Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I absolutely love reading Adrian Tchaikovsky. He is incredibly prolific and yet is able to say something profound using meticulously detailed hard SF speculation on that very demanding calendar. The protagonist in the book, Arton Daghdev (the pronunciation of the name figures prominently), takes some getting used to. The book is written from his first-person perspective, and as a narrator he can come off kind of flip in a very 2024 way ("you'll never believe what's coming next"). But in my view this is Tchaikovsky doing something very subtle with the narrator--he's distancing himself from his story with the wisecracking. The story he's trying to tell is horrible and sad, and he has to get some distance from it in order to tell it at all.

Daghdev doesn't come off as a true revolutionary, at least not until the end. But again I think this is deliberate. Daghdev regularly refers to himself as a small-time revolutionary, much more talk than action, surprised that his minuscule actions warranted a response from the State. He and his circle played at revolution, and he compares himself poorly to others that he viewed as more committed.

The scientific speculation is amazing stuff--symbiosis taken to the maximum. Organisms have evolved to be able to interface with each other, and any macro level organism (and probably micro too) is made up of many other more specialized ones. They are figuring out how to interface with humans too, which seems pretty awful.

The ending is quite wonderful and highly scary. Tchaikovsky is truly a master of his craft, and his work definitely worth savoring.

My Goodreads Review

The Man Who Saw Seconds, by Alexander Boldizar

I rarely give a book five stars and I did for this one. I did not do it because it is a perfect book. It has rough edges and incongruities. I did it because it was a fascinating and challenging read in a way that has become very rare in speculative fiction. It won the Locus Award for SF in 2025, because it should have. And it was not nominated for many other major awards because the Hugo and Nebula nominators have traveled a path of renominating the usual suspects writing comfort novels and retreads (sorry, "retellings").

The basic form is a thriller that builds incredibly quickly. Boldizar takes an idea--that our consciousness is always lagging our actions--and spins up a premise for an action novel. The protagonist can very accurately predict the future within about 5 seconds. Boldizar uses this to explore how people, men in particular, make decisions to escalate violence. There's a lot of great stuff on the law, on military training, and political machinations.

[It is important that you don't read this if you're considering reading the book. A whole lot of the enjoyment comes from not being able to anticipate the ending, but I have to discuss it. The book does not have a happy ending. It has a logical one. That's an incredibly daring choice. I kept waiting for some way that he was going to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, and he didn't, really. Nor did he really leave room for a sequel. From the last paragraph and line of the book we know how the next one would end, and Boldizar would be seriously challenged to come up with a way to even make it interesting. (hide spoiler)]

I am one who enjoys leaving some suspense for my next reading session, but I struggled to put this one down and when I did, I didn't sleep well. If you like SF you will love this book.

My Yelp Review

The Lords of Uncreation, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I absolutely loved this conclusion to the Final Architecture series, for some of the same reasons that other reviewers didn't like it so much. There's a lot of battle sequences--I think they are really exciting and Tchaikovsky's background shows (he shares in his bio that he's trained in stage fighting, and that experience clearly informs the battles). He manages to make something as ridiculous in scope as saving all sentient life in the universe scale down to something we can get our heads around.

The whole series is worth reading for the relationships between the crew of the Vulture God (a deep-space salvage tug). Through all the insanity they are deeply devoted to each other, and particularly to Idris. Idris is endearing for his over-the-top depiction--he's only got one job, that of saving the universe, and he is conspicuously and self-consciously terrible at anything else. He is the most vulnerable lead character that I remember reading, and the rest of the crew is symmetrically devoted to him. I am sad to come to the end of the story--I will miss these folks. I also think Tchaikovsky has effectively closed off the series so that we can truly miss them.

My Goodreads Review

Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler

It is amazing to me how well this book holds up 30 years after it was written. Definitely in its predictions--climate change was a mere gleam in an Exxon scientist's eye when this came out. The MAGA prediction does not shock me as much as some--there's a pretty straight line from the Moral Majority to today's Christian Dominionism.

The way this book holds up is in the lesson Butler conveys. In her time she said "I write not to predict, but to warn". And we did not heed the warning. Now here we are. Her protagonist's blunt descriptions of the failure of our culture and its consequences will be read 100 years from now as a companion to history.

Another reviewer said, "This is one of the best books I have ever read. I do not want to read it again". I absolutely second that. This was one tough read. I put it down at one point for more than a month. But I am glad I finished it.

My Goodreads Review

The This, by Adam Roberts

I am a jaded SF reader with a degree in philosophy so I have to say The This scratched all my itches extremely well. Yes, it's a difficult read, and those are very much not in style right now, but having come off reading Travis Baldree as an award winner I was really pleased to have come across Adam Roberts.

Here are two brilliant little side ideas I have not seen in other reviews:

Roberts uses two "cutouts"--men with no serious connections to anyone else, who won't be missed--in his story. SF often uses one, but he needed two. One protagonist is a fellow "orphaned" in his mid-twenties with his parents' death. Roberts notes that it's a hard time to lose parents. I've known people in this position and can say this is not acknowledged enough. So Rich (real name Alan, lots of play on this) is kind of drifting through life as a low-rent writer. Roberts captures the little elements of his life so well--preparing a microwave dinner and forgetting to eat it, and noting the careful place setting in a sad way. A perfect capture of a moment.

He also has an extended segment where Rich is reading an interview of a psychologist who argues for the importance of people being together. He says that to be present to each other we must *smell* each other, even if that is subliminal. I have believed this ever since social media and remote meetings took off, and have seen very little on it.

But of course Roberts' big project here is to tell a Hegelian story, and I believe he does so very successfully. This does not mean that at the end of it you will understand Hegel's dialectic, even though Roberts references it directly at the end. Rather, the story arc and how the plots come together is distinctly Hegelian. I would say he has to have understood Hegel much better than most who read it (certainly better than me) in order to pull this off.

This got shortlisted for some minor award, but generally speaking there's not much reward for writing deeply thoughtful work now. I am glad I came across this.

My Goodreads Review

Eyes of the Void, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is the middle entry in the Final Architecture series. Middle books often fade a bit, but this one really impressed me. It seems to be hard to be original in Space Opera these days--so many of the award-nominated books in most of the majors are fantasy, alternate history, or barely speculative at all. Tchaikovsky manages to tell a real grabber of a story and at the same time add something to the subgenre.

All space opera is really sea stories--a technology is introduced that makes voyages between stars possible, but difficult, like a long hazardous sea voyage. The sea here is Unspace, a place where nothing seems real but something is present. Idris Telemmier is one of the few remaining identified talents at navigating, and bearing the strain of, this space.

The plot is amazing and convoluted, and the fights are somehow realistic among all the speculation. I still don't know how writers do that--what incredible world building goes into making aliens and technology come together in believable combat. There's a lot of it here and it's really well integrated and satisfying.

What I like best about this series, though, is the relationship of the crew. There are plenty of intrepid, marginal spaceship crews pulling off amazing feats through their devotion to each other (the Rocinante of the Expanse is the best). The great thing here is the crew's unique devotion to utterly damaged, fragile, crucial Idris Telemmier. He is so obviously vital to every player's plans that he can't move without an army chasing him. He is also utterly helpless in most circumstances, such that the Vulture God crew would do anything for him and yet it's not at all weird or cloying, just charming and inspiring. Even those who want to use him utterly tend to soften up. His specific strengths allow him to come through and save the day.

Am looking forward to reading the last one in the series, and if it's the end, I will miss this bunch.

My Goodreads Review

Leviathan Falls, by James S. A. Corey

I've read several fantasy and science fiction series in my time, though only a few are as ambitious as this one. The absolute hardest thing to do is end them well. Many don't even try, they just let them tail off (looking at you, George R. R. Martin and Song of Ice and Fire. Tolkien too) or rush the ending. Leviathan Falls brought this incredible series to a satisfying conclusion, exactly when it was done. The crew of the Rocinante had gone from a tight group of people who worked really well together to a team that was infatuated with each other--and the authors manage to convey that the characters KNEW it. Brilliant. All the elements were brought together to get across that sense of impending doom. No soap opera here, it was very clear that things were coming to a head and that everyone was sacrificing themselves, all they had, and all their loved ones and followers to make it work.

The Expanse was a great series for making the reader feel like a very small part of a sweeping history, and Leviathan Falls managed to scale that up an order of magnitude. A Jupiter-sized diamond containing all the knowledge of the Ring Gate builders? Really works to convey the scope of their accomplishments.

In the end it all comes down to James Holden, and individual decisions that he makes. That sacrifice trope has been done a lot, but it still works here. He grew the most out of all the characters, and that was set up from the beginning--it was foreordained that the man with "no inner life" would acquire one. I feel like I know them all.

In my view this is the defining work in Space Opera. The speculation is amazing and the storytelling is perfect. For me it does not break new ground, but it is the very best example of all that has gone before in that genre.

My Goodreads Review

Auberon, by James S. A. Corey

I read the other novellas and short stories in the Expanse series mostly because I'm an obsessive completionist. But you would definitely miss some things about the Expanse if you skipped them. Strange Dogs introduced Cortazar, who of course becomes very central. I don't think this book will introduce a character of that scale since the series is almost done, but it is an essential moral commentary on how people and systems would work at that scale. We've had Winston Duarte *thinking* he understood that problem, and creating a system where absolute control delivers healthy and satisfactory lives for most people. But absolute moral codes don't survive contact with reality, and boy is the ending a zinger of a way to deliver that. The outcome is in some ways telegraphed, but you really understand more about this universe by reading this novella. Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank really know how to write together.

My Goodreads Review

Tiamat's Wrath, by James S. A. Corey

 I don't give out a whole lot of five star reviews. This book earns it in part based on all that leads up to it. All of the characters are incredibly real, and that realism rubs off on Teresa Duarte, whom we don't know nearly as well.

Hard for me to say anything previous reviewers have not. The main characters have an incredibly intense relationship, and the authors ride right on the edge of having the intensity spill over into sappiness. There are a lot of authors trying to do this kind of book or series now, but this is the one they have to live up to for sheer entertainment value. I don't know if there's any one aspect where The Expanse is the best of its kind, but it's so close to the top in all of them that it's my favorite in 50 years of reading SF. I loved Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga series, but this one edges it out and I can't think of any other extended series that comes close.

Now comes the hard part--the ending. So many series in fantasy and science fiction come to an unsatisfying end. But I think they're going to pull this off.

My Goodreads Review

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, by Ted Chiang

 Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom is one of the original stories in Ted Chiang's Exhalation collection, and was nominated for a Hugo for Best Novella this year.  My very favorite thing about all of Chiang's stories is that in each one he takes on the biggest of topics--some aspect of the meaning of life.  I can't think of one that couldn't be a sermon (in a somewhat liberal, intellectual church).  The driver is a speculation that is sometimes possible, sometimes not, but always grounded in reality.  In this story the driver is a device that forces a quantum choice, causing possibilities to diverge, then showing you yourself living in that alternate possibility.  What would we use that for?  What would it teach us?  Well, we'd exploit it for money, but also use it for connection, for collaboration, and for science.  In the protagonist, Nat, we see someone who has gone down a difficult road but is trying to make better choices, and trying to find reasons to do so.  My favorite idea is that of making choices that influence our future alternate selves--each positive choice makes it easier for those alternate versions to make positive choices as well.  Made my day.

Goodreads Link

Wind Will Rove, by Sarah Pinsker

Wind Will Rove by Sarah Pinsker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Sarah Pinsker has two strong pieces up for awards this year. And Then There Were (N-1) is perhaps the more imaginative of the two, but Wind Will Rove is emotionally powerful.

The story itself is about preservation of memory. The protagonist is a teacher of history on a generation ship heading for a distant star. Early on in the voyage, a disgruntled IT tech erased all their cultural history from the ship databases. The physical survival of the ship was not in doubt, but the loss of the history panicked people and nearly ended the mission anyway. They became hyperconscious of the past, and attempted to preserve as much of their history through their own memories as possible.

Some are simply depressed by the story, thinking it either didn't make a point or the point was too obvious. They would be rewarded by trying again. Yes, the rebellious children are kind of silly. They usually are. What adults who actually care about them do is try to reconcile with an eye to having them learn something from the rebellion, and keep their original ideas. Pinsker's protagonist is trying to do this, and on the face of it this is a harder road than simply kicking the kid's ass and telling him to get with the program. The just-barely-spoken acknowledgement here is that whatever tactics are used to reconcile the discontented have to work for seven or more generations without a break. Simple oppression is more likely to get you another disgruntled IT worker. And you can never plug all the holes.

The story illustrates the importance of memory in spite of, and eventually because of, its imperfections. Faulty memory begets evolutionary creativity, which is just as important as sui generis creativity, even if the young have not figured that out yet. Or the old.

Great stuff, and she could sweep the Hugos and Nebulas for both novella and novelette this year.



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And Then There were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker

And Then There Were by Sarah Pinsker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This story is the most clever take I've seen yet using the encountering-yourself-on-multiple-timelines/universes trope. It is an incredible piece of autobiography--she explores multiple versions of herself meeting herself--at a SarahCon! Too good.

The story itself is personal and gets appropriately meta, but never really weird--it's pretty apparent Sarah Pinsker imagines herself as an acutely normal person. But maybe not, the boundaries of differentiation of Sarah Pinskers is actually explained in the story. It's fascinatingly self-complete. I don't give out five stars very often, this is only the third time, but if this story isn't on multiple award ballots then the awards are messed up.



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Existence, by David Brin

David Brin is one of my all-time favorite writers.  His Uplift series is a great concept, and has served him to build a very fertile universe.  However, I'd have to say that I like his more grounded SF even better.  Earth is an excellent near-future novel, which is very tough to pull off.  And then, after far too long away from SF, he published Existence in 2012.  He'd been so long away, other than one short story I'd seen in 2009, that I didn't go get it right away, but received it recently as a gift.

And I would have to say that it's my favorite work of his yet.  This is a very ambitious work, stretching possibility to the limit without breaking it.  The reviews of the hardcover book say that one can read it as an Uplift preview, but the author makes it clear that this is not the case.  He said that having Faster Than Light travel, like in Uplift, is like "playing tennis with the net lowered".  This universe breaks no laws of physics, but instead speculates on what a cosmos that produces intelligent beings would look like if they were able to send something--a probe, a recording, anything--across the vast interstellar distances.

And what a rough place it would be.  Brin's core thought is that any non-static object, like a self-replicating probe or an artificial intelligence in a small package, would undergo change over the millions of years it would be in transit.  The spawning species would almost certainly be extinct by the time the artifacts made it to another civilization, with most never making it at all. If there were enough of them to actually encounter each other away from their home system, they might have evolved very different abilities, motives, and tactics from what their makers intended.

Existence is the story of what it might be like if earth received one of these evolved probes at some point in the not too distant future.  Then, more, and more...could we survive the influence of devices so far removed from their makers?

Brin is an astute student of society, and has written much non-fiction on the topics of privacy, politics and sociology.  His blog (on his website) makes for fascinating and inspiring reading.  He deeply values diversity of ideas as a defining human strength and the key to survival--and I heartily agree with him.

So I give the book a rare four stars for execution, and a nearly impossible fifth star for all that went into it.  More people should be reading and listening to David Brin, whether they agree with him or not.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurdly Hypothetical Questions

The core of almost all hard science fiction is to start with a premise that is not currently, or ever, possible (what if we could travel faster than light?  Fly at will?  Visualize the Internet in our heads?), but to then keep the rest of scientific knowledge the same and speculate about what happens in a story.

By this definition, Randall Munroe's What If? is very close to science fiction.  All it is lacking is the story.  It should be required reading for anyone considering writing science fiction, since it's basically a book of premises.  But I don't really think I would have to tell an SF writer that, I'm quite sure they have all read it by now. 

If you are at all interested in science and are reading this, you have heard of xkcd. Munroe has been drawing this comic for many years, starting as a NASA engineer.  He has made enough fame and fortune off this work to kick the NASA gig and write full time.  In What If?, he takes his readers' most elaborate and interesting hypothetical questions and tries to answer them with as much accurate science as possible.  He is thoroughly and amazingly successful at this--it's clever and interesting all the way through.  It's written in short chapters so you can consume it in little bites, and this is actually a pretty good way to read it.  I've been reading bits and pieces off and on for several months.

Munroe has a clean, clear, humorous writing style that will last forever.  If he wrote a novel, it would read a lot like Andy Weir's The Martian, for similar reasons--they are both engineers that obsess over the facts and just relate them straight out.  Maybe Munroe will try it sometime.  I loved it and give it my most utterly rare 5 star review as required reading.  If for some reason you have procrastinated, go get it now.

The Martian, by Andy Weir

I got The Martian as a gift in paperback, but as most know by now it was originally posted online for free, then put out as a 99 cent Kindle edition.  It went completely nuts, became a bestseller, and now he has a movie deal.  I hear Matt Damon is going to play Mark Watney.

And everything the reviewers have said so far is true.  I could put it down, because I'm disciplined (compulsive), but it was damn hard.  I devoured every page.  Mark Watney is a likeable, everyman/McGuyver.  He logs his solutions to insanely hard survival problems with a great mix of stress and pride, and throw sheer joy of problem solving into the mix.  This is true old-school Golden Age Science Fiction, where the science drives the story.  The writing is matter-of-fact, the protagonist is basically the author, and it all works perfectly.

Andy Weir is a phenomenon now.  I do kind of wonder what he's going to do with himself.  I don't expect him to repeat this feat, and it would be painful to see him try.  He does say he's been writing as an amateur for some time, but for him to do another commercially successful book he would have to get into more literary things like character creation.  Hard to pull off.  And who cares.  If this is all he does, he's gone a ways toward reviving hard SF.

I give it 5 stars.  And this is not an Amazon 5 stars.  I've only given that a few times out of the 1300+ stories I've reviewed.  It is a masterpiece of its type. I noted that it did not get a Nebula nomination.  If it doesn't get a Hugo nomination then SF awards are simply broken and I will have a hard time justifying paying attention to them anymore.

A Memory of Light, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

The Wheel of Time series was 23 years old when it concluded last year.  I did not start reading the series when it first came out, though I did hear about it--I began it around the turn of the millenium, and then purchased the books as they came out.  So partly free.  And I am part of a legion of fantasy SF readers for whom the series has been part of life, for 14 years now.

It was never a compulsive part, as even when I am not a free SF reader, I am a cheap one. I got the final volume, A Memory of Light, for Christmas this year and spent close to three months reading it.  Coming to the end of such a series, I was bracing for disappointment.  Bringing a series to a close is a truly difficult affair.  So many classic works have ended poorly.  Brandon Sanderson had done a very good job of getting the series from the death of Jordan to the ending, but still...

Not this time, though.  A major series spanning many years comes to a full and satisfying conclusion.  Jordan gets only partial credit, since he didn't manage to conclude it in his own lifetime.  But it was really good to see such a fine strong ending.  Sanderson says Jordan had most of the ending written, and I can buy that, since it's heavy on battle scenes.  Those were his strength before he undertook this series.  But the pacing is definitely Sanderson.

Really, in the end it delivers what was promised all the way at the start.  Rand Al'Thor leads the forces of the Light into the Last Battle, as promised.  All the major characters are there, and get their say one way or another.  Rand becomes rather larger than human, even as he tries to hold on to his humanity--pretty much what you would expect of the Savior.

But while this, like so many of its kind, bears a resemblance to the Bible, this isn't really a Christ allegory.  In the end, Rand is still human, with some special power.  The ending underlines this well. 

No tricks or gimmicks here.  The heroes of the end of the Third Age step up and play their part, as do the villains.  The series never was about complex personalities, though they do have flavor.  If you have never picked it up, I would say it's worthwhile to spend a year (or however long it takes you to read 14,000 pages) and read it.  It sets a good expectation for what a fantasy series can deliver.  I give this one my rare Five Stars, in the special category of Long Series With A Real Ending.

Itsy Bitsy Spider, by James Patrick Kelly

I've been a bit disappointed by the award nominated stories I've read recently.  Some were good, some not so good, no real grabbers.  I am much happier now, having read Itsy Bitsy Spider, by James Patrick Kelly.  This story manages to combine speculation on future care of the elderly with some serious emotional content, including a very subtle but powerful reorienting of the protagonist's perspective on her father.  I was deeply moved and smiling when I finished, and had plenty to think about, which is all one could ask for in a story.  Really interesting, and I truly hope you go read it, as it does what speculative fiction can do better than most any other genre--get you far enough out of your normal way of thinking to open you to new possibilities.  I'm giving it 5 stars, which I have not done for any other story.