Book #32 of 2026: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen (Berserker #7) I’ve never read anything else in Fred Saberhagen’s classic Berserker series (1963-2005), but I know that its core idea of killer self-replicating spaceships programmed by a long-dead race to destroy all life in the universe has been fairly influential in the science-fiction genre. …
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Book #29 of 2026: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik A solid mix of 3s and 4s, collecting eleven pieces of short fiction by fantasy author Naomi Novik previously published elsewhere between 2008 and 2019. The remaining two entries that are new to this volume (“After Hours,” which follows her Scholomance trilogy, and …
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Book #22 of 2026: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams The assembled titles in this collection of time travel short fiction get nearly the full range of ratings from me, which is often true of such anthologies. But since there are only six stories here, I guess I might as well review …
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Book #13 of 2026: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor I got my hopes up during the introduction to this collection, in which series editor John Joseph Adams explains the selection methodology: he himself read several thousand short stories of genre fiction published throughout a single calendar year, aiming …
Book #2 of 2026: World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau The 1985 World Fantasy Convention, held that year in Tucson, AZ with a theme of “Writers of the Southwest,” produced this souvenir book to resemble an issue of the old pulp magazine Weird Tales. (Seriously, look it up; designer Donald D. Markstein did an …
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Book #195 of 2025: Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is Brandon Sanderson’s second collection of short fiction, following Arcanum Unbounded in 2016. That earlier volume collected all the writer’s smaller works in his expansive Cosmere setting, while this one contains the opposite: ten tales expressly not …
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Book #171 of 2025: Star Wars: Dark Legends by George Mann This 2020 title, recently re-released as an audiobook, offers a fun concept, executed well: seven short stories in the Star Wars universe, all with some sort of spooky flair. I don’t want to oversell the horror here — these are PG scares, and not …
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Book #135 of 2025: The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with one of the editors.] Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand is a massive post-apocalyptic classic — over 1100 pages in its revised …
Book #79 of 2025: In the Realms of Gold by Victoria Goddard Within the context of author Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds fantasy saga, Ysthar is another name for Earth, and so these five stories take place in what’s seemingly a version of our own reality — albeit one that the protagonists discover is rather more …
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Book #75 of 2025: Doctor Who: The Cloud Exiles & Other Stories edited by Michael Stevens I’m going to quote from my own review of 2024’s Doctor Who: The Phaser Aliens & Other Stories — which I coincidentally listened to one year ago today — as so much of it applies to this subsequent release …
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