Swords and Spaceships for December 8

In the near future, massive floods have led to untold destruction and rampant homelessness. Fascist government elements take their opportunity to round up people of color, disabled people, and LGBTQ people and shove them into labor camps. But new heroes rise to lead a resistance: Kay, a drag queen in mourning for his lost love; a social worker named Firuzeh; Bahadur, a transmasculine refugee. With the help of a rogue army officer, they plan a revolution that will very much be televised.

In the midst of a massive climate crisis, the space race has come back to life, with corporations offering massive rewards for anyone who will go out into the black to claim resources in their name. Jack is desperate to escape earth and joins a team chasing down an asteroid… but he doesn’t realize that everyone on the ship is just as desperate as him, if not more so. And they’ll do anything to get to the steroid first–and make sure they get a bigger share.

Chih and their companions are at the mercy of a band of tigers. If they want to keep themself and their friends alive long enough to be saved by their mammoth allies, they must unravel a secret hidden in a story about a tiger and her scholarly lover.

The Kaiser plan might have helped avert a multi-planet war that they themselves were probably the cause of, but two planets have been left devastated by alien technology. Now with the Kaiser family trying to settle into quiet obscurity, the vultures are circling in to strip these razed planets of their remaining resources, and tensions are building again. The Kaisers need to find the truth of what happened to these two worlds… and avert another war.

Captain Desiree Quicho and her crew of utter BAMFs do not have time for your nonsense, because they have a universe to save from an evil billionaire, a criminal queenpin, political factions scrambling in a power grab, and an AI on a rampage. Captain Quicho just wanted a peaceful moment and some good barbecue, but she’ll have to fight to get it.

The crew of the Kettle is an eclectic set: Max, a xeno-archaelogist from Earth stranded far from home; Lahra, a warrior from a nearly extinct people, who does battle with sword and song; Wheel, the grumpy cybernetic pilot with a shady past. Together, they hunt artifacts that they mostly sell–but they always hope it can show them the way home, for certain values of home. But when they pick up an artifact that’s far more powerful than they could have imagined, they end up squarely in the crosshairs the space fascists called the Vsenk–and the crew will have to go from hunting ruins to fomenting rebellion.

A crew of absolute losers overseen by an AI arrive on a planet on the ass-end of space with a mission of salvaging a long-dead UN starship. They’re expecting a long, ugly, boring, and very thankless job. What they get is a backwater filled with megafauna and a competing salvage crew, and a planet that seems to be actively trying to kill them besides. They need to engineer their way to both survival and their payday with every card in the deck stacked against them.

Dolly almost has a legit profession in this cyberpunk future–she recovers abandoned sports cars from parking lots in Dubai and sells them off for parts. But when her friend Bristol catches wind of an auction for the most expensive dog in the world, she gets pulled in for one more job. Because how hard could a dog heist be?