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Notes -
Not a complete list, I don't remember all the fiction, and some of them are either so specialized in focus to be irrelevant, or I just read on a bet and a review is besides the point (eg, Minotaur Milking Farm after it became a short-lived twitter meme, which beyond its obvious problems was also just bizarrely normie).
Conventional Books -
A Market of Dreams and Destiny: Alternate universe London Underground Gaiman-esque fantasy where everything has a price. Serviceable prose, decently interesting universe, but it needed several editing passes or maybe even a serious rewrite. The author has too many viewpoint characters and too little meat to each tone, the politics go beyond overt to the point of hilarious inconsistency, there weren't any real big payoffs or conclusions, and the central questions just didn't hook me much. I was kinda hoping for a something akin to Fable Of The Swan, so might expectations might have just been too high for what's ultimately just angsty slash, but I just came away feeling meh.
Icarus Series: Scifi series rolling around spacers that operate somewhere between couriers and smugglers, with some twists to that. I'd actually read Icarus Hunt a couple decades ago, but I'd filed it away as a Zahn one-off; stumbled across the reset of the series in a B&N and splurged. I think I prefer the characters from Hunt, since for goofy publishing reasons, Plot and subsequent stories focus on a different set of main characters, but each story still works great and a not-absolute-best-tier Zahn character is still a great character. Not my single favorite Zahn series -- I think the Conqueror's Trilogy just had a better central gimmick -- but well-executed and consistently clever and easily beats Blackcollar.
Hugo Award Novels: yes, I still get the packet, though it's harder and harder to justify paying for it. Mostly a lot of meh. A Sorceress Comes To Call is well-executed prose and nothing else; The Ministry of Time has a great idea it does absolutely nothing with, Someone You Can Build A Nest In is about as shallow as xenofiction gets. Alien Clay's the only one I'd really put a vote into, and that's just workable rather than deeply memorable -- it's far from Tchaikovsky's best.
Humble Tech Book Bundle: Computer Science the Fun Way: a bunch of No Starch Press compsci books. I'm mostly self-taught (and worse, self-taught in weird focuses), so these were a kinda interesting read from a formal programming perspective. They're all pretty reasonable for their subjects, but what those subjects actually were and how closely they related to computer science versus computer engineering was rough at times. Computer Graphics From Scratch is literal 'how you'd do things without a graphics API, which you will never do', while on the other extreme Data Structures the Fun Way was a distillation of the various 'how do B-trees do and why would you actually use them'. Only real big complaint I have within the content was Code Craft, which felt both very opinionated on what coders should be doing and simultaneously fell prey to many of the same problems that mauled the old Clean Code movement. On the other side of things, The Book of I2C and Introduction to Computer Organization were the sort of writing that seem like great dives through layers of abstraction that I was looking for. Dunno that I could recommend any of these on their sticker price, but the shop regularly offers deep discounts.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Yudkowsky's AI safetyism to the masses. Takeaway: Not Great, Bob. There's few things more frustrating than a good writer making bad arguments for a position you think is worthwhile, and Yudkowsky's written single one-off jokes (eg, Moore's Law Of Science Fiction) that were more compelling than this book, while providing only the least-plausible defenses against his proposed horror stories. The first half of the book is telling us how People Won't Just in the face of a superintelligent system, and then the second half gives a list of things that would work if People Would Just. Few people are going to buy into the assumptions, here, and those that do won't trust the conclusions. I've long complained that post-golden era LessWrong erred by emphasizing pivotal moments and extreme runaway, but the book comes across as less grounded in its speculative fiction than Friendship is Optimal, and where a reread of FiO leaves people going oh fuck, I keep coming away from sections thinking they'll be dated in years, if not months. Maybe there's something valuable here I've missed because I've read Yudkowsky since the 00s, but I just don't see it.
The AI Con: Takeaway: Even Worse, somehow. Where Yudkowsky seems likely to be dated quickly, The AI Con seems like it was dated before it even started writer. Computers Make Mistakes, IQ Doesn't Exist, Stochastic Parrots, Water Consumption, yada yada. I don't know if the authors originated this stuff or just absorbed it from those around them, but they sure as hell didn't care whether anything was meaningful or correct. Even where it should have been strong, on the economics and social impact, it still couldn't bother: "bossware" is up there with eyetracking for something that could become a dystopian hellscape, and deepfake ransoms are already making the world cyberpunk in the worst ways, and the authors can't actually sell those stories. Finally, the policy proposals are a grab-bag of the impossible and/or useless.
((There was some "how to deal with AI for normies book", too, but the part where I can't remember the name tells you about how valuable it was: think three-hundred-plus pages of 'ah, but LLMs do X' that were marginal predictions for Llama.))
The Unplugged Workshop : woodworking handtool-focused crafting guides. Hard to review this because, outside of watching a few youtubers, I just don't know the topic that well, and it's impractical enough that few people I know do either. Worse still, it's definitely an intermediate-level work, with only occasional accommodations for beginners like myself. Still, highly readable, well-organized, functional, and good project layouts, and the stuff I've tried so far has... well, not always turned out well, because I'm used to chisels as a de-riveting tool, but at least been more limited by my skill than that of the writer. Even if you're really into woodworking, a marginal buy, decent borrow.
Complete Guide To Sewing: I was told this was The Standard Book on the topic, and I can see why. Where a lot of 'beginners to experts' books tend either, this covers the whole spectrum from before your first stitch all the way to deep project work I couldn't even begin to understand. Not an enjoyable read by any means, but a good reference. The projects are my only big complaint: not only were they clearly marketing to a specific demographic that had zero overlap, these felt more like they were trying to help guide people who were already working from a pattern, leaving you to really guess at sizes and shapes. If you're doing anything sewing-wise more serious than patching torn pants, worth a buy... but get a used copy.
Comics -
Promethea: another one I'd read before, but that was borrowing it from a library, and now the local comic book store had the full series in trade edition. It's an Alan Moore comic, with all the benefits and costs that involves : wildly metafictional, deeply detailed, uncomfortably sexual, not quite as clever or as dedicated to its principles as the writer wanted it to be, and with an unfulfilling conclusion. Still, if you like Common Grounds or Astro City, it's worth looking at, and far more approachable and optimistic than the typical Moore comic.
Black Summer: second verse, same as the first: read it in the Obama era, and now could find it in full TPB. It's a very late GWOT story, and intensely political about it. The first pages have a superhero with blood-drenched hands lecturing the White House Press Corps about how 9/11 was planned and the Wars In the Middle East were just filling for corporate greed and the last two Presidential Elections were stolen, but he's Taken Care Of The Problem. The only men and women who can challenge him are the five(ish) surviving self-enhanced members who once worked with him... if they want to, and can get past a government presuming they are his allies. It'd run into political disfavor before it had even finished, as by 2008 concerns about a President's legitimacy had become much more popular in the wrong side of the aisle. In 2025, a man surrounded by floating eyes talking about stolen elections has rather different political valiance (and Ellis would get cancelled for other reasons). But where Ellis's other works in the same time period were either pointless gore porn (No Hero) or have a couple interesting scenes trying to cover up threadbare plot and nihilism (Supergod), Black Summer remains interesting enough to keep on the shelves, even if (or because) it'd never get written again. Not quite good enough to recommend as a buy -- the conclusion just doesn't feel earned, to the surprise of no one familiar with Ellis -- but might be worth a borrow.
Online Published -
Contention I and II: average Joe gets isekai'd into an alien or post-human world without even the clothes on his back, and gets to do the Primitive Technology speedrun. There's some really good plot seeds here -- the main character's obviously flawed in relevant ways without being an absolute asshole, there's a big driving question about the local precursors that's escalated really well, the not!magic system is useful and compelling without overriding a lot of the discovery and exploration bits. But it's also only two novellas into a story that seems built to go on for another two or three books minimum, the author only started on Book III in the tail end of last year (currently patreon-only), and that makes it hard to recommend.
Kitty Cat Kill Sat: basically Rimworld - with one of the more sadistic storyteller options - meets cozy fiction, where an (accidentally) self-uplifted domestic cat pits herself against all the plural of several post-apocalypses. My gold standard for xenofiction is Book Of Night With Moon, and Argus doesn't quite get that high. The plot's a little too meandering, the payoffs need to be set up better, and it needs an editing pass. Still a fun rampage, happy to have paid for it.
Reaper's Lottery and Executioner's Gambit: furry scifi, with very heavy raygun gothic and gumshoe inspiration. It's intensely furry, like the rest of the Hayven Celestia works, enough to probably be offputting to anyone else, but like Skinchange (cw: featureless furry nudity, scifi violence) it's got a pretty strong core underneath it.
If I were to describe why I liked the series a lot, I'd say because of how it reminds me of Vlad Taltos "in space!" The smartass protagonist finds himself inside plots-within-plots and has to piece together what's going on and improvise a solution. A formula I'm yet to get tired of, as my father used to say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, unless you're paid by the hour.
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I think it deserves higher praise here than you're giving it(though I'll confess that I'm a shameless Warren Ellis fan) if only for the fact that it basically subverts the entire expectation of what a political assassination entails and why they're always bad('Lots of people hated John F Kennedy. He barely got elected. But Lee Harvey Oswald isn't remembered as an American hero. Just a prick with a gun who killed a president. That's you now, John.')
The last moment where all the surviving Heros were all girls and all that implies was still a little cringe, though.
Yeah, especially given the broader zeitgiest at the time, it was a genuinely surprising take, and the level and degree of conflict between the heroes and the government is a much more nuanced take than the "you people are young" summary he'd give in interviews. As an exploration of political philosophy or philosophy of war, it does a pretty good job, if limited by its time and its awareness.
My big complaint's just that it doesn't really feel great about its characters. It's a comic book, and a short-run series at that, so expectations are never high to begin with, but the ending is undermined not just because It's Woke, but because it doesn't really feel like a conclusion for the characters that got to it. Tom feels very Batman-inspired and Horus very Superman, and that's a classic for a reason. Do their perspectives actually say anything about Truth, Justice, and the American Way? About
assassinscriminals being a cowardly and superstitious lot? Or if they're working as alternative company counterparts to Captain America and Iron Man, anything about their political philosophy? Artemis pointedly compares the US government with the Nazis in one argument with Dominic: did he persuade her before his death, or was her violent persona and facing always an act?You don't need this sort of deeper layering. Black Summer benefits in the sense that not doing it means you can't do it poorly, like No Hero or The Boys and their utterly wretched X-Men parodies. But it's frustratingly noticeable given how little else there is to say about the characters.
That said, I do think it's one of, if not the best, Ellis short series. So part of it's probably me not clicking with him as a writer in general.
Black Summer(and Supergod, and No Hero) probably work alot better in the overall context of the time - not the political context, but that of comics overall.
Warren Ellis is one of those writers where he does something completely new and off the wall - sometimes it works, sometimes it stumbles - and then everyone around him scrambles to copy it because 'holy shit this is actually something new and innovative and exciting and' rather than doing anything new and exciting they just copy/paste until it's a bad parody(See: Extremis, Nextwave, Authority, probably a few others that I missed.)
Warren Ellis is pretty much a Comic Book Writer's Comic Book Writer. I have no idea if the stuff he wrote on his blog still exists in any sort of form nowadays, but several times he went all-in describing the creative process and history and what he has to do not only to write comic books but what it takes to get it published.
And he was very, very big on the concept of using comics as a medium to push out new ideas, and do them cheaply. He actually wrote a comic with this entire goal in mind - Fell - and I think it's worth checking out.
So, yeah. Warren Ellis doesn't really do characters. He does ideas, concepts, lobbing them out like hand grenades before moving on to something new - which, again, when the comic book environment is focused on reboots and milking the same characters for endless decades, makes for quite the refreshing change.
So, it's a fair criticism. I think he can do characters - stuff like Transmetropolitan, Doktor Sleepless, arguably Planetary with Elijah Snow - he just... doesn't. Most of the time.
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