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.

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.

Meghan Douglass’ short indie sci-fi horror that is dark, bleak, and utterly disturbing in all the right ways. Coming in at around the 50-page mark, I blasted through Humanity Lost really rather quickly. You might think that’s not enough time for a story to make your skin crawl, but, oh boy, this did exactly that.

Ringworld is one of those classic sci-fi books that curiously seems to fall into the same kind of subgenre as Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama—that of people exploring an awe-inspiring alien megastructure no-one’s ever seen before. I enjoyed that book a lot, and so I knew I had to give Ringworld a go, especially having heard good things about Larry Niven’s work generally. So this was my first delve into his Known Space universe, but the experience left me torn.

Oh my gosh, why did I put off reading this for so long? I’ve had Duckett & Dyer: Dicks for Hire sitting on the Kindle for ages, and I’d never gotten around to it until now. And it is hilarious. I haven’t read many comedies—only Hitchhiker’s Guide, some Discworld, and Terry Brooks’ Magic Kingdom For Sale. Sold! and that was quite a long time ago. So it was refreshing to read some more sci-fi comedy, and G.M. Nair’s novel was an absolute riot.

I know I’m always in for a good time when Drew Wagar releases a new book. The Elect Saga is an interesting series; not technically new, but newly released wide. Drew announced to us on his Discord that he was re-writing and re-editing the short fan-fiction series he’d written years ago for the Elite-inspired videogame, Oolite, removing any copyright offending content, and releasing it out into the wild for all to read.

This book had been sitting on my shelf for well over a year by the time I picked it up to actually read. Such is the way of the eternal TBR. I’m glad I finally did, though. I really love the cover art for this book, and those of its sequels Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, each one taken from a single painting by John Harris, split into triptych. And I have to admit, the cover is really what drew me to Ancillary Justice initially. Well, that, and an intense curiosity about such a highly-regarded space opera. So, let’s get into it.

Ever since university, I’ve kept in the back of my mind the idea of reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Why university? Because one of my lecturers was a Barsoom super-fan. One time, I wrote an essay for his class which was about writing the preamble to a constitution for a new human settlement on Mars under John Carter. The trouble was, it needed to be 500 words. Most preambles to constitutions are 150 - 200 words long. So, using my imagination, I came up with an entire story to fill out the word-count of how these people escaped the tyranny of Earth and established a settlement on Mars.

I’ve been saving this one up for a while. I really enjoyed reading through the first three books of the Questrison Saga, Heliopause, Ephemeris, and Accretion. Their blend of space opera and fantasy with intense action was a lot of fun, and those first three are relatively short.

Another book I’ve read as part of Drew Wagar’s Monday night Twitch book club. Similarly to the situation with H.G. Wells, I’d never read any Jules Verne before, though I am familiar with a number of his more famous stories - particularly Around the World in 80 Days, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And those are mainly via TV and movie adaptations

I picked up Last Flight of the Necros Night by Eldritch Black & E.G. Seven for free on Amazon, and the premise sounded good, also I really dug the vibe of the cover art. I fancied a little taste of cosmic/sci-fi horror, especially since I recently played the new remake of Dead Space, so I’m on a bit of a kick at the moment. I’m sorry to say this one didn’t do it for me.

On Monday nights, fellow author, Drew Wagar runs a Twitch livestream all about science fiction, fantasy and writing. At the end of 2022, he had the idea to use the streams as a sort-of book club, where we would collectively look at old (public domain) sci-fi novels. Our first piece of “homework” was to read some of H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds if we hadn’t already read it. I’d personally never read it, though I was familiar generally with the story from movies and TV. So I downloaded a copy and started reading…

A Twilight-zone inspired science fiction short story collection from J.D. Sanderson. Anthologies and short story collections really are great, aren’t they? I’ve come to enjoy them over the last couple of years, and it’s one of the more unexpected things to come out of my journey back into reading science fiction. Especially from fellow independent authors. There’s a goldmine of great ideas and exceptional work to be read, that all too often doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

It took me a while to get through Children of Dune, not because it’s not good - because it is, very much so - but because November and December are heavy months for me, and I didn’t find the time nor the inclination to read very often. So it took a lot longer than I would have liked, and in fact, I finished it just before Christmas. There’s a lot about Frank Herbert’s writing that’s really grown on me as I’ve continued through the series…