogs and cats (in that order).

Reid does not seem to have had a long-term romantic partner, though it’s fairly clear what was going on with his series of male house-mates; there are a few women in the narrative (and I’m glad to see that he stayed in touch with his nurse Emma) but it’s mostly a story of men talking to men. Or not talking – an early dramatic moment is his friendship with Henry James, cut short when James apparently was mortally offended by Reid’s dedication to him of his very gay second novel, The Garden God.

I think that if I were going to make a serious effort to get into Reid’s fiction, and the circles he moved in, this would be a really interesting book, and I wonder if someone enterprising might produce an annotated version; but unlike with Apostate, I am not particularly interested in taking that on myself.

You can get Private Road here.

From a Shadow Grave, by Andi C. Buchanan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the future, there are many stories of those who go back. Those who go back to find a better time, and those who go back to change their own time. They go back to kill or to save, or for one to achieve the other. These stories centre on particular points in history, feature moral dilemmas and unintended consequences.

Brief but efficiently chilling story of a 1930s murder victim in Wellington, New Zealand, who comes back in three different alternative supernatural ways. One of the Sir Julius Vogel packet from 2020, which contains my dwindling pile of unread books acquired that year. You can get From a Shadow Grave here.

Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Fish Bowl”):

She did not have strong feelings about Puan Lai, but she liked the house. Between the entrance and living room there was an expanse of cool, white marble floor that would have been a hallway in a normal house. Puan Lai had dug out a hole in the floor and filled it with water. The pond was rectangular, like a swimming pool, but the water was green, swarming with koi and goldfish.

This is a tremendous collection of short stories by Zen Cho, including “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again” which won the Hugo in 2019 (one of my years). They are all in the fantasy vein with some of them slipping towards horror. They all feature Malaysian culture, especially Malaysian Chinese culture, which is a particular point of interest for me as I get on with editing my grandmother’s memoirs of her time living and loving in Penang. Some are set in Malaysia, some in England, some elsewhere entirely. The ones I liked most were “House of Aunts”, a story of an undead teenager and her older (much older) relatives; “Prudence and the Dragon”, about an unlikely love story; and the Hugo-winning “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again”, another unlikely love story. But they are all excellent. You can get Spirits Abroad here.

Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan, and The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe

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Two more stories from the New Zealand pile, which I’ll deal with quickly.

Second sentence of third section of Ventiforms:

Pilot’s seat was a misnomer, really. Tailé just sat. Surprise flew herself. There was a bit of shaking, but Tailé was still able to eat her wrap as they descended. It was good, the eggplant tasted fresh, and the sauce was divine. She complimented the ship on it.

Very short piece about a mother looking for her lost son, and some memorably unusual aliens. Decent world-building for the length. You can get Ventiforms here.

Was my shortest unread book acquired in 2020 (and turned out to be even shorter than I thought). Next on that pile is We All Fall by Helen Vivienne Fletcher.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Blacksmith:

“Ah, hell, Granny, what’d I do now?”

Third in a fantasy trilogy. I found it very clunky; a world with placenames partly borrowed from Britain and partly made up, with apparently normal Christianity and magic coexisting, and leaden exposition. You can get The Blacksmith here.

Was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Tyrelia, by S R Manssen.

Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

And it just … kept … going. A howl of deep, horrible agony, a soul-shredding pain.

A Fifteenth Doctor novel set during his travels with Belinda, probably between Lux and The Interstellar Song Contest, with the Doctor and Belinda exploring a world where a dying sentient spaceship’s screams are disrupting the mental state of everyone withing range, most notably the descendants of the original crew who live in Sevateem-like conditions. It’s a fairly standard plot, but what I like is that we get a lot more characterisation of Belinda than we did onscreen; one of the things I didn’t like about the most recent season was that we didn’t really get to know her, and Fergesen has done well by her in this story. Not a book for non-Whovians, but a pleasing extra for fans, especially younger fans. You can get Spectral Scream here.

Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He arrived at the clockmaker’s tree shortly after dawn.

As will be apparent, I’m working through the material given to us as part of the Hugo and Sir Julius Vogel voter packets as I reach the end of my stack of (mostly electronic) books acquired in 2020. This popped up as part of the Hugo submission of Diana Pho for Best Editor, Long Form, along with nine other books, and I think it’s the last of them.

This started off really well; a fantasy secondary world (which doesn’t always float my boat) where the protagonist, a young magical warrior who is also the queen’s secret lover, starts to find out more about how it all functions. It’s the third book in a trilogy, which often means a harsh did-not-finish for me, but it worked well at first – I believe that the three books have different protagonists, so the plots are not too intertwined.

And then in the last quarter or so, it simply lost me. We shifted to a confusing landscape with confusing characters, where we found out confusing things about our unreliable protagonist. It was disappointing after what I felt was a strong start. Maybe I lost energy and it’s on me. Anyway, you can get Tides of the Titans here.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2020, and the sf book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on those piles are From a Shadow Grave, by Andi Buchanan, and The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe.

Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

But India is also home to some of the most iconic games of all time. If the Middle East gave us one of the best racing games, then India is the birthplace of one of the greatest war games that humans have in-vented: the game of chess.

An outline of 80 classic games from the mathematical point of view, framed as a voyage around the world to explore the games of each continent and subcontinent. Unfortunately this framing turns out to be a bit problematic, as he sort of has to ignore the actual geography and the history of colonialism to make his points, whatever they are. There’s a weird five page chunk near the end about women writing games. The bit about Azad seems oddly familiar to me from elsewhere. There’s some very interesting material here, but I think it could have been much better organised, and the researchers whose work he has, er, depended on could have been given more credit. Still, you can get Around the World in 80 Games here.

Down, by Lawrence Miles

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Ssseize him!’ snarled Dr Harbinger, but the robots had already released the dauntless Binky Sharperton, and were e‘en now closing on Harbinger‘s escaped nemesis. The first of the diabolical automata raised the electrical tendril to which its miniaturized chronon ray was mounted, but even steel was no match for Mr Misnomer‘s legendary right hook. The leather gauntlet pounded the brute machine‘s trisilicate face, and sparks flew from its antennae as it blew a fuse.⁵
⁵ Passages like this one demonstrate a wilful ignorance of basic cybernetics theory. Oobert Valdeburg (see Bibliography) claims this suggests a dearth of Public Domain robotics data in the 2530s, a theory which is provably untrue. More likely, it indicates a mistrust of technology typical of puritanical ‘back-to-basics’ cultures. Ironic, then, that almost all of Mr Misnomer‘s adventures were written by autolit engines. Note also how electronic menaces such as the Nemesis Doomsday Engine and Dr Harbinger‘s Megalomanopticon are always fitted with built-in self-destruct mechanisms, against all sense and reason.

I thought this was a rather good entry in the Bernice Summerfield spinoff series of books. Benny appears on a hollow world, encumbered with two junior archaeologists, and encounters various archetypes (dinosaurs, cavemen, useless Nazis (the best kind)) and threatening situations. Perhaps a little more going on than I had braincells to process at the time. But it all seemed to make sense. You can get Down here.

Next in this sequence is Deadfall, by Gary Russell.

Little Wars and Floor Games, by H.G. Wells

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Second paragraph of Little Wars:

(1) The Country must be arranged by one player, who, failing any other agreement, shall be selected by the toss of a coin.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Floor Games:

We always have twin cities, or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city with two wards, Red End and Blue End; we mark the boundaries very carefully, and our citizens have so much local patriotism (Mr. Chesterton will learn with pleasure) that they stray but rarely over that thin little streak of white that bounds their municipal allegiance. Sometimes we have an election for mayor; it is like a census but very abusive, and Red always wins. Only citizens with two legs and at least one arm and capable of standing up may vote, and voters may poll on horseback; boy scouts and women and children do not vote, though there is a vigorous agitation to remove these disabilities. Zulus and foreign-looking persons, such as East Indian cavalry and American Indians, are also disfranchised. So are riderless horses and camels; but the elephant has never attempted to vote on any occasion, and does not seem to desire the privilege. It influences public opinion quite sufficiently as it is by nodding its head.

Two very short non-fiction pieces by H.G. Wells, one about a very specific set-up for wargaming with model soldiers (infantry, cavalry and artillery) and one about a rather richer fantasy society built up by him with his sons. These are both very engaging, and Little Wars in particular is at the root of much else. Full of imperialist fervour and outright racism of course, and Wells was far from an outlier in his time and place.

A kind friend got me the reprint of both pieces as a 64-page double by Shilka Publishing, which you can get for a few quid here, but sadly lacks the illustrations which are referred to throughout the text. This is a loss for Floor Games in particular, where Wells’ own sketches really enliven it – the second paragraph of the third chapter was originally published looking like this:

You can find Little Wars here and Floor Games here on Project Gutenberg.

Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Garden”, by Isabelle McNeur):

Adams left a wife and a kid behind. I don’t know how he did it. I had enough trouble leaving my dog. For the first time in my life I had been glad my parents had already passed.

Collection of stories by Aotearoa New Zealand writers, all of which had previously been published elsewhere. I guess it was in the Sir Julius Vogel packet for 2020 as it won the award for Best Collection that year. A lot of the stories are post-apocalyptic; a lot of them are about how we lose contact with nature. Probably the two best are “Logistics”, by A.J. Fitzwater, which was on the 2018 Tiptree long-list, and “The Glassblower’s Peace”, by James Rowland, which had me looking up Venetian history. You can get Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer.

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Technology exists in a complex, dynamic system (the real world), where second-, third-, and nth-order consequences ripple out unpredictably. What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. What people actually do with your invention, however well intentioned, can never be guaranteed. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when most people just wanted to play music. Alfred Nobel intended his explosives to be used only in mining and railway construction.

A book about the transformative potential of AI, which I’m afraid I thought went on a bit about how amazing and societally transcending it is going to be, without really getting much into the detail of what that will look like. The final chapter goes into potential regulatory protections, and I found it rather conservative although clearer. You can get The Coming Wave here.

Really the most important thing about the AI revolution is that China is so far ahead of the rest of us that it may well decisively tilt the global economy to their advantage, especially now that the USA is no longer interested in international co-operation and has declared war on its own smart people.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that pile is The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson.

A Small Semblance of Home, by Paul Phipps

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(No paragraphs as it is an audio)

Short, sweet story read by Carole Ann Ford, with the First Doctor working through his relationship with Barbara. Phipps says it is set at the very end of The Edge of Destruction. I groaned a little at the punchline which I found a bit corny, but otherwise it is nicely done. You can get A Small Semblance of Home here.

Raven Heart, by “Murphy Lawless” (C.E. Murphy)

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

All of that, and she had absolutely no idea what anybody said through the whole process. She could just barely answer a question if it was put to her, and if she looked at Richard Yale she couldn’t even do that. Once the words left her lips, she had no idea what she’d said, and had to trust that even stupefied, she wouldn’t betray her or the town’s best interests.

Novella by Catie Murphy, who is known to some of you, under her Murphy Lawless pseudonym. It’s a story of capitalism clashing with culture in today’s Alaska; you know what’s going to happen as soon as you look at the front cover, but the ride is immense fun and the sex scenes very good without being gruesomely explicit. You can get Raven Heart here.

This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan.

The Revenant Express, by George Mann

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

All those years hearing talk of hellfire and brimstone on a Sunday morning, the vicar preaching that a life of sin and misdemeanour would lead to condemnation and torment in the next life—at no point had the young Clarence imagined the waking Hell he might first be forced to endure as a working adult. None of it had prepared him for this.

I wasn’t expecting to like this much, and I didn’t. Steampunk and zombies, neither of which are my favourite things, along with Mann’s usual leaden prose and historical inaccuracies. Did not finish. You can get The Revenant Express here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020, and the sf book that had lain longest unread on my bookshelves. Next on those piles are Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed. Marie Hodgkinson, and Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer.

July 2025 books

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Non-fiction 8 (YTD 44)
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex
F**k Work, Let’s Play: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It, by John Williams
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman 
Little Wars and Floor Games, by H.G. Wells
Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy
Apostate, by Forrest Reid
Private Road, by Forrest Reid
Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs

Non-genre 1 (YTD 22)
Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by Freeman Wills Crofts

SF 15 (YTD 79)
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Revenant Express, by George Mann (did not finish)
Raven Heart, by Murphy Lawless
Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson
Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer
Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan
The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe (did not finish)
From a Shadow Grave, by Andi C. Buchanan
Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho
We All Fall, by Helen Vivienne Fletcher
Tyrelia, by S R Manssen (did not finish)
Dragon Rift, by Eileen Mueller (did not finish)
Dark Winds Over Wellington: Chilling Tales of the Weird & the Strange, by TL Wood
The Master, by Louise Cooper
House of Odysseus, by Claire North

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 19)
A Small Semblance of Home, by Paul Phipps
Down, by Laurence Miles
Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen

Comics 1 (YTD 19)
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al

6,000 pages (YTD 46,800)
13/28 (YTD 77/177) by non-male writers (“Lawless”, Hodgkinson, Dyer, Howe, Buchanan, Cho, Fletcher, Manssen, Mueller, Wood, Cooper, North, Fergesen)
3/28 (YTD 25/177) by non-white writers (Suleyman, Mishima, Cho)
1/28 reread (Down)
207 books currently tagged unread, down 17 from last month, down 92 from July 2024.

Reading now
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

Coming soon (perhaps)
Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al
Deadfall, by Gary Russell
Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution, by Una McCormack
The Devil’s Chord, by Dale Smith 
Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams
Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert
Into the Mire: The Collected Works, by Casey Lucas
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis 
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff 
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett 
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch 
Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley 
The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings 
The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch 
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King 
Final Cut, by Charles Burns 
“Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle 
Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire 
A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson 
Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood

Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima

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Second paragraph of third chapter (English translation by Stephen Dodd only, I wasn’t able to get at the Japanese original):

This was Akiko’s first ever solo trip. Her mother and father had both voiced their opposition, appalled by their young daughter’s reckless behaviour. They were anxious for her wellbeing and desperate to stop her. Akiko was incensed by her parents’ concerns and misgivings, which were so human.

Until recently, the only thing that I knew about Yukio Mishima was his dramatic death in 1970, committing seppuku while attempting to incite a military coup to restore imperial rule in Japan; a very unattractive incident which disinclined me to find out any more.

However a friend persuaded me to give his 1962 novel Beautiful Star a try. It is indeed very interesting; an ordinary suburban family of four come to the realisation that they are all in fact aliens from other planets, and that it is their mission to save the Earth from nuclear war. Bearing in mind that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only as distant then as the first Obama election and the Beijing Olympics are now, you can see why this would have weighed heavily on both writer and reader.

We readers are left to decide for ourselves whether the protagonists are correct or deluded in their belief in their own extra-terrestrial origins. On the one hand, they tap into a network of other extra-terrestrial believers in Japan, and they observe (or think that they observe) UFOs responding to them. On the other, they seem to remain subject to very human physical constraints such as pregnancy and cancer. The point of the book, perhaps, is to make us look at ourselves as if we are outsiders (Mishima writes himself into the background, as a guest speaker), and for the non-Japanese reader this is enhanced by the cultural differences to our own experiences.

The fact that the protagonists have possibly deluded beliefs that they alone can fundamentally alter society is a chilling foreshadowing of the author’s own fate. I just don’t know enough about his personal history to be confident that we can read much into that. For what it’s worth, this was apparently his favourite of his own (many) books. You can get Beautiful Star here.

Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al

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Second frame of third story (“The Body Electric”):

Two hours earlier…
Clara: When you mumbled something about where we were going, Doctor, I thought you were taking me for dessert.
Doctor: No time for consonant-based puns, Clara.
Doctor: These are the quartz wastes of Asmoray.

Another collection of three Titan Comics stories featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara. The first is about a bereaved family trying to reunite across timelines but finding that nasty timey-wimey creatures want to get involved. The second has Sammy Davis Junior, Dean Martin and friends thwarting alien invasion in 1960s Las Vegas. The third has Clara reflecting on her own role as she helps ward off another alien threat to an exploitative human colony, and perhaps goes in the wrong direction. All decent enough. You can get Fractures here.

Next in this sequence: Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al.

Apostate, by Forrest Reid

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

A brother and a sister shared to some extent the day nursery with me, but they were my seniors by several years, and hardly counted in my scheme of things. Of far more immediate interest was the personality of a sagacious old tabby, who would stroll into the nursery and lie on the floor in the sun, and was good-natured enough to purr when I used her as a pillow. I was aware that she timed these visits, and that if she did not find me alone (by which I mean alone with Emma) she would not stay. Not that she was, so far as I recall, a particularly affectionate animal. Cats are never sentimental; they treat you exactly as you treat them; and it was simply that she had marked me down, with unerring instinct, as ” safe “—a person who could be trusted to amuse the kittens while one dozed and dreamed.

I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.

As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.

What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)

Modern map from the PRONI Historical Maps viewer.

Chapter VI is a detailed description of 1880s Belfast which I reproduce here (apart from the references to popular literature of the day):

My waking world, also, was gradually expanding, though it still remained the very small world of a provincial town—a rather hard, unromantic town too—devoted exclusively to money-making; yet a town, for all that, somehow likeable, and surrounded by as beautiful a country as one could desire. The Belfast of my childhood [the 1880s] differed considerably from the Belfast of today [1926]. It was, I think, spiritually closer to that surrounding country. Then, as now, perhaps, it was not particularly well educated, it possessed no cultured and no leisured class (the sons of even the wealthiest families leaving school at fifteen or sixteen to enter their fathers’ offices); but it did not, as I remember it at any rate, bear nearly so marked a resemblance to the larger English manufacturing towns. 

The change I seem to see has, of course, brought it closer to its own ideal. For some not very intelligible reason, a hankering after things English—even what is believed to be an English accent—and a distrust of things Irish, have always characterised the more well-to-do citizens of Belfast. But in the days of my childhood this was not so apparent, while the whole town was more homely, more unpretentious. A breath of rusticity still sweetened its air; the few horse trams, their destinations indicated by the colour of their curtains, did little to disturb the quiet of the streets; the Malone Road was still an almost rural walk; Molly Ward’s cottage, not a vulcanite factory, guarded the approach to the river; and there were no brick works, no mill chimneys, no King’s Bridge to make ugly blots on the green landscape of the Lagan Valley. The town itself, as I have said, was more attractive, with plenty of open spaces, to which the names of certain districts—the Plains, the Bog Meadows—bear witness. Queen’s University was not a mere mass of unrelated, shapeless buildings; the Technical Institute did not sprawl in unsightly fashion across half the grounds of my old school. Gone is the Linen Hall, that was once the very heart of the town in its hours of ease. A brand new City Hall, all marble staircases and inlaid floors, garnished with statues and portraits of Lord Mayors and town councillors, and fronted with wooden benches on which rows of our less successful citizens doze and scratch the languid hours away, flaunts its expensive dullness where that old mellow ivy-creepered building once stood, with its low, arched entrance, its line of trees that shut out the town bustle and dust. The Linen Hall Library, transported to another building, still exists, but, as with the city, expansion has robbed it of its individuality. The old Linen Hall Library, with the sparrows flying in and out of the ivy all day long, fluttering and squabbling, was a charming place. It was very like a club. Its membership was comparatively small; its tone was old-fashioned; it belonged to the era of the two-and three-volume novel; it had about it an atmosphere of quiet and leisure. […]

In the Linen Hall Library, curled up in a low deep window seat, I would sit gazing out between the trees and right up Donegall Place, which on summer afternoons was a fashionable promenade, where one was almost sure to meet everybody one knew. […] And here, one summer afternoon, just outside the tall iron gates, I beheld my first celebrity. Not that I knew him to be celebrated, but I could see for myself his appearance was remarkable. I had been taught that it was rude to stare, but on this occasion, though I was with my mother, I could not help staring, and even feeling I was intended to do so. He was, my mother told me, a Mr. Oscar Wilde; and she added, by way of explanation I suppose, that he was aesthetic, like Bunthorne, in Patience.

Oscar Wilde famously visited Belfast in January 1884. It is interesting that Reid’s mother contextualised him for eight-year-old Forrest by referencing the 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan opera which satirised him.

The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.

I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here.

F**k Work, Let’s Play: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It, by John Williams

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Second paragraph of third “secret”” (ie chapter):

When I spoke to Sam Bompas and Harry Parr ten years ago they had been creating their remarkable experiments with food and drink for a couple of years. Those early days were marked by fun and innovative projects that often required Sam and Harry to think on their feet.

I occasionally like to read self-help books, and this was recommended by an entrepreneurial friend; if you are of an entrepreneurial mindset, it’s probably the sort of book that will help you hone your thoughts and take the next steps. I’m not sure that it was really written for my sort of approach to life and work, but it’s closer than the last such book I read (The 4-Hour Work Week). You can get F**k Work, Let’s Play here.