Happy New Year everyone! Welcome back to At Boundary’s Edge. This is the first of my newly refurbished monthly introductions. A slightly spruced-up version of the old TBR & BEYOND posts. The purpose is the same, but the style is slightly different. Let’s get into the meat of the matter.

January is, as you may know, Vintage Science Fiction Month. Now, a lot of books I read could charitably be called vintage, so this month isn’t all that different to my usual reading. Nevertheless, I like to make the effort. I’ll be highlighting some of the older works in my TBR, all of which were published more than forty years ago. They are, in no particular order:

• The Legion of Space, by Jack WIlliamson
• Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement
• Mutiny in Space, by Avram Davidson
• Swampworld West, by Perry A. Chapdelaine
• The Rival Rigellians/Planetary Agent X, by Mack Reynolds

While these are the focus for the month, they’re all quite short, so I should have time to fit in one more vintage project. This month marks the 75th anniversary of Isaac Asimov’s debut novel, so I want to write a little something to commemorate the day. the obvious way to do that would be to reread his debut, Pebble in the Sky, but I did that just five years ago. Instead, I’m going to reread a series that doesn’t get as much attention. His early juveniles, the Lucky Starr novels. there are six of these, but they are all razor thin, so it doesn’t feel impossible to read them all in the next few weeks.

Any free time I have beyond these books will be spent pecking away at either Stephen Baxter’s Manifold saga, or the ever-reliable Star Trek Litverse. I’ve got plenty of books in both stacks, so that’ll definitely keep me going all month, even if I’m unlikely to read a book over four hundred pages long.

Towards the end of last year, I spent a lot of time exploring nineteenth century literature. The stuff that eventually turned into what we know now as science fiction. There are three particular strands I want to pick apart. Scientific Romances, Last Man novels, and Utopias. That might be one article, or it might be three. Either way, that’ll be the non-review side of things covered for January.

If you want to join me in any of my reading, you’re more than welcome to. These days I spent most of my time on BlueSky and Instagram, but I’m still hanging around the X-formerly-known-as-Twitter.

Dates for the Diary

16th – Publication date for Nnedi Okrafor’s Death of the Author

17th – Season 2 of Severance begins on Apple TV+

19th – 75 Anniversary of Pebble in the Sky, the debut novel of Isaac Asimov.

30th – General publication date for Rob Young’s Leontus: Lord Solar, a new Warhammer 40,000 character novel.