top shelf reads of 2025

The Centauri Device, M. John Harrison (Doubleday, 1974)

“In the nebulous regions between pulpmaster E.E. Doc Smith’s Skylark series and anti-novelist William Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy, THE CENTAURI DEVICE is a poisoned love letter to the Space Opera canon. But it’s the un-stitched delivery that makes this 1975 novel shine glorious. This is a dense and colorful adventure with a swashbuckling air to it, chrome and leather and amphetamines, but oddly also in line with Dashiel Hammett’s ‘Red Harvest’ more than any other book.”

The Anomaly, Gilles Deleuze (Other Press, 2020)

“Gilles Deleuze ghostwriting a high-concept ‘airport’ thriller a la Michael Crichton, this French Covid-era novel dissects the doppelganger as episodic wonder, and delivers a fine beach read that delves into speculations on true self and identity without ever bowing under a Foucaultian weight of digression and rumination. Yes, Tellier reminds us that we have been ‘photocopied’ – in more dubious ways than one.”

Downward to Earth (Doubleday, 1971)

“Action in the high adventure mold, where each setting is one of absolute wonder – whether the mountains of mist, or the arid plateaus where survival equates with transcendence. And surprisingly, some really gruesome body horror that outrivals Jeff VanDerMeer’s Area X quartet.”

Best of Cordwainer Smith (Doubleday, 1975)

“‘Scanners in Vain’ and ‘The Planet of Shayol’ are worth this collection alone – two brilliant SF body horror classics that transcend the theatrics of the usual space opera. Grotesque and strange beyond the pulps – sometimes like a drag show penned by Clark Ashton Smith and Yogi Bear. You get space pilots re-engineered to be half machine, able to withstand a sleepless journey centuries long into other galaxies while losing their identity in a steel box. And in ‘Shayol’, a biomorphic nightmare where prisoners are sent to a rogue planet, exposed to a climate where limbs and organs grow on them like cancers, only to be cut off by a human-cow servant that gathers the harvest and sends them back to the Instrumentality of Mankind.”

Moderan, David Bunch (Avon, 1971)

“I’m not sure there is a more colorful and more maddening book than Moderan. When you take out the brassy BOLD humor out of this one, THE ALL CAPS INSANITIES, what is left is a deadworld document about neverending misanthropy and the casual trigger-happy entropy that cheap cybernetic technology can embrace. Moderan is hate philosophy as situational comedy. Despite the cancers growing in between the plates of New Metal Men, there is nothing real in Moderan besides mockery of the living. All is revered with hatred towards every facet of living.”

Nova Express, William Burroughs (Penguin, 1965)

“NOVA EXPRESS is less a novel than it is an infection in page form. One could read it white-knuckled, and then gleefully slam a one-star rating on it like a death sentence. However the next morning, it could develop into a 5-star rating as quickly as a venomous rash. Glorious rubbish? The truest eavesdrop into the universal concept of madness and entropy? Either way, NE is not for everybody. Burroughs could care less about opinion. Opinions have been altered by the Nova toxins for decades. He’s just the messenger.”

Under Heaven’s Bridge, Michael Bishop & Ian Watson (Ace, 1982)

“Under Heaven’s Bridge is a brilliant and flawed novel, co-authored by two writers who typically subvert the tech-heavy space opera for exposes of alien cultures against human science & morality, Conradian views of being the ‘other’ in a land stranger than one’s own, and of course, extraterrestrial religions. Here Bishop and Watson (two fine purveyors of transcendent ethno headtrips) guide their Japanese linguist hero, Keiko, through an exhibition on a far planet under a dual sun system ready to go nova. The rocky red-desert planet is inhabited by the slow and unsettling, Kybers, elongated alien forms that remind Keiko of the golden Kannon statues within the Buddhist temple of Sanjusangendo, Kyoto. These creatures are confounding pacifists (or so we think), physically comprised of both machine and flesh, and go into unexpected hibernation mode where they turn into statues neither alive or dead, yet locked in some spiritual inner gravity of the universal collective.“

We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ (Dell, 1977)

“Random A.I. defines the term ‘bitter pill’ as referring “to something unpleasant or difficult to accept, often a failure, loss, or unwelcome piece of news. It’s a metaphor for a situation that’s hard to stomach or swallow, much like taking a bad-tasting medicine…Joanna Russ’ We Who Are About To is the bitter pill of Science Fiction, or one of the very few non-glorified and almost anti-wonder novels that shirk the trappings of exploration, courage and star-flung mysticism which the genre holds as protectively and piously as a golden shield.”

Tie for best collection: The Knight of the Limits (Barrington Bayley), The Hole in the Moon & Other Stories (Margaret St. Clair), Very Slow Time Machine (Ian Watson)

Honorable Mentions: Tender is the Flesh, Settling the World, Destruction of the Temple, Lathe of Heaven, The Kingdom of This World, The Furies, Bedouin Hornbook, New Worlds Quarterly 1, The Cipher, Transfigurations, The King in Yellow.