Sponsored by Tor Books
Discover the debut novel from former NFL player and tech enthusiast Chris Kluwe. Ditchtown. A city of skyscrapers, built atop the drowned bones of old Miami. Ashley Akachi is a young woman trying her best to cope. Ditchtown, however, is not the only world Ash inhabits. Within the virtual world of Infinite Game, Ash becomes Ashura the Terrible, leader of the Sunjewel Warriors, loved, feared, and watched by millions across the globe. However, Ash is about to stumble upon a deadly conspiracy that will set her worlds crashing together, and in the real world, you only get to die once.
Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, and I’ve got something a little different for you this week. The Lambda Literary Award finalists got announced, and there is a lot of awesome SFF in there, a bunch of which is hiding in other categories. So for most of this newsletter, we’re taking a quick tour through the finalists. Happy Friday the Queer-teenth!
News and Views
For your short story reading pleasure: The Night Sun by Zin E. Rocklyn
S. Qiouyi Lu examines Beneath the Rising (Premee Mohamed) and Steel Crow Saga (Paul Krueger): A Framework for Decolonizing Speculative Fiction
Speaking of Beneath the Rising, Premee talked about it over at the Big Idea.
Jeannette Ng re-read 1984 and had some fascinating thoughts about it.
Star Trek‘s Prime Directive is influencing real-life space law.
Archaeological evidence fo an ancient human settlement being wiped out by a meteor impact
On Book Riot
This week’s SFF Yeah! Podcast is about urban fantasy and science fiction.
5 Out of This World Alien Romance Books
A Celebration of Clones in Comics
5 Unapologetically Ambitious Women in SFF
Friday the Queer-Teenth: 2020 Lambda Literary Finalists
Massive congratulations to all the finalists! Obviously SFF gets its own whole category in the Lammies, but we’ve infiltrated a few of the other categories as well!
In Transgender Fiction:
The Trans Space Octopus Congregation by Bogi Takács – This is Bogi’s debut short story collection, filled with speculative goodness.
Honey Walls by Bones McKay – “Row is perfectly normal for a transgender man. That is, if you ignore the fact his girlfriend talks to ghosts, his sister spies on him through his reflection, and that he has no heart.”
Poet, Prophet, Fox: The Tale of Sinnach the Seer by M.Z. McDonnell – A “new myth” inspired by the old myths of Ireland, about a powerful druid and prophet who is a trans man.
In Lesbian Mystery:
The Hound of Justice by Claire O’Dell – Sequel to A Study in Honor, the next adventure of a gender-bent Watson and Holmes, set in near future America in the midst of a new civil war.
In Lesbian Romance:
Aurora’s Angel by Emily Noon – A broken-winged angel and a huntress with a bloody past come together–and find romance–in a journey beset by monsters.
In LGBTQ Children’s/Young Adult:
The Grief Keeper by Alexandra Villasante – An El Salvadorian girl named Gabi flees across the US border after her brother is murdered. Caught by US authorities and certain her asylum claim will be denied, she agrees to join an experimental study that allows her to take the grief of another into her own body.
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi – A young trans girl named Jam befriends a frightening creature named Pet, who has come to her world to hunt a monster–but Jam has been told her entire life that all the monsters are gone.
The Wilder Girls by Rory Power – Eighteen months after the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine, all the teachers are long dead from the mysterious disease called Tox, and the woods around the school have been made impassable by the infected. When Hetty’s beloved Byatt goes missing, she’ll do anything to find her–even break quarantine.
In LGBTQ Studies:
Queer Times, Black Futures – An examination of Afrofuturism across the arts, looking at the significance of these imagined worlds to queer and black freedom.
And then the LGBTQ SFF/Horror Category – there’s some familiar titles in here!
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James – A mercenary is hired to find a missing boy, and searches through a lush, fantastic, and brutal world in order to find him.
The Deep by Rivers Solomon, et al. – Yetu’s people are the descendants of pregnant, enslaved African women who were thrown overboard during the middle passage, and Yetu is the historian who alone remembers their traumatic past. Overwhelmed, she flees and rediscovers the world her people left behind long ago.
False Bingo: Stories by Jac Jemc – A story collection filled with sinister forces, some supernatural, some not.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon – “A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens.” And there are dragons.
The Rampant by Julie C. Day – A decade after an ancient Sumerian god descended on Indiana and promised a sort of Rapture… but the dark herald monster that will kick it off is missing in action, and bored gods have started snacking on humans.
A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney – A marsh-bound town in Maryland has been home to a movement of African-American artists, all of whom use the same haunting color somewhere in their work. That spectral hue calls graduate student Xavier to the town… and then out into the marsh itself.
Stories to Sing in the Dark by Matthew Bright – A short story anthology of the queer fantastic.
Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin – A reclaiming of the stories and myths of women previously told and translated by men.
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 over at my personal site.