Happy Friday to Maleficent and only Maleficent. It’s Alex with a 1500-word ode to Angelina Jolie’s faerie-queen cheekbones because she can cut me with them any time… I MEAN. With your news for the week, most of which has nothing to do with Game of Thrones, and some free association on today in history.
Sponsored by Flatiron Books
Welcome to Finale, the final book in Stephanie Garber’s #1 New York Times bestselling Caraval series! It’s been two months since the Fates were freed from a deck of cards, two months since Legend claimed the throne for his own, and two months since Tella discovered the boy she fell in love with doesn’t really exist. Tella must decide if she’s going to trust Legend. After uncovering a secret, Scarlett will need to do the impossible. And Legend has a choice to make that will forever change him. Caraval is over, but perhaps the greatest game of all has begun.
News and Views
Book Riot’s got a list of 10 great YA fantasy stand alones. Also 7 YA novels with heroines disguised as boys.
Ooh, a deleted scene from Brooke Bolander’s Hugo-nominated The Only Harmless Great Thing.
An important scene from Good Omens almost didn’t get filmed for the TV adaptation; good thing Neil Gaiman was on it. (How’s the excitement levels on the TV series? I’m still a little *unsure face* about Crowley’s hair…)
The 2019 Nommo Awards Shortlist has been announced! (The Nommo Awards are given by the African Speculative Fiction Society, if you’re unfamiliar.)
How about a list of queer sf/f novels starring queer women that are coming at us soon?
You can read the first three chapters of Max Gladstone’s Empress of Forever.
Tor.com has also revealed the cover for K.M. Szpara’s Docile, which included a list of AO3 tags.
Star Wars engineering nerds rejoice! The TIE Fighter Owners’ Workshop Manual is coming, and it’s got some cool bits in it about the Empire and the First Order.
All I’m going to say about Game of Thrones (the TV show version) is that people are sure having a lot of feelings about it. io9 has suggestions for 10 female fantasy writers you should read after the series is over. Because no, GRRM still hasn’t finished it.
There’s a bioreactor being developed to provide food and water during space travel! Not quite at The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet levels yet, but it’s a first step! Also, let’s talk about space crap.
An examination of queer friendship in (Hugo-nominated) Artificial Condition by Martha Wells.
The Redemption of Time added a fourth book to the Three-Body Problem trilogy… and started as fanfiction.
It’s definitely not fiction, but I need everyone to know that Bill Nye Has Had Enough.
Free Association Friday
Did you know, 301 years ago, the world’s first machine gun was patented by a lawyer in London named James Puckle? (Insert joke here about how of course a weapon of mass misery and death was created by a British lawyer. My apologies to any lawyers reading this.) Happy 301st birthday, you deadly tool of mass carnage and destruction who also, nearly three centuries later, gave us Barret Wallace in FFVII with his machine gun arm. (If you missed it, a few days ago, Square Enix dropped its teaser for the FFVII remake. It’s very pretty.)
Of course, this is also how we ended up with that amazing melding of magic and bullets called gunpowder fantasy. My number one favorite in that sub-genre is Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which starts with His Majesty’s Dragon. Which if you ever read Master and Commander and found yourself thinking, “well, that’s nice, but this really needs more dragons,” then there you go. The Thousand Names by Django Wexler and The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells also fit the bill, but with more outright magic and fewer dragons. Go a bit steampunk and you can have something like P. Djèlí Clark’s (Hugo-nominated) The Black God’s Drums. Head a little further ahead in (alternate) history and you get things like Mercedes Lackey’s WWI-era Phoenix and Ashes.
Guns are definitely a staple of urban fantasy or weird west, which is no surprise. Stephen King’s The Gunslinger springs instantly to mind, as does Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. Trying to exhaustively list urban fantasy where there’s magic and shooting would have us here all day, but I must mention the anthology A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters.
I also ran across this fun blog post looking at how guns might change a classic fantasy setting. Though I’d argue if you already have dragons, particularly the classic fire-breathing type, your castles were probably already decorative.
See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me on the (Hugo-nominated!!!) Skiffy and Fanty Podcast or over at my personal site.