Reactormag shares a couple of forthcoming 2025 releases, among them the latest by Charlie Jane Anders and a dragon book by Cherie Radke.
They also shared an excerpt from T.J Klune’s latest, The Bones Beneath my Skin.
Best Of Lists, Recommended Reading lists, nomination suggestions… it’s that time of year. Nerds of a Feather starts with their recommended list of fiction and visual work categories.
John Scalzi announced completion of The Shattering Peace, the seventh OLD MAN’S WAR novel, which will come out in September.
Bell Nelson stepped down from the role of NASA Administrator on Monday, January 20, 2025.
In 1926, Rebecca Bradley robbed a bank in Texas, earning the nickname The Flapper Bandit. “A Bank Robber or a Lightning Rod for America’s Fear of Independent Women?” Atlas Obscura asks. Why not both?
My biggest take-away from the Scientific American article was that there is a field called clinical paleogenomics. Still, interesting article about Neandertal DNA, with plenty of fodder for a What if…?
I just read The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville, and it featured an immortal babirusa. That’s why I chose the strange looking deer-pig with the four tusks for today’s image.
Pretty much as expected going into 2024, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood was my pick for best book read in that year. A little more drawn out and less compact than Hild, but still a very compelling tale about someone whose life might have happened that way. For runners-up, I finally got around to reading Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October and found it great fun, and Samantha Harvey’s short novel Orbital was quite good, with our planet (as seen from the ISS) a looming character behind the human drama–more enjoyable than I would expect in a Booker winner. Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves was also pretty good, as, inevitably, was the latest (Vol. 9) Monstress graphic novel.
The Nerds list only had four books that I tried out, with less than satisfying results. Seth Dickinson’s Exordia set my teeth on edge with its tone and I bounced off that not many chapters in. The West Passage seems to be trying for a combination of Vance’s Dying Earth and Carroll’s Wonderland, but lacks the wit of either (author Jared Pechaček must have been having fun, but I just didn’t share in it). The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands (Sarah Brooks) was maybe a parable about living with difference, with a cast you could identify 1950s paperback-style by their titles (the Professor, the Evil Security Agents, the Engineer, etc.) taking a fin de siècle train journey through a Lovecraftian wasteland in Asia, but it offered more promise than it delivered in the end. The Last Hour Between Worlds is one I just finished, kind of a fun popcorn read with a complex and not fully explained setting of layered realities, a plot like a cross between Groundhog Day and Nine Princes in Amber, but suffering from Melissa Caruso’s usual problem shoehorning romantic elements into the story and not being very convincing in the execution.
I was surprised and happy to see that a number of readers online this year have rediscovered Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men (from 1995), an affecting story that ReacTor mentions today in its list of quiet post-apocalyptic novels. It’s good to see some worthier past novels finding an audience in these latter degenerate times.