Star Trek: Lore War by Christopher Cantwell; Collin Kelly; Jackson Lanzing; Ryan North

 

My first ever comics were Star Trek comics. I loved superheroes when I was a kid, of course, still do, but what I knew of them came from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and the Superfriends and the Super Powers action figures (which did have mini-comics, (as did He-Man figures, but I digress in this double parenthetical)).  When I fell in love with Star Trek in 1988, I couldn’t get enough of it. So in addition to watching the show and reading the novels, I picked up Star Trek comics at a convention and eventually subscribed to get the TNG comic from DC in the mail. 

Although I fell off reading Trek comics for a while, I recently have started reading more of the IDW Star Trek comics (I enjoyed Godshock and I LOVED Ryan North’s Lower Decks run and his graphic novel Warp Your Own Way) so I was happy to get an eARC of the trade paperback of Lore War. 

This book really drops you in the middle of a terrible new world in which Data’s evil twin brother Lore has remade all of reality in his own image. It truly is a horrific world and many of our regular characters are twisted in a terrible way. The Sword of Kahless, however, has the ability to awaken people to the changes to reality and slowly but surely Sisko, Beverly, and the others come up with a plan to strike back at Lore. A special highlight in this book is the Lower Decks Shax story written by Ryan North. When Shax is awakened to the reality by the Sword of Kahless, he relentlessly uses his knowledge of past Star Trek technobabble to single handedly take down Lores’s StarFleet in a very satisfying way. It is clear that North knows and loves Trek and uses that love and knowledge well. 

Fate's Bane by C. L. Clark

 

This book was very interesting- I didn’t know anything about the book or the author when I got an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. (I think I requested it confusing the author for KJ Parker).  This was a small scale fantasy novel with a sapphic romance between a clan leader’s daughter and the daughter of a rival clan leader who is a captive being raised alongside the other children of the clan. The magic was fascinating, but I never really felt the romance. When two characters get together as children and then hook up as young teens, it is very hard for me to take their “forever love”seriously. They’re still kids for goodness sake! I also had a hard time accepting that the narrator could forgive the other girl after the duel (I don’t want spoil things here so that’s all I’ll say). The structure of the ending was also very interesting. I wouldn’t say that I loved it, but I’m glad that I read it.

Joke Farming by Elliott Kalan

 

I first encountered Elliott Kalan when his podcast, the Flophouse, did a bonus episode in conjunction with The Greatest Generation to review Star Trek V. I fell in love with him as a podcaster when I listened to I, Podius, the I, Claudius rewatch podcast he did with John Hodgman. After that I started listening to the Flophouse regularly, and I realized that he was the writer of Spider-Man and the X-Men, which was hilarious (that’s where the Sauron cancer meme comes from). So when I heard him talking about an upcoming nonfiction book of his about comedy, I knew I had to read it. He is IMHO the funniest member of the original peaches - I think because his clever style of comedy dovetails well with my own interests. 

This book was stellar. It would be easy for a book about joke creation and construction to end up being dry and clinical but this book is anything but. Kalan’s signature wit comes through on every page. I cannot recommend this enough. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review. 

A Hole in the Sky by Peter F Hamilton

I love the books of Peter F Hamilton! I love the Commonwealth books so much! I still remember the first time I read Pandora’s Star - specifically the chilling and alien sections from MorningLightMountain’s point of view - and I wish I could go back and read it again for the first time. 

I also really enjoyed  the Void trilogy, and I adore Great North Road. 

When I finished reviewing the Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton, I said that I looking forward to more. And I was not disappointed when I got an eARC of A Hole in the Sky in exchange for an honest review - it was fantastic! I love Hamilton’s space opera, and I love a good generation ship story, and this was so much fun! 

I didn’t realize that this book was a YA book when I began it, so in some ways it came across as a breath of fresh air. Some of the sex and violence in Hamilton‘s other books gets a little grim, and it was a pleasure to have a teenaged female protagonist in this book that I wasn’t going to have to worry about. 

The mysteries of how the people on the generation ship lost their access to technology were well plotted and well revealed. I didn’t want to put this book down because I kept wanting to find out what was going to happen next. Highly recommended. 

The Everlasting by Alix Harrow

 

I first heard of Alix Harrow when her short story “A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” was nominated for a Hugo Award. I read it, and I loved it. When her first novel came out, The Ten Thousand Door of January, I read it right away, but was a little disappointed. The book felt disjointed, and I didn’t care for the protagonist or her struggles very much. I felt like the author didn’t successfully make the leap from short story to novel.  

I read Ms. Harrow’s two fractured fairytale novelas when they were nominated for the Hugos and I enjoyed them, although they felt a bit glib (I think in part because I’m getting a little tired of the hard-drinking, Devil-May-care protagonist trope and because I’d read other  fairytale retellings that lined up with my tastes more).

But OMG Starling House! That book was a massive leveling up - one of the absolute best books I read the year it came out. I loved it so much!!! I remember listening to the audiobook while driving on a foggy fall night and feeling throughly spooked out in the most enjoyable way. 

So of course I was excited when the publisher and NetGalley granted me an eARC of a new work by Ms. Harrow. The Everlasting was a book I hadn’t heard much about and didn’t even read a blurb of before I started so I didn’t know what to expect. The beginning made it seem like a fantasy novel but then it became so much more! A story about time travel and national identity and the lies we tell ourselves, I couldn’t stop devouring it because I just had to know what happened next. This book, after Starling House, really cements Alix Harrow as a major talent and a must-read author for me. 

The Time Traveler's Passport collection

  

This is another of Amazon’s themed short story collections by top authors. This time, the stories are all time travel themed and the authors are John Scalzi, R. F. Kuang, Peng Shepherd, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake, and P. Djèlí Clark. This one was a real mixed bag for me. The Scalzi story was enjoyable and clever but with a lack of characterization - something I have come to expect from this author, and it didn’t hurt the story at all. The Kuang story was brutal and breathtaking and the protagonist made a particularly violent choice towards the end that made me dislike them intensely again, not a surprise from this author. And the Clark piece was haunting and sadly realistic. The real standout for me was the story by Peng - I’d never read anything by this author before and I will look out for them in the future. The other pieces were much, much weaker. I might’ve been happier skipping them entirely. I disliked the Bailey story almost as much as I disliked her debut novel (which was a lot). And the Blake story didn’t even feel like science fiction. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. 

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor and John Joseph Adams

I always said I never used to like anthologies because of the tonal shifts and the variability in quality of the stories. However, I have really started to really enjoy these best of the year anthologies - it’s a great way for someone like me, who usually prefers single author short story collections, to catch up on recent short fiction. There were some Hugo nominees that I had read before in here that I remembered, but much of this collection was new to me. There was a particularly haunting tale about a family using a device to remove memories, originally intended to prevent trauma, being overused with disastrous consequences, that still sticks with me. 

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.