26 Jun 2025 3 min read

6.25.2025

kinda fantastical, kinda smutty

books in French on a bookshelf

Here are some books I've read in recent months that do not make me feel like I'm living through a cracked and even bloodier version of the present. Not that they don't contain their own built-in alarm systems. Most spec-fic does.

The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed: it's hard to say anything about Ursula K. Le Guin without sounding like a gushing fanboy but she's just really, really good and her work reads like well measured literary fiction. The fantasy and sci-fi elements provide organic backdrops for her ideas, rather than being sandboxes for her characters to play in. As she said: a novelist's business is lying. Hallelujah and amen.

Children of Time trilogy (w/ Children of Ruin and Children of Memory)
If your thing is hyperevolved spider species hanging out with humans, then heading out into the universe to mingle with octopus folk and then all of them together meeting something even weirder and being faced with how to deal with that, this whole trilogy is for you.

Alien Clay: same author as Children of Time.
What happens when earthlings go bungling around on another planet with an entirely different biological rulebook.

The Three Body Problem trilogy (w/ The Dark Forest and Death's End)
The politics angle is really only a concern if you're a committed Maoist, I would think. The series is really about humanity finding ways to work together faced with a common threat (okay that sounds relevant), and the twisty narrative lets the author introduce some pretty sophisticated and imaginative world-bending concepts. Read it before you watch any of the adaptations if it's not too late.

The Fifth Season: only read the first one so far and I think I need to take the rest more slowly to really savor what she's up to. Kinda fantastical, kinda smutty, all interesting and rendered earnestly. Book two queued up.

Project Hail Mary: best Andy Weir (author of The Martian) I've read. Hard nerdy sci-fi in the guise of an interspecies buddy comedy. They're making a movie with Gosling. I believe in Gosling. I just hope they don't overdo the CGI and make it look dumb.