Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 28, 2024

These books actually came in the door about a week ago, but I bumped them from last week's post because it was a huge box of remainders, and I didn't want to deal with typing up them all on vacation.

Tell you the truth: I still don't feel like it. So this will be roughly a third of the total, and the rest will come over the next two weeks.

These are the SFF books that I got in a big box of random remainders from HamiltonBook, a fine mail-order retailer relatively close to me (Connecticut) that I've been buying from for decades now. If you like books by the pound, and have wide enough interests to find stuff you like from a massive but quirky list, I recommend them highly. Many of the things I bought should still be available right now - though maybe not for long, since the deal with remainders is that they're only cheap as long as they remain.

Anthropocene Rag is a novella-as-a-book - it says so, though it's 250 pages long, which was enough for a full novel back in the Old Days - from 2020 by Alex Irvine. I read and liked several of Irvine's novels, but haven't seen anything from him for a while - quite likely because I wasn't looking in the right place at the right time. This one is a journey across some kind of post-apocalyptic USA (singularity model), with what looks like a quirky first-person narrator.

Lud-in-the-Mist is a moderately famous 1926 fantasy novel by Hope Mirrlees; it's the kind of book that everyone's favorite fantasy writers all seem to love, but has stayed off a lot of readers' radar for the past century. It's set on the borderlands of Faerie, with trade officially outlawed, which I gather starts the plot going. I've had it on my "should probably read some day" list for ages now.

Something More Than Night is a 2021 novel by Kim Newman - another writer I keep thinking I should read more of - featuring the dynamic detective duo of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff in 1930s Hollywood. Given that it's Newman, I'm pretty sure there's some fantasy or horror elements, not just mundane detection. But the book itself keeps that pretty close to its vest, so I guess it's to be discovered in the reading.

Season of Skulls is the third of the "New Management" trilogy from Charles Stross, which is set in the same world as his "Laundry Files" books but which he (if not his publisher) considers somewhat separate. (And he has a point: different casts, different timeframe, different core concerns.) That's vaguely annoying for me, since I missed the middle book, Quantum of Nightmares, perhaps vaguely thinking this one was #2. So I have one whole book to find and read before I can get to this. I did read the first book of the trilogy, Dead Lies Dreaming, at least.

Shriek: An Afterword is the second book in a typically odd Jeff Vandermeer trilogy about the city of Ambergris: I got it to replace a bound galley that I've had since before it was published in 2006. (Is that a humblebrag or a confession? I honestly don't know.) I read the third book in the trilogy, Finch, not long ago, and may get to this one as well.

Imperium Restored is another book in Walter Jon Williams' space opera Praxis series. I missed these when they came out, and have been getting them semi-randomly since - I believe the series has two trilogies and a couple of novellas, and I now have books one and two of trilogy one and books one and three of trilogy two. I have no idea when I would find the time to read six five-hundred-page books, even if I found the missing ones, but we all need goals, don't we?

And last in this batch is The Wolfe at the Door, which I thought was the inevitable "best short fiction of" published after Gene Wolfe's death. But it isn't - it seems to instead be a new collection of forty-ish random pieces of fiction and other short things, the also inevitable "collection of all the unpublished stuff" book. And I like the idea of that second book - the one this actually is - much better, in large part because it's primarily things I haven't read before. Wolfe was a writer of obsessions and crotchets, who got more like himself as he aged - not always in good ways - but was always worth reading.