Breathing Just a Little

  This book is a tense, thought-provoking next-five-minutes dystopia with an unusual hook -it's focused on the increasing ways in which we are cluttering up space with our junk in the name of universal connectivity and resource pillaging, and the impact that is having both on us as people and on our ability to see and learn about the universe around us. The protagonist, Finley, is the daughter of an astronomer and an astrophotographer, based at Sliding Springs observatory at the edge of the Warrumbungles National Park in NSW, Australia (a real facility doing very similar work to that described in the book, although I suspect its actual administrative arrangements are quite different). The narrative does a bit of back-skipping to explain the scope of the dystopian moment and how it came to be, but it's mostly a quest story with an endpoint that I thought was telegraphed pretty clearly, although I was surprised to see other readers saying it came as a shock to them. The book is v...

The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the novellas - another post to come on the novels!  If I was giving the prize? It would go to either The Butcher of the Forest or What Feasts at Night. This is a little surprising, as fantasy-horror is not one of my favoured subgenres usually, but these are two very good works. Best Novella Nominees 1. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo: 7.5/10 This is the fifth in a series of novellas. The Singing Hills novellas are set in a fantasy world that is closest in analogue to Imperial China, with shades of both Mongolian and Inuit influence. The central conceit and driving device of the series is the journeys of Chih, a travelling archivist and cleric, who gets themselves into a range of problems and adventures as they record ...

 The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the short stories! Novella and novel review posts to come. The six stories on the list are: “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim While I have given a tie mark to the two I think are the strongest, if it were me, I would give the Hugo to We Will Teach You How to Read We Will Teach You How to Read because I think what is does is strikingly original in both form and affect, and I think risk-taking innovation like that should...

This has been a slow month so far with new books, as I have been pretty frenetic with life and work commitments. I've read one of the Stella Prize shortlisted books (Cactus Pear for My Beloved) which I reviewed here , and also one pretty average mystery novel that I haven't reviewed, but other than that, I've only finished these two spec fic books. I've just started (and will finish and be reviewing!) another Stella nominee, Translations, and am wending my way through the Terry Pratchett official biography which will definitely get finished this month, which will make six. However, that might end up being all she wrote given the timetable of the next 12 days, which includes both a heavy workload and a higher than average volume of social engagements. Ahhhh well, not every month can be *all* about books... Of these two, I would recommend the first to fantasy and fairytale fans without hesitation, but the second (the classic - a Booker nominee that I somehow missed when i...