So it is that summer ends. The past three months have seen pouring rain, scorching sun, and just about everything in between. Between July and August I have managed the staggering achievement of not buying a single book. There’s a very real danger I’ll have no TBR left by the time October starts. But that’s for the future, for now it’s time to look back at the previous month, and everything book-related that happened.

Reading

August has been the month of catching up. The big news is that I complete Star trek: A Time To…, which was a mixed but largely strong batch of books. I followed that up with Peter David’s Before Dishonor, which is among the stranger Trek books I’ve read, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I feel about it. That leaves me with just the Mission Gamma series left to read and I’ve cleared Trek off my TBR altogether.

Another series I wiped off the slate is H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy trilogy, as well as John Scalzi’s Fuzzy nation reboot. It’s always good to get a new Piper, and Scalzi fared pretty well too. There are some more, much more elusive, Fuzzy books out there by other authors, but I’ll soon be reviewing what I’ve read thus far.

Then there are the random books I’ve picked up over the course of the year. Military SF is one of my go-to genres, and Antares Passage (Michael McCollum) was a great example of what I’m after. Steven L Kent’s The Clone Republic and Ian Douglas’ Earth Strike were slightly less impressive, but interesting enough to form the backbone for an upcoming article on twenty-first century Mmilitary SF. One other military SF book from August was Steve Lyons Siege of Vraks, fun (for a certain definition of the word) slice of Warhammer 40,000 action.

Blogging

Bundling together books of a similar type for single articles has been a lifesaver in terms of how many hours I’ve been putting into this blog, though it does mean less individual book reviews, the bread and butter of the blogging life. As well as series roundups, I’ve put together group reviews for a random grab-bag of Star Trek audiobooks, and a slightly deeper piece on the history of religion in science fiction.

The other big project in August was my three-part Great Summer reading Roundup, which was basically a hybridisation of all the catch-up articles I’d been meaning to type up since June. You can check those posts for yourself, but the gist is that I’m about where I want to be, even if not all of my grand plans have come to fruition exactly as I’ve planned.

After some quieter periods here At Boundary’s Edge, I feel like I’m getting back into the swing of things, and have some plans for the months ahead. You’ll see what they are soon enough

In the News

Hugo Awards – The 2024 Hugo Awards went off largely without a hitch (a voting irregularity was discovered and then dealt with very openly and quite early on), and Glasgow WorldCon was largely a success. I definitely felt like I was missing out by not going, so next time I’m in the same country as a WorldCon, it’s going to the top of my list. On the Hugo front, best novel went to Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, so that’s one more book for me to stay on the look out for.

Updates

There’s really only one big piece of news in terms of this blog, and that is the fact that I’m hurtling towards my 1000th post. I have no idea what I’ll do to celebrate that milestone, but I’ve got some time to think about it. I definitely won’t hit that marker in September, and travel plans in October will slow me down a lot, so Post 1K (cool name pending) will materialise in November or December. If you’ve got an idea for what it might be, feel free to chuck it my way. I’m all ears.