Category Archives: Article

Black Library: What’s Next After the Horus Heresy?

Black Library’s epic, ridiculously huge Horus Heresy series has proven incredibly popular, and for a lot of fans it’s the ‘premium’ BL range, the series that takes top billing and gets readers most excited. For all that it started small and exploded into something utterly massive, as readers we’ve always known that it has a definitive end point, and for almost as long as there’s been the Heresy range there’s been speculation over what Black Library will do once the series has finished – what ‘the next Heresy’ will be. With the Siege of Terra mini-series drawing to a close – at the time of writing there are just two books remaining of the planned eight – and heralding the long-awaited end of the Heresy, that question of what might come next seems more pertinent than ever.

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Monthly Roundup – January 2022

Somehow another month has gone past and it’s already the end of January, which means it’s time for my first Monthly Roundup post of 2022. After the craziness of December when I kept myself incredibly busy with my Advent Calendar series, I deliberately toned things down a bit for January to give myself a bit of a rest, and while I’ve still put together ten articles and two new site pages, it’s been good to slow down a little. While I may not have written as much as I have done in previous months, it’s been a really busy month on the reading front, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking ahead and planning posts that I’m hoping to deliver later in the year.

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Why Reading Goals Are Great

I recently read an interesting article on the Tor.com site called Maybe Reading Goals Are Good, Actually, which suggested that for a lot of us reading is proving harder than usual right now, and that setting reading goals might be a good thing to do. I agree! I regularly set reading goals – you can read about my 2022 goals here. However, the article seems to be based on the assumption that reading goals are a sort of necessary evil, a last resort to turn to when the world gets in the way of everything else. This…I don’t agree with. I actually think that a lot of the article’s conclusions are pretty accurate, just maybe not its assumptions, so I thought I would write my own piece on the same subject to talk about it from a different point of view, reinforcing some of the same messages and offering alternate views on others.

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Preparing For Reign of the Devourer by David Annandale

Here’s a question: what connects Percy Bysshe Shelley, Howard the Duck, a vampire cow and a murderous surgeon? The answer is that they’re all influences author David Annandale drew upon in one way or another when writing his latest Marvel novel Reign of the Devourer, which is out now (in ebook) from Aconyte Books! After reading his recent guest post about the relationship between horror fiction and visual media, I thought it might be fun to ask David to talk a bit about the books, comics and movies that inspired and influenced him while he was working on Reign of the Devourer, and put together a sort of ‘primer’ for the new novel. If you want to get into the appropriate mindset for the latest (mis)adventures of Doctor Doom, these stories are exactly what you need!

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Track of Words in 2022: Plans and Goals

As January is progressing quickly and time is ticking on, I think it’s time to talk about my goals for 2022, and my (loose) plans for Track of Words this year. I’m not really one for setting bold New Year’s resolutions or making too many commitments to big changes in my life, but I do enjoy challenging myself to goals that I can reflect on throughout the year. If you’re interested, you can check out the article in which I talked about my 2021 goals, and then another article in which I reflected upon how well I did meeting those goals last year. For the purposes of this article though, I’m talking about what I’d like to achieve in 2022, and in order to do that I’m going to split things out into three sections: a quick overview of where I see the site going this year, then specific Track of Words goals (i.e. what I’m hoping to specifically achieve on the site this year) followed reading goals (some of which may impact on ToW, others will not).

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Science Fiction Debuts in 2022 – Michael Mammay Guest Post

Welcome to the first Track of Words guest post of 2022 – today I’m joined by science fiction author Michael Mammay, who’s here to talk about debut SF novels coming out this year. If you’re on the lookout for some great new reads, this is the article for you! Michael’s Planetside series comes highly recommended, and his latest novel The Misfit Soldier is due out from Harper Voyager in February 2022! If you’re on Twitter and you don’t already follow Michael, I would strongly recommend you do – he’s a really positive presence, and a great advocate for SF, so enjoy reading his guest post and then check him out on Twitter!

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Yearly Roundup: 2021 Numbers and Goals

Every year I do a retrospective post – or series of posts – in which I take a look back over the previous twelve months on Track of Words, and this year is no different. I’ve now been running Track of Words for eight years, which somewhat blows my mind, and I find it fascinating to look back at how the site has developed over those years. Not just how it’s grown in terms of people visiting, but also in how I’ve changed how I work on it, and the relationship between what I do for the site and what I read in general. In this article I’m going to take a look at a couple of retrospective elements, beginning with some numbers before moving on to reflections on how I did with my goals for 2021.

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Monthly Roundup – December 2021

Hello, and welcome to my Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. We’ve reached the end of December (not to mention the end of another year), and it’s been a busy few weeks here with a post every day from the 1st to the 25th as part of my Advent Calendar series. I really couldn’t be happier with how this turned out, and I’m incredibly grateful to all of the authors (and one editor) who contributed to the Advent series! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading all of the interviews, guest reviews, guest articles and everything else (including a brand new piece of original fiction) as much as I enjoyed working on them. If you haven’t had a chance to read them all I’ve included all of the relevant links below, and as usual as well as talking about this month’s new posts I’ll give a bit of a general update for the month.

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TBR: SFF Books Coming in 2022

I’ve seen lots of people writing their ‘most anticipated’ lists for 2022, and I’ve even published an excellent guest post from author Thomas Parrott along those lines, so I thought it was about time I jumped on the bandwagon and looked ahead to next year myself. If I’m honest, I’m hoping to spend much of 2022 catching up on books I didn’t get round to reading this year, but that’s not to say there aren’t loads of great books due for publication over the coming months that I’m very much looking forward to reading, so I’ve picked out some of my personal highlights to talk about here. For my main list I’ve concentrated on general SFF releases, but I’ve also included a shorter list later on of the Black Library novels I’m currently looking forward to the most.

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Best SFF Books of 2021

I’ve already talked about my favourite Black Library novels of 2021, but I think it’s time to look more broadly at the best science fiction and fantasy books I’ve had the pleasure of reading this year. Back in 2020 I put together a Top 20 of 2020 list but this year I’m trimming things back down to concentrate on my top 10, all of which are books I’ve given 5* reviews to (over on Goodreads where star ratings are a thing) and all of which I have sung the praises of all year! As ever it’s proved tricky to narrow things down to just ten, but I’m really happy with this selection – so take a look, and let me know what you think.

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