A few months ago I rewatched Starship Troopers, which was great as a satire but not great as science fiction. I was in the mood to read some of the good stuff. Good thing I have a bunch of books sitting around (on shelves, in front of shelves, behind doors, etc) for this exact situation!

First was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series. Gripping and fun — I read the whole trilogy one after the other and my interest never flagged. Really good modern space opera, with all the stuff you want: weird planets, space battles, and wonderful aliens. (The Unspeakable Aklu is the best.)

Then I read Tom Toner’s Amaranthine Spectrum series. Another trilogy, which had slipped entirely beneath my radar when it came out a bit over a decade ago. I can’t help but feel that the bland covers and the title of the first in the series (The Promise of the Child, which is a cool quote if you recognize it, but kind of incomprehensible if you don’t) didn’t do this series any favors. It’s awesome and mindblowing. One of the most complex and fascinating far-future histories (12,000 years in the future!) I can think of. It has a slow start, but that’s necessary so the reader isn’t overwhelmed. The places it eventually takes you are wild.

I read Tom Holt’s Walled Orchard books (Goatsong and The Walled Orchard together in one volume. They’re about Eupolis, a contemporary and rival of Aristophanes. It was interesting, to say the least, reading a book about how comedy speaks to power in a crumbling democracy during Jimmy Kimmel’s silencing and unsilencing. I hadn’t read any Holt before, only a fair amount of K. J. Parker. I’m telling you, it would have been totally obvious that Parker was Holt it anyone had compared the voice in these early books of his with the later Parkers. So clearly the same voice…

Then I read W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. It instantly became of my favorite novels. Stunningly good, and oddly gripping, though it would seem by description to be glacial. The ideas are so interesting that you just have to keep reading to see what thoughts Sebald will connect up next, and how. At times it reminded me of Ligotti.

Then I read a book that made the Amaranthine Spectrum’s 12,000 years seem like the blink of an eye. I’m talking of Olaf Stapledon’s The Last and First Men, in which 50,000 years can pass in a sentence (or, towards the end of the book, millions of years). I dearly loved it, despite some occasional creakiness or silliness. Truly one of the greatest imaginative works I’ve read. It really cheered me up, in these bleak times, by reminding me that not only is this government a blip, but this country is a blip, and this civilization is a blip, just as this species is no more than a blip in cosmic time. Maybe what comes next will do a better job of things!