Author: Alex Acks

Happy Tuesday to everyone, but mostly to Dr. Leon Advogato, one of the lawyers at the Order of Attorneys of Brazil. It’s Alex, with new releases and a random collection of news for your perusal. Something that’s been bringing me joy these last few days: a clip of Fayard and Harold Nichols doing their dance routine from Stormy Weather (1943).

New Releases

Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow commissioned by Slate, New America, and Arizona State University – A collection of short fiction that focuses on emerging technologies from a wide list of excellent authors including Nnedi Okorafor, Paolo Bacigalupi, Annalee Newitz, and Deji Bryce Olukotun.

Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight by Aliette de Bodard – Aliette de Bodard’s first short story collection, which includes tales from her Xuya universe.

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher – A young woman works to sort out the house of her dead grandmother, who was a hoarder. While cleaning, she finds her dead step-grandfather’s journal, which describes terrifying things that she begins to encounter in the woods.

The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith – The Unwritten Wing is a neutral place in Hell where stories never finished by their authors live. Claire is the head librarian of these stories, mostly tasked with hunting down characters who have come to life and begun searching for their writers. But a simple retrieval goes wrong when an angel attacks…

Shadow Frost by Coco Ma – A princess on a desperate quest to save her kingdom from the demons who threaten it discovers a plot for her own assassination along the way. She and her friends must unravel this plot, with strands that lead back into their group–if the demons don’t get them first.

The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis – Five girls, called “good luck girls,” are sold to a “welcome house” and branded with cursed markings. When one of them accidentally kills a man, they embark on a dangerous journey toward freedom, justice, and revenge, guided by a bedtime story passed down among their sistren.

The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl by Theodora Goss – A new adventure for the Athena Club, that wonderful pastiche of female characters who often had their agency stolen or stories not written in classic literature. After their adventure rescuing Lucina van Helsing, the monstrous gentlewomen return home to find that both Alice and Shelock Holmes have been kidnapped.

News and Views

In the wake of the discussions about awards named for Campbell and Tiptree, Jason Sanford points out another one that really needs to be discussed: Arthur C. Clarke

Wired reviews Lost Transmissions, a book about forgotten works that deserve some fan love.

Karen Gillan and Ryan Reynolds hilariously get into it in the AGBO Superhero Fantasy Football League, which has mandated trash-talking.

Chuck Tingle now has an official TTRPG: The Tingleverse: The Official Chuck Tingle Role-Playing Game. Tingle has succinctly addressed the lack of mechanics for “pounding” on Twitter.

Alex Brown’s short fiction recommendations for September.

NYT is bringing back mass market paperback and graphic novel/manga best seller lists, and they’re adding in MG and YA.

Volume 327 of Book Fetish is all about fantasy.

Gollancz and author Ben Aaronovitch (author of Rivers of London) are launching an award for British BAME [black, Asian, and minority ethnic] science fiction and fantasy authors.

Ewilan’s Quest is becoming an animated series.

io9 picked their 10 favorite films from Fantastic Fest 2019 and I am SO EXCITED.

Paul Krueger, author of Steel Crow Saga, did a Reddit AMA… which his mom crashed.

Ever wondered what Guardians of the Galaxy character you are? We’ve got a quiz for that.

Sony and Marvel have managed to reach an agreement over Spider-Man.

Thor and Lokie are heading to Serial Box in Thor: Metal Gods.

Deep math nerdery ahoy: progress on the twin primes conjecture.

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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.

Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex with some news and a slightly spooky warm-up since we’re heading toward October. I hope everyone has a lovely weekend–and before you go, check out this test animation Ray Harryhausen did for his never-made War of the Worlds movie.

News and Views

We’ve got a post for you about the 2019 Rhysling Award winners. SFF poetry!

This week’s SFF Yeah! podcast is all about African SF/F.

The Daily Bugle has pivoted to video.

Favorite essay of the week: The care and feeding of Supervillains.

Runner up in the essay department: What Today’s Sci-Fi Should Learn from Flash Gordon.

Matt Wallace on your true cyberpunk name.

The Emmys happened. Awards were won. Honestly all I care about is Gwendoline Christie looking like a neck-snapping goddess.

And here’s a list of six books about space to check out.

This week’s LeVar Burton Reads podcast is JY Yang’s Tiger Baby.

Oh no there’s a recipe for Mudder’s Milk in Firefly: The Big Damn Cookbook.

They finally figured out a way to make me watch another Jurassic World movie. Because it’ll involve Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum.

Check out NASA’s new spacesuits!

Phil Plait explains a new paper about how an asteroid impact gave life a helping hand 466 million years ago.

A study finds that cats are just as loyal to their humans as dogs, and was definitely not authored by a cat wearing glasses and a lab coat.

Snopes is 25 years old and I have just turned into dust and blown away.

Free Association Friday

Look, I’m writing this to you from the deep past that is Wednesday evening having just spent an hour frantically poking the screen of my cell phone to defeat a giant pokémon that is both a dragon AND a ghost. I also might or might not have imbibed a beer at this point. So let’s talk ghosts, dragons, and ghost dragons!

Obviously, there are a zillion books that involve ghosts and a zillion and a half that involve dragons in our genre. But I’m looking at the standouts that grabbed me by the throat and shook me like a ghost dragon.

Ghost-wise, we’re starting with An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. Because the ghosts are right there in the title. And just because they’re mostly metaphorical ghosts as opposed to beings created of ectoplasm doesn’t make them any less horrifying. The twisted ghosts of societal history, the more personal ghosts of absent friends and family, the horrible ghosts of trauma. They’re all there, and they’d probably be easier to deal with if they were real. For a much more literal ghost, how about The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco. The cover’s so deliberately evocative of the antagonist from Ring by Suzuki Koji, but the formerly vengeful ghost is at least looking out for the little guy, unlike Sadako. Seanan McGuire’s Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day is chock full of ghosts in a complex earth-bound afterlife, with bonus witches.

What about dragons? Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho has magicians and dragons in regency England, yes please. Of Cinder and Bone by Kyoko M has the perfect pitch: Jurassic Park, but with Dragons. Nothing else needs to be said. A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan follows the world’s most renowned dragon naturalist on her adventures. Smoke Eaters by Sean Grigsby is about a firefighter who discovers he’s immune to dragon smoke… so he gets inducted to the elite dragon-fighting force of his city. And last but not least–I read The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick when I was a teenager and I’m still thinking about its factory-made flying war machines twenty years later.

So what about ghost dragons? Well, in Red Threads of Fortune by JY Yang, it’s not dragons precisely, but human souls can end up in things that are distressingly large and scaley. And in RJ Barker’s The Bone Ships, there are literal ships made out of literal dragon bones, though it’s more totally metal than ghostly.

But for no reason at all–definitely not getting into details–I’m just going to gently slide Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb across the table.

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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.

Happy Tuesday, shipmates! I hope you’re ready for a broadside of new releases, because there are some great ones this week. It’s Captain Alex with a barrage of books and some fun news items. Also, I want to share with you what is totally going to be my next crochet project and a video game about a horrible goose that I now need.

New Releases

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz – A time travel story where Tess, from the future, has dedicated herself to shifting the past to create a safer world in her time, trying to find a way to make her edits stay while she avoids fellow travelers willing to stop her with deadly force. Her life intertwines with that of Beth, on her own path of violence and vengeance after helping her friends hide the body of an abusive boyfriend.

Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger – An unlikely band of four people, ranging from criminals to royalty, unites to hunt down a killer that defies not only earthly laws, but those of magic as well. Expect battle couples, magical animal companions, and snark. (Full disclosure: Paul and I share an agent.)

The Bone Ships by RJ Barker – The people of the Hundred Isles have long built their ships from the bones of dragons, now thought to be extinct. But a new dragon has been spotted in far-off waters, and a race to claim it is on. Whoever takes the dragon will shift not just battles, but the endless war in their favor.

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht – A monster that cannot die stalks the ruined, festering, abandoned city of Elendhaven, sent on tasks by his frail master. The monster’s ultimate goal is revenge on all those who have wronged his city, no matter what he will destroy along his path.

A Dream So Dark by L.L. McKinney – Still reeling from the events of A Blade So Black, Alice returns to rescue her friends and stop the Black Knight–and save Wonderland once and for all. But what if Wonderland has actually been trying to save her?

Stormrise by Jillian Boehme – A girl named Rain disguises herself as a boy using dragon magic, so that she can become a warrior. As war threatens her home, she realizes the very magic that has enabled her disguise might be the key to awakening the ancient dragons that slumber–and save her home.

News and Views

There’s some great SFF on the National Book Award longlists. Not gonna lie, I’m most excited about Pet by Akwaeke Emezi.

Aron Eisenberg, who played Nog on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, passed away.

My favorite thing I read all week: Let Liv Tyler go to space

Highlights from Neil Gaiman’s Reddit AMA.

Author Eric Flint has an epic rant about the electoral college.

The BN blog asks: Does science fiction have a moral imperative to address climate change?

If you’ve wanted to read Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series and aren’t sure what order to go in, here you go.

100% this: An ode to Robin Wright from Princess to Queen

A cute list of funny Weasley twins moments from the Harry Potter books.

This truck was obviously playing Shadowrun.

I want to share this amazing Twitter thread about the Four Tigers Sword with everyone.

Architectural photography from megacities to remind us that the future is now.

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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.

Happy Friday, gentlebeings! We’ve made it through another week; if you’re in the northern hemisphere, it’s hopefully starting to feel a bit like fall (my favorite time of the year). And it’s me, Alex, with some links and a list of sort-of random books. If you need a laugh to take you into the weekend, I cannot recommend the finalists for the 2019 Wildlife Comedy Photography Awards enough.

News and Views

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry on what it means to win a Hugo as a blind person.

On overcoming white bias in literature.

The Archived by V.E. Schwab will be adapted for the CW.

In other adaptation news, Kingkiller Chronicle is looking for a new home after Showtime released the rights.

This week’s SFFYeah! podcast is about books with spooky houses.

Christopher Eccleston (the Ninth Doctor) talks about his battles with depression and disordered eating.

Anathema Magazine, which focuses on stories by Queer/Two-Spirit POC/Indigenous creators, is running its yearly fundraiser.

Michelle Goldberg wrote about The Handmaid’s Tale and the way literary dystopias don’t keep up with reality.

If you’re looking for YA Science Fiction, we’ve got some suggestions for you.

It’s been proposed that an a Shakespeare First Folio has annotations in it from John Milton.

Free Association Friday

You might have heard that some unnamed people (probably wishing to remain nameless because they don’t want the might of the internet to fall on their heads) want to remake The Princess Bride. Cary Elwes responded with a perfect Tweet and also expanded his opinion a bit over at SyFy Wire. And this might get me in trouble with the gods of Book Riot, but here’s my hill I’m going to die on: I like the movie scripted by the inimitable William Goldman orders of magnitude better than I liked his original novel.

So in honor of that movie, let’s talk some other books that strike a chord with The Princess Bride!

The book that leaps most immediately to mind is Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, I’m not even going to be coy with you. It’s got lots of sword fights and intrigue and while there isn’t exactly true love to be had, it’s gay as all hell–all while still having an amused tone. And in that vein, I feel compelled to also mention The Henchmen of Zenda by K.J. Charles, which is more filed under romance than fantasy; it falls more under thought experiments of what the Dread Pirate Roberts’s crew might have been a bit like (many a buckle is swashed), while also being Extremely Gay.

If I think about true love like we get it in The Princess Bride, I immediately jump to The Tiger’s Daughter; it’s tonally a lot more serious, but if you want to talk about a couple whose love rivals Wesley and Buttercup’s, that’s where to find them. Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn is a little bit lighter. Political intrigue, court, a really nasty piece of work as a prince, and true love waiting in the wings.

On the more free association end of things, the first book I actually thought of while coming up with this list was JY Yang’s The Red Threads of Fortune. Why? Well first off, we don’t call this “Alex has an objectively defensible reason for everything backed up by an annotated bibliography Friday.” There are just certain ways my brain works. Anyway, there’s a lot going on in behind the events of this novella; a lot of machinations and politics, and the protagonist is just exasperated. There’s a scene that involved a lot of cussing. You’ll know what I mean when you read it. I also want to throw Steel Crow Saga in here for the adventure factor and the humor that Paul Krueger uses to leaven the definitely-darker-than-The-Princess-Bride subject matter. (Full disclosure: I share an agent with both Paul and JY.)

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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.

Happy Tuesday, shipmates! It’s Alex with some new releases for you and such news items as I found interesting. If you’ve got some time and you’re looking for a laugh, the 29th First Annual Ig Nobel Awards were held on September 12th and you can watch the ceremony here. (If you just want the summary, File 770 has a list of the award winners.)

Oh and! Don’t forget to enter our giveaway of the year’s 10 best mystery/thrillers so far!

New Releases

A Hero Born by Jin Yong – A wuxia novel from the master, Jin Yong, available for the first time in the US. After the murder of his father, Guo Jing and his mother flee to join Genghis Khan. Later, under the guidance of the Seven Heroes of the South, Guo Jin returns to China to fulfill his destiny.

Gamechanger by L.X. Beckett – Rubi is a public defender in the Bounceback generation, the first generation to be free of the troubles of the 21st century. But when she’s assigned to help Luce, she has to figure out why he’s been targeted by the governments of the world–and why he seems determined to stop the global recovery.

Chilling Effect by Valeria Valdes – After Captain Eva Innocente’s sister Mira is kidnapped by the Fridge, a shadowy criminal syndicate that holds people in cryostasis, Eva must undertake a series of missions across the galaxy to pay the ransom–including one that includes psychic cats.

Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson – Just what it says on the tin. Mary Shelley is often credited as the writer of the first science fiction novel, but she wasn’t alone in the genre. This book explores the fascinating lives of women who were on the cutting edge of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

News and Views

NBC has made six short episodes for The Good Place set at the end of season 3. You can watch them at NBC’s site or on their app.

The cutest thing I’ve seen all week: A Detroit high school allowing seniors to cosplay for their IDs.

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak is being adapted for Netflix.

We’ve got a great list of Dragon Books for Grown-ups!

Hulu’s Castle Rock has a trailer out for season 2.

HBO is apparently ordering a pilot for a Game of Thrones prequel about the Targaryens.

Carnival Row has an official TTRPG that you can download for free.

The Wheel of Time has started filming in Prague and they took a super cute cast photo.

From the Department of This Is the Stage of Dystopian Capitalism We Are Now In So Writers Keep That In Mind: KFC is making a Colonel Sanders dating sim that looks upsettingly cute. One of the characters is a deep fryer. No, really.

A long but fascinating read: The search for a warning that lasts as long as nuclear waste. Which of course immediately makes me think of The Only Harmless Great Thing.

I’m a geologist, so that means you get cool geology things when I see them. Like this article about the geology of the Chicxulub Crater.

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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.

We did it, space pirates! Survived another week. Happy weekend if you’re a Monday through Friday kind of person, and wishes for strength if you’re rolling up your sleeves for work.

News and Views

BBC America announced the leads for its Discworld-inspired series The Watch and it’s pretty exciting. Just looking at the casting, you can already see where there’s going to be some variance from the books. Personally, I can’t wait to see where they go with it.

James D. Nicoll does an analysis of Hugo finalists by gender. Here’s a companion Twitter thread with a great alternate visualization to his powerful use of typography.

In this week’s SFF Yeah! there’s discussion of The Testaments and renaming awards.

Speaking of, the Tiptree Motherboard has reversed their earlier position after extensive community discussion and are looking in to renaming the award.

You can pre-order Aliette de Bodard’s first short story collection Of Wars, Memories, and Starlight now.

It’s going to be Alexander Skarsgård versus Whoopi Goldberg in the upcoming adaptation of The Stand.

An essay exploring the Chosen One trope.

Scientists have detected water vapor on a “super earth” exoplanet!

Moon’s Haunted

“Tell me,” he says, “have you ever heard of something called a moon?” — FromThe Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Basically, that’s a line that made me crap my drawers when I read it, though I’m not going to expand on why because that would be a massive spoiler. (But my goodness, if you haven’t read this series yet, why not?)

But in honor of Friday the 13th–which is my favorite day, since I was born on a 13th day (not in September) and get to have the spookiest birthdays possible now and then–and the fact that it’s going to be a Friday the 13th with a full Moon, we’re going full “Moon’s haunted.” And I’m not just talking about the Guardians retruning to the Moon in Destiny.

I’ve got to start with 172 Hours on the Moon by Johan Harstad. NASA runs a contest to select three teenagers to go into space–and to the moon. But little do they know there is a long-forgotten, dark secret waiting there, ready to kill them. In a similar vein there’s oldie-but-goodie Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, where an alien artefact waits on the dark side of the moon. The artefact is actually a maze filled with utter murder.

The moon is literally trying to kill us all at the start of Seveneves. Breaking up, bombarding the Earth with massive chunks of itself. What a jerk. And the Moon is similarly murderous in Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It series, where an asteroid knocks the moon closer to the Earth and basically starts a global geologic apocalypse.

On the “hell is people” front, I have for you Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald, in which the Moon is basically the most cynical version of the Wild West but with the chance of asphyxiating and five powerful families threaten everyone’s existence with their political games and power plays. Dove Arising by Karen Bao, where a teenager has to join the brutal Lunar militia after her mother is arrested.

And for a gentler sort of “haunting” rather than directly haunted, how about When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore? It’s difficult to describe, but there’s strange magic, and witches, and pictures of the moon. I also still have a lot of love in my heart for Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan even if the depictions of women in it were inexcusably dated even when it was published in 1977. Astronauts find a skeleton on the moon, one wearing a strange spacesuit… and it’s 50,000 years old. The mystery only gets deeper and stranger from there.

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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.

Happy Tuesday, space pirates! I hope everyone had a great and hopefully relaxing weekend. It’s Alex, with a selection of new releases and some (at times extremely hilarious) news items. But before we get started, here’s what I’m loving right now, mostly because I never get tired of music videos about Steve Rogers. Bonus: this homecoming assembly Marvel-themed dance routine, holy forking shirtballs.

New Releases

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi – There are no monsters in the city of Lucille. But when a creature made of horns, color, and claws crawls out of a painting in Jam’s house, she’s forced to reconsider this truism. The creature is named Pet, and has come to hunt a monster–one that no on will admit exists.

A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker – Look, I think the hook alone on this book is enough: “Public gatherings are illegal, making concerts impossible, except for those willing to break the law for the love of music–and for one chance at human connection.”

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow – January is the ward of a wealthy man and feels little different than the arcane artifcats that he stocks his sprawling mansion with–until she finds a book that promises adventures in other worlds and truths about her own.

The Resurrectionist of Caligo by Wendy Trimboli and Alicia Zaloga – A body thief who makes his living selling cadavers to medical schools is framed for the murder of one of those cadavers. To escape execution, he agrees to bind himself to a former friend forever in a blood magic ritual–and then help her find the real murderer running loose in their city.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir – Space necromancers in a gothic sci-fi universe vie to ascend to immortality. Gideon is a swordswoman dragged into this murderous contest by her childhood nemesis when all she really wants is out.

News and Views

McSweeney’s, killing it as always: I’m just the guy to write your female empowerment series.

Volume 5 of the Long List Anthology (an anthology of stories that didn’t quite make the finalist cut for the Hugos) is crowdfunding now.

Maria Haskins has short fiction recommendations from the month of August.

Fonda Lee (author of Jade War) is writing for Marvel’s Sword Master, starting with issue #4.

A list of fiction’s greatest technopaths.

Supernova Era by Cixin Liu is going to be adapted for film in China.

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders has been optioned for series development by Sony.

Jonathan Igla, who was a writer and the executive story editor for Mad Men has been hired to write the Hawkeye series for Disney+.

Here’s the first look at the final season of The Good Place.

NPR had Margaret Atwood do an exclusive reading from The Testaments.

There’s an actual statue of Iron Man in Italy and reading about it made me tear up.

Joker won the Golden Lion (the highest honor) at the Venice Film Festival.

A personal essay about recognizing fannish toxicity in oneself.

Walter Mosley left the Star Trek: Discovery writers room after being warned by HR to not use the N-word. (For context: Walter Mosley is African-American.)

The TSA has relented on those soda bottles from Galaxy’s Edge.

We have all seen this movie and most recently it was called The Meg.

Pairing solar panels and certain crops can be a win-win.

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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.

Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Captain Alex, with some SFF news and a randomly-generated list of books, so I hope you’re ready. But first, I want to share with you my favorite tweet of the week. I don’t know, I just giggle every time I look at it.

News and Views

A24 is making an Earthsea series that was approved by Ursula K. Le Guin.

This week’s SFF Yeah! is about discovering the backlist of your new favorite authors.

Harley Quinn is so fuckin’ over clowns.

A really great essay about female characters and masculine modes of power.

Amazon broke the embargo on The Testaments and released it a week early. And Hulu’s already developing a series for the new book.

Why hopeful prequels to dark stories matter. (Spoiler warning for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance)

The Uncanny Magazine team has posted their Hugo acceptance speeches and they’re well worth a read–particularly Elsa Sjunneson-Henry’s.

Rena Barron on how Black (as in of the African diaspora) Magic inspired her new book, Kingdom of Souls.

I have so many feelings about the trailer for the 26th Season box set of Doctor Who. (Ace should totally get to meet the 13th Doctor. WHO’S WITH ME?)

And speaking of Doctor Who, goodbye, Terrance Dicks. You made my childhood immeasurably better with the show you helped write.

Winners of the Dragon Awards were announced.

There’s a couple of days left to back this IndieGogo for translating The Road of Ice and Salt, a vampire novella by Mexican author José Luis Zárate. The campaign is being run by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (author of Gods of Jade and Shadow).

If you’re looking for an anthology to Kickstart, this one looks pretty cool: Glitter + Ashes, an anthology about queer joy and community in the face of disaster.

In the wake of the Campbell Award having its name change, there’s been discussion (started by Natalie Luhrs) driven largely by the disabled community that it’s high time the Tiptree was renamed as well. The Motherboard’s response here.

The history and science behind why we’re afraid of clowns.

Free Association Friday

I took my first shot at commuting home from work on my bicycle. It’s a 21-mile trip, so not something I can do every day, and I’m definitely not up to a round trip at this time. But I survived and I’m feeling pretty good, so I want to have some science fiction with bikes.

The thing is, though, there’s not a whole lot of bicycles prominently placed in SFF, which I think is a travesty. The absolute number one best book though is Witchmark by C.L. Polk, which not only has a bicycle on the cover to let you know what’s coming… but has actual magical bicycle chases! Give it a read, and you’ll instantly know that the writer has some serious cycling experience.

There are some cute, non-central-to-the-action bicycle scenes in both Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens (in which Anathema Device actually names her bike!) and Robin McKinley’s Sunshine. Because characters have to get around somehow, even if they don’t have a car.

The bicycle also has a long-time presence in dystopian fiction. It can be a way to generate power, classically seen in Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!, which also gave us Soylent. S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series (starts with Dies the Fire) has undead armies on downhill bikes. So, you know. Good stuff.

Stanslav Lem’s The Star Diaries have weird, invented, nonsense bicycles drawn by the author. And in my search for more books that involve bicycles, I came across an entire series of feminist science fiction anthologies that start with Bikes in Space. Check out the whole series on the publisher page.

It’s not SFF, but I think my favorite book with lots of bicycling in it is Mark Oshiro’s Anger is a Gift. Or for something non-book but rainbow-colored and ridiculous, I cannot recommend the movie Turbo Kid strongly enough. Just check out the trailer.

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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.

Happy new release day, me hearties! It’s Alex, with a pile of really interesting essays for you this week–and a bunch of new books. I’m still riding high from the weekend, which brought me two non-SFF joys: First, the first episode of the new season of The Great British Bake Off (they’re releasing the episodes in the US on Netflix every Friday after they air in the UK). Second, we got the news that Alex Trebek is officially a bigger badass than Chuck Norris could ever hope to be, because he whomped pancreatic cancer and will be back to hosting Jeopardy.

New Releases

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers – At the turn of the 22nd century, humanity is able to solve the worst biological limits of space flight, enabling a new age of exploration. But they have not solved relativity, or the challenges of the spacefarers returning to a world that might have forgotten them, a challenge explorer Ariadne chronicles.

Caster by Elsie Chapman – In Aza’s world, magic is a dangerous, illegal thing that killed her sister. But with her sister dead, she must step in to try to save her family’s tea house–by taking part in an underground magical tournament that might take her own life as well.

The Nightjar by Deborah Hewitt – Alice is an “aviarist,” capable of seeing the Nightjars, magical birds that guard human souls. After her best friend is hit by a car, Alice must seek out the Rookery, the hidden and magical alternate London, if she’s to find and save her friend’s nightjar.

Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron – Arrah is the only one in her family of powerful witchdoctors with no magic. In desperation, she considers trading years of her life for a few scraps–and soon she may not have a choice at all, as the powerful Demon King stirs and threatens everything she loves.

The Mythic Dream edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe – An anthology that explores retellings of myth and legend, with stories from JY Yang, Alyssa Wong, Seanan McGuire, Rebecca Roanhorse, John Chu, and more.

Loki: Where Mischief Lies by Mackenzi Lee – A younger Loki, desperate to prove he’s a hero, descends on 19th-century London to investigate a string of murders that seem to involve Asgardian magic.

News and Views

A little preview from Entertainment Weekly of N.K. Jemisin’s next book. You can now pre-order The City We Became.

The 30th issue of Uncanny magazine will be Disabled People Destroy Fantasy. Take a gander at the TOC here.

One booktuber’s quest to cover a tricky topic: Every Bosom in The Wheel of Time (part 1).

Amal El-Mohtar’s review of Palestine + 100.

An essay about Irish folklore and language getting used as disposible fantasy-fodder:  Do American Writers Think Irish is Public Domain Elvish?

An amazing (long) essay about violent video games and grief: Select Difficulty

Look, it was just a really good week for essays: Fast Color and the Humanizing of Superpowers in Black Women

HBO has revealed who is voicing the Daemons in His Dark Materials.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is now streaming on Netlix. It’s also about climate change.

Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders on the intersection between writing about science and writing science fiction.

Anna Smith Spark (author of The Court of Broken Knives) dug into what grimdark means in her Reddit AMA.

New Terminator: Dark Fate trailer. CHILLS. I HAVE CHILLS.

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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.

Happy Friday, shipmates! You made it! This is Alex to bring in the weekend with some news and desert-related book noodling. Oh, and a strong recommendation that you should watch Missy Elliott’s VMA performance because it’s sci-fi as all heck too.

News and Views

The Campbell Award has been renamed. More context on this over at Book Riot if you’ve missed what’s going on. Related: Was John W. Cambpell A F***ing Fascist, or Merely a Fascist?

Fonda Lee (author of Jade War) wrote us a great list about siblings in fantasy.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture forty years later.

New Wild Cards story over at Tor.com!

The TSA has banned “thermal detonator” soda bottles from Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in both carry on and checked baggage.

This week’s SFF Yeah! podcast is about the Hugo awards and the Blade trilogy.

S.L. Huang (author of Null Set) on the danger of swords. Somewhat related: a freelance photographer went to a medieval battle reenactment and got some amazing pictures.

I feel required to mention that the final trailer for Joker is out.

Marvel comics no. Marvel comics why.

I am excited about this documentary on Alien.

Here’s a long piece about The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance‘s journey to the screen.

Thanks to some really questionable choices by big tech, the necessity of ethics is coming back into discussion–and science fiction is part of it.

How firenados work. This is some dragon-level stuff.

You had me at “16,000-year-old puma poop.”

And some cool, science-y nail art!

Free Association Friday

Apparently this August has been one of the top five warmest on record for my city, and I believe it. Colorado has a lot of land that’s near-desert or desert, rainfall-wise, and you can feel it most in the summer when the dry meets the hot. (Which is probably why so much of my writing, like my novels, is set in the desert.) So how about some desert books to capture this August feeling?

There is a lot of desert-based fantasy, and so much of it is really good. Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand is my hands-down favorite because it’s so much about the wild, dangerous magic of the desert. City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty is a close second, though it spends a lot more time in the city of the djinn than out in the sands. That book starts in Cairo, which immediately brings to mind E. Catherine Tobler’s Rings of Anubis if you’re feeling a bit more steampunk to go with the magic, or N.K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon if you’re looking for something more ancient and deeply mythological. Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed goes fully fantasy adventure–as does Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton, with added gunslingers. Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson combines hacking and magic in a fictional Middle Eastern state.

City of Bones by Martha Wells takes us to an entirely unfamiliar world, still fantasy, where relic hunters sift through bone. The start of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, has that same sort of combined fantasy and science fiction with blowing dust feel.

The weird thing I noticed as I was making my list of these books is that there’s so much more desert fantasy than there is sci-fi. Because while there might be science fiction that touches on a desert location, it lacks that deep connection to place that has provided so much meat for fantasy. With exceptions, of course. Technically speaking, any book set on Mars that isn’t about a transformed and terraformed version of it is about a desert planet; let’s just take Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars as the prime example of that. And of course, there’s the grandaddy of all desert SFF: Frank Herbert’s Dune. I’d also offer up Iraq + 100 as science fiction much closer to home; it’s short stories by Iraqi authors that imagine their country 100 years in the future.

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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.