Welcome to September, and welcome to Autumn. the weather has already taken a turn away from the heatwave of the past six months and we’ve been treated to some nice cool rain. The land needs it, but it’s not very nice to be out and about in, so you’d best curl up indoors with a good book. That’s my plan for much of the coming month.

What books am I going to be reading? Well, I’ve started off with William C. Dietz’s The Final Battle so I can round off my upcoming Military SF post, but after that I am declaring September the month of big, chunky books. the inspiration for this was the buddy read I’ll be starting in the next day or so. Technically we’re only reading Peter Watts’ Blindsight, but I have an omnibus edition that also includes Echopraxia, which makes for a quite a thick book.

I turned to Instagram for advice on how to tackle my TBR this month, and the answer was clear. Roll Dice, Read Books. With that in mind I’ve chosen six big books to randomly select from. Five of them are over five-hundred pages, and I’ve stuck the almost equally long The Parafaith War in there to keep things respectably sturdy.

Gary Gibson’s Stealing Light has been on my TBR for a long while, so it’s well past time I actually read it. Stephen Baxter is one of my favourite modern authors, so his Behemoth trilogy is one I’m confident of enjoying. I next to nothing about The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann, but I know it has some fans out there, so I’m eager to give it a go. I’ve enjoyed Niven and Pournelle separately (I’m listening to the latter’s Janissaries as I type this), so Footfall has a high bar to cross. And then there’s Stephen King, who I will once again be dipping into when all the science fiction becomes too much for me.

That’s my main source of entertainment sorted for the month, but if I need to take a break between these monolithic tomes, I’ve got plenty of shorter works to pick from. I’m not going to commit to any theme in that regard, but they’ll probably veer towards the lighter end of the spectrum in terms of both theme and physical weight.

Dates for Your Diary

September is a busy month for new releases, with some real heavy hitters putting out new books.

16th – Who Will You Save? by Gareth L. Powell – Powell’s second release of the year is a collection of short fiction from his two-decade career. I’m a big fan of his space opera, but haven’t actually read any of his short fiction, so this will be an interesting diversion for me.

17th – Gen V: Season 2 – I’ll admit that the gore-slick comedy of The Boys has worn a little thin at this point, but I’m curious to see how the spin-off fares. If nothing else, I’m expecting a few shocks, a few laughs, and buckets of fake blood. A sure-fire way to enjoyably kill a few evenings.

18th – Halcyon Years, by Alastair Reynolds – For the first time in a long while, I’m excited by a new Alastair Reynolds novel. You see, it’s a standalone, and he has a very strong track record with those. I’ll be heading into this mostly blind, and if John Lee is narrating, will likely grab the audio edition.

18th – The Shattering Peace, by John Scalzi – Scalzi’s recent books have been outright comedies and not really to my taste, so I am delighted to see him heading back to the slightly more serious space adventure series that made his name. I’m hoping to find time to reexperience the original Old Man’s War novels before diving into this seventh instalment.

25th – Hearthspace, by Stephen Baxter – How Baxter continues to blow my mind on an annual basis, I do no know. But I do know that I am here for it. I don’t need to know much about this book to happily pay the price of admission, and I strongly expect this to be one of my favourite books of the year. It’s certainly the one I’m anticipating the most right now.

As always, if you think I’ve skipped something interesting or overlooked an important release, let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I shall wish you all a happy month of reading, and return to my books.