On the commute so it’s #TrainReads with the very interesting SF mystery If The Stars Are Lit by Sarah K Ellis
Womble of Liverpool. Enjoys geekery, bad jokes & may tempt a bit. pronouns - he/they/Womble Also Book Blogger/Tempter run fast, laugh hard, be kind - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net
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On the commute so it’s #TrainReads with the very interesting SF mystery If The Stars Are Lit by Sarah K Ellis
For the night crowd!
Yeah I much prefer in 24 hours but it’s been a busy week
Stay tuned coming your way this week. This is always a must read round up of the best horror film festival
Depends how much free time I have for a review - this week I’ve stacked the books to now review while reading goes on elsewhere
A brand new issue of Vector dropped. They're 3 away from 300 issues! This one is themed on the topic of "futures." I haven't gotten to dig in just yet, but it's on the docket! vector-bsfa.com/2025...
HULOT GOES THERE. I review MONSIEUR HULOT'S HOLIDAY (aka LES VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT) right here... nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2025/09/mons...
Hope you soon feel better
Does I Want That Twink OBLITERATED! reclaim the idea of pulp for a queer audience, centre masculinities in a new light, and take the reader on a damn fun ride?
Between Worlds introduces diverse voices shaping Indian speculative fiction today. Edited by @gautambhatia88.bsky.social, these original stories blend the surreal with the urgent. Pick up your copies from your nearest bookstore or online.
It is the first Monday of the month, so here is a new issue of Words for Worlds, the F-SF newsletter with an Indian slant: gautambhatia.substack.com/p/words-for-... feat. The Yellow Rain, The Artist, women surrealist painters, THE SENTENCE updates, new Indian SFF, and more.
I keep saying. Walled. Garden. Meanwhile, I can leave @buttondown.com any time I want to, because they're a proper newsletter platform. I just don't leave, because it's awesome and I love it.
What I love about Hugo nominating stats is seeing all the awesome stuff on the long list. Seeing that one of my favourite fan writers keeps getting so close to his first Hugo nod. (P.S. — Nominate Arturo Serrano next year!!!) And @strangehorizons.bsky.social excellent podcast almost scored a nod!
It's a gorgeous shot, isn't it?
Hello Evening Crowd - today’s review is on a collection of very different interpretations of fairy tales
I'm very happy to be one of this year's Guests of Honour, alongside Sheree Renée Thomas, Anna Martino, and Trick Weeks! Flights of Foundry is free, online, and a good time. You should totally come
The pumpkins They destroyed their cage Yes YES The pumpkins are out
The Damned King, by @justinleeanderson.com (pub by @orbitbooks.bsky.social) is another great instalment on the Eydin series, perfect if you want an epic fantasy proposal with complex characters, politics and full of twists. Full thoughts: jamreads.com/reviews/the-... 💙📚
My September newsletter just dropped
And here is the second!
Hope you soon feel better
Thank you!
Out tomorrow!
Today we're thrilled to welcome to the Hive authors from upcoming Dark Academia anthology THESE DREAMING SPIRES to discuss what the genre means to them! Read more: tinyurl.com/bd3r7ax3 #DarkAcademia @titanbooks.bsky.social @marieoregan.bsky.social @paulkane.bsky.social
Sometimes, the daylight can heighten the tension. With summer coming to a close, we asked the BFS community for their favourite daylight dark fiction stories. What brings the scares despite the light? Here's what they had to say... britishfantasysociety.org/when-the-dar...
"Her eyes glittered. She is keen,uncomplicated as a blade; with that frightening smile that she wears when she goes into a fight - frightening because it is serene, the smile of someone for whom all's right in the world."
Joining #blogtour for #TheTranscendentTide by @dougjohnstone.bsky.social out now from @orendabooks.bsky.social. Thanks to @annerandomthings.bsky.social. In this excellent 3rd part of the trilogy, #Sandy & the #Enceledons face the greatest threat yet 📚💙 bluebookballoon.blogspot.com/2025/08/blog...
That was such a brilliant read
Written by @angelaslatter.bsky.social , illustrated by me!
“A wildly imaginative ride ... one of the best cyberpunk books I've read in years” @starkholborn.bsky.social "Elegantly written and thought provoking" @thefantasyhive.bsky.social "Funny, strange, emotional" @runalongwomble.bsky.social "Stellar writing" @booksbonesbuffy.bsky.social
Hello Lunchtime crowd today’s review has a mix of great storytelling and analysis
NEW POST: Morning everyone! As well as my books, audiobooks etc, I like to read comics but can’t be arsed to do a review for each one. So I thought I would do a monthly round up of the comics I read. Today’s post is a roundup of the comics I read in August. www.fantasybooknerd.com/2025/09/book...
Artifact by Jeremy Robinson: A Masterful Blend of Science and Suspense "For those looking to lose themselves in a tale where innovation and nightmare collide, Artifact is an essential addition to your reading list." gnofhorror.com/artifact-by-... 💙📚🩸
New Review - a highly recommended collection of reworked fairy tales and also great analysis oh how these stories have evolved - Black-Winged Angels by Angela Slatter is out now! www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2025/9/...
Balrog!
If The Stars Are Lit by Sarah K Ellis
Tragically I'm on the road when this is happening, it looks AMAZING! If anyone goes, let me know how it was? I was a terrible student at 18 but I love lectures now.
I have a digital copy of this AND, I really like the idea of this format. Sam and Mary are two very interesting authors to pair together just as a baseline. Just started this today.
Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel by Paul Kincaid The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction edited by Rakesh Khanna, translated by Vishwambhari S. Parmar by Sneha Pathak Ice Cream Man by W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo, and Chris O’Halloran by Nataliia Sova Link to latest issue in bio!
Thank you for a great collection!
New Review - a gorgeous collection of revised fairy tales and also analysis awaits in the highly recommended Black-Winged Angels by @angelaslatter.bsky.social out now! www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2025/9/...
I remain delighted that the origin of the Dragons was a right-wing post-Puppies "a REAL award with a popular vote at, like, DragonCon, we'd win all the time!" sentiment, and once the award under said parameters got properly underway... it started nominating similar folks to the Hugos, Nebulas, etc.
Good evening, I waited to post when I could say I finished The High County, a Star Trek novel by John Jackson Miller, very enjoyable. I am now starting A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde, and I'm still reading short stories based on The Stand, loved the stories by Tim Lebbon and C. Robert Cargill
Good evening or should I say Buena sera as I am currently in beautiful Italy. I'm a bit late to the party. I finished the wonderful Indie book "Little nothing" by Dee Holloway yesterday and started the second Thursday murder club book "The man who died twice"
Just finished Herculine by @emotrophywife.bsky.social coming soon from @sagapressbooks.bsky.social “unflinching examination of trans life beyond simplistic narratives of either tragedy or triumph” Get a copy here amzn.to/41uMTN1
UPDATE: we're looking at more like 1:30 folks, thanks!
May not be an ending…
@runalongwomble.bsky.social Firstly Karla’s Choice, Nick Harkaway Fills in a lot of the Smiley books’ backstories in a well written story that feels genuinely in the mould of Le Carre. A satisfying ending with the same familiar bittersweet melancholy.
Good morning Womble! I'm currently reading K.B. Spangler's fabulous 5-book Rachel Peng series, about a former warrant officer turned cyborg. My roommate, who is a former warrant officer but not a cyborg, will read it after I do!
As always the Womble will have more for you soon!
And so much cool stuff that caught my eye
The future has warnings for the present
Ended a great series
Met a lovely author
This week a sneak peek back to the 80s
Happy Sunday, Womble! I recently finished Cauley's The Payback and Thompson's Doctor Who story, One Night Only (A Fela Kuti Story), both tremendously enjoyable. I just started Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster, and I'm also savoring Colleen Doran's lovely Good Omens graphic novel.
Going to start Little Fires Everywhere, and maybe also read some manga~
Evening wombie. Finished Starter Villian by John Scalzi yesterday so I'm looking for my next read right now.
The Stupid-title of Stupid-titles.
I am currently reading Random Harvest
Last day for the Open Call for novella and novel submissions at Ruadán Books! Got something for us? Read the guidelines at ruadanbooks.com/submission-g...
Hi Womble, still on Miranda Hart and Adrian Edmondson, but I've started the boss's book: The Great When by Alan Moore. Also Well Fed by James Collier.
Which is more my point - it’s the looser technical idea and I’m more interested in the consequences that idea has on the world - SF for me has some technical/social edge but how that itself comes to being I can be forgiving of
Hi, Womble! I'm reading The Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois by Ryan Graudin. I've tried 3 times to write my opinion down and every time I feel like I sound disparaging, so I'm giving up. But the book is good so far.
Writing The Murder was a really interesting set of essays on crime fiction - review to come Next up If The Stars Are Lit by Sarah K Ellis
Good evening, Womble! Currently listening to The Island of Missing Trees which also inspired tonight’s dinner with it’s lovely descriptions of yummy Turkish dishes.
1) How Christopher Priest wrote for Doctor Who, and what happened next fromtheheartofeurope.eu/how-christop... A footnote to Who history; two stories that were never made.
Evening Womble! I'm slow these days so just finishing Hemlock and Silver by T Kingfisher (if you thought her imagination was terrifying in the last book, brace yourself) Then going into Minority Rule by Ash Sarkar because my partner cannot stop raving about how smart it is.
Morning Womble! Expecting more thunderstorms today, which will make for a nice afternoon of comfort reading! My daughter and I are "book club" reading Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fanoglio. Super fun so far!
Just finished a cracking Historical Fiction book - The Pretender by Jo Harkin. A definite recommend to all those who could not quite find something else after Wolf Hall to scratch that itch.
All the hugs and you’re doing all the right things
Puzzled why naming your furniture range Loki seemed a good idea…unless it keeps looking very different to the manual
Interesting one based one something else I’ve just read Frankenstein. It’s handwavium science as to how the Creature is made the story is far more about the consequences - the world still hangs together due to a lack of much explanation
Leviathan Wakes, the first of the Expanse sequence.
Pre-ordered
The explanation for the change is for me often something I’m less invested in
The transporter doesn’t really have an in series description it’s purely a device to skip locations and occasionally do some stories on aftermath. I think for me SF novels are very much exploring consequences of a set up be that huge space empire or the next big experiment
Afternoon Womble! Swapping between The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri in print, and Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow in ebook. Both great but very different!
An impressive alarm call!
Good afternoon Womble! My sleepy Sunday afternoon dozing on my MIL’s sofa has been interrupted by having to chasing a hawk out of the kitchen. I have also just started a new audiobook: The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Bettany Hughes
Continuing reads: Physical: The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson Kindle: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
just began Sarah Maria Griffin's Eat the Ones You Love, already wonderfully gross and precisely cruel, almost done with Sacha Coward's Queer as Folklore, which is light and meandering but mostly clever
Afternoon! I'm halfway through Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Silver Nitrate. I'm enjoying it, and as a bonus learning a lot about Mexican cinema and the racist underpinnings of 20th Century western magic beliefs!
Just finished rereading The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia McKillip, now trying out a much lighter dungeon core litrpg called The Fallen World: Dungeon Engineer by Alex Weber.
Even very tech heavy SF can fail at being good I don’t tend to think SF needs to stand up to scientific scrutiny. I’m more interested in the impact on the story.
Current read also has thoughts on genre as a label here Carole Johnstone talks about what it can mean
I really like that approach!
Science fiction is the subset of fantasy where we are being fashionable about science. This is science fiction's own novum: the idea that "science" can be an aesthetic and that then-current models and ideologies of knowledge, both in form and content, can be a source of both constraint and excession
Spoiler-free review.
Just finished Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud and started the short story anthology Roots of My Fear
You can't preorder it yet, but my cursed film novel THIS MOVIE DOESN'T END THE WAY WE WANT, out September 15 next year from Titan, is bringing back the tattoo artist protagonist 😄 Though unfortunately for her, she isn't in a romance 📽️
I won't identify the current book since I may not finish, but next up will be Annalee Newitz's Automatic Noodle.
Afternoon, sir. All good here, hope you're well. Currently making my way through Kirsty Logan's collection, Things We Say in the Dark. Cracking quiet, literary horror.
Good morning Womble ! At the moment I’m reading Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edogawa Ranpo — I’d say these are interesting, which isn’t a damning with faint praise comment. Some intriguing tales in it.
I’ve just finished The Time of The Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones. Here’s me tracking it down as the book I couldn’t remember the name of last week. bsky.app/profile/mags...
A not insignificant motivation for me writing The Salt Oracle was because I feel *strongly* that dark academia needs a) this exact interrogation of institutional power & classism b) the real academic horror, aka funding bureaucracy c) a library though. It still needs a library.
In among research, I'm still reading "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Le Guin, which I tend to re-read every 5 years. The illustrations by Charles Vess give it a whole new dimension. Such a beautiful edition.
After starting and giving up on a couple of library books, I am whizzing along in NK Jemisin’s Obelisk Gate. Meanwhile, John Gwynne’s Valor is glaring at me because it’s been waiting through all these library books to be picked up again.
Good morning! Today I'm reading The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed. Only just begun, but so far I'm enjoying it (no surprise there!)
Good morning! Right now I’m reading The Grey Bastards by Jonathon French. Kinda snuck up on me how good this book is😼
