There’s not enough mechs taking centre-stage in sci-fi books, and that’s a real shame because they’re awesome. I’ve gained a new appreciation for them since playing Armored Core VI last year, and I even watched some Gundam for the first time since then. Reality Check is all about mechs. A hotshot young Cyber Cycle racer turned mech pilot defending Earth against a hostile alien invasion. Great premise.

I received a free ARC of Out of Breath from the author in exchange for an honest review. I really enjoyed Carrion Crew. I thought the worldbuilding and setting was fantastic. You can read my thoughts on it here. I’ve been looking forward to reading more from that world, and so I was honoured when James reached out to offer an ARC for Out of Breath to review. So, let’s get to it.

This is one of those books that’s totally come out of left field. During the half term break, my family and I went on an outing to a National Trust property in Sevenoaks called Ightham Mote, a medieval moated manor house with sprawling gardens. As with many National Trust properties, Ightham Mote had a delightful little used bookshop, which I naturally perused. However, I found nothing I wanted in there. So where did I get RoboCop from?

I loved Children of Time. It became one of my favourite books, and it was the first time I’d read anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky. You can read what I had to say about it here. Children of Ruin, then, is the second book in Adrian’s trilogy, and it’s taken me far too long to get around to reading it!

I really enjoyed Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War trilogy with its fantastic characters, sentient spaceships, and nightmarish aliens. Stars and Bones may be set in a completely different world, but it has all the hallmarks from Gareth’s previous trilogy. Plus a snarky talking cat! What’s not to love?

I knew the Dune saga started to get weird with Children of Dune, and I thought I was well prepared for the utter insanity of God Emperor of Dune, but I don’t think it’s possible to properly prepare yourself for it. You just have to dive right in. It’s so much weirder than you could possibly anticipate.

After having utterly devoured Dr Crunden’s SFINCS semi-finalist novella, Dust & Lightning, I knew I had to read more of her work. The Outlands Pentalogy is, as the name suggests, a completed series of five novels set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future. Normally, my sci-fi tastes lean more heavily towards the kind set in and around space, like the aforementioned novella, so I’m not remarkably well-read when it comes to post-apocalyptic or dystopian stories—Neuromancer excepted.

When I picked up Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, I wasn’t expecting the tale to remind me of the Shadeward Saga. But with its high fantasy setting amid a hard sci-fi backdrop, I was pleasantly surprised. This was a pretty quick read for me and I’m finding that novellas give me a rather satisfying feeling of progress for a normally slow reader such as I am. The cover art for Elder Race is absolutely gorgeous and depicts the Tower featured within beautifully.

I hate that my first thought when reading this book was of James Cameron and his damnable smurfs. I hate the fact that I thought about those movies at all while reading Le Guin. It feels like a real disservice. Don’t get me wrong here, the Avatar movies are good fun, with great visuals and set pieces of course, and I thought the second one was better than the first. But let’s be honest, we don’t watch them for their poignancy.

A Necromancer Called Gam Gam is a semi-finalist in the first annual Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS), and it’s been on my TBR for a little while. But, as a fellow SFINCTER (lol), I couldn’t help but be curious about some of the other books in the contest. So I moved this one up, and I have to say, as someone who lost a parent at a young age, it made me cry.

I didn’t expect to blast through Wishhobbler in a single day, but from the first page I was hooked. It’s weird, darkly funny and a little sinister. It certainly put me in mind of some of the books my eldest has been bringing home from school, and it has some really fantastic stylised illustrations throughout to match!

I thoroughly enjoyed my previous read by Azalea Forrest, Witch in the Lighthouse, but after reading A Bitter Drink, I think this one is my new favourite of the two. Less Ghibli, and dialing back on the coziness a little, to instead bring us great character work and higher stakes in an imaginative fantasy world. So, let’s have a deeper look.

This isn’t a first for me. I have fond memories of my dad reading The Hobbit to me as a bedtime story when I was a child, and it’s remarkable how much the book stuck with me over the years. Now I’m older and I have children of my own, it has given me a wonderful opportunity to read the book to them as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t own a copy of the book!

Here’s my totally irreverent, irrelevant, and worst ever annual “Books of the Year” list for 2023! This is a terrible list of books. I mean, most of them aren’t even books. Why did I make this? I could’ve been playing Final Fantasy XVI, or hanging up the laundry, or literally anything else. But instead I am pleased to present to you my totally irreverent, irrelevant, list of awards to mark the end of the grand old year of two-thousand-and-twenty-three. And of course, it’s in a top-ten format.

I’m pretty happy with the amount of books I managed to read and review this year! So many were indie books, too, which was my goal. All in all, I read and reviewed 25 books up to the time of writing this post. Whenever I review books, in addition to this blog, I usually post them to Goodreads and Amazon, as well as sharing the link to the review on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Facebook, and sometimes Instagram (if I remember).

An excellent eclectic short story collection from J. Dianne Dotson. After finishing the Questrison Saga, I knew I’d be forever picking up J. Dianne Dotson’s books, because they’re a great lot of fun. I think there’s only one more book out that’s under the J. Dianne Dotson pen name: The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, and from there on, her works will be published under the pseudonym Jendia Gammon.

I picked up Daros during one of the big indie sales and oh boy was it a fun read. It’s been difficult picking between all the different books I grabbed during that one sale, and I’ve only swamped my TBR even more since then! But this isn’t supposed to be about my ever-growing TBR, even though at my average reading speed, it’ll take me over 3 years to get through. This is about Daros by Dave Dobson.

A new book from Drew Wagar is always a cause for excitement. I cannot stress enough how good the Shadeward Saga is, and as you’ll have seen if you’ve been following these book reviews, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his other works, too. It feels like a long time since we first heard about Drew’s plans for the Hegira Saga, bringing more stories to the fantastic universe of Shadeward, and then it felt like the release date for this first novel, Contravention, came upon us so fast I hardly had time to think

Alan R. Paine has a particular style to his writing that is immediately apparent, but easy to underestimate. My first experience with his style of storytelling was his contributions in the fantastic sci-fi anthology, Nine Streams of Consciousness, and then later in his NaNoWriMo experiment Faraway Sky; Ocean Deep. His works all have a deeply anthropological feel to them—akin to Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing in many ways. There’s always deep explorations of aspects of humanity and the experience of life which are given so matter-of-factly that it can be a little uncomfortable at first.

Dust & Lightning is a futuristic standalone science fiction novella from Rebecca Crunden that also kind of blurs lines with the superhero genre, and it’s honestly a heck of a lot of fun and vibes. If you’re an indie writer and not already following Rebecca on the myriad socials, then you absolutely should.