WAYNE'S 2026 BOOKS: BOOK 1
Sleeper Beach
by Nick Harkaway

I read the first of Nick Harkaway's SF-noir books (Titanium Noir) early last year, and have repeated the pattern by reading the second early this year. Both were Christmas presents from my wife and the writing is excellent in both of them.

What differs about the second book–to its detriment–is that the story told in the first book depended on the central theme. The basic conceit is that a drug exists that can rejuvenate the lifespan of humans, bulking them up in the process and rendering them through successive doses into physical and financial Titans. The story in Titanium Noir depended on this premise; the story and conclusion couldn't have played out in a world without Titans, and Titanic transformation was a pivotal theme.

Not so in Sleeper Beach. While the craft was excellent–Harkaway works the tropes and themes of noir very well, with wonderful turns of phrase–the story didn't need to be a Titan story at all. The main character from Titanium Noir, private investigator Cal Sounder, continues his investigations in Sleeper Beach, but the story could have been told with any gumshoe with only minor tweaks. The Titan theme is wasted, as the investigation, a murder on a beach in a company town, centres on the push and pull of small-town secrets and capitalism vs socialism, rather than a continuing exploration of the Titan theme. There are insights into the life of Titans, but they're supplementary to the main storyline.

If you read Titanium Noir and want to read more about the further adventures of Cal, then go ahead! If you love noir and want to read a story with some excellent prose, then try it out. But if you want to delve deeper into the idea of the Titans, then this book may be lacking.

#books #bookreview2026 #bookreview #noir #SF #sciencefiction #crime

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 11

Sub-Majer’s Challenge
by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

I keep going back to L.E. Modesitt Jr's Saga of Recluse. Why, I hear you ask? Is it because the characterisation is excellent? Are the plots engrossing? Or are your a sucker for punishment, looking to recreate the enjoyment you felt for the first five or ten books of a series that has now reached (checks notes)... Book 25?!

This is the third (? I think) of a subseries about Alyiakal, who will become Emperor of Cyador, the fallen and forgotten empire briefly mentioned in earlier books. Alyiakal continues to ruminate seriously to himself about things, grossly outclass any threats he encounters while contemplating ominous dangers from all around, and assist his fiance in setting up a booze-trading company. He trashes enemies in combat, accumulates whispered praise from his subordinates, and makes me wonder what Modesitt Jr.'s editors were doing when they let him stretch out two books worth of events into a plodding five novels. Look, don't get me wrong. I am a sucker, and I will read the next book when it comes out this year, but... gosh. It would be nice if more happened in these books.

#books #bookreview #bookreview2025 #fiction #fantasy

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 10

SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups
by Ed Helms

I stumbled onto Ed Helm's SNAFU podcast and enjoyed it immensely. The first season covered a near-WWIII flashpoint that occurred as part of the Able Archer 83 military exercise, the second detailed the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI and their raid on the FBI office in Medburg, the third (and my favourite) explained Formula 6, the US government's decision to poison their own citizens in the effort to maintain prohibition. Unfortunately, season 4 pivoted to become a sort of lite version of "The Dollop" (Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds' excellent history/comedy podcast), with a SNAFU-of-the-week presented to a guest comedian, rather than the in-depth and long-form explorations of seasons 1-3.

SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups follows the structure of season 4 of the podcast. Short stories about times in history when things went wrong... sometimes terribly wrong. I enjoyed it as an audiobook narrated by Helms himself, and found it entertaining, if very tabloid in scope compared to those multi-episode dissections of the early podcast seasons. The stories are fun – Helms is a professional actor, after all, and his delivery and flair for comedy is on display here – but I really found myself often wanting more detail. I suspect most of the SNAFUs depicted will each have their own dedicated books, and with good reason!

It's an interesting read (or listen) if you're into history, comedy, or just want to hear about things that went terribly wrong as a way to make your own life feel a little better in these dark days.

#books #bookreview #bookreview2025 #history

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 9

Hummingbird Salamander
by Jeff VanderMeer

I really wanted this to be better... and shorter. I've liked Jeff VanderMeer's books in the past (the excellent Annihilation stands out), but this one didn't gel with me. I stuck it out, but I found the protagonist unlikeable (I suspect intentionally), the story over-long and at times over-wordy, and the ending very unsatisfying.

For those somehow still interested, it's the story of a corpo security expert who is sent a taxidermied extinct hummingbird and proceeds to follow a very long rabbit-hole through a near future eco-dystopia. You might enjoy it. I endured it to find out the ending and subsequently wondered if it was worth it.

#fiction #bookreview #bookreview2025 #dystopia #mystery #fiction #sciencefiction #SF

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 8

The Internet Con
by Cory Doctorow
(@pluralistic)

I will never not boost the work of Cory Doctorow, even if most of the time I'm not big-brained enough to follow every thread that he lays down.

This book talks about interoperability, and how it's something that most people don't realise that they need more of in their life, and how it's been criminalised in the name of keeping citizens in the thrall of Big Tech. What's interoperability? If you've ever wondered why messages don't work properly across the iPhone/Android divide, or why you can't easily leave Facebook for another social media platform, or why you're not allowed to repair your own tractor, then you know something about why interoperability is important but restricted by tech gatekeepers. It's easy to make a device that can perform any sort of computation, but they're always locked down – for whatever reason, usually profit – and this hobbling of the devices and platforms you own and engage with is an ongoing restriction on your personal data and belongings.

Doctorow shows the problem through a great series of examples – search engines, operating systems, VCRs, copyright infringement notices, deliberately-borked internet treaties, and so on – in his typical very-readable fashion. The first third of the book is a hit list of things you didn't realise made the world just a little bit more shitty... or enshittified.

The book pivots to discussing interoperability and federation, before throwing some problems up into the air that he opines can be solved with that one simple trick that the technofeudalists hate: better regulation.

I'll never not read a Cory Doctorow book, but I wish now and then that some of the solutions for which he advocates were implemented, rather than each new year bringing another set to examples for him to inevitably use in the opening chapters of his next book.

#books #bookreview #bookreview2025 #enshittification #doctorow #interoperability #federation

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 7

I Shall Wear Midnight
by Terry Pratchett

I've been a longtime fan of Sir Terry Pratchett, but I'd never read his last book: The Shepherd's Crown. There was a sad finality lurking there, that once I read it, Pterry would really be gone. Of course, readers of the Discworld know that as as long as we keep someone's name in the clacks, they're still with us.

I went back on this standpoint when I decided to read the Tiffany Aching books to my daughter. With each book, The Shepherd's Crown grew closer, until the start of this book, the penultimate Tiffany title: I Shall Wear Midnight. It unfortunately starts with (spoiler warning) the physical abuse of an underage girl by her father, and her subsequent miscarriage. This scene put my daughter understandably off reading any further for months.

But we eventually returned to the book as those months lent an increase in maturity to her, and enjoyed it well enough. The villain – an eyeless entity known as The Cunning Man – ticked almost every misogynist box available, and my daughter found him justifiably hateable. We get to see Tiffany's maturation proceed, and my daughter loved the ending... even if a certain event that she was hoping for didn't appear 'on-screen'.

The Shepherd's Crown is still unread as yet, so for now and always, GNU Terry Pratchett!

#books #bookreview #bookreview2025 #fantasy #Discworld #fiction

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 6

The Future of Another Timeline
by Annalee Newitz

Unfortunately I neglected to keep up with both my reading and reviewing this year, so forgive me if details are sketchy in some of my upcoming posts.
This goes double for this book, which was good, but – given that it was a time travel story that featured multiple bifurcated timelines, revisions of history, and unreliable narrators – at times complicated.

Tess is a professional geologist and time traveller, using mysterious geo-locked formations to travel through history, hoping to make targeted changes in order to create a better future. Unfortunately, a group of incel chuds from years ahead are doing the same thing, sabotaging women's rights through the timeline to achieve their goal of a world where men utterly dominate other genders.

I loved and endured this book by turns: I hated the antagonists so much, but the protagonists at times didn't feel interesting, as if the writer was checking off boxes rather than showing well-realised characters. It felt very academic at times, with some sections feeling like a dramatisation of a pHD dissertation. It wasn't bad at all, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a time travel novel that doesn't reuse the same old tropes, or someone that just wants to read about people standing up to very punchable misogynists.

#books #bookreview #bookreview2025 #sciencefiction #timetravel #sf #fiction

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 5

Picks and Shovels
by Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic)

Huzzah! A new Martin Hench book! I was a proud backer of Cory Doctorow's Kickstarter to publish this work without the anti-consumer and anti-writer practises of the usual purveyor of the written word: our old frenemy Amazon. I chose the epub version (which I read using Calibre on my Android phone), and the only reason I didn't buy a physical copy is that I'd like to get all the Hench novels in paperback, and this book isn't in that format yet.

Anyway, Picks and Shovels takes Martin Hench wayback to the late 80s, when computers had to be programmed without monitors (the horror), when mobile phones were something seen only on Star Trek, and when Martin - sorry, Marty - is a boo-boo baby proto-accountant feeling his way into the big bad world of finance by way of the silicon highway introduced by personal computing.

It's an origin story both for Hench and Silicon Valley, and a great read. With a company whose founders read like the opening to a bad joke (a rabbi, a priest and a Mormon elder) and a rival company locked in a battle for dominance, Picks and Shovels shows us that consumer capture, enshittification, and hostile design has always been around, even when computers were beige and bulky.

As with all of Cory's works, you read and you learn and you have fun, all at the same time. He has a way of distilling some bigbrain ideas into smaller morsels for the rest of us to understand, and be entertaining at the same time. I smashed this book in a few days as it was eminently readable, and I just wanted to see what happened!

You don't have to read the first two Hench books (Red Team Blue and The Bezzle) to enjoy this one, but you really should anyway as they're all neat and Cory is the kind of writer that we should all be supporting in these uncertain pre-technofeudal times.

#books #bookreview #bookreview2025 #enshittification #doctorow #fiction #crime

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 4

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
By Yanis Varoufakis

Hot on the heels of Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, I venture further into politcal thought with this semi-memoir from economist Yanis Varoufakis. Framed as a conversation with his late father, using Greek myths and Mad Men as motifs, and detailing a terrible threat to democracy as we know it, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is a powerful and disturbing read.

As if unfettered capitalism wasn't bad enough. Now we have technofeudalism: cloud-based rent-seeking that used the springboard of capitilism to tear it apart from within, draining public funds during COVID, enriching amoral and rapacious techbros, and setting us our society for a return to peasant life, but this time... there's an app for it.

If you ever wondered why Uber seemed like such a good idea but might now be worse than taxis, why the unelected Elon Musk is tearing chunks of the US government apart, and how Bezos can afford space jaunts but not toilet breaks for his workers, then read this. Then... throw a molotov cocktail at a Swasticar or something else positive.

#books #bookreview #bookreview2025 #technology #economics #technofeudalism #nonfiction

WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 3

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein

So I'll start by saying what this book isn't. It isn't the story of a woman who had her identity cloned and went on a wild ride through the dark web trying to discover the identity of the person that stole her persona. That's what I thought this book was. I'm not sure how I arrived at that misconception, but it didn't take long for me to work out I was egregiously self-misinformed.

What it is: a story of a woman (Naomi Klein, you may have heard of her feminist ecoleftist works) who finds herself frequently mistaken for another Naomi: Naomi Wolf, whose viewpoints rapidly diverge from those of Naomi #1. This mistaken identity, exacerbated by the social madness that ensued during COVID, forms the spine of the book, which examines the mirror world that exists between left and right politics. The diagonalism that has emerged in recent years, seeing strange bedfellows like fascists and wellness cultists, is another strong theme, and one that I found the most fascinating.

It's a powerful work. Flawed in some ways - I found myself disagreeing at times and finding some sections particularly self-absorbed - but it is in many ways a memoir, so some allowances need to be made. Klein works through a handful of major topics, presenting her own personal experiences as well as the emerging and changing battlegrounds between authoritarians and progressives. Doppelganger is well worth a read for anyone who cares about the threats to democracy de jour.

#books #Bookstadon #bookreview #bookreview2025 #nonfiction #politics