I missed out on Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books during my teenage years which is when I suspect a lot of people find these books with their magical horses (known as Companions) and tales of growing up and finding out about the world. I’ve been making up for it though since the books have been ending up neatly packaged into trilogies on Kindle over the past couple of years. This particular trilogy is interesting because it features a protagonist who is mentioned very early on in […]
Everything you could ever want to know about welding
Andy Weir hit the headlines with his first novel The Martian, a tale of early exploratory missions to Mars going just a bit wrong, leading to a movie featuring Matt Damon and some potatoes (you may have found it hard to spot the difference). It was always going to be interesting to see how he followed that up, and the answer was to stick to a near-future SF novel with a decent grounding in plausible “what if” science. Artemis is set on humankind’s first lunar […]
In the Bleak Midwinter
My book reading year ends, and starts with, this classic children’s novel by Susan Cooper. The second book in the series of the same name is a seasonally appropriate touchstone being set between the winter solstice and twelfth night and since I first read it as a child is a book I return to most years at this time. The book is the tale of the youngest son in a large family turning eleven and finding out that he is the last of the “Old […]