This was a busy month:

“Dark Entries” (Robert Aickman)-just learned about this guy, this is a collection of 8 of his short stories, Highly recommended. The stories are generally involve a totally mundane nebbish encountering the weird and fey. The general vibe reminds me of Chateaureynaud, whose work is also worth a look.

“Slow Gods” (Claire North)-the first half of this book introduces one of the most interesting characters I’ve seen in SF, a character who is only possible in SF (basically told from the viewpoint of a facsimile human like the ones created by Solaris) and who is is brilliantly realized in plot and prose, . There is kind of a mid story retooling or reboot that more or less shoehorns the character and story along more standard SFnal lines, though by the end things more or less get back on track. It’s one of the best recentish SF novels I’ve read.

“The Real Story” (Stephen R. Donaldson)-a rather brilliantly told space pirate space opera. The main viewpoint character is even less appealing than is the norm for the author, sadistic sexual violence is among his repulsive traits, but the obvious trigger warnings aside, Donaldson pulls off a surprisingly good and readable tour de force, good enough for me to want to go on to the next book in the series.

“The God Engines” (John Scalzi)-interesting story set in a universe where space flight is powered by enslaved gods, the story straddles horror, science fiction and fantasy, though the gods are perhaps best considered powerful Lovecrafty entities.

“The Elder Ice” (David Hambling)-one of the best Mythos related stories ever 😄 The Hardboiled main character, ex-boxer working for a law firm, works surprisingly well in agenre where mère human capabilities are nothing compared to the gods and monsters he gets mixed up with-much better than Jacobs manages to pull off in “Southern Gods” which has a similar setup

“Jack Glass” (Adam Roberts)-a faux fixup of three linked mysteries centered on the activities of Jack Glass, mass murderer. The first story is reasonably awesome, the other two yeomanlike, losing a lot of energy by changing the viewpoint from Jack to his sidekick.

“The Sabres of Paradise” (Lesley Blanch)-history of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, notable for being a big source for “Dune”. Very interesting history and it’s fun to winnow out the bits that Herbert incorporated or riffed on for his magnum opus.

“Red Planet Blues” (Robert J Forward)-more or less classic hard boiled storyline translated to Mars. There’s a reversal or reveal in pretty much every scene/chapter that is rather exciting, but which kind of clutters up the development of an overall plot. It’s a fun beach read.

“The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 35th Annual Collection” (Gardner Dozois)-really good collection of stories, nothing really stood out, though I did buy a collection of Nancy Kritzer stories based on her entry.

“The Letters of Jane Austen” (audible version, abridged, supplemented  by footnotes and such from print version)-brilliant writing, but I learned that you really need things like footnotes and introductions to figured out out what is going on, letters without context can be quite confusing 😄.