The slightly surprising winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel was This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman – book seven in a series that had recently made the transition from self-published success to trad-publishing acquisition. I'll be honest and say I hadn't heard of the series until it was announced as a finalist and didn't know that it had recently been republished by Ace Books. I thought I'd see what the fuss was about and purchased the audio book of the first entry in the series but then didn't get round to reading it until this weekend.

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In Chapter 16 of this project, we looked briefly at the Peterloo Massacre – a historic protest in Manchester in which people demanding democratic reform where brutally attacked by the army. A 130 years after that event, Manchester and Britain was a very different place. Britain was in a process of often rapid decolonisation, withdrawing from India in 1947 and from the Mandate of Palestine in 1948. Britain had been impoverished by World War II but, at the same time, was going through a process of social reform under the 1945 Labour government.

So on Wednesday I got an exciting new present: an Nintendo Switch 2. I got Switch-lite way back in early March 2020, anticipating that I might be spending more time in-doors in the near future. Generally, I've always preferred hand held games consoles for lots of reasons but one of them was I used to catch a lot of public transport. So there is some irony that my Switch purchase was also when my pattern of work shifted from commuting to working from home. I really liked the Switch-lite: the range of games was good and while you might have to wait a couple of years to play the big-famous games like Skyrim, the console could still deliver a decent experience.

How I imagine Glorfindel’s horse looks (sorry Asfaloth) In this fourth section we cover another three chapters: X – Strider, XI – A Knife in the Dark and XII – Flight to the…

I watched most of the first season of Enterprise. I say "most" because I did fast forward parts of some episodes. It did, on average, get better but it always feels a bit underpowered: it thinks it can make warp 5 but not without the whole show having bits fall off. So, theme song aside, what isn't working? Much of the cast just aren't that great. Scott Bakula is pretty good and while Jolene Blalock doesn't get much variety playing T'Pol, her character works and she manages some very dry one-liners.