I finished Adrian Tschaikovsky's epic space opera trilogy just before New Year's Eve. That was the final book I completed in 2025. It was well worth the ride. The series as a whole took a bit of time to get going and Tchaikovsky is prone to exposition dumps, particularly in Shards of Earth, but overall it's a good read and quite entertaining. I liked the character development.

The series also featured dueling assholes--a protagonist and an antagonist. Ollie, on the side of the protagonists, is one of those professional assholes that doesn't really get along with most people, but if she chooses to be your friend, she'll be your friend for life. Ollie's major character arc was overcoming her biases against the Parthenon society, as it's composed of "perfect" Amazonian warrior-women while Ollie suffers from numerous birth defects that left her body crippled and deformed.

At first I thought there was going to be some mild wokeness in the story, but much of it was justified by the setting and characters, so it didn't bother me much. Also, Tchaikovsky didn't seem to be too enamored with perfect socialist societies, instead preferring the rough-and-tumble life of the spacers who really keep society running through their rugged individuality, scavenging and trading wherever they can to keep flying between the stars, regardless of the dangers posed by "unspace."

I won't spoil the climax, but it's pretty badass. Idris uncovers the truth behind the so-called "lords of creation and uncreation." The Architects are not what everyone thought they were, either, serving their masters unwillingly, weeping at the destruction they are forced to cause throughout the cosmos.

This has been on my TBR pile for several years now. I remember being excited when the Centenary Edition came out, but then I got distracted and busy with other things. Now I'm reading it and enjoying it quite a bit. Robert E. Howard's Conan is quite a bit different than Arnold Schwarzenegger's depiction in the movies, though I think he captured Conan's spirit quite well.

I did realize that while compilations of stories by an author are a fun read, they can start to become repetitive after a while. Howard has a formula, for sure. Conan will become enmeshed in some complicated scheme or a situation that's outside his usual understanding and he'll need both brains and brawn to sort it all out. This repetitive formulaic storytelling is not unique to Howard, of course. I had similar experiences when reading Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories. It's probably best to read a few stories, then switch to something else, and come back to the stories again.

I can also tell that Howard was HUGELY influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Their fingerprints are all over Howard's stories. From Lovecraft, Howard weaves the setting, with it's alien gods and ancient powers walking the land, unknowable to mankind. From Burroughs, Howard develops some of Conan's traits from both Tarzan and John Carter. Conan is wild, unpredictable, animalistic. He's also cunning, powerful, and strong, able to overcome his enemies through sheer determination. He's also chivalric and honorable in his own way. Not quite a Southern gentleman, though.

Since I got a bit tired of reading Conan, I decided to mix it up by reading Edgar Rice Burroughs for a bit, starting with A Princess of Mars. John Carter is a former Captain in the Confederate Army of America who goes to Arizona after the war to seek his fortune in gold prospecting. While being chased by Apaches, he hides in cave, then proceeds to have an out-of-body experience that propels his spiritual form to Mars (or Barsoom, as the locals call it).

He meets the local native green Martians and gains their trust. Then escapes their custody to join the red Martians, who are much more human-looking, and falls in love with their princess. It's easy to see how much Burroughs influenced the pulp adventure genre with his stories.

I was a bit surprised to find out that Burroughs was American. For whatever reason I assumed he was British. But nope, he was born in Chicago. I also thought he was writing books later than he did. Although he was a contemporary of Robert E. Howard, that was more towards the end of Burrough's life. A Princess of Mars was published in serialized format in 1912, while Howard was still a child.

Jim Butcher's latest entry in The Dresden Files comes out in a couple of weeks. I believe it's the beginning of the end of the series, since I've read that Butcher wants to finish with around 20-21 stories. Anyway, in preparation, I've decided to do a re-read of The Dresden Files from Storm Front to Battle Ground.

Storm Front introduces us to Chicago's only professional wizard--he has an ad in the Yellow Pages and an office in midtown. Butcher also begins laying out the foundations of his urban fantasy settings, establishing the core rules in which his characters operate. At this point, Harry Dresden is fairly powerful, but he still has a long ways to go until he reaches the heights of power he wields later in the series. He'll take many levels of badass along the way. For now, he's enmeshed in a scheme by a rogue wizard who is creating a magical drug that opens up the "Third Eye" of normal people and lets them see the world for what it really is. In Harry's world this is a very bad idea, because most people are not prepared for that experience without extensive training. There are things that are revealed when using the Sight that can drive you insane. Harry himself will experience one of these later and he pays a heavy price for it.

It's pretty good for a debut novel, but I think the series really gets going with Book 3, Grave Peril as Butcher expands the world considerably and introduces amazing characters, such as Michael Carpenter.

This is probably my least favorite of The Dresden Files. It's not bad, but it's not the strongest entry. Harry is called upon to investigate a series of murders that only take place during the full moon. Naturally, he reaches the conclusion that it's the work of a pack of werewolves that have infiltrated Chicago. However, his work is complicated by the fact that the FBI is investigating the murders as well and their motives are not exactly pure.

This is where we also see how Harry begins to adapt and grow as a character, as he realizes that the tools and tricks he used in the first book, Storm Front, are not powerful enough to aid him. So he upgrades his equipment using his magical skills. This will become a recurring theme throughout the series. As Harry points out more than once, a wizard who is prepared for a contingency is a very, very formidable opponent, so he does his best to be prepared. Though often his preparations go by the wayside and he has to rely on his wits, skill, determination, and raw power more than once.