Ignácio de Loyola Brandão

Graphic created by my father

Here’s to a happy reading in 2025! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. This was the third year running of record-breaking numbers of viewers and views in the 13-year history of my site. What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2024? Let me know in the comments.

Clifford D. Simak defined my 2024. Starting with a February review of his collection Worlds Without End (1964), I embarked on a fiction and non-fiction reading extravaganza that culminated in my article for Journey Planet, which I spent most of the summer writing, titled “‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’”’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.” Despite his Grand Master status, there’s little scholarship on Simak’s work and so much more to be done. As expected, there was little response to the article outside of my website. I also wrote two Exploration Logs on six of his interviews and his 1971 Worldcon speech and contributed to a podcast on “The Huddling Place” (1944) (the second City story). Sometimes you find a little niche that you never expected to inhabit which you feel there’s so much more to explore and say. I hope my Simak focus continues into 2025.

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1. I have yet to read anything by Melissa Scott — as is my habit, I start with a lesser known novel (in this case, her first one).

2. SF in translation from Brazil! Looks terrifying.

3. And I’m yet again the owner of another one of the worst SF covers. That said, Sheila MacLeod’s Xanthe and the Robots (1977) seems to be an intriguing take on androids and the the nature of humanity.

4. A complete unknown author (wrote more mainstream lit than SF) and novel… According to SF encyclopedia, Albert Joseph Guerard’s only SF novel Night Journey (1950) “depicts an idealistic soldier against the background of a useless Near-Future European Future War. The loss of his illusions is rendered with psychological acuity, though the narrative itself is dithery.”

Count me intrigued.

Let me know what you think of the books and covers in the comments!

1. The Game Beyond, Melissa Scott (1984)