2025 In Review

A Part Time Sci-Fi Writer, Reader, and Fan Looks Back

Many thanks to those that follow the Enormous Room. I’m not prolific or even of Great Interest, but I enjoy my little pod of the internet in the SF community. I am filling the niche for mildly amusing sci-fi content, so here’s to a even more-or-less mildly amusing 2026!

-H. W. Taylor

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Contents

-Sci-fi 2025 Reading
-Enormous Room Recap
-Sci-fi Movies 2025 (mostly AVATAR)

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Reading

My big sci-fi read-thru was the Dune series by Frank Herbert. Before the 2021 movie came out I read Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune. The first two I loved and was gripped, delighted, and surprised throughout, but Children of Dune was a tougher read for me. But this year, I thought I’d make another run at them and decided to reread the first three before hitting God Emperor of Dune. I had the same experience, feeling too detached from the protagonists to care if their descent down the “Golden Path” was derangement or desperation. Nonetheless, I’ll forge on through Heretics sometime this year.

But my favorite sci-fi read of 2025 was a whim purchase at a used bookstore, Clifford Simak’s Shakespeare’s Planet. Previously I’d read his The Way Station and enjoyed it and the blurb seemed fun. It’s about a Tri-Personed Ship on a mission to find a habitable world lands on the eponymous planet, sending out a human and the robot Nicodemus to explore its suitability. There they encounter the aptly named alien Carnivore, who is Shakespeare’s best friend. Overabundant in ideas and scientifictional fecundities, I haven’t found such a disorienting and entertaining pulp story since C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra.

This years focus will be on reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy. It’s long been recommended to me and it receives nothing but the highest of marks from readers I respect, but other comments about it have intimidated me. So I’ve finally started it and I have to say, it’s fantastic; rich, mysterious, and already I can tell it will sustain multiple deep readings.

The Enormous Room Recap

The first part of 2025 held the latter half of my vow to provide fiction every month for 12 months. I did that and then went fallow. Here’s the archives, but I’ll link a couple of the older newsletters for convenience.

• In January I concluded my six part ghost story The Wicked Flee When None Pursue. It was paywalled (for publishing reasons), but there’s a free ticket to unlock it. So far, that’s the only locked post (again, for publishing reasons).

• In February I wrote a little superhero fan-fiction about my Superman analogue Godmode in a tussle with, well, romance, the morals of secret identities and a powerful enemy on the surface of the sun.

• In March and April I posted two older stories: The Last Song of Mars and Into Your Hands. Both can be found in my short story collection Desolations (available in ebook (5.99) or hardcover (17.99!).

• I took off May and June, but returned in July with some brief thoughts on the Superman movie and Advice on Readers Avoiding AI Writing. In October I gave my thoughts on Tron: Ares, which I’d overhyped to myself.

2026 is shaping up to continue an infrequent arrival of the Enormous Room. I am part-time writer, who part-time writes sci-fi. But I enjoy the world of Sci-fi, both movies and fictions, and so I thank you for joining me on my mildly amusing forays into the world.

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Sci-Fi Movies 2025

In previous newsletters I talk about the tantalizing theophanic narrative of the Tron movies and the importance of Superman (even if the recent movie (to me) was '“meh, fine” level. I’m not much impressed by Bong Joon Ho and his Mickey 17 did nothing to change that opinion (tho check out his Memories of Murder), and while I said nothing about Jurassic World: Rebirth, I considered that a kindness. But the big movie of 2025 was Avatar: Fire and Ash.

As longtime readers know, I used James Cameron’s Aliens as a naming convention (paired with Shakespeare’s The Tempest) in my Unique Miranda trilogy, and as every human knows he’s created two of the very best SF films of all time in Aliens and Terminator 2. While the Avatar films are far from perfect (dialogue/ reliance on ‘splodies), the world is so rich and immersive, and there are some tantalizes elements that keep me interested.

I love the Eywa stuff, the mystery of Kiri, and the transformation of humanity into Pandora. As I’ve said in a previous newsletter, with how distinct the Na’vi are biologically from the rest of the species on Pandora, and the immanently adaptability of humanity, plus the messianic nature of Jake Sully, there could be some neat revelations in the movies, but they’re being so slowly played out, I’m in doubt as to whether they’ll go anywhere.

But the other interesting debate that’s been spawned from the Avatar series is the very real valorization of Miles Quaritch among some unsavory internet types. I won’t link to them, but white-nationalists side with Quaritch (who -I can never fail to mention- is called “Colonel McRapeTheEarth” by sci-fi author Adam Roberts), calling Jake a race-traitor. Ewya is deemed a virus, infiltrating the minds of every native Pandoran, and the strip-the-earth Capitalists are heroes for combating it.

I could get by on the spectacle of the franchise, but having just a bit more to ponder makes the series more than just a fun romp.

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Brief! and (I hope) Mildly Amusing!

HOPES & DREAMS: I’m currently working on an H. W. Taylor short story, but I’m also feeling the pull to return to my Nasostorto universe wherein the Unique Miranda trilogy is set. I’ve got a second trilogy that follows the adventures of Juno Pax and Toneo that I’m excited to get too. Plus there’s Project Hail Mary and DUNE Part 3 to look forward to.

Onward to 2026!