Camestros Felapton

2022 Hugo Award Finalist

Category: Currently Reading

  • Currently Playing: The Cult of the Lamb

    Most of the readers of this blog are science fiction fans and a classic tradition of science fiction fans is to start your own messianic cult. In real life, starting and running a cult can be both time-consuming and expensive. You need a compound (or fleet of ships), followers, robes, and lawyers to keep the […]

  • Currently Reading: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik + current state of Hugo reading

    I’m going through the Lodestar nominees currently. I did just finish T. Kingfisher’s A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking which is currently winning all the awards. It was great fun and well-deserving of all the praise it is getting but I don’t have much to say about it for a review. Reminds me of Murderbot […]

  • What I’m Reading Update

    My odd approach to reading Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series came to an end when Book 9 wasn’t available in audiobook format. Book 7 was at least a kind of finishing point with a major change in the faerie politics of San Francisco by the end of it. So four books of the series read […]

  • An Odd Way to Read October Daye

    With the Hugo Award closing date not until November and due to circumstances giving me an unusually good head start, I’m making a serious stab at voting in the Best Series category this year. The Daevabad Trilogy, S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager) <- I’d already read all of this and enjoyed it! The Interdependency, John Scalzi […]

  • Review: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

    I apologise to whoever recommended this book in the comments but I can’t recall who it was! Thank you anyway, as this book is delightful. The town of Grafton in New Hampshire has (according to this book) been a somewhat independent sort of place, keen on low taxes and small government. It has also been […]

  • Currently Reading: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

    Oh this book is very much full of the kind of stuff I like. Stuck in a huge labyrinth like house full of statues and with floors in intermittently flooded by the ocean, the narrator believes they are exploring the known universe. The reader can tell they are probably somebody trapped in a magical place […]

  • Currently Reading: The Mythic Dream by Dominik Parisien, Navah Wolfe, et al

    I picked up this anthology to review the IGNYTE award finalist story by Rebecca Roanhorse [my review]. I’ve been listening to it on my socially-distant-get-out-of-the-house walks subsequently and of the 9 (of 18) stories I’ve listened to so far most are very definite hits and none are misses. Fisher Bird by T. Kingfisher turns Hercules […]

  • Currently Reading: The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

    My current audiobook companion to long walks is the final book in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, read by Ben Miles. It’s got kings, executions, imperial shenanigans and it is in a trilogy, so that makes it fantasy right? Seriously though, the Tudor period has to be one of the most fictionalised bits of history […]

  • Review: Superior by Angela Saini

    Science journalist Angela Saini’s third book Superior: the Return of Race Science is a very timely survey of the history and contemporary impact of the attempts to use science to prop up racism and beliefs about race. From Carl Linnaeus to the sinister Pioneer Fund, Saini maps the shifts both in actual understanding and the […]

  • Currently Reading: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

    This is proving to be every bit as good as people said it would be. An ambassador from a space habitat that controls access to a key navigation route is sent to the heart of a hegemonic empire. Mahit Dzmare has spent her life studying the literature of the not-so-benevolent Teixcalaanli Empire and is both […]