Brand new year, same old blog. Thank you all for joining me here At Boundary’s Edge for another year of madness and science fiction (the exact ratio of which is yet to be determined). I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a good feeling about 2026, and am looking forward to sinking my teeth into that towering TBR of mine.

As has become tradition, I’ll be kicking off the year with Vintage Science Fiction month. this was started a whopping fourteen years ago by Andrea at LittleRedReviewer and has become one of my favourite monthly challenges of the year. The idea is simple: Read books published before you were born. for me that’s books published before the mid-nineties, though with my TBR, I could easily do the challenge using books published before the seventies.

Because 2026 marks a full century since the first ever dedicated science-fiction magazine (okay, technically scientifiction, but I’ll be counting it nonetheless), I’m starting the year with a book that is one hundred years old. That is The Question Mark by Muriel Jaeger. From there I’ll jump into the thirties with Olaf Stapledon, and then the forties with Robert Heinlein. Heinlein is an author I’ve read a couple of books from, but want to read more from this year, and his juveniles seem as good a place to start as any.

Two other authors I’ll definitely be reading in January are Brian Aldiss and Edmund Cooper. Both of these are vintage British authors, though one is considerably better-known than the other. again, I’ve dabbled with both authors before, to mixed results, so it will be interesting to see how their standalone novels hold up after all these years.

Along the way I’ll also be reading books from the likes of Michael Moorcock, Clifford D. Simak, and Richard Matheson. The good thing about older science fiction is that it tends to be quite short, so you can pack a whole lot into a single month. the only other definite read for the year is Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. My regular buddy reader and I have decided to open up a small discord book club for our buddy reads. Hopefully the Boundary’s Edge Book Club fares better than the late and unlamented Social Club of two years ago. If you know, you know.

Themed reading months are going to be a big thing for me this year, but I’m also learning from my mistakes and will be peppering random books in as we go along so that my reading doesn’t grow too stagnant or repetitive.

Dates for your Diary

January is a nice quiet month when it comes to releases, with only one that’s caught my eye. I speak, of course, of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which premieres on the eighteenth. Star Trek as a franchise celebrates its sixtieth anniversary this year, and there’s a very good chance that Strange New Worlds will return towards the end of the year for its penultimate season. with the Skydance/Paramount merger now settled, I’m also hoping we get some news on where the franchise is heading next, and in what form.

From me, for now, that’s all I can think off. I hope we all have a great January of science fiction and reading.