#jackdann — Public Fediverse posts

Born this Day:
Jack Dann (born February 15, 1945) is an American-Australian author known for lyrical, psychological science fiction. His novel The Man Who Melted (1984), a Nebula finalist, depicts a dystopia of telepathic dissolution and collective consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dann

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https://astralcomputing.com

Born this Day:
Jack Dann (born February 15, 1945) is an American-Australian author known for lyrical, psychological science fiction. His novel The Man Who Melted (1984), a Nebula finalist, depicts a dystopia of telepathic dissolution and collective consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dann

#Literature
#SciFi
#ScienceFiction
#books
#bookstodon
#coverart
#JackDann

Groups:
@books
@scifi
@Scifiart
@sciencefiction

https://astralcomputing.com

Born this Day:
Jack Dann (born February 15, 1945) is an American-Australian author known for lyrical, psychological science fiction. His novel The Man Who Melted (1984), a Nebula finalist, depicts a dystopia of telepathic dissolution and collective consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dann

#Literature
#SciFi
#ScienceFiction
#books
#bookstodon
#coverart
#JackDann

Groups:
@books
@scifi
@Scifiart
@sciencefiction

https://astralcomputing.com

Born this Day:
Jack Dann (born February 15, 1945) is an American-Australian author known for lyrical, psychological science fiction. His novel The Man Who Melted (1984), a Nebula finalist, depicts a dystopia of telepathic dissolution and collective consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dann

#Literature
#SciFi
#ScienceFiction
#books
#bookstodon
#coverart
#JackDann

Groups:
@books
@scifi
@Scifiart
@sciencefiction

https://astralcomputing.com

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1960s #1970s #ArkadyAndBorisStrugatsky #bookReview #bookReviews #books #CherryWilder #ECTubb #EdgarPangborn #fiction #FrankKKelly #fritzLeiber #GeorgeHSmith #GeraldKersh #IzumiSuzuki #JackDann #JackWilliamson #JamesTiptreeJr #JoeHaldeman #JohnWyndham #KatherineMacLean #KimStanleyRobinson #OctaviaEButler #philipKDick #RichardMatheson #sciFi #scienceFiction #TheodoreSturgeon #ZoeFairbairns

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1960s #1970s #ArkadyAndBorisStrugatsky #bookReview #bookReviews #books #CherryWilder #ECTubb #EdgarPangborn #fiction #FrankKKelly #fritzLeiber #GeorgeHSmith #GeraldKersh #IzumiSuzuki #JackDann #JackWilliamson #JamesTiptreeJr #JoeHaldeman #JohnWyndham #KatherineMacLean #KimStanleyRobinson #OctaviaEButler #philipKDick #RichardMatheson #sciFi #scienceFiction #TheodoreSturgeon #ZoeFairbairns

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23” x 14”

The concept here is that the aliens and the lone human-—who is an alien to the others—are posing for a group photograph, with the photographer being out of view to the right. ¼

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23” x 14”

The concept here is that the aliens and the lone human-—who is an alien to the others—are posing for a group photograph, with the photographer being out of view to the right. ¼

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23” x 14”

The concept here is that the aliens and the lone human-—who is an alien to the others—are posing for a group photograph, with the photographer being out of view to the right. ¼

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23” x 14”

The concept here is that the aliens and the lone human-—who is an alien to the others—are posing for a group photograph, with the photographer being out of view to the right. ¼

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXLVI (Kim Stanley Robinson, Miriam Allen DeFord, Keith Laumer, and Jack Dann)

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

Finally acquired a new scanner!

1. The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson (1985)

• Fred Gambino’s cover for the 1999 edition

From the back cover: “In the 33rd century humanity is scattered among the planets of the Solar System. Millions of lives depend on the revolutionary physics of Arthur Holywelkin; millions of hears are moved by the music created by the strange, eerie instrument he built in the last years of his life: the Orchestra. Johannes Wright is the Ninth–and youngest–Master of the Orchestra. But as he sets out on his first Grand Tour of the Solar System, unseen foes are at his heel, ready to reveal all but the meaning of their enmity. In confronting them, Wright must redefine the Universe–for himself and all humanity.”

Initial Thoughts: I should have a review of an early Kim Stanley Robinson novel up on the site soon. I have fond memories of reading Red Mars (1992) and Green Mars (1993)–and less fond memories of Blue Mars (1996)–as an older teen. The only Robinson work I’ve reviewed on the site is “Exploring Fossil Canyon” (1982). Unfortunately my cover of The Memory of Whiteness had a pernicious sticker that damaged the cover…

2. Greylorn, Keith Laumer (1968)

• Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GREYLORN. Humanity’s last hope lay in one spaceship racing through the voids of the universe. The Red Tide had all but engulfed the Earth, and there was just enough time to find Omega, the planet that had long ago been colonized–and then had simply disappeared.

After four years in space, the ship felt the hand of calamity all at once. Its food stores were destroyed by a meteor crash. its crew was set to mutiny. And, worst of all, was the threatening alien ship, with its strange cargo of human bodies…”

Contents: “Greylorn” (1959), “The Night of the Trolls” (1963), “The Other Sky” (variant title: “The Further Sky”) (1964), and “The King of the City” (1961).

Initial Thoughts: I’ve only read Laumer’s (successful) attempt at a New Wave story — “In the Queue” (1970).

3. One Way and Other Stories, Miriam Allen deFord (2025).

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Miriam Allen deFord (1988-1975) was a feminist, a suffragette, birth control advocate, journalist, editor, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and author of science fiction, mystery, and true crime. Now, at long last, a collection of her science fiction short stories are back in print with One Way and Other Stories.

Mystery writer, Fortean, anti-fascist, feminist of the first generation, and science fiction trailblazers for five decades, Miriam Allen deFord masterfully weaves all of her facets into her stories, bringing a macabre, fantastic tone to her tales: Bradbury meets Hitchcock. She was already the grand dame of science fiction when the genre reached its second peak with the magazine boom of the early ’50s. Her work thus paced and led the way for SF’s Silver Age.

Miriam Allen deFord somehow slips under the radar when luminaries are listed. With luck, this volume will remedy this oversight.

~Gideon Marcus, editor of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women.“

Contents: “Not Snow, Nor Rain” (1959), “Oh, Rats!” (1961), “One Way” (1955), “The Margenes” (1956), “The Akkra Case” (1962), “Time Out for Redheads” (1955), “Where the Phyh Pebbles Go” (1963), and “The Eel” (1958).

Initial Thoughts: It’s always nice to see a lesser-known classic author getting a collection of stories in print. The indie press Space Cowboy Books also published Jaroslav Olša, Jr.’s Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction  (2025), which I featured earlier this year. I’ve enjoyed some of deFord’s work in the past–in particular her earlier work. You can snag a copy of Other Stories here. They include small reproductions of the original interior art.

4. Junction, Jack Dann (1981)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GO TO HELL. The hundred-eyed bird monster told Ned Wheeler that his foreordained quest must begin in Hell–which lay just beyond the borders of Junction, the tumultuous, bawdy, pious town that knew damnation as a daily experience and salvation as a distant hope.

ned’s odyssey took him to a place stranger than Junction, stranger than Hell–the bizarre, unbelievable, dangerous city called New York.

Its learned scientists told him of incredible things, like the laws of cause and effect and the fact that they had ceased to operate. It was as if the entire world were living in a chaotic dream–perhaps Ned Wheeler’s dream…”

Initial Thoughts: I recently reviewed, and enjoyed, Dann’s Nebula-nominated novella “Junction” (1973). This is the fix-up novel version that also includes the short story “The Islands of Time” (1977). I’m a bit worried. I felt like the original novella version could have been trimmed and tightened. Not sure how a novelization will add to the metaphysical kaleidoscope that was the original. We shall see!

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1960s #1970s #1980s #bookReview #bookReviews2 #books #fiction #jackDann #keithLaumer #kimStanleyRobinson #miriamAllenDeford #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXLVI (Kim Stanley Robinson, Miriam Allen DeFord, Keith Laumer, and Jack Dann)

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

Finally acquired a new scanner!

1. The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson (1985)

• Fred Gambino’s cover for the 1999 edition

From the back cover: “In the 33rd century humanity is scattered among the planets of the Solar System. Millions of lives depend on the revolutionary physics of Arthur Holywelkin; millions of hears are moved by the music created by the strange, eerie instrument he built in the last years of his life: the Orchestra. Johannes Wright is the Ninth–and youngest–Master of the Orchestra. But as he sets out on his first Grand Tour of the Solar System, unseen foes are at his heel, ready to reveal all but the meaning of their enmity. In confronting them, Wright must redefine the Universe–for himself and all humanity.”

Initial Thoughts: I should have a review of an early Kim Stanley Robinson novel up on the site soon. I have fond memories of reading Red Mars (1992) and Green Mars (1993)–and less fond memories of Blue Mars (1996)–as an older teen. The only Robinson work I’ve reviewed on the site is “Exploring Fossil Canyon” (1982). Unfortunately my cover of The Memory of Whiteness had a pernicious sticker that damaged the cover…

2. Greylorn, Keith Laumer (1968)

• Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GREYLORN. Humanity’s last hope lay in one spaceship racing through the voids of the universe. The Red Tide had all but engulfed the Earth, and there was just enough time to find Omega, the planet that had long ago been colonized–and then had simply disappeared.

After four years in space, the ship felt the hand of calamity all at once. Its food stores were destroyed by a meteor crash. its crew was set to mutiny. And, worst of all, was the threatening alien ship, with its strange cargo of human bodies…”

Contents: “Greylorn” (1959), “The Night of the Trolls” (1963), “The Other Sky” (variant title: “The Further Sky”) (1964), and “The King of the City” (1961).

Initial Thoughts: I’ve only read Laumer’s (successful) attempt at a New Wave story — “In the Queue” (1970).

3. One Way and Other Stories, Miriam Allen deFord (2025).

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Miriam Allen deFord (1988-1975) was a feminist, a suffragette, birth control advocate, journalist, editor, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and author of science fiction, mystery, and true crime. Now, at long last, a collection of her science fiction short stories are back in print with One Way and Other Stories.

Mystery writer, Fortean, anti-fascist, feminist of the first generation, and science fiction trailblazers for five decades, Miriam Allen deFord masterfully weaves all of her facets into her stories, bringing a macabre, fantastic tone to her tales: Bradbury meets Hitchcock. She was already the grand dame of science fiction when the genre reached its second peak with the magazine boom of the early ’50s. Her work thus paced and led the way for SF’s Silver Age.

Miriam Allen deFord somehow slips under the radar when luminaries are listed. With luck, this volume will remedy this oversight.

~Gideon Marcus, editor of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women.“

Contents: “Not Snow, Nor Rain” (1959), “Oh, Rats!” (1961), “One Way” (1955), “The Margenes” (1956), “The Akkra Case” (1962), “Time Out for Redheads” (1955), “Where the Phyh Pebbles Go” (1963), and “The Eel” (1958).

Initial Thoughts: It’s always nice to see a lesser-known classic author getting a collection of stories in print. The indie press Space Cowboy Books also published Jaroslav Olša, Jr.’s Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction  (2025), which I featured earlier this year. I’ve enjoyed some of deFord’s work in the past–in particular her earlier work. You can snag a copy of Other Stories here. They include small reproductions of the original interior art.

4. Junction, Jack Dann (1981)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GO TO HELL. The hundred-eyed bird monster told Ned Wheeler that his foreordained quest must begin in Hell–which lay just beyond the borders of Junction, the tumultuous, bawdy, pious town that knew damnation as a daily experience and salvation as a distant hope.

ned’s odyssey took him to a place stranger than Junction, stranger than Hell–the bizarre, unbelievable, dangerous city called New York.

Its learned scientists told him of incredible things, like the laws of cause and effect and the fact that they had ceased to operate. It was as if the entire world were living in a chaotic dream–perhaps Ned Wheeler’s dream…”

Initial Thoughts: I recently reviewed, and enjoyed, Dann’s Nebula-nominated novella “Junction” (1973). This is the fix-up novel version that also includes the short story “The Islands of Time” (1977). I’m a bit worried. I felt like the original novella version could have been trimmed and tightened. Not sure how a novelization will add to the metaphysical kaleidoscope that was the original. We shall see!

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1960s #1970s #1980s #bookReview #bookReviews2 #books #fiction #jackDann #keithLaumer #kimStanleyRobinson #miriamAllenDeford #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXLVI (Kim Stanley Robinson, Miriam Allen DeFord, Keith Laumer, and Jack Dann)

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

Finally acquired a new scanner!

1. The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson (1985)

• Fred Gambino’s cover for the 1999 edition

From the back cover: “In the 33rd century humanity is scattered among the planets of the Solar System. Millions of lives depend on the revolutionary physics of Arthur Holywelkin; millions of hears are moved by the music created by the strange, eerie instrument he built in the last years of his life: the Orchestra. Johannes Wright is the Ninth–and youngest–Master of the Orchestra. But as he sets out on his first Grand Tour of the Solar System, unseen foes are at his heel, ready to reveal all but the meaning of their enmity. In confronting them, Wright must redefine the Universe–for himself and all humanity.”

Initial Thoughts: I should have a review of an early Kim Stanley Robinson novel up on the site soon. I have fond memories of reading Red Mars (1992) and Green Mars (1993)–and less fond memories of Blue Mars (1996)–as an older teen. The only Robinson work I’ve reviewed on the site is “Exploring Fossil Canyon” (1982). Unfortunately my cover of The Memory of Whiteness had a pernicious sticker that damaged the cover…

2. Greylorn, Keith Laumer (1968)

• Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GREYLORN. Humanity’s last hope lay in one spaceship racing through the voids of the universe. The Red Tide had all but engulfed the Earth, and there was just enough time to find Omega, the planet that had long ago been colonized–and then had simply disappeared.

After four years in space, the ship felt the hand of calamity all at once. Its food stores were destroyed by a meteor crash. its crew was set to mutiny. And, worst of all, was the threatening alien ship, with its strange cargo of human bodies…”

Contents: “Greylorn” (1959), “The Night of the Trolls” (1963), “The Other Sky” (variant title: “The Further Sky”) (1964), and “The King of the City” (1961).

Initial Thoughts: I’ve only read Laumer’s (successful) attempt at a New Wave story — “In the Queue” (1970).

3. One Way and Other Stories, Miriam Allen deFord (2025).

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Miriam Allen deFord (1988-1975) was a feminist, a suffragette, birth control advocate, journalist, editor, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and author of science fiction, mystery, and true crime. Now, at long last, a collection of her science fiction short stories are back in print with One Way and Other Stories.

Mystery writer, Fortean, anti-fascist, feminist of the first generation, and science fiction trailblazers for five decades, Miriam Allen deFord masterfully weaves all of her facets into her stories, bringing a macabre, fantastic tone to her tales: Bradbury meets Hitchcock. She was already the grand dame of science fiction when the genre reached its second peak with the magazine boom of the early ’50s. Her work thus paced and led the way for SF’s Silver Age.

Miriam Allen deFord somehow slips under the radar when luminaries are listed. With luck, this volume will remedy this oversight.

~Gideon Marcus, editor of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women.“

Contents: “Not Snow, Nor Rain” (1959), “Oh, Rats!” (1961), “One Way” (1955), “The Margenes” (1956), “The Akkra Case” (1962), “Time Out for Redheads” (1955), “Where the Phyh Pebbles Go” (1963), and “The Eel” (1958).

Initial Thoughts: It’s always nice to see a lesser-known classic author getting a collection of stories in print. The indie press Space Cowboy Books also published Jaroslav Olša, Jr.’s Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction  (2025), which I featured earlier this year. I’ve enjoyed some of deFord’s work in the past–in particular her earlier work. You can snag a copy of Other Stories here. They include small reproductions of the original interior art.

4. Junction, Jack Dann (1981)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GO TO HELL. The hundred-eyed bird monster told Ned Wheeler that his foreordained quest must begin in Hell–which lay just beyond the borders of Junction, the tumultuous, bawdy, pious town that knew damnation as a daily experience and salvation as a distant hope.

ned’s odyssey took him to a place stranger than Junction, stranger than Hell–the bizarre, unbelievable, dangerous city called New York.

Its learned scientists told him of incredible things, like the laws of cause and effect and the fact that they had ceased to operate. It was as if the entire world were living in a chaotic dream–perhaps Ned Wheeler’s dream…”

Initial Thoughts: I recently reviewed, and enjoyed, Dann’s Nebula-nominated novella “Junction” (1973). This is the fix-up novel version that also includes the short story “The Islands of Time” (1977). I’m a bit worried. I felt like the original novella version could have been trimmed and tightened. Not sure how a novelization will add to the metaphysical kaleidoscope that was the original. We shall see!

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1960s #1970s #1980s #bookReview #bookReviews2 #books #fiction #jackDann #keithLaumer #kimStanleyRobinson #miriamAllenDeford #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXLVI (Kim Stanley Robinson, Miriam Allen DeFord, Keith Laumer, and Jack Dann)

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

Finally acquired a new scanner!

1. The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson (1985)

• Fred Gambino’s cover for the 1999 edition

From the back cover: “In the 33rd century humanity is scattered among the planets of the Solar System. Millions of lives depend on the revolutionary physics of Arthur Holywelkin; millions of hears are moved by the music created by the strange, eerie instrument he built in the last years of his life: the Orchestra. Johannes Wright is the Ninth–and youngest–Master of the Orchestra. But as he sets out on his first Grand Tour of the Solar System, unseen foes are at his heel, ready to reveal all but the meaning of their enmity. In confronting them, Wright must redefine the Universe–for himself and all humanity.”

Initial Thoughts: I should have a review of an early Kim Stanley Robinson novel up on the site soon. I have fond memories of reading Red Mars (1992) and Green Mars (1993)–and less fond memories of Blue Mars (1996)–as an older teen. The only Robinson work I’ve reviewed on the site is “Exploring Fossil Canyon” (1982). Unfortunately my cover of The Memory of Whiteness had a pernicious sticker that damaged the cover…

2. Greylorn, Keith Laumer (1968)

• Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GREYLORN. Humanity’s last hope lay in one spaceship racing through the voids of the universe. The Red Tide had all but engulfed the Earth, and there was just enough time to find Omega, the planet that had long ago been colonized–and then had simply disappeared.

After four years in space, the ship felt the hand of calamity all at once. Its food stores were destroyed by a meteor crash. its crew was set to mutiny. And, worst of all, was the threatening alien ship, with its strange cargo of human bodies…”

Contents: “Greylorn” (1959), “The Night of the Trolls” (1963), “The Other Sky” (variant title: “The Further Sky”) (1964), and “The King of the City” (1961).

Initial Thoughts: I’ve only read Laumer’s (successful) attempt at a New Wave story — “In the Queue” (1970).

3. One Way and Other Stories, Miriam Allen deFord (2025).

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Miriam Allen deFord (1988-1975) was a feminist, a suffragette, birth control advocate, journalist, editor, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and author of science fiction, mystery, and true crime. Now, at long last, a collection of her science fiction short stories are back in print with One Way and Other Stories.

Mystery writer, Fortean, anti-fascist, feminist of the first generation, and science fiction trailblazers for five decades, Miriam Allen deFord masterfully weaves all of her facets into her stories, bringing a macabre, fantastic tone to her tales: Bradbury meets Hitchcock. She was already the grand dame of science fiction when the genre reached its second peak with the magazine boom of the early ’50s. Her work thus paced and led the way for SF’s Silver Age.

Miriam Allen deFord somehow slips under the radar when luminaries are listed. With luck, this volume will remedy this oversight.

~Gideon Marcus, editor of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women.“

Contents: “Not Snow, Nor Rain” (1959), “Oh, Rats!” (1961), “One Way” (1955), “The Margenes” (1956), “The Akkra Case” (1962), “Time Out for Redheads” (1955), “Where the Phyh Pebbles Go” (1963), and “The Eel” (1958).

Initial Thoughts: It’s always nice to see a lesser-known classic author getting a collection of stories in print. The indie press Space Cowboy Books also published Jaroslav Olša, Jr.’s Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction  (2025), which I featured earlier this year. I’ve enjoyed some of deFord’s work in the past–in particular her earlier work. You can snag a copy of Other Stories here. They include small reproductions of the original interior art.

4. Junction, Jack Dann (1981)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GO TO HELL. The hundred-eyed bird monster told Ned Wheeler that his foreordained quest must begin in Hell–which lay just beyond the borders of Junction, the tumultuous, bawdy, pious town that knew damnation as a daily experience and salvation as a distant hope.

ned’s odyssey took him to a place stranger than Junction, stranger than Hell–the bizarre, unbelievable, dangerous city called New York.

Its learned scientists told him of incredible things, like the laws of cause and effect and the fact that they had ceased to operate. It was as if the entire world were living in a chaotic dream–perhaps Ned Wheeler’s dream…”

Initial Thoughts: I recently reviewed, and enjoyed, Dann’s Nebula-nominated novella “Junction” (1973). This is the fix-up novel version that also includes the short story “The Islands of Time” (1977). I’m a bit worried. I felt like the original novella version could have been trimmed and tightened. Not sure how a novelization will add to the metaphysical kaleidoscope that was the original. We shall see!

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1960s #1970s #1980s #bookReviews #JackDann #KeithLaumer #KimStanleyRobinson #MiriamAllenDeFord #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXLVI (Kim Stanley Robinson, Miriam Allen DeFord, Keith Laumer, and Jack Dann)

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

Finally acquired a new scanner!

1. The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson (1985)

• Fred Gambino’s cover for the 1999 edition

From the back cover: “In the 33rd century humanity is scattered among the planets of the Solar System. Millions of lives depend on the revolutionary physics of Arthur Holywelkin; millions of hears are moved by the music created by the strange, eerie instrument he built in the last years of his life: the Orchestra. Johannes Wright is the Ninth–and youngest–Master of the Orchestra. But as he sets out on his first Grand Tour of the Solar System, unseen foes are at his heel, ready to reveal all but the meaning of their enmity. In confronting them, Wright must redefine the Universe–for himself and all humanity.”

Initial Thoughts: I should have a review of an early Kim Stanley Robinson novel up on the site soon. I have fond memories of reading Red Mars (1992) and Green Mars (1993)–and less fond memories of Blue Mars (1996)–as an older teen. The only Robinson work I’ve reviewed on the site is “Exploring Fossil Canyon” (1982). Unfortunately my cover of The Memory of Whiteness had a pernicious sticker that damaged the cover…

2. Greylorn, Keith Laumer (1968)

• Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GREYLORN. Humanity’s last hope lay in one spaceship racing through the voids of the universe. The Red Tide had all but engulfed the Earth, and there was just enough time to find Omega, the planet that had long ago been colonized–and then had simply disappeared.

After four years in space, the ship felt the hand of calamity all at once. Its food stores were destroyed by a meteor crash. its crew was set to mutiny. And, worst of all, was the threatening alien ship, with its strange cargo of human bodies…”

Contents: “Greylorn” (1959), “The Night of the Trolls” (1963), “The Other Sky” (variant title: “The Further Sky”) (1964), and “The King of the City” (1961).

Initial Thoughts: I’ve only read Laumer’s (successful) attempt at a New Wave story — “In the Queue” (1970).

3. One Way and Other Stories, Miriam Allen deFord (2025).

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Miriam Allen deFord (1988-1975) was a feminist, a suffragette, birth control advocate, journalist, editor, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and author of science fiction, mystery, and true crime. Now, at long last, a collection of her science fiction short stories are back in print with One Way and Other Stories.

Mystery writer, Fortean, anti-fascist, feminist of the first generation, and science fiction trailblazers for five decades, Miriam Allen deFord masterfully weaves all of her facets into her stories, bringing a macabre, fantastic tone to her tales: Bradbury meets Hitchcock. She was already the grand dame of science fiction when the genre reached its second peak with the magazine boom of the early ’50s. Her work thus paced and led the way for SF’s Silver Age.

Miriam Allen deFord somehow slips under the radar when luminaries are listed. With luck, this volume will remedy this oversight.

~Gideon Marcus, editor of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women.“

Contents: “Not Snow, Nor Rain” (1959), “Oh, Rats!” (1961), “One Way” (1955), “The Margenes” (1956), “The Akkra Case” (1962), “Time Out for Redheads” (1955), “Where the Phyh Pebbles Go” (1963), and “The Eel” (1958).

Initial Thoughts: It’s always nice to see a lesser-known classic author getting a collection of stories in print. The indie press Space Cowboy Books also published Jaroslav Olša, Jr.’s Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction  (2025), which I featured earlier this year. I’ve enjoyed some of deFord’s work in the past–in particular her earlier work. You can snag a copy of Other Stories here. They include small reproductions of the original interior art.

4. Junction, Jack Dann (1981)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “GO TO HELL. The hundred-eyed bird monster told Ned Wheeler that his foreordained quest must begin in Hell–which lay just beyond the borders of Junction, the tumultuous, bawdy, pious town that knew damnation as a daily experience and salvation as a distant hope.

ned’s odyssey took him to a place stranger than Junction, stranger than Hell–the bizarre, unbelievable, dangerous city called New York.

Its learned scientists told him of incredible things, like the laws of cause and effect and the fact that they had ceased to operate. It was as if the entire world were living in a chaotic dream–perhaps Ned Wheeler’s dream…”

Initial Thoughts: I recently reviewed, and enjoyed, Dann’s Nebula-nominated novella “Junction” (1973). This is the fix-up novel version that also includes the short story “The Islands of Time” (1977). I’m a bit worried. I felt like the original novella version could have been trimmed and tightened. Not sure how a novelization will add to the metaphysical kaleidoscope that was the original. We shall see!

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1960s #1970s #1980s #bookReview #bookReviews2 #books #fiction #jackDann #keithLaumer #kimStanleyRobinson #miriamAllenDeford #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction

Book Review: Jack Dann’s Timetipping (1980)

• Margo Herr’s cover for the 1st edition

3.75/5 (collated rating: Good)

Alien sex dolls. Carpet stain entities constructing love-nests. Underground retirement community entertainment. Jack Dann’s stories obsessively chart the new rituals of survival in a blasted, irradiated, and decayed future. His characters attempt to identify their place in the world, or, at the very least, stay alive as the world shifts. If you do not care for anti-heroes, a good dose of dystopian perversity, and moments of metaphysical descent, Timetripping (1980) might not be for you. Four of the fourteen stories in the collection were nominated for the Nebula Award.

If you are a fan of the New Wave (and Barry N. Malzberg and Robert Silverberg in particular), and haven’t yet explored Dann’s nightmares, don’t wait as long as I did. Also, go ahead and snag a copy of his later masterpiece The Man Who Melted (1984). I’ve acquired copies of two early fix-up novels Junction (1981) and Starhiker (1976).

My 20 best short story reads of 2025 will undoubtedly include a handful of stories from Timetripping (1980). I found his best works—“The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), “I’m with You in Rockland” (1972), and “Camps” (1979)—remain cohesive despite moments of metaphysical rumination and deluge of surreal image. Even at his least effective moments of narrative wander, Dann adeptly conjures image and turn of phrase.

Due to the quantity of stories in the collection, I apologize in advance if a few of my reviews are a bit cursory. Alas.

You can read the entire collection here.

Short Story-by-Story Reviews/Ruminations

“I’m with You in Rockland” (1972), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Strange Bedfellow, ed. Thomas N. Scortia (1972). Strange Bedfellows is one of a handful of 70s SF anthologies on sex and sexuality. This fits the remit in spades.

In a New York redolent with pollutants and humidity, Flaccus (sexual reference intended) constructs, in a reinforced metal harness, a “jagged framework of plastic and steal” with two thousand other suited workers (2). At night his relationship with Clara is on the rocks. He proclaims his love with indecision and distraction. She’s kind. She’s worried. She wants to make it work. Her words cut to the point: “Well, you certainly don’t show it” (2). He views her attempts at making love as playing “games” with a “trapped stranger” (2). He cannot perform. He yearns to abandon Clara. To drive off into the smog-drenched cityscape in his car and pick up a hitchhiker to satiate his desires. One day he decides to smuggle out his high-tech metal harness and go for a drive.

Dann delivers a sinister and perverse allegory of the corrosion of the mechanical age on modern man. Flaccus only feels whole and sufficiently masculine while inside of his metal apparatus. Flaccus doesn’t attempt to escape or make anew. He is a manifestation of the new world’s disease. He is a denizen of the present. He flourishes in the pollution. He yearns to blend into the smog. The city gives him power. He becomes indistinguishable from the metal that girds his body.

Disturbed. Dystopic.

“Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (April 1973). In a crowded city filled with “cinereal light,” Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation. And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat (“Rags”). And the cat, a projection of one of the “invisible beings,” manifest’s another’s voice: “I made [the cat] out of the bar down the street. Take a look, the bar isn’t there anymore. I used it all up” (9). She tries to blot out the voice. She does not want to accept that the “streets might change their form and substance, and the voice might grow a body” (11). Is it not better to leave some things “unsubstantial”? (11).

But the voice behind Rags draws her out. Forces her to acknowledge its existence. And then she sees Sandra, and a strange ritual she performs before a mirror. Sandra believes her ritual keeps the world, in an undefined sense of ending, existing. Entropic congregations of bugs and trash surround the room in which Sandra brings Joanna. A confrontation between the two looms. Rituals of the dead transpire below in the streets.

Rich in language and scene, “Rags” is a fantastic evocation of slippage and decay, of sad souls trying to make sense of a world that seems desperate to blot itself out.

“Timetipping” (1975), 3.75/5 (Good): First appeared in Epoch, ed. Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood (1975). An epidemic of unusual events occur–“everything went blip” (18). At one moment a person could be replaced with another, from a different time. Paley Litwak, not a “holy man, but he could hold up his head and not be afraid to wink at God” (18), remains the same, a survivor in the bizarre new world. Not once does did he trip into a different time. The rest of the world is adrift, everyone was swimming by, “blipping out of the past or future and into the present here or who-knows-where” (19). People jump into one time, and people they know jump into others. It’s impossible to create order, to stake out a fiefdom. A few references to atomic testing and weapons suggest a genesis for the shift. But then too Litwak shifts.

Of all the stories in this collection, I found “Timetipping” that hardest to parse–in part due to the references to Yiddish terminology, Jewish faith, ritual, and community. I confess my partial ignorance. At its most general, “Timetipping” is a representation of the transient nature of the present–and the human tendency to create communities and rituals to bind the mutable into sometime tangible. This story, along with “Camps” (1979) below, are analyzed in Marleen Barr’s article “Playing with time: Jack Dann approaches the Holocaust as ‘a different universe of discourse'” in Extrapolation, vol. 39, n. 2 (1998) which I plan to read soon.

Unusual. Oblique.

“Windows” (1972), 2.75/5 (Below Average): First appeared in New Worlds Quarterly 3, ed. Michael Moorcock (1972). In a cluttered, book-filled, apartment, John remembers fragments of conversations with his neighbor about history, the decadents, the connections between literary pasts and presents. Suffocating and tempted by “a vague homosexual urge” (29), John convinces himself to exit the apartment to search for another book, or perhaps a prostitute. As he walks the crush of the New York streets, vaguely familiar people call him “Richard” (30). On his sojourn he comes across a dead woman’s body. What transpires might be a hallucinogenic evocation of his intense claustrophobia and other psychosis.

Despite the insubstantial quality of the story, there are still some perceptive moments. For example, John ruminates on the nature of history: “Chunks and pieces of one era might be similar to another but for all the wrong reasons. Events might repeat themselves in form only” (29). “Windows” does adheres to the self-hating frustrated homosexual narrative. But then again, so many of Dann’s characters do… Not sure what to make of this one.

“A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): First appeared in New Dimensions: Science Fiction: Number 8, ed. Robert Silverberg (1978). Nominated for the 1979 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery (I couldn’t dispel the sense that everything took place in the labyrinthine, mossy, crumbling, tree-filled Père Lachaise). Roger dreams that he is an “angel of God guiding the eyeless through His realms” (36). Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. His wife Sandra drugs the squealing children in the back seat of their car “to make the trip go faster” (36). Bennie, Roger’s favorite son, dons the makeup of an angel and parrots the words of his father, “even kids must have their own special vision of death” (37). Roger and Bennie share a fascination over poetry, literature, and art on death and dying. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

More than simply a necropolis, this cemetery is a living organism — filled with restaurants, brothels, processions of priests and mourners, hordes of children burying unclaimed bodies, and little shops. Roger even allows his son to visit a prostitute who proclaims “death is an orgasm, not a social artifact” (40). As Roger and Sandra lay out the food for the picnic, Bennie, still in his angel costume, wanders off to dance on a fresh grave. As they wait for him to return, Roger imagines himself called by God to “man the machinery of His Cemetery” (42). Watching children play games amongst the tombstones, Roger falls asleep. And when he awakes Sandra is nowhere to be seen.

This is my absolute favorite story in the collection as Dann manages to reign in his tendency to allow stories to wander. It’s concise. It’s punchy. It’s filled with evocative imagery. It’s in turns snarky and disturbed. Roger is but a cypher of a new hedonistic fanaticism. His wife, a voice of reason, has her own part to play.

“The Drum Lollipop” (1972), 3.5/5 (Good): First appeared in Orbit 11, ed. Damon Knight (1972). Frank Harris screams at his wife. She begs him to stay. The cycle repeats. Upstairs their daughter Maureen, thinks her broken drum. The drum, and the drumsticks, appear to be able to cast spells, or, at least, animate (or hold back) a strange puddle in the living room. Soon thin tendrils emerge from the puddle. It appears only Maureen can see them. They twist around her parents, who seem to have fallen back in love. They gather others to their yard, pulling them into some love-hive. The stain remains unobserved in the living room. Will they see the stain? Will the spell hold? What is Maureen willing to do to keep her family together?

“Days of Stone” (1979), 2.75/5 (Below Average): First appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (January 1979). Mrs. Fishbine spends hours laying in bed, “almost without moving,” flipping through her “teevee selector” or starting at the “whorls in the ceiling” while daydreaming about a young man “who would quietly give her all her dreams in return for a kiss and a smile” (55). He daydreams are interrupted by more disquieting thoughts–her aging body and her husband’s abandonment despite her giving up “everything for him” (55). She imagines bloody deaths for her ex-husband and new wife. Her son stops by with bad news. Initially she’s thankful that her ex will receive his due. But soon, she makes her final calculus with the oncoming sense of death–permeating all.

Ted White was willing to publish a range of stories in Fantastic including those that do not register as overtly science-fictional. While one its own, “Days of Stone” contains some powerful images (especially at the end when Mrs. Fishbine turns on the lights in her house as “a night beacon, a flare against death”), I had to reread this one to remember the details. It’s a bit insubstantial in comparison to the best in the volume.

“Night Visions” (1979), 2.5/5 (Bad): First appeared in Shadows 2, ed. Charles L. Grant (1979). Martin attempts to commit suicide in his “Naples-yellow coupe” (59). He dreams of the impact, how time will “distend like a bladder, filled with the insights and profound despair that must attend the last instants of consciousness” (59). He imagines the final impact would be the “truly cosmic orgasm” (59). However, his car has other ideas. Subverting the trope of the roadtrip and/or car as vehicle of evil, “Night Visions” is a toothless attempt at nightmare that doesn’t quite catch. For Dann, this feels a bit unrefined.

“Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in New Worlds Quarterly 5, ed. Michael Moorcock (1973). The elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials (63). Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus. He wants to bring people together, “to smell each other, to touch each other” (67).

After the meeting, everyone else heads off to the feelie rooms. Fleitman begins to implement his vision. But there’s a problem: he senses his mind is slipping. He wonder where he heard particular words. Why he thinks of “gunnysacks” when he imagines a woman’s breasts (64). He has faint memories of Tod Brownings’ Freaks (1932). He stars to conduct research on historical circuses. And with these fragments and references and memories, he constructs a visual deluge by means of a massive computer underneath the Entertainment Building. The computer pastes and modifies and blends selected images (it’s hard to escape parallels with AI art). Fleitman “twisted the computers’ suggestions into travesties as he giggled” (71). It will be a manifestation of circus unlike any other.

The act begins. Chaos breaks loose. And he must journey to the surface. He is overwhelmed by the smells he encounters: defecation, spoiling meat, incense–orange, tabac-perspiration, exhaust fumes from makeshift engines” (80). He must navigate a new world ruled by the youth and their rituals. After he emerges, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Fleitman lives in a subterranean retirement home. Perhaps the wealthy elderly fled the youthful deprivations of the surface. Or some generational conflict forced the elderly underground, and the new world envisioned by the youth is also in a state of advanced decay.

I found “Fragmentary Blue” contained an absolutely brilliant and bizarre premise that fizzles a bit. As with so many stories in the collection, I’m a sucker for how Dann evokes societal entropic decay. He avoids all explanations of what happened. Instead, his characters manifest the syndromes of the day.

“The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): First appeared in New Dimensions: Science Fiction: Number 5, ed. Robert Silverberg (1975). Nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground” (85). The shop is located on a street owned by the Shtetl-Castigon Corporation, in turn run by the Chardin Ghetto as a money-making venture for the community’s colony on “Omega-Adriadne” (83). In this future, various thought gasses are pumped into the Undercity to encourage and control. As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. He can’t identify whether they are Kinkies looking for a thrill or upsider collectors seeking to add to their collections. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection — “you cannot satisfy yourself with dolls” he warns (85). Yes, this story has terrifying alien sex dolls. Soon Chaim identifies that something else is afoot. The shetl has a legion of enemies, motivated by anti-semitism, and this might be an attempt to entrap his business in a scandal. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

My second favorite in the collection, “The Dybbuk Dolls” contains a highly original (and seedy) premise. No wonder this one snagged a Nebula nomination (albeit, in a year with a larger slate than normal)! Again, I admit insufficient knowledge of Judaism. As the term shetl is sometimes used to refer to communities in New York city, I suspect Dann is imagining future manifestations of New York’s Hasidic population? Regardless of the specifics (I looked up a lot of Yiddish words), this is an immersive story. The world is vividly realized. The dilemma truly horrifying. The interweaving of Judaic myth, religious stories, and rituals in a future world absolutely fascinating. Recommended for the adventurous reader.

“Camps” (1979), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman (May 1979). Nominated for the 1980 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Stephen lies ill in a hospital bed, thinking only of pain. After an injection of Demerol, he “enters pain’s cold regions as an explorer” navigating a landscape of “wash-blue shards of ice, crystal pyramids and pinnacles” (101). His nurse Josie takes care of him, checking his drains, attempting to convince him to watch television. Soon his drug-induced dreamworld starts to interact with historical scenes of the Holocaust. Stephen comes to understand that he was “a Jew in this burning, stinking world” width a “yellow star sewn on the breasts of his filthy jacket” (103). But this world begins to intersect with his present medical condition. And the figure of Josie also appears to have a role in both….

A powerful invocation of the collective trauma of the past, and how the past wraps its way around our souls, informs our actions and manifests our terrors, a cloak that we cannot cast off.

“The Marks of the Painted Teeth” (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Demon Kind, ed. Roger Elwood (1973): In the wreckage of a partially bombed city, a group of hungry transient children attempt to find new members to add to their gang. They all adhere to a collective mass delusion. If they do not fit the visual characteristics of previous members, the old features are pasted onto the new: “Dorcas was erasing Sue’s face […] Her skin became brittle, then fell away to reveal new flesh underneath, full of pocks and scars” (128). As they munch on dead water rats, and avoid fights in the surviving basements of houses, they decide to project their own reality on the unstable traumas of the fractured present. Dorcas proclaims “because we have to be everything. If we want, we should be able to be anything” (132). And so they create a delusion of a cave to protect themselves within one of the children’s mouth. He’s careful to keep it closed. He lives with the others inside of his own mouth. In his dreams the bones inside of his mouth morph into a human pelvis (136). As they take turns (I think) hiding inside each other’s bodies, they wander a landscape increasingly afflicted by disease and avoiding “Screamers” (138). And like a reverse genesis myth, they believe themselves gods and plan on “making wars” and interceding against each other (139).

Stories like this one demonstrates Elwood’s wide-ranging view on the genre in his quest to fill as many anthologies as possible. This is an off-the-wall gem. As with others in the collection, I’d suggest another formulation of Dann’s obsession with worlds afflicted beyond recognition and the desperate, sad, often pathetic attempts to make meaning in the remains. Here children literally retreat within themselves and conjure games to pass the time amongst the dead and dying. 

“Among the Mountains” (1977), 3.75/5 (Good): First appeared in A World Named Cleopatra, ed. Poul Anderson and Roger Elwood (1977). In 1973, Poul Anderson published a short story called “The Serpent in Eden” (1973) that takes place on a world called Cleopatra inhabited by refugees from a poisoned Earth. They encountered a “world of gently rolling seas and unutterably beautiful sunsets” filled with exotic life and violent storms. This became the genesis of a shared world sequence, with additional stories by Michael Orgill, Jack Dann, and George Zebrowski, published under the title A World Named Cleopatra (1977). As I have not read Anderson’s original story I struggled for the majority of Dann’s installment to understand exactly what was happening. Maybe they’re more standalone tales than a sequential series? Let me know!

In a village, painted in distinctly South-East Asian strokes, daily life manifests a proscribed set of rituals. A wrinkled man named Giay tells stories that reinforce the status quo and the town’s place in the world. If a denizen leaves “the sacred grounds of his ancestors, he would sever all ties to the world of men” (144). The story follows Bao, a boy in the town, and his voyage into the larger world after a barbarian (“moi”) attack. “Among the Mountains” reads in parallel with the Vietnam War. The war rages across rice paddies and jungles. I detected references to the My Lai Massacre (1968): “Demons are running around, burning, shooting, raping girls and women in the open, in the mud and rain” (149). There appears to be a contest between two powers–both of which use bio-engineered aliens called fabers as soldiers and practice brainwashing. Bao finds himself caught in a “ching-game. He followed his programmed dreams, led dimsimple fabers, watched them die, won villages, lost villages, hit, slept, and fought” (155). He views himself as a “blind spirit submerged in a dead present” unable to escape the path he’s set upon.

The story effectively transmits the cyclical repetitions of violence and brutality. Mixed in with the sinister brainwashing experienced by the characters, a sense of relentless militaristic marching, conflict, and despair dominates. Bao cannot escape the sense that he can freely interacts with the stimuli around him, both physical and mental. Even how to dream was taught by the state (163). A powerful manifestation of the corrosive nature of violence. Bao’s a classic Dann character, he yearns to understand his place in the cosmos. If that is even possible.

“Junction” (1973), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (November 1973). Nominated for the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novella. I suspect this is Dann’s best-known early short story. It was later expanded into a novel in 1981. John Clute, echoing Gregory Feeley, in SF Encyclopedia, describes it as a distillation of “Dann’s central theme: the rousing of a young man from disaffected solipsism into awareness of the marvels of the noösphere.”

Junction is a small town of “little houses with no glass windows” with meticulously tended almost artificial yards (171). There’s a church. There are bars and brothels. Junction claims to be a democracy, but the nature of power remains unclear: “of course, the president had no power—that was reserved for the king. But no one knew who the king was” (178). And beyond the town? Hell. Out there “nothing was predictable” (171). This mutable landscape shifts color, water cracks, the sun could transform at any moment into a “golden insect sucking up the world” (171). Ned spends his days with prostitutes while his dad begs him to attend church, which follows a Bible further redacted every year. And then one day Ned sees a creature out in Hell, and it follows him into the protective boundaries of Junction. “Elected” president by backroom dealings in the town, Ned, “King of the whores” (183), must leave his aimless life of sex and trek into the shifting chaos of Hell.

All types of dichotomies rule Junction including a heightened religiosity mixed with extreme eroticism. Reverend Surface comments on religious texts manifests this clash: “We’ll laugh at the books and obey them, mock them for being apocryphal, love them because they might be God’s” (185). And goodness me Dann has a sense of the powerful image. For example, the creature that follows Ned into the town sits “atop of the old metal buildings on a girder, all eyes open, halo attracting and killing insects” (187).

As the story spirals off into all sorts of levels transcendental metaphysics–via ruminations of the nature of time (“consecutive time is a mnemonic device”), the generative power of dreams, and time travel—the story loses a bit of its power. Regardless, “Junction” should be applauded for its evocation of cosmic immensity and of bizarre manifestations of apocalyptic process. I’m not convinced I entirely understood the logic behind ever shift other than to highlight the hilarious/horrific ironies of belief and reality.

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1970s #avantGarde #bookReviews #bookReviews #books #fiction #horror #JackDann #Judaism #sciFi #scienceFiction #scifi

I have just realised that if I didn't know how to use apostrophes correctly, I would have perpetrated one of the most outstanding Jack Dannisms ever, in the form of THE DEVILS FINGER SANDRA BOND.

https://reactormag.com/the-jack-dann-game-invades-the-best-of-the-decade-readers-poll

#writing #JackDann

I have just realised that if I didn't know how to use apostrophes correctly, I would have perpetrated one of the most outstanding Jack Dannisms ever, in the form of THE DEVILS FINGER SANDRA BOND.

https://reactormag.com/the-jack-dann-game-invades-the-best-of-the-decade-readers-poll

#writing #JackDann

I have just realised that if I didn't know how to use apostrophes correctly, I would have perpetrated one of the most outstanding Jack Dannisms ever, in the form of THE DEVILS FINGER SANDRA BOND.

https://reactormag.com/the-jack-dann-game-invades-the-best-of-the-decade-readers-poll

#writing #JackDann

I have just realised that if I didn't know how to use apostrophes correctly, I would have perpetrated one of the most outstanding Jack Dannisms ever, in the form of THE DEVILS FINGER SANDRA BOND.

https://reactormag.com/the-jack-dann-game-invades-the-best-of-the-decade-readers-poll

#writing #JackDann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. 1/2

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. 1/2

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. 1/2

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. 1/2

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. 1/2

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

@Priyajsridhar
Hello #Writephant !

Today, I'm getting joy from a new research book that is Right. On. Point. It's The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History by Jack Dann. #love

OTOH, my usual source of joy is also giving me setbacks. The World's Cutest Kitten has decided that her new career will be as an interior designer.

Her favorite medium is toilet paper.

Argh.
#CatsofMastodon #kittensofmastodon #amwriting #amresearching #JackDann #alternatehistory #amcleaning

@Priyajsridhar
Hello #Writephant !

Today, I'm getting joy from a new research book that is Right. On. Point. It's The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History by Jack Dann. #love

OTOH, my usual source of joy is also giving me setbacks. The World's Cutest Kitten has decided that her new career will be as an interior designer.

Her favorite medium is toilet paper.

Argh.
#CatsofMastodon #kittensofmastodon #amwriting #amresearching #JackDann #alternatehistory #amcleaning

@Priyajsridhar
Hello #Writephant !

Today, I'm getting joy from a new research book that is Right. On. Point. It's The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History by Jack Dann. #love

OTOH, my usual source of joy is also giving me setbacks. The World's Cutest Kitten has decided that her new career will be as an interior designer.

Her favorite medium is toilet paper.

Argh.
#CatsofMastodon #kittensofmastodon #amwriting #amresearching #JackDann #alternatehistory #amcleaning

@Priyajsridhar
Hello #Writephant !

Today, I'm getting joy from a new research book that is Right. On. Point. It's The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History by Jack Dann. #love

OTOH, my usual source of joy is also giving me setbacks. The World's Cutest Kitten has decided that her new career will be as an interior designer.

Her favorite medium is toilet paper.

Argh.
#CatsofMastodon #kittensofmastodon #amwriting #amresearching #JackDann #alternatehistory #amcleaning

@Priyajsridhar
Hello #Writephant !

Today, I'm getting joy from a new research book that is Right. On. Point. It's The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History by Jack Dann. #love

OTOH, my usual source of joy is also giving me setbacks. The World's Cutest Kitten has decided that her new career will be as an interior designer.

Her favorite medium is toilet paper.

Argh.
#CatsofMastodon #kittensofmastodon #amwriting #amresearching #JackDann #alternatehistory #amcleaning

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. The aliens and the lone human-who of course is an alien to the others-are posing for a group photo.

https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/aliens/

✨ ✨ ✨

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. The aliens and the lone human-who of course is an alien to the others-are posing for a group photo.

https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/aliens/

✨ ✨ ✨

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. The aliens and the lone human-who of course is an alien to the others-are posing for a group photo.

https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/aliens/

✨ ✨ ✨

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. The aliens and the lone human-who of course is an alien to the others-are posing for a group photo.

https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/aliens/

✨ ✨ ✨

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann

ALIENS (1979)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 23" x 14"

Cover art for an anthology of stories about aliens and one of my favorites. The aliens and the lone human-who of course is an alien to the others-are posing for a group photo.

https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/aliens/

✨ ✨ ✨

#sciencefiction #scifi #scifiart #illustration #anthology #gardnerdozois #jackdann