… but you can have not enough space for them. I’m going to have to have another clear out soon to free up some room. I’ve already boxed up some books, but I think more will have to join them… None of this is helped by me continuing to buy books, of course – although some of those below I won’t keep once I’ve read them… well, one of them, at least.

It might be time to write a sequel to ‘Wunderwaffe’… Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Strategic Bombers 1935 – 1945, Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Fighters 1939 – 1945 and  Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Ground Attack & Special Purpose Aircraft I bought on eBay as a job lot for a really good price. Soviet Secret Projects: Fighters Since 1945 means I’ve now got both of the Soviet books. Um, perhaps I could write a sequel to ‘Our Glorious Socialist Future Among the Stars!’…

Some new genre fiction – well, Exit West isn’t category genre, but has somehow managed to make the shortlist for the BSFA Award. Oh, and the Man Booker too. Elysium Fire is a sort of follow-up to 2007’s The Prefect, which has now been republished under the title Aurora Rising, because. I liked The Prefect, it’s probably my favourite of Reynolds’s novels, so I’m looking forward to this new one. The Smoke I reviewed for Interzone; it’s excellent and one of my books of the year so far. Finally, Dun da de Sewolawen is by a friend, and it sounded interesting.

I bought some of the Author’s Choice Monthly books a while ago, and I’ve always been annoyed that I don’t have a complete set, because, well, sets are for completing, of course. Moonstone and Tiger-Eye (Charnas) I wanted to read, not so much Neon Twilight (Bryant) or Into the Eighth Decade (Williamson). But, well, sets. The same is sort of true for the two Mike Mars books: #6 South Pole Spaceman and #7 Mystery Satellite. I have a couple of them already, but I want to complete the set. But I’m also interested in the topic they cover: early space flight.

Some other books by, er, authors I collect. I’ve been a big fan of Blumlein since first reading one of hs stories in Interzone back in the 1980s. Charnas’s ‘Beauty and the Opera, or the Phantom Beast’ is one of my favourite genre stories and it appears in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms. It and The Roberts I ordered direct from Tachyon Publications… and was delighted to discover on arrival they were both signed. Transit of Cassidy is one of George Turner’s mainstream novels. I think it’s the only one that was published outside Australia. (All of his science fiction, however, was published in both the UK and US.)

Finally, some books for the collection… US first editions of Whipping Star are usually really expensive, so this one was a really lucky find. I hadn’t known The Artificial Kid, Sterling’s second novel, had been published in hardback until I stumbled across a copy on eBay. I have The Women’s Press edition of The Two of Them, but I found this hardback for a couple of quid. In the Heart or in in the Head is a literary memoir, published by Norstrilia Press. Copies are hard to find. And, last of all, a signed slipcased edition of Visible Light, which a UK-based seller had up on eBay for a very reasonable price. I have the contents already in The Collected Short Fiction of CJ Cherryh, but, you know, sets…