I promised yesterday I’d put up a post showing the books I bought at Novacon, and so here it is. Also included are those books purchased since the last book haul post. Embarrassingly, it’s more than I thought it was. Oh well. Time to learn to speed-read…

Three Women’s Press sf titles from Novacon – as mentioned in my previous post: Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison; The Book of the Night, Rhoda Lerman; and The Two of Them, Joanna Russ. Expect reviews to appear at some point on SF Mistressworks.

More from Novacon – and, er, a Moore from Novacon: Judgment Night by CL Moore. Also for SF Mistressworks. Critical Threshold and The City of the Sun are the second and fourth books of Brian Stableford’s Daedalus Mission sextet. Now I need to find copies of the other four…

More recent books from Novacon. And you can’t get more recenter than the brand new Solaris Rising collection. The Matthew Farrell of Thunder Rift is actually sf author Stephen Leigh, and the Adam Roberts of The Snow is actually top parodist A.R.R.R Roberts.

Some charity shop finds. Marilynne Robinson’s Home I’ve been keen to read after being impressed by her Gilead. Not sure why I picked up Touching The Void – possibly because it’s on the World Book Night list. Adam Thorpe is an excellent writer and his Hodd is a retelling of the Robin Hood legend. John Banville I’m not especially keen on, but I thought I’d give his Eclipse a go.

Some sf (-ish) novels from Harewood House’s second-hand book shop. Jayge Carr’s Leviathan’s Deep I’ve been after ever since I read her story in Women of Wonder: the Contemporary Years (see here). It will be reviewed for SF Mistressworks. The Raw Shark Texts was a Clarke Award finalist in 2008, but lost out to Richard Morgan’s Black Man. The Manual of Detection by Jebediah Berry I’ve been on the look-out for ever since seeing an approving review of it by Michael Moorcock.

A pair of paperbacks from my father’s Penguin collection. Never read any Faulkner, so Intruder In The Dust should be interesting. And the only Orwells I’ve read are Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, so Down and Out in Paris and London should also be interesting.

Some new books. Songs of the Dying Earth I have to review for Interzone. I’m about a third of the way through it. The Ascendant Stars is the third and final part of Mike Cobley’s jam-packed space opera trilogy. Prague Fatale is the eight novel featuring German detective Bernie Gunther. I’m guessing it’s set in the Czech Republic…

The Electric Crocodile first edition is for the collection. Anthony Burgess: A Bibliography is to assist with the collection.

Some sf graphic novels. I finally got round to buying a copy of Dead Girls, the first part of the graphic novel adaptation of the novel of the same title. It’s very good. Dejah Thoris: Colossus of Mars is an original story set in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom, featuring John Carter’s improbably bosomed wife and set long before he appeared stark naked on the Red Planet. It’s actually quite good – keeps to the spirit of the books, gives Dejah Thoris very much a starring role with agency, and has some lovely artwork. Warlord of Mars, an adaptation of ERB’s A Princess of Mars, is less successful. The art is a little variable, and ERB’s prose was never very good. But then the idea of ERB’s Barsoom novels was always better than their implementations.

Finally, a book about Ridley Scott’s Alien. It’s full of lots of fanboi goodies, like behind-the-scenes photographs, production design sketches, fold-out plans of the Nostromo, and all that sort of stuff. Cool.