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  Recent Reads: The Green Man's Holiday. Juliet E. McKenna starts this adventure with a wedding, and a child (in this case, a changeling) isn't far behind. In the Mendips Dan and Fin must reunite a family, defeat an old evil, and send something home. All in a day's work. It's a pity this is a holiday.

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  Recent Reads: Wooing The Witch Queen. Stephanie Burgis' romantasy is a delightful Ruritanian gaslamp fantasy, where no one is what they seem and where a fleeing duke in disguise and a nerdy queen have to show their real selves to find the love that neither believe they deserve. Revenge is sweetness.

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  Recent Reads: The Teacup Dragon Sanctuary. Jessica Thorne's cosy romantasy has higher stakes than most, underneath its tale of a mysterious island and its link to dragon magic, mixed with academic and social rivalries. An enjoyable confection, much like its tiny dragons that thrive on cream cakes.

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  If you'd been reading my @InfoWorld column, you'd already be on top of a lot of today's Windows news. I've been on top of Microsoft's agent management tooling for some time now. Like this piece... https://www.infoworld.com/article/4215416/running-ai-agents-in-sandboxes-with-microsoft-execution-containers.html

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  Recent Reads: The Jewel And The Comet. Tim Pratt's space opera romance mixes universe spanning secret agent hijinks with kink to good effect, as humans, aliens, intelligent spaceships, and more all do their best to make the universes a bit more Culture-like. A Banks homage that sticks the landing.

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  Recent Reads: Wickhills. Premee Mohamed's secondary world spy thriller is Le Carre meets Herron via John M Ford, but all Premee. A defection goes wrong, and agent Ferec is burned and out in the cold. What is he to do, when the deep secrets of the city he defends are now his worst enemy? Recommended.

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  Recent Reads: Rome To The Stars. S M Stirling and Melissa Olthoff tell the story of the future of an alternate history, as space-faring Romans fight against the remnants of a fallen human interstellar empire. It's all terribly Hornblower really, which isn't such a bad thing. Tactics and strategy.

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  Microsoft has internally made Rust a tier-1 development language. That means it's been getting a (for now internal only) set of tools to build into Microsoft's build tooling, using the Visual C++ compiler tools. https://www.infoworld.com/article/4227839/microsoft-doubles-down-on-rust.html

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  A couple of weeks ago I went to the community-run Fabcon EU event in Barcelona, where I took the opportunity to explore the new Rayfin data application SDK and its agent-based development options. Using JS decorators to build in guardrails makes a lot of sense. https://www.infoworld.com/article/4233317/building-fabric-apps-with-microsofts-rayfin.html

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  Sometimes it's more than worth drilling down into familiar tools that have been around as long as we've been building Windows code, because it turns out there's a lot of interesting infrastructure under the hood of tools like MS Build. https://www.infoworld.com/article/4222857/msbuild-explained-understanding-microsofts-build-platform.html

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  Microsoft's new tooling to quickly configure *any* Windows PC as a development workstation is more than likely why it's sunsetting its Dev Box cloud PC project. Why have a separate SKU when any Windows 365 PC can be a Dev Box? https://www.infoworld.com/article/4188967/making-windows-a-developer-platform-again.html

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  Recent Reads: Some Desperate Glory. Emily Tesh's not-a-space-opera subverts expectations at every turn. Kyr is not a hero, instead groomed from birth into a revenge weapon, only to be betrayed by those she trusts. With nothing left, a loose cannon tears up the facade of her world. A memorable book.

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  Recent Reads: Fold Catastrophes. Peter Watts' latest collection of short fiction is a powerful indictment of humanity's inhumanity. His futures are dark and strange, and only a couple of steps from our todays, grounded in science and society. One thing connects them: all are powerful and compelling.

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  Bouonne Libéthâtion à tous! 🇯🇪

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  Recent Reads: Qalea Drop. Book 7 in Joel Shepherd's Spiral Wars series. As the stakes get higher, the cast gets bigger. On one side, the Corbi evacuation gets unwanted Reeh attention, on the other, Phoenix is hunting a lost AI queen that may hold the key to the biggest threat yet. Gripping stuff.

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  Recent Reads: New Adventures From The Trigan Empire - Book 1. Michael Carroll has a big job, continuing the classic 70s comic strip. Sensibly he's jumped a generation, pulling on threads from the original stories to bring new jeopardy to the Trigans, and to Janno's family. A worthy successor indeed.

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  Recent Reads: Side Quested Book 1. Ale Presser and KB Spangler's webcomic collected, as Charlie, Leopold, and Robin meet and start their quest to find the source of magic - and themselves. A coming of age with Babs the Dragon and confusing families that know more than they say. A delight indeed.

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  Recent Reads: Salvation's Child. Adrian Tchaikovsky's graphic prequel to his Final Architecture series opens in the chaos of Earth's evacuation. Marta and her daughter Xavi bounce between worlds until Xavi hears - something. This is the true story of the miracle at Forthbridge, messier than legend.

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  Recent Reads: Prophet - Remission. Brandon Graham's reinvention of a Rob Liefeld supersoldier is far future graphic SF, with art from Simon Roy and others. A cloned warrior wakes from cryosleep to cross a changed Earth and reboot a collapsed interstellar civilisation. Space barbarians à la Moebius.

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  Recent Reads: Lawless Book 4 - Boom Town. Another volume of Dan Abnett’s neo-noir space western. Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss. Bedrock’s status as Freetown is threatened as with money comes corruption. Meanwhile old threats resurface, along with a musical. It all makes sense. Onward!

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  Recent Reads: Lawless - Ballots Over Badrock. Dan Abnett's neo-noir space western sage continues, with elections, corruption, and a monster underneath the streets. Nothing is going right for Metta Lawson and she can only watch as her town goes to hell in its handbasket. But that doesn't stop her.

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  Recent Reads: The Lychford Collection Book 1. The first three of Paul Cornell's rural fantasy novellas, starting with The Witches of Lychford. Cotswold dramas where a small market town is connects us to other worlds, and the troubles that ensue as new guardians learm the rules. Midsomer fantasies.

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  Recent Reads: Lightfall - The Girl And The Galdurian. Tim Probert's epic graphic fantasy starts small, a girl foraging in a forest, and ends big, a battle for the last fragment of the sun. A war between literal light and dark is brewing, and anxious Bea is at the heart of things. Superb art, too.

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  My latest at @InfoWorld takes a look at Microsoft's Istio-based ambient service mesh for its Azure Kubernetes platform. It's an interesting set of tooling and worth investigating - after all, no sidecars! https://www.infoworld.com/article/4155954/ease-into-azure-kubernetes-application-network.html?utm_date=20260416190606

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  Recent Reads: Rando Splicer. Yes, the title of this volume in Joel Shepherd's Spiral Wars is silly, but the book is definitely not. The Phoenix's crew has to navigate more politics and hidden histories, as they deal with races that are more alien as they are so similar to humanity. The wars go on.

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  Recent Reads: The Power Fantasy - The End Of History. Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard's first arc ends. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned." Yeats has it all.

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  Recent Reads: Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur. Ian McDonald's wonderful novella takes us across a fractured USA, where time travel gives us dinosaur rodeos. It's a poetic tale as Tif aims to become a buckaroo, riding a dino in the ring. A broken world with broken people, trying to fix themselves.

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  Recent Reads: Lightfall - The Dark Times. Tim Probert's saga continues. Kest is dead, and with the spirit gone, so are the lights. Bea and Cad hunt the lost sun across a dying world, only to find that the story of the lights is not what they've been told. Is the truth the light that will save Irpa?