It’s the end of March, which means I am finally free from a pile of lambs, and am now surrounded by a much more tolerable pile of chocolate eggs. It’s a nice way to end what has been an incredibly busy month. The first and last weeks have been spent with all the stresses of the lambing season, whereas the middle was far more pleasant, with my girlfriend flying in for a few weeks. Those weeks were largely spent trawling used bookshops across the country, the results of which I will go into next month.

All that has left very little time for blogging, but I’m happy to say that a combination of scheduled posts and back catalogue hits have kept the place ticking over nicely in my absence. Let’s dive into that.

Reading

I fully expected to not get a whole lot of reading done this month, but managed to keep my bookish intake at a respectable rate thanks to a marathon of Star Trek novels. On the whole, though, it’s been a slightly disappointing month in terms of quality. Trek novels are always a mixed bag, as yesterday’s reviews demonstrated, but the bigger disappointment was Peter F. Hamilton’s The Neutronium Alchemist. I’ve got a review of that to come next week, but it sits awkwardly in bottom place as my least favourite book of the year. Not surprising that it was a slog to finish

I did manage to end the month on a high, however, with Gary Kloster’s Lazarus: Enmity’s Edge. It’s not up there with my favourite Warhammer novels, but it’s by far the best thing I’ve read this month.

Blogging

Blogging definitely took a back seat to real-life priorities this month, but I still ran WarhamMarch, as has become my tradition. I got a couple of reviews out of this year’s Warhammer listening, and also dug into the numbers behind some of my favourite Black Library authors. I have an intense dislike of the idea of top ten lists, so this is about as close as I’ll come, but the amount of interaction that post received is a solid reminder of why favourites lists are so unpopular in the online book community.

I’m also editing the finishing touched of another Black Library project that will be published next month. I won’t name names just yet, but I was able to interview one of my favourite new Black Library authors, and I look forward to bringing you the results.

In the News

Hugo Awards – The shortlist for the 2024 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and make for interesting reading. I haven’t read any of the novel candidates, but I do recognise them this time around, so maybe I’m not wholly out of touch after all. The TV nominations are (in all but one case) episodes I have seen and enjoyed, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for ‘Wild Blue Yonder.’ Also of interest in the announcements was the list of those who declined nominations. Natasha Bardon’s response was particularly insightful in terms of how the publishing industry is viewing the fallout from the Chengdu award debacle. Besides which, it’s nice to see that Bigolas Dickolas is still a feature of the wider bookish community.

Vernor Vinge (1944-2024) – This month also brought the sad news that we have lost another titan of the genre. I wasn’t Vernor Vinge’s biggest fan, but he was a stalwart of the hard SF renaissance of the late twentieth century. It may just be that I’m paying more attention to such things these days, but lately it feels like we’re losing an entire generation of writers.

Updates

I’m currently sitting on a TBR stack of over fifty books, which is an intimidating number by my efficient standards. The good news is that it should see me through to the summer without needing any more additions. I’m also doing well at keeping the costs down, having only purchased four new books this year, with the rest being used copies. Even better, a well-stocked Waterstones gift card covered a fair bit of the new stuff.

Next month I’m going to be celebrating the best of British SF, so British authors will be getting priority, alongside some articles that I hope will prove enlightening. I’ll go into more detail about this in tomorrow’s TBR post.

The other thing I’m working on is my social media presence. I’ve never had much of a following, but it never hurts to promote a little growth. To that end I’m firing up my old Instagram account, so feel free to follow me over there. Better yet, you can hop into my Discord and join the science fiction chat.