S&L Podcast - #504 - The Miéville Effect
/We have the best 25 books coming out in the next six months and the best 25 books of the last 25 years. Goodbye to the Science Fiction Book Club, our final thoughts on The Ministry of Time, and we kick off our read of The Will of the Many.
WHAT ARE WE NOMMING?
Tom: Soup dumplings, chicken mandu, and fried rice
Veronica: Nikka whiskey
QUICK BURNS
CrochetChrisie and Seth: Bookshop.org now sells ebooks. Like their print books, shopping there supports local booksellers.
Bookshop.org - Ebooks
Mark: This one may only be of interest to Sword and Laser oldsters (we know who we are). The Science Fiction Book Club may be shutting down!
ReactorMag - SF Book Club Closing
JasonReads: Scalzi just finished a new book in the Old Man's War series.
AND
John Scalzi (DING!) posted the cover to the latest entry in his Old Man's War series, due out September 16. Art by John Harris, who's done the artwork for all of the books in the series. This will be one of two books Scalzi (DING!) releases this year, with When The Moon Hits Your Eye being the other.
Chris K. - Via Locus: 2025 Audie Awards Finalists:
As a side note: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, narrated by Katie Leung & George Weightman (Simon & Schuster Audio), was a finalist in the Fiction category.
Science Fiction:
Mal Goes to War - Edward Ashton, narrated by Katharine Chin & John Pirhalla (Macmillan Audio)
The Book of Doors - Gareth Brown, narrated by Miranda Raison (HarperAudio)
Frontier - Grace Curtis, narrated by Aven Shore (Tantor Audio)
Lake of Souls - Ann Leckie, narrated by Adjoa Andoh (Hachette Audio)
System Collapse - Martha Wells, narrated by Kevin R. Free (Recorded Books)
Fantasy:
Bookshops & Bonedust - Travis Baldree (Macmillan Audio)
The Bright Sword - Lev Grossman, narrated by Lev Grossman & Nicholas Guy Smith (Penguin Random House Audio)
Goddess of the River - Vaishnavi Patel, narrated by Sneha Mathan (Hachette Audio)
Black Shield Maiden - Willow Smith & Jess Hendel, narrated by Willow Smith (Penguin Random House Audio)
Someone You Can Build a Nest In - John Wiswell, narrated by Carmen Rose (Tantor Audio)
Locus - 2025 Audie Awards Finalists
JasonReads: John Ridley, who wrote the screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, is slated to direct an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's 1954 novel The Caves of Steel, an SF detective novel. The book is the first in Asimov's Robot series and features the first appearances of human Elijah Bailey and the android R. Daneel Olivaw.
ReactorMag - Asimov Adaptation
Seth: Reactor puts out a list of SFF titles from the first half of the year. First, a few paragraphs for more established writers and entries into series, then 30 others that get special attention. Marked quite a few as want to read.
ReactorMag - 30 SFF Titles in 2025
Paul: A list of the 25 best books of the last 25 years by an indie bookstore. It’s got a lot of big names and no real surprises. The big question now (potentially for the breakout discussion): What’s missing? These lists seem wary of picking much from the last few years, but I’d have had Babel on there, personally.
Powell’s - 25 Essential SFF Books
BARE YOUR SWORD
Feedback from the audience
Trike:
Re: My clean house. Yes, we maintain strict discipline here because cleanliness is next to godliness. Vacuuming is done once a day, immediately followed by thorough dusting, then polishing the silver.
I’m kidding; it is filthy. You want to talk dog hair, get a Pug. BUT we just got new carpets, and we have severely curtailed the dogs’ traffic on them. Although Zoey, the blind 20-year-old Chihuahua, did tinkle in the great room. However, I did receive my order of twinkly lights Thursday and set up the first batch that has faux leaves around the plants.
BOOK OF THE MONTH DISCUSSION
Kick-Off
The Will of the Many by James Islington
Wrap-Up
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Calvey
I hail from the future as I finished the January book in December.
Let me tell you, the first half of the book was really slow and really didn’t give me hope. Then it switched. I didn’t see the hook coming, so I was totally caught off guard by the reveal. I will be curious to know if others saw it coming. I guess, in the end, I liked it more because of the ending, but I don’t think it’s an Obama book, just saying. I really want to ask him, “Wuuuut?”
I will be curious to listen to this podcast and the reviews from everyone. I have to think it will have a lot of loves or hates...
ScottM
I've been swamped with a major transition I'm doing at work, so I just picked up the January read this evening. I'm around the halfway point, and wow, I'm blown away.
I will say, especially in light of the conversation this afternoon in general-chat, that this book lands very much as literary fiction for me. So far, there hasn't been a ton of plot, though I sense elements starting to come together. The focus has been on character development and really major themes of identity, how others perceive us, how we perceive ourselves, and the power of narrative.
And time and again, there has been use of language in ways that stopped me in my tracks. I've highlighted a ton, but I'll note a couple of very short and non-spoilery examples.
"This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you."
That sent chills down my neck, and I had to sit with it for a moment. That distills a complex experience that is not at all easy to express.
And then there's this example that I think would be easy for people to rush past, but it's worth settling into:
"He filled the room like a horizon."
What's a horizon? It's a demarcation line between two distinct states or realities. It's the distant marker of where we are journeying. It's a descriptive term for expanding our vision and experiences. It's a lot of things, but not something we typically attribute to a person or describe as filling a room.
Oh, and the learning to ride a bike scene reached a point where I chuckled out loud, not something I usually do.
Oh, and one line that probably made me smile, mostly because I have a mother with two master's degrees in psychology as well as various other degrees:
"I ask both as a psychologist and a person with a normal level of empathy."
John Nevets
Having thought about it a bit, I wonder if a big part of why I don't like the first half of the story is that I like my protagonists to be competent, if not experts. It’s part of why I like Stephenson and Andy Weir books so much. I don't mind if they are broken or imperfect, but I like them to be good at things.
I liked the lead in Planetfall despite her brokenness—because I could relate to it and because she was so competent at what she set out to do. And despite our bridge seemingly being very good at knowing her history and how to describe the present, I just didn't find her competent. This made more sense in the second half of the book, but it just didn't work for me in the first half.
But I'm still trying to sort out why this story didn't work for me, while others that are similar did. I wonder if Kings of the Wyld had been written from Gabe's utterly broken POV instead of Clay's if I would have liked that book? I don’t know.
Jan
I very much enjoyed the book—or at least 90% of it—as I really liked the beginning and could at least appreciate what the ending was doing. But I loved the language, the choice of words, how the characters talked, and the dry wit throughout.
I enjoyed this aspect and the characters so much that I would have been very happy if this had been just an exploration of the characters and the environmental, cultural, and political themes and allegories being presented by this very precise and witty narration.
The rushed plot at the end was fine, but for me, the star of the book was the language. Damn, was it good!
John
This book presents intriguing ideas and considerable potential but feels like it needed further development to fully realize that potential. The lighthearted housemate relationship was engaging, and I particularly enjoyed the quirky interactions between the two main characters and the fresh perspectives of historical figures encountering modern life.
However, my main criticism lies in the unclear purpose behind retrieving people from the past. While initially, experiments are explained as a simple test of what's possible, the later suggestion that these historical figures are somehow essential to some future mission remains frustratingly unclear. Instead, the narrative largely focuses on teaching these transplanted characters modern values and terminology—an angle that could have worked well as comedy had the author leaned into it but instead fell into a cringe-inducing middle ground.
The story also leaves several rich veins of narrative potential untapped. For instance, the premise that they only take people who historically disappeared raises fascinating questions: Are the Ministry themselves inadvertently responsible for creating these very disappearances? The expatriates' intellect suggests they would have grappled with such paradoxes, which could have added compelling tension to their relationships, yet this angle remains unexplored.
I'm ultimately glad I read this because reading such works serves as inspiration. While masterpieces can feel intimidatingly perfect and poor writing can be discouraging, encountering something good but unpolished motivates me to explore my own potential as an author.
ADDENDUMS
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