Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 13, 2026

It was my birthday last week, and I got a couple of book-shaped things as presents - one from myself (who knows me better?) and one from my older child.

I also got two books from Tachyon during the week since that momentous birthday party, and, given the title of this post series, they need to come first.

Meg Elison has a new short novel, Foundling Fathers, officially publishing later this month. (Though what I have in my hands is a final book, so you may be able to get one, too.) It's a SF novel, in which some shadowy right-wing billionaires are raising clones of "Thomas, John, George, and Ben" - exactly the ones you think, from the title - as part of their usual schemes. Apparently a modern smartphone falls into their hands, which leads to various funny complications.

(I am exactly the kind of person who immediately thinks, "wait, isn't Franklin a good thirty years older than the others? How does that work?" But the whole raised-in-secret, isolated-island-plantation thing is so vastly different from their original lives that this is a really silly, minor quibble at best.)

Also from Tachyon (published last month): Ignore all Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann. I should note that I've never been fond of the "this one company owns everything, and they are Evil and Oppressive, and Our Hero will smash them in the course of the book" kind of story, which this seems to be. (Companies that big and evil and oppressive don't get smashed that way; they wither away when something else crops up or change over time.) It's set on Callisto, where the evil oppressive company is Inspiration, which uses GenAI to something something "own everything and [determine] which stories can be told." Have I mentioned that, after my time in the book-mines, I also have a mild allergy to stories about story-tellers, particularly when that story-telling is Important and Foundational to their Very Identities and the Source of All Good Things in the Known Universe? Also that I think most discourse around AI - especially things that use "GenAI" as the stake in the ground, three years later - is stupid and confused and wrong, on both sides?

So I'm afraid I am very unlikely to enjoy this book, or be able to read it without flames on the side of my face, so I will point you to it, note that you are not me and probably have completely different hobby-horses, and say that Ignore has a bunch of glowing quotes and is notably queer-positive.

Bought for myself: Platform Decay by Martha Wells, the most recent novel in the "Murderbot" series. You probably don't need me to tell you about the series, but I will if you're interested. I don't really know what happens in this book, and I don't much care: I'll read it fairly quickly no matter what.

And last is the big present from my child: a big slipcased thing called The Skyrim Library. There are three books in a very handsome case, each collecting a lot of short material and a lot of art that I think was mostly from in-game materials (the game being Skyrim, of course). It is a cool-looking object that I now need to find an appropriate place on a shelf - and, I hope, also find time to read at least parts of the thing.