After writing about The Wandering Inn earlier, I realized that I’ve never written anything about With This Ring either and I’ve been reading this for a far longer period of time. This is of course not an original work but a piece of fan-fiction based on the Young Justice television series that is set in a version of the DC universe. I’ve massively cut down on my reading of fan-fiction these days and most of them aren’t worth talking about. I make an exception for this not because it is particularly well written but because of its sheer massiveness and the consistency with which the author has been able to churn out updates every day almost without fail.

I haven’t been so diligent as to buy anything close to every edition of this annual anthology of the year’s best science-fiction stories but this has indeed been a semi-regular fixture of my life ever since I started reading fiction from way back during my school days. This particular edition however is the very last one as editor Gardner Dozois died in 2018. This truly marks the passing of an era for although he is not well known for his own writing, his editing work has been influential in the field for decades and as this volume illustrates, he does invaluable work in documenting what happens in the field of science-fiction every year.

Since this book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for 2020, I’ll take that to mean that I’m finally current on new science-fiction releases. Another problem I’ve been having recently is that even as I continue to read at least one traditionally published science-fiction or fantasy novel a month, I’ve been liking them a lot less than the web serials or even the random fanfiction which I read a ton of. Here at last is a novel that I solidly liked and would recommend, even though I think it is closer to being space opera than science-fiction. Admirable work by new writer Arkady Martine.

So this is the last book of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy about Athena and Apollo’s project to found Plato’s Just City. It’s pretty clear that this was written only to close out the trilogy as there is very little plot. Much of it consists of a series of philosophical essays by Crocus, the first of the Workers, the robots Athena brought to build the city, to gain sentience. The much promised renewed contact between the Platonic cities and the rest of humanity also turns out to be a bit of a damp squib. But it does have time-travel, aliens and even a dinosaur!

Back when I wrote about the final book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy I said I’ll probably pick up this semi-official companion book and now I have. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered. This started out as a piece of fanfiction by a devoted fan Baoshu and became popular enough that it was acknowledged by Liu Cixin and his publisher. But it remains firmly in fanfiction territory as it is nowhere as creative or as well written as the original trilogy. It is also largely a companion piece to Death’s End instead of the trilogy as a whole as it features the characters from the last book.

This Russian novel is probably best known as the inspiration of the video game of the same name though I have not played it as I rarely play shooters these days. It was however first made available online in the Russian language, making it an early example of the web fiction that I read so much of these days, and the author Dmitry Glukhovsky apparently started writing it at the age of 18. I decided to check it out after reading some good reviews of it and while it certainly feels like a Russian novel, I found that I don’t like it much at all.

I’ve been trying to be more up to date on current science-fiction books and this is one of the most talked about ones recently. It is the debut novel of its author, Rivers Solomon, who self-identifies using the pronoun they and them, and indeed many of the characters in it have atypical genders. I was also attracted to its premise of reimagining the scenario of black slaves in the America South on board a generation ship. In the end however I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would as it leans so heavily on its inspirational sources that it’s barely much of a story on its own.