Some days you find out that the world is nothing like what you think it is.
An archaeologist named Tamara working near Hadrian’s Wall is approached by a very annoyed-looking, silver-haired woman with an incomprehensible message: The game is moving on, the time has come to play a hand, and Tamara is on point. Time to find the Necessary Arthur and get down to business!
Ethical Empire built the gate to heaven, and their employees hold the keys. By offering custom-built afterlives through full-brain uploads, they answered the needs of a society pushed to the brink by climate change and cascading antibiotic failure. But for Zoe, who works daily to assess the sins of users and decide who’s worthy of salvation, heaven is not so simple. Despite the urging of the angels on her shoulder, she is determined to uncover heaven’s secrets, no matter the cost.
The Night Soil Salvagers no longer need to perform the service they have provided for longer than memory can account for. Instead, they pass the nights in playful and profound acts of artistry, music, trickery, gardening, and honoring the city they know and belong to more so than anyone.
Uncover the heart of this mysterious community through the tales they tell each other, the tales that others tell of them, and the scores of their Dadaesque nocturnes, as they strive to lessen the burden of the city on the Earth.
Stella thought she’d made up a lie on the spot, asking her childhood friend if he remembered the strange public broadcast TV show with the unsettling host she and all the neighborhood kids appeared on years ago. But he does remember. And so does her mom. Why doesn’t Stella? The more she investigates the show and the grip it has on her hometown, the eerier the mystery grows.
Joining a boyband gave Tyler everything he ever dreamed of. A close-knit group of friends, the chance to model a beautiful masculinity, and a vocal implant that lets him sing even better than he did before transitioning. But deep on tour, Tyler realizes he wants more from one of his bandmates, yearns for a love that would never fit the image that has been carefully crafted for him. His manager wants him to be the heartthrob: available, wholesome, and pure. And since his manager gave Tyler his voice, he can always take it away again.
A young academic has been granted permission to travel to a mining outpost on a small planetoid far from the sun to study the culture of a small squatter population that lives in total darkness.
I like fantasy well enough, but what warms the cockles of my heart is science fiction. Preferably with rockets. Brobdinagian space battles (or at least the potential for same) are also a plus.
Here are a few recent novels that scratch that old-fashioned itch.
Hello, hello! Welcome back to our detailed examinations of the Stormlight Archive! So far we’ve talked about history, the Heralds, the Knights Radiant, fabrials, worldhoppers, secret societies, and the Fused. This week, it’s time to turn our attention to those mysterious beings, the Unmade: Splinters of Odium and instigators of much mayhem. What do we know about them, anyway?
Heroines in young adult fantasy and horror are often fighters, out to save the world, defeat the bad guy, and vindicate themselves in some way. But there’s a new trend that’s emerging, one that takes the idea of what it means to be a heroine and tilts it: reclamation. In these stories, girls have experienced some kind of transgression of the self, be it an idea imposed by a force outside themselves or a physical violation of some kind, so that the deeper themes have to do with taking back what was stolen on every level.
The recipients of this year’s Shirley Jackson Awards have been announced!
The awards ceremony is usually held each year at ReaderCon in Massachusetts, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s ceremony was a virtual one.
Warner Bros. is looking to expand on the Matt Reeve’s upcoming film The Batman. It was announced today that it’s greenlit a TV series set in Gotham City’s police department from Reeves, Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, and The Batman producer Dylan Clark.
Based on a comic book called Warrior Nun Areala created by Ben Dunn that was published in the 1990s and 2000s, the first season of the new Netflix series Warrior Nun has gone live. It’s overall a good series, but it falls short of greatness due to its reliance on two extremely tired and bad tropes. However, discussing one, possibly both, of them requires a big-ass SPOILER WARNING, so consider yourself warned that this review will discuss all ten episodes of the first season, including the tenth that has major revelations.
[SPOILERS for all ten episodes of the first season of Warrior Nun….]
Kate Elliott has been a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, a nominee for the Andre Norton Award, and a seven-time Locus Award nominee. She is the author of multiple series, including The Spiritwalker Trilogy, the Crossroads series, the Crown of Stars series, the Court of Fives series, and the fantasy series beginning with Black Wolves, which won the RT Reviewers Choice Award. (Not sure where to start? Check out her very handy blog-post on this very topic.)
Her most recent book is Unconquerable Sun (available now from Tor Books), which she describes as “gender-swapped Alexander the Great in spaaaace. Space opera? Space epic? Space adventure? Space campaign? You tell me.” This week, she dropped by r/Fantasy for an AMA, where she talked Alexander the Great research, writing sci-fi vs. fantasy, tips on genre-blending, tips on plot and conflict, favorite tropes, Slow TV, and much, much more. Here are the highlights!
Head below for the full list of horror and genre-bending titles heading your way in July!
We’re back again for more Terry Pratchett Book Club, and this time we’ll do a little jig because we’re coming to the end of our first book! Which probably calls for a cake, or a party, but this is a book club, so we’ll read instead.
We’ve come to the final section of The Colour of Magic, “Close to the Edge”. In this moment, it’s meant rather literally…
Sylvia is a writer nearing the end of her life. Widowed with two daughters whom she loves but is distant with, with over thirty novels written to her name, and with one last book in her, she is making peace with her death, the end of it all. Only there’s someone in her life who won’t let her go; a character in her mind, who has been in nearly every story she’s written, a nameless man who has been with her almost every step of the way. And if she dies without putting him in a book for real, then he will die along with her, trapped in her skull. Thus begins Jo Walton’s Or What You Will, a book about books, about art, about writing and creation, and how in the act of creating, we work towards immortality.
Two best friends create a computer that can see one year into the future. But what they can’t predict is how it will tear their friendship—and society—apart.
We’re excited to share the cover for The Future Is Yours, a science fiction thriller from author Dan Frey—publishing February 2021 with Del Rey. Check out the cover below, along with an excerpt of the first chapter!
Michelle Ruiz Keil’s young adult historical fantasy novel All of Us With Wings is a challenging book to review. Full of difficult but important themes and topics, it embraces discomfort and pushes the reader to look deeper. This is a heartrending story about grief and recovery, abuse and survival, independence and found family. It may not be something everyone is ready to read, but for those who need it, the book will feel like catharsis.
Max is a cheery xeno-archeologist from Earth, stranded and trying to find a way home. Lahra is a stern warrior of a nearly extinct race searching for her people’s heir. Wheel is the couple’s cybernetic pilot running from her past and toward an unknown future…
The trio traverse the galaxy in Michael R. Underwood’s space opera adventure Annihilation Aria, publishing July 21st with Parvus Press. Read an excerpt below!
A Peculiar Peril is, like all of Jeff VanderMeer’s books, very peculiar indeed. Defying genre expectations, it is at once epic fantasy, contemporary fantasy, historical fantasy, and portal world fantasy. It is a young adult novel with POV chapters featuring not just teens but inexplicable magical beasts, talking animals, rebellious mages, a stressed out speculative fiction author, and the head of an undead French emperor. It is a big book full of strange turns of phrase, stranger characters and settings, and a nagging sense that by the time you finish you will both know too much and not enough.
“Remember”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky and Lisa Klink
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 3, Episode 6
Production episode 148
Original air date: October 9, 1996
Stardate: 50203.1
Captain’s log. Voyager is ferrying a group of Enaran colonists back to their homeworld of Enara Prime. In exchange for getting them home in a fraction of time that their own slower ships would get them there, the Enarans provide Voyager with their superior energy-conversion technology.
[So that’s it? We just go on our merry way and nobody ever has to take any kind of responsibility?]
The Blair Witch Project is generally credited with inventing the found footage horror genre in 1999. But if you are looking for the first film with shaky camera work and amateurish actors stumbling around in the woods, you need to go back 18 years earlier to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, a movie whose scrappy anti-slickness was, unexpectedly, both inimitable and one of the most prescient looks of the ’80s.
The Evil Dead was made for only about $350,000, and it looks like it. But where found footage movies use their low-budget aesthetic to signal authenticity and ground-level hand-held documentary verité, Raimi leans into the wrongness of his ersatz grungy fakeness. The giddy terror of Evil Dead comes from the way it plunges its hapless protagonists into a pasteboard world, in which literally anything can come tearing through the cabin walls. “It’s not real” can be a comforting mantra—until, suddenly, it isn’t.
Aliette de Bodard is the author of the Hugo-nominated Xuya Universe series—”space opera set in a galactic empire of Vietnamese inspiration where sentient ships are part of families“—and the Dominion of the Fallen series—”dark Gothic books set in a Paris devastated by a magical war.” A triple-Nebula-award winner, quadruple BSFA-award winner, and a winner of the Locus award, she also works as an engineer in railway signalling and currently lives in Paris.
Her newest book is Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murders, which she describes as “a fantasy of murders and manners that merges Asian court dramas with high Gothic—perfect for fans of KJ Charles, The Untamed and Roshani Chokshi’s The Gilded Wolves.” This week, she dropped by r/Fantasy for an AMA, where she talked book recommendations, tea recommendations, fountain pen recommendations, writing from the POV of sentient non-humans, writing as an exophone writer, exposition, endings, novellas, mythology, Full Metal Alchemist, and much, much more. Here are the highlights!
Head below for the full list of Young Adult SFF titles heading your way in July!
