Horbinski launches us into this history of manga with the image of a boy dashing through the streets of Kumamoto, desperate to get his hands on a monthly magazine.

Ideas need to be thought rather than merely posited.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars saw publication in The All-Story (under the title Under the Moons of Mars). It introduced the American reading public to John Carter: a swashbuckler extraordinaire whisked away to Mars to court beautiful women, to bounce about the red planet with gravity-defying leaps, and to swing a sword. Burroughs’s pulp sensibilities drip from the opening pages and launch the reader quickly and expertly into what has become one of the most influential action-adventure power fantasies, injecting his narrative with heaped helpings of wistful longing for a world in which physical prowess reigns supreme—and he packaged it all within a boundless imagination that, even today, feels exciting to read.

When you dig deep enough, loneliness and queer yearning are at the roots of this novel.

What happens when that comfortable, cozy life starts to feel stifling?

Tchaikovsky might be back on familiar ground, but he is doing something more than giving his growing range of fans something that they have had already.

Murderbot has no interest in saving you. It has a job to tolerate and approximately zero patience for human interaction. What it does have is an encyclopedic knowledge of soap operas and the ability to keep an entire survey team alive while pretending it’s all deeply inconvenient. “So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.” (p. 20) That voice—anxious, sardonic—won Martha Wells a Hugo and a Nebula when All Systems Red arrived in 2017.

When people start referring to other people as diposabley, who are the real vermin?

Reading Steven Erikson’s newest Malazan novel, No Life Forsaken, I found myself drifting through layers of familiarity: The still-relatively-fresh-in-the-mind familiarity of the book’s direct predecessor, 2021’s The God Is Not Willing, the events of which are occasionally alluded to, albeit minimally; the hazier “I think I recognize that name and maybe remember they did X or possibly Y” familiarity that arises when characters and plot points from 2016’s Fall of Light, the second in his ongoing prequel trilogy, pop up; and then the even more tenuous sense of recognition that comes with returning to the setting and storyline of a run of Malazan books from the early 2000s.

2025, y’all.