Nearly everything I received for my birthday was 1) a book, and 2) science fiction. Neither of these are bad things, naturally, although I’m having to go through my library a bit more and find room. (What things weren’t sci-fi, were space. So that works out fairly well I feel.)

The two that weren’t sci-fi were Universe and Saturn: A New View (a proFOUNDly beautiful book, by the way.) I received this year’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, Orphans of Chaos by John C. Wright (huzzah!), The Demolished Man and Virtual Unrealities by Alfred Bester, and The Two-Space War by Dave Grossman and Leo Frankowski (which I know NOTHING about. Lenneth found it for me on LibraryThing and we were both so entertained by the description that I wishlisted it.)

Probably the neatest fiction book I received was Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy by Alexander Levitsky. Levitsky is a Slavic language scholar at Brown University, and he assembled a historical look at Russian fantasy (which includes science fantasy and fiction) that ends (not begins!) around the time that Sputnik launched. Most of the stories are from the 19th century, some are older than that! I have a fascination with Slavic culture (especially the Russian space program), so I’m really looking forward to working through the whole thing.