Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, and I’ve got new releases and a couple of fun books from Black indie authors. (One of them, I keep staring at and wondering if I could buy a print of her book cover, it’s that dang cool.) I hope you have good things coming at you this weekend! Stay safe out there, space pirates, and I’ll see you on Tuesday.
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This week I want to draw your attention to a couple of neat-o SFF Kickstarters. Khōréō year 4 is fundraising! It’s a quarterly magazine of short speculative fiction by immigrant and diaspora writers and artists; they have done such good work the last three years. I also stumbled across this super cool project: An Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction. They’ll be translating a collection of Gujarati novellas and short stories into English, and some of them will be sci-fi, since that falls under the pulp umbrella.
Bookish Goods
Black History Superheroes Shirt by MCoStudioShop
This is some extremely cool art imagining figures in Black history in an Afrofuturist style. The shop’s got the nine face shirt or shirts of individual pictures. The picture does not capture how cool they look — you should definitely check out the seller’s site. $41
New Releases
Jubilee by Stephen K. Stanford
Detectives Col and Danee have an unpleasant mission: retrieve the body of a conservative politician who has been a naughty boy. But this is complicated by the location, Jubilee, a lawless and artificial world that functionally exists within its own parallel universe. When the detectives arrive to pick up the stiff, they find the corpse has been switched out…and that’s just the start of the trouble.
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older
Seventeen students and staff have disappeared from Valdegeld University, yet no one but Investigator Mossa has noticed. Mossa will need Pleiti’s assistance in unraveling this mystery, which will take the two of them to Mossa’s home on Io and require them to delve into the history of humanity’s exodus from Earth.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
I talked about brand new indie releases earlier this week, but here are two more recent indie releases from Black authors!
Sistah Samurai by Tatiana Obey
Okay, first, look at that cover. I want to hang that on my wall; it’s so absolutely badass. Also, the story sounds very cool, too, an homage to the anime Afro Samurai in which Sistah Samurai, despite being tired and busy and way past her days of playing hero, will be called on to do just that.
We Are the Origin by C. M. Lockhart
Brandi was forced into service of the queendom before she was old enough to understand “no” and has since been the queen’s own blade, used to cut down the disloyal and blasphemous. She’s a tool and certainly not someone who is supposed to think. But then Freya, goddess of life and judger of souls, charges her to protect rather than destroy — and Brandi has no choice but to obey these new orders, no matter how much of the world is turned against her and how deeply she wades into the messy and deadly politics of gods.
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.