Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, with a couple new releases, and some parallel world recommendations. Happy New Year’s Eve Eve, the last Friday of 2022. It’s sure been a year, hasn’t it? Here’s hoping 2023 has some great books —and great things in general! — in store for all of us. Health, long life, and happiness to you all, space pirates! I’ll see you on Tuesday.
Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge is in its ninth year, with a set of 24 tasks that invite readers to expand their worldview through books. Read one book per task, or do some multi-tasking by counting one book for multiple tasks. It’s all fine! The point of the challenge is to push yourself to expand your horizons. Thank you to Thriftbooks for sponsoring Read Harder 2023.
To find the tasks and subscribe to our newsletter for tips and recommendations, visit Read Harder 2023.
Let’s make the world a better place, together. Here’s somewhere to start: NDN Collective and Jane’s Due Process.
Bookish Goods
2023 Reading Tracker by NovellyYours
Not strictly a science fiction thing, but since we’re heading into a new year, I thought this reading tracker looked great. If you check out the link, there are a bunch of fun sample pages for tracking different things. Start the new year organized! $30
New Releases
A Fractured Infinity by Nathan Tavares
Hayes is a struggling documentary filmmaker whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of a handsome physicist named Yusuf, who claims he’s needed to understand a mysterious device called the Envisioner. At Yusuf’s say-so, Hayes is whisked off to a secret research facility. There, he learns that the Envisioner was created by an alternate version of himself from a different universe… a version who is angry, obsessive, and married to Yusuf. Soon, he finds the fate of countless realities in his hands — as well as the fate of his Yusuf, who he’s begun to fall for.
Love in the Age of Dragons by Fatima R. Henson
Ayanna Grace is a 17-year-old Black girl who survives by living in an abandoned subway that has become home to a full underground community. And the reason humans are scratching out a living underground? Two years ago, dragons came pouring out of a mysterious worm hole and the world burned. But now the medicine and water is running out, dragon attacks are imminent, and Ayanna is still a normal teenager who is interested in boys… and has several to choose from.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
Parallel realities make for some fun science fiction. Here’s a couple more if A Fractured Infinity sounds good to you.
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
In a deeply dystopian, capitalist world of haves and have-nots, of course when multiverse travel is invented, it’s used for the benefit of corporate profit. But in order to send humans to these other worlds to collect data and steal ideas, people whose version in the other reality have died are necessary. And Cara is a massive asset — she’s dead in 372 worlds so far — so she’s got a hope of gaining citizenship and security. But when one of her eight remaining selves dies, a secret she’s kept hidden for a long time is soon in danger of being revealed…as are the lies on which the entire world is based.
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
Wars are fought between corporations and soldiers are sent to distant fronts by being turned into light and transmitted. But some soldiers, like Dietz, are experiencing the world differently than their fellows — and it’s impossible to know if the war is truly something far different from what they’ve been told, or if it’s just battle madness taking its toll.
See you, space pirates. 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.