Books in June 2025

Dom

Dom

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A collage of covers from the books that I have read this month. The top of the collage shows my The Storygraph Avatar and says @cybergoth's June 2025 Reads. The books are all described in the following text.​
June saw me read eight books, and only a single roleplaying game. This brings me to 65 for the year, so ahead of target for the book a week I set myself as an objective. Page count was at 2,663 with a year-to-date total of 16,008.

Only a single non-fiction in June, Timothy Snyder's On Freedom, which I recommend as a follow on to his warning about fascism, On Tyranny. Written before the present US administration, this was a warning that sadly wasn't listened to.

The roleplaying book I read was the first book of Invisible Sun, The Key. I found it intriguing, but hard work. Then again, every Cypher System game I have read has been a slog in the character generation system. There's enough here to intrigue me, and I am looking forward to reading The Gate. I'm hoping this doesn't become the large white elephant black cube in the room I have my gaming books in.

I read two books that were gaming adjacent. First of all, Marc Miller's Agent of the Imperium. This was much better than I'd anticipated and was quite a page turner. It brings up new lore about the Traveller Charted Space universe and is quite a fun time jumping epic. The other was Simon Stålenhag's Swedish Machines: Sunset at Zero Point. Stålenhag is linked to Fria Ligan, and created Tales from the Loop, and this is his latest art storybook. It's a beautifully illustrated LGBTQ tale of abandoned machines and growing up.

I also enjoyed the second Mickey 7 book, Antimatter Blues, which wasn't quite as good as the first but had a great energy to it. I will look out for future stories.

Simone St. James' The Broken Girls is another supernatural horror tinted (or should that be tainted) murder story, and kept me turning the pages. I'd picked it up because I'd enjoyed her Murder Road last year.

However, I have two books tying for my favourites this month.

The first is Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? by Nicci French. This follows the story of a family whose mother disappeared when the children were growing up. A neighbour is assumed to have killed her, but her body is never found and it could have been that she just left. The tale covers the time of the murder and the modern day, when the family has reason to meet up again. However, as they do, some of the other children affected by the murder are starting a podcast to try and find out the truth. It gets messy, and you see the impact of the original disappearance on everyone involved.

The other is another Adrian Tchaikovsky book, Bee Speaker. This is the third book in the Dogs of War setting and followed a mission from Mars returning to a post-slow-apocalypse Earth, on a rescue mission for the distributed intelligence, Bees. It gets messy. Transhuman science fiction excellence.

Overall, a good month.

3 July 2025

Continue reading...
 
I also read Agent of the Imperium recently, but didn't get on with it.

The Traveller stuff was okay (although I have questions), my main issue was the disjointed nature of the whole thing. As each section started, I found it hard to know where I was in the overall narrative. I know there is a Traveller date code each time, but "40 years later..." would have been so much clearer.

(And I found the hero of the story pretty unpleasant. Not a sympathetic character.)
 
Someone had mentioned to watch the dates, so I didn’t have much of an issue with that.

I do agree the protagonist is not especially pleasant. But what else would a Decider be?

The Milieu Zero book also upset a lot of folks as they used the East India Company as a model for the early Imperium’s expansion. Sympathetic it wasn’t.
 
I figured I needed to read the dates, but I found they didn't sink in (as I didn't find them particularly memorable). Especially when picking the book up again after leaving it overnight.

As for the protagonist, he could have been written more sympathetically. (I'd suggest Star Wars' Thrawn as villain who is written sympathetically. At least in the early books.)

And goodness, using the East India Company as a model probably isn't something you'd try these days...
 
steveh said:
And goodness, using the East India Company as a model probably isn't something you'd try these days...
Click to expand...
True, but it’s probably a more realistic take on empire building than the usual ‘hero’ stuff. Folks got upset that the Imperium weren’t the ‘good knights and heroes’.
 
I read Agent of the Imperium and found it better than I expected, also it had lots of little insights into how Miller's Third Imperium works.
 
Think I might need to read it now.
 
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