Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Bill Capossere

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era by Adam Kotsko

Adam Kotsko’s, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era — no surprise given the title — explores the “strange new worlds” of the Trek universe from Enterprise onward, managing to get about as fully up to date as one can with publication schedules, missing only the very recent Section 31 film (apparently to Kotsko’s great benefit). Aimed at the layperson despite its close readings of the shows and cultural criticism,

June 20th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Film / TV, Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It

Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It by Emily Hauser

Emily Hauser is the author of THE GOLDEN APPLES TRILOGY, a retelling of several Greek myths. But in Penelope’s Bones, she puts her Classics/Ancient History scholarship to work in the service of non-fiction, using her own knowledge and a veritable mountain of cross-discipline evidence to re-examine the role of women in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey,

June 13th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The Afterlife Project: Recommended with a caveat

The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed

The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed is a cli-lit book that follows two distinct storylines, one set in the not-too-distant future wracked by climate disaster and a “hyper-pandemic” and the other set 10,000 years later in a vibrant recovered world, one that may or may not have us humans around anymore. The two-track structure is appropriate, as I had two differing reactions to the book, finding the far-future section (mostly) quite strong while having a less favorable reaction to the near-future setting,

Luminous: A beautiful debut

Luminous by Silvia Park

Luminous (2025) is the debut novel for Silvia Park, and as such evinces some of the issues that sometimes crop up in first books in areas such as structure and pace. Those issues, however, are more than eclipsed by the book’s shimmering prose, frequently moving moments, and thoughtful exploration of a number of themes, all circling around the question of what it means to be “human.”

Park sets her novel in a unified Korea, roughly twenty years after the war that ended their separation.

The Ashfire King: A flawed but worthwhile return to Abdullah’s magical world

The Ashfire King by Chelsea Abdullah

The Ashfire King is Chelsea Abdullah’s follow-up to the highly enjoyable The Stardust Thief, picking up pretty immediately after the events of that book, which ended on a pretty sizable cliffhanger. While the new novel doesn’t attain the heights of its predecessor, which I called “one of the most enjoyable and captivating books” I’d read that year, despite some issues it moves the story along, deepens several of the characters,

May 23rd, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Chelsea Abdullah | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Written on the Dark: Feels like Kay’s most elegiac work

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

In Written on the Dark (2025), Guy Gavriel Kay returns to his “quarter-turn from our own” world, here shifting time and place to a late-medieval “France” (Ferrieres in Kay’s universe) ruled by a “mad king.” When the king’s brother is killed by the powerful Duke of Barratin and left on the streets of Orane (think Paris), tavern poet Thierry Villar finds himself embroiled in the politics and intrigue of a world he’d never imagined himself part of, as Ferrieres tries to avoid civil war while also attempting to fend off an exterior invasion by the king of the island nation across the channel [some spoilers to follow in this review;

The Antidote: Sometimes great, sometimes befuddling

The Antidote by Karen Russell

Karen Russell’s newest, The Antidote (2025), is at times a great book, is at times a befuddling book, and is, in a few instances, a flawed book. The strengths of the book are many: wonderful character creation; the exploration of gravely important themes such as historical erasure, the treatment of Indigenous people, the shaming of women; a healthy dose of magical realism via a magical camera, a sentient scarecrow, and memory-vault “witches”; and wonderfully rich, vivid description. The issues crop up with regard to character presentation,

The Book That Held Her Heart: Concludes a trilogy that’s easy to recommend

The Book That Held Her Heart by Mark Lawrence

Mark Lawrence’s first title in his LIBRARY TRILOGY, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, made my Top Ten Books list the year it came out (2023), and while its sequel, The Book That Broke the World, wasn’t as strong, I still quite enjoyed it. Now Lawrence is out with The Book That Held Her Heart,

April 22nd, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Mark Lawrence | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Murder by Memory: Intriguing setting but didn’t connect

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

Murder by Memory is a cozy mystery novella by Oliva Waite set on a generation spaceship. Unfortunately, despite the intriguing setting, this didn’t connect with me for a number of reasons: the brevity of the novella form seemed to work against the story, neither the mystery nor the solving of it was particularly compelling, and the novel was both a bit overly expository and too twee for me.

The HMS Fairweather has been journey through space for 300 years, carrying thousands of passengers whose minds are stored in the ship’s Library so when their bodies wear out or are damaged,

Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe

Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer’s book Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe is an always informative, often fascinating, and at times worrying look at humanity’s long speculation and exploration of what is in the air around us and what we breathe besides the life-giving oxygen we need.

Zimmer covers a lot of ground here, going back to ancient civilizations and the idea of “miasma” or “bad air,” an explanation of sickness that held sway for centuries until being rivaled in the 14th century by the opposing idea that “diseases such as plague were caused by contagion — a poison that grew inside the sick and then spread to the healthy.” A speculative theory strengthened by the invention of the microscope in the 17th century,

March 14th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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