Recent content by Autumnal

Wimp. Use Theatrix.

A summary of my 2025 reading, with help from StoryGraph: 124 books read - 17,413 pages, 1,131 hours 55 science fiction 27 fantasy 26 horror 18 history 9 mystery 74% fiction 26% nonfiction 40% digital 60% audio Christopher Ruocchio: 7 books Stephen Baxter: 5 books Terry Pratchett: 5 books

That sounds like some heavy sledding. I hope it’s worth the work!

I had a stressful morning, with a crisis among Mom’s caregivers. Once it settled down, I curled up with an audiobook of Clark Ashton Smith’s stories (The End Of The Story, volume 1 of the 5-volume set from Night Shade Books). The readings are uniformly great and the prose, oh man, the prose is...

I remember Dr Catherine Asaro disassembling some jerks on rec.arts.sf.written in the ‘90s who were sure that no woman could grasp chemistry or physics the way they did, especially if she’s writing romance-heavy stories. (She’s got an MA in physics, Ph.D in chemical physics.)

There’s more overall story there than is visible at the start. Trust me, would I lie to you? I finished Wolfhound Century. It remained great. It does end on a cliffhanger, but then I look forward to reading more about this place and these people.

I’d hoped this would be my last book of 2025, but missed it by a hundred fifty pages or so: Wolfhound Century, by Peter Higgins. This has been my library for years, and finally I go to it. Wow, it’s great. It’s a police procedural whose investigation leads to matters of politics and revolution...

From Richard Kadrey: And from Ben Monroe:

Pendragon is a possibility. The sets of personality traits for cultural virtues is a very handy thing, and the passions are great for anything with heavy melodrama. (Thinking here of a late friend whose character in Stafford’s campaign had Suspicious 20 and Loyalty (Arthur) 22. He saw threats...

Those are really weird labels. Like, Gibson has been vocally anti-capitalist his whole career, and so is Bacigulpi. If Dick isn’t a philosopher, nobody in sf is, b ii t since are structured societies a thing to philosophers to seek? le Guin concerned with order but Lem and Mieville not? WTF?