What are you reading in 2025?

[Autumnal]

I really liked The Difference Engine, but it’s really different from anything else I’ve read by either author solo. It goes deeper but not faster. If you’d like to read some 19th century alternate history with super tech that turns out to have a solid physical rationale and radical politics, and that moves right along, let me recommend Stephen Baxter’s Anti-Ice.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

After doing the Appendix N Jam, I'm really feeling that vibe right now, so it might just be the huge clash of tones putting me off the Difference Engine.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I read it so long ago soon after it came out, but I remember two things about it - 1) it was good but not great because 2) two great tastes that went ok together, but the parts were greater than the sum. Ie, it was not better than any of the books Gibson and Sterling wrote alone that I had read to date.

Corollary - it was an early steampunk iteration, and as such should get a bit of credit (or blame I guess, depending on your perspective).

 

[Clint_L]

I started re-reading the Harry Potter series - I was in Porto on vacation a few weeks ago, wanted an easy vacation read, and it was the obvious choice given that Rowling started work on it while she lived there, and there are all kinds of nods to the books throughout the city. Anyway, I just finished book 7 last night.

It's still a fun read - Rowling's formula of taking the old Tom Brown's Schooldays template and adding magic works a treat...for the first six books. But, man, Book 7 really goes downhill without the Hogwarts school year to give it structure. It's way over-stuffed, so much so that the climactic final battle of the entire series is constantly interrupted by pages upon pages of exposition to elaborate on all the plot contrivances (meanwhile, a key plot point such as Ron and Hermione figuring out how to destroy one of the horcruxes happens entirely off stage, though the film adaptation wisely decided to develop it). I'd forgotten that Harry's ultimate confrotnation with Voldemort is 90% the two of them playing twenty questions as Harry goes through the dubious technicalities of wand ownership. It's very strange that his final victory feels a bit like "Aha - you should have read the fine print, Dark Lord!"

Also...what is with mega-popular fantasy settings playing footsie with slavery? Harry, like Luke Skywalker before him, is a slave owner - Kreacher the house elf (who of course has come to love him by the end). Why on earth did Rowling introduce the whole "house elves are slaves" subplot...what point is she trying to make, since it really goes nowhere? Anyway, it feels weird to be rooting for a protagonist who owns another sentient being.

Edit: I suspect that her editors knew it was kind of a mess but also knew it didn't matter.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What, you didn't enjoy "and then they camped in the woods for six months. Let's drop in on them and show you how boring that was?" She was clearly impossible to edit by the time Book 7 rolled around.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Uh, I just started the Difference Engine and it's super-boring. Does it pick up or am I right in wanting to nope out? So far, it's mostly how it's terrible to be a prostitute in an alternate history London that has mechanical computing happening in the setting background.

Nah it's pretty boring mate.

Like, I say that with love. It's a book I enjoyed a lot as a teenager, and I do think it was important to developing and popularizing steampunk as a genre. If only anyone at all had understood that the industrial revolution, even with computers and robots was a horrific dystopia, not an idealized state lol, I thought that book made it pretty clear but I think some people's brains stop when they see a top hat or hear someone called "Lord [insert very British name]".

but the parts were greater than the sum. Ie, it was not better than any of the books Gibson and Sterling wrote alone that I had read to date

Exactly, both did wildly better by themselves.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I actually shelved John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. Should have been up my alley, but after about 50 pages, the writing style and story structure got to me.

Instead I switched to Samit Basu's The City Inside. Really good read; it felt frightfully relevant and is likely only to get more so with time. The line "They don't want people to live like humans. They want them for data, and then for meat." stuck with me.

Now I'm reading Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I actually shelved John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. Should have been up my alley, but after about 50 pages, the writing style and story structure got to me.

Instead I switched to Samit Basu's The City Inside. Really good read; it felt frightfully relevant and is likely only to get more so with time. The line "They don't want people to live like humans. They want them for data, and then for meat." stuck with me.

Now I'm reading Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix.

Love Schismatrix

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Love Schismatrix

Really digging it so far. I was a little worried at first that it would feel too sci-fi and not cyberpunk enough, but it's got grit and grime in spades.

 

[Alzrius]

I just finished reading Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry, and came away suitably impressed.

Notwithstanding the exceptionally short stories that I read last year, this was my first read-through of The Twain's exploits (though they're never called that in this book), despite being familiar with them, Lankhmar, and Nehwon, mostly through their presentations in various old D&D products. Having read through Leiber's own writing at last, I find myself having a much better appreciation for the characters.

Being the first chronological stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (albeit not the first that Leiber wrote, I'm given to understand), the book has four tales to tell. The first is little more than a two-page introduction, setting the proverbial stage. After that, we get Fafhrd's origin, then Gray Mouser's, and finally their meeting and teaming up.

Reviewers far more skilled than myself have written about what makes Leiber's work so compelling, but for me it's that his writing has a skillful mixture of evocative and informative, never delving into purple prose but always being just flowery enough that it's never workmanlike. Combined with the fact that he seems to weave between action and exposition so surely that he makes them seem like two sides of the same coin, and it's no wonder that he's regarded as one of the great writers of his genre. The man could make checking your mailbox seem like an adventure and a commentary on your personality all at once.

My one critique is the ease, during the final story ("Ill Met in Lankhmar"), with which Fafhrd and Gray Mouser become friends. To be fair, this is lampshaded both by the circumstance (where they unexpectedly try to rob the same group of thieves at the same time) and by their having very briefly met before (given a brief reference in each of their respective origin stories). Still, it feels just a tad too convenient how they become fast friends, though I'd posit that it's how the story ends that cements their partnership. As far as literary sins go, this is barely a venial one.

I've heard for some time that Leiber's stories were among the most central in the pantheon of writing which inspired Gary Gygax; having finally partaken of them myself, I can absolutely see why that was.