It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

As a general rule, I avoid anything written by Piers Anthony.

Something struck me as I read this third book in a planned series of seven: how discursive it is.

Although by Randall Garrett and Laurence M Janifer, Brain Twister (1962, USA) was originally published under the name Mark Phillips (the two authors’ middle names), and under the title ‘That Sweet Little Old Lady’, in Analog in 1959.

(A review posted on FB back in 2024) Back in the 1950s, Galaxy Science Fiction began a series of reprint paperback novels which they gave away with issues of the magazine.

This is the sixth and final book in Gill’s series set in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt featuring the scribe/detective Huy.

Rereading these books, I’ve been surprised which stories I’ve remembered and which ones I’ve forgotten.

(Originally posted on FB two years ago) A Desolation Called Peace (2021, USA) is the second book of a duology and, I think, more lauded than the first, with nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA Awards; and winning the Hugo, which the first bo…

Chilling Effect (2019, USA) is the first book of the Captain Eva Innocente series, followed by Prime Deceptions (2020, USA) and Fault Tolerance (2022, USA).

I forget why I bought A Death in the Family (2009, Norway) – and yes, I know his name his rendered as “Knausgaard” in the English translations.

(A review first posted only on Facebook in 2024) Brothers of Earth (1976, USA) was Cherryh’s first novel (published a few months after Gates of Ivrel (1976, USA), but actually submitted and accepted first).

I’ve been buying Reynolds’s books in first edition as soon as they appear since first coming across one of his stories in Interzone.

(Another review I originally posted on Facebook a couple of years ago.)

When I read the preceding novel in the Scarpetta series, Autopsy (2021, USA; my review), I hadn’t realised that Cornwell had actually ended the series with book 24, Chaos (2016, USA; my review).

Chiang is the science fiction short story writer non-genre readers all praise (one of his stories was a question in this week’s University Challenge, for example).

(A Facebook review) This won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book.