Category: Swords and Spaceships

Happy Friday, shipmates! We all made it, and your reward from Captain Alex is an odd grab bag of news and some free association of novels. Oh, and if you need an end-of-the-week pick-me-up, I heartily recommend the #TerribleMCUCasting hashtag on Twitter.

News and Views

Harry Potter turned 39 on Wednesday.

Author Sherrilyn Keynon dropped her lawsuit against her husband.

Black Nerd Problems has a really great, deep look at David Mogo, Godhunter.

Ada Hoffman (author of The Outside) wrote a great essay about portrayals of disability in Star Wars.

And this is one heck of a question: Too many Star Wars books, or not enough?

There’s a documentary about Ursula K. Le Guin coming to PBS on August 2.

Jaimie Alexander is volunteering for Sif to be Valkyrie’s queen and all I can say is YES. (How about a love triangle where no one loses?)

Madeline Miller’s Circe is coming to HBO.

The creator of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski’s autobiography, Becoming Superman, just came out, and he talked to SyFy Wire about it.

Fast Color is going to go from being a movie to a series on Amazon!

And there’s a new Dungeons and Dragons movie coming? (Insert uncertainface here.)

An interesting examination of Stranger Things as uniquely suburban horror.

From Tor.com, a great roundup of short fiction from July.

I am excited about seeing Lupita Nyongo’o in the zomcom Little Monsters.

This ancient Roman stylus shows that gifts from tourists really haven’t changed in 2000 years.

It’s been a big week for fossils. A triceratops skull was found in the North Dakota Badlands by a university student. And an 1,100 lb sauropod bone got dug up in southwestern France. And a little Chinese boy found fossilized dinosaur eggs.

Free Association Friday

So today in history, Emperor Majorian got arrested in 461 and deposed… but when I first read that name, I read it as “Majoran” which became “Majora” in my head, and instantly I was thinking about Majora’s Mask and it’s brain-bending countdown and world-salvaging time loop.

The first thing I leapt to was trying to figure out books that use the sort of screaming-tension countdown that has made Majora’s Mask a popular meme. And… my finite knowledge and google skills kind of failed me, I admit. It’s a device I used in one of my own books (Blood Binds the Pack if you’ll forgive the shameless plug) but it’s not really so explicit as an on-the-page countdown in much of anything else. There are definitely some books with tight timelines! Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen has a pretty ramped-up timeline that involves time travel at the end of the book. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire has a pretty implicit, tight timeline that kicks in partway through the book, which I will not spoil here. And so on.

But time loops? There’s a lot of fun books with time loops… though most of those are triggered by the death of the protagonist rather than a deliberate choice to use an Ocarina of Time-esque MacGuffin. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver reminds me a lot of Happy Death Day, except without the serial killer. The timeloop in Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds is driven by love. All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka has humans and aliens battling it out over who will figure out how to win the timeloop first. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North is perhaps the most Majora’s Mask-esque, with a timeloop that is one step closer to the apocalypse every time it triggers.

In a slightly different vein, Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes has not so much a timeloop as a… clone loop. And the characters have to figure out what is going on before they run out of clones. And Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde is a fun riff on the infinite lives of video games, which become their own kind of weird timeloop for players.

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.

Yo ho, happy Tuesday, my merry marauders. It’s Alex, with a good crop of new releases even though we’re at that weird animal known as the fifth Tuesday in a month. I’ve also got an assortment of news for you… and before we get started, I have to share this thing that Brooke Bolander (who gave us The Only Harmless Great Thing) shared on Twitter, because it’s super intense, actually true, and I’m still obsessed with it: “The Man Who Rode the Thunder” which is about a pilot who had to emergency eject at about 50,000 feet and then fell through a thunderstorm.

New Releases

Ascent to Godhood by JY Yang – In the fourth book of the Tensorate series, the Protector is dead… and one woman is both her greatest enemy and her greatest mourner. (Look, if you have not read this amazing, queer series, do yourself a favor and start with The Black Tides of Heaven.)

Shatter the Sky by Rebecca Kim Wells – “Raised among the ruins of a conquered mountain nation, Maren dreams only of sharing a quiet life with her girlfriend Kaia—until the day Kaia is abducted by the Aurati, prophetic agents of the emperor, and forced to join their ranks. Desperate to save her, Maren hatches a plan to steal one of the emperor’s coveted dragons and storm the Aurati stronghold.”

The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen – An undertaker of the Crow caste comes to collect the body of a Prince and finds that he has faked his own death. (The tagline on this is wonderful: “One way or another, we always feed the crows.”)

Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott – An outsider arrives in Rotherweird, a town started long ago by twelve children with unearthly powers who were exiled by Elizabeth I.

The Ember Blade by Chris Wooding – A young man is imprisoned after his father is executed for treason. He’s rescued by a man who hates him and is oath-bound to protect him; on the run, his next task is to steal the fabled Ember Blade and inspire a revolution.

News and Views

Congratulations to the World Fantasy Award finalists! (Moment of personal squee: An anthology that I have a short story in, Sword and Sonnet, is a finalist.) The novel list is GREAT:
In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey
The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
Witchmark by C.L. Polk
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Gorgeous new cover art for Susan Dennard’s Witchlands series. (You can already see it on Bloodwitch.)

50 must-read fantasy books by women.

If you’re in a post-Stranger Things monster slump, here are some books that will help you out.

Everything makes me more hype about the oncoming superheroes-via-fast-cars Hobbs & Shaw: the world premiere had dueling red carpets for the two guys in the title.

By the way, the writer of most of The Fast and the Furious movies says that vroom vroom in space is not out of the question. DO IT YOU COWARDS.

More details about Carnival Row coming out. It’s already been renewed for a second season and it hasn’t been released yet.

Orlando Bloom won’t be in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, partly because he says he’s too old to be Legolas again.

Wireless is asking the important questions: Will Heroes in Loincloths Ever Make a Comeback?

A takedown of the face-touching trope that gets used way too often when blind characters are involved.

Researchers have improved on a commercial prosthetic hand so that it has a lighter touch and a sense of touch… and named it LUKE.

The French Army is hiring science fiction writers to creatively identify future threats.

Science fiction is real alert: Scientists can now build feedback circuits in cells.

Here’s a really cool time-lapse video of a storm.

Today in extremely depressing but important: Many Animals Can’t Adapt Fast Enough to Climate Change

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, pirates and privateers! It’s Alex, with your daily dose of news and other SFF book related things. Today, I’m still freaking out about the trailer for Harriet, in which Harriet Tubman gets the total badass movie treatment she deserves. Also, if you want a dose of nostalgia, here’s a litte video with rainbows.

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This newsletter is sponsored by TBR: Tailored Book Recommendations.

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A Few New Reads

Aliette de Bodard had a book come out on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday! The House of Sundering Flames is the next book in her series about the great magical houses of Paris–which are headed up by fallen angels. (No North American edition yet, sadly.)

Rivers Solomon has an angry story out at Tor.com: Blood is Another Word for Hunger

There’s a new toolkit by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry for the Fate TTRPG system, aimed at helping support players with disabilities in games and add disabled characters: Fate Accessibility Toolkit

News and Views

Here’s the shortlist for the 2019 British Fantasy Awards! There’s so much good stuff on the list, but if I had to tell you to read one book, I’d point straight at Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri.

The Booker Prize longlist has been announced, and it includes several genre titles, including The Testaments by Margaret Atwood and An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma.

This week’s SFF Yeah! podcast is about music in SFF.

A heart-warming cross-over comic about Thor and Mr. Rogers.

Goodbye, Rutger Hauer. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is returning yet again, this time as a TV series on Hulu.

Orbit has acquired a fantasy trilogy that draws on Norse mythology and Scandanavian folklore from writer John Gwynne.

If you love blooper reels like I do, you are not going to want to miss the one from Avengers: Endgame.

If you’re not too familiar with the groundbreaking work of Ursula K. Le Guin, don’t feel bad. Here’s a guide to help you get started.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia wrote a cool piece about shape-changing in Mexican folklore (which definitely relates to her new novel Gods of Jade and Shadow).

Free Association Friday

I realized that today is Stanley Kubrick’s birthday–which feels like a big deal, considering the influence he had on science fiction cinema. (At least the sector of science fiction cinema that hasn’t been swallowed by the action blockbuster machine.) 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb have left massive cultural footprints–and need I even mention The Shining?

Trying to think of Kubrick-esque books is one heck of a challenge. The first thing that sprang to mind for me was Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, and it’s in large part because the movie that came from it was so dang Kubrick-esque. (It’s easier to think of movies than books, probably, because so much of Kubrick’s signature is found in his visual sensibility.)

Thematically, Kubrick was always interested in humanity–where we’ll go in the future, how we hurt each other, and how the collective consciousness of society works. I think Octavia Butler explored a lot of the same concepts, though very much in her own way, particularly in The Patternist series (start with Wild Seed) and The Xenogenesis trilogy (starting with Dawn). Ramez Naam’s Nexus is about a nano-drug that links human minds together. He, She and It by Marge Piercy explores human identity and environmentalism in a post-apocalyptic world. Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente has that base uneasiness to it that I tend to associate with Kubrick’s work as well. Glasshouse by Charles Stross is about simulated cultures and some deep, deep, justified paranoia.

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 Captain Alex, and considering we just passed by SDCC weekend, there’s a lot of good stuff to share with you. Personally, I’m most excited about Thor: Love and Thunder because I’m an Asgardian at heart, and Taika Waititi not only retrieved Natalie Portman from the Marvel forgetting hole, he’s making her Thor–and letting Valkyrie be out and proud in this one. Basically, if you heard hypersonic squeals of joy on Saturday night, that was probably me. Sorry about your windows.

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This newsletter is sponsored by Meerkat Press and Claiming T-Mo by Eugen Bacon.

Perfect for fans of Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin. In this lushly written interplanetary tale, an immortal priest commits an act that unleashes a Jekyll-and-Hyde boy upon the world. Three distinctive women—his mother, his wife, his child—must confront their fears and navigate the treacherous paths to claiming him from a darkness that threatens them all.

“Packed with so much love, fear, pain, and hope, that it invites multiple re-readings, and is good enough to justify the time spent doing so.” —Lightspeed Magazine

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New Releases

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – A young woman in the jazz age dreams of escaping a life of domestic drudgery until she accidentally frees the Mayan god of death and is handed a life or death quest.

Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan – Charlie is a dreamhacker, someone who can enter dreams and change them. Her booming business suddenly turns deadly when one of her clients sleepwalks off a building.

Jade War by Fonda Lee – The Kaul family battles rival clans and encroaching foreign threats that seek the island of Kekon’s jade. Sequel to the award-winning Jade City.

How We Became Wicked by Alexander Yates – An insect-borne plague divides the world into the infected Wicked, the isolated and plague-free True, and the immune Vexed. In this world, three 16-year-old teens struggle to survive.

Desdemona and the Deep by C. S. E. Cooney – “The spoiled, daughter of a rich mining family must retrieve the tithe of men her father promised to the world below. On the surface, her world is rife with industrial pollution that ruins the health of poor factory workers while the idle rich indulge themselves in unheard-of luxury. Below are goblins, mysterious kingdoms, and an entirely different hierarchy.”

News and Views

Science fiction and fantasy writers talk about what it was like to watch the moon landing.

The original 1979 Dune board game is getting a re-release.

A list of 5 ways science has made SF more interesting.

An interesting (and slightly depressing article) about city planners utilizing computer modeling for increased flooding as climate change progresses.

Total science fiction [corporate dystopia] fuel: how the heck could you even regulate Facebook’s Libra?

This Twitter thread documents an amazing interaction a bookseller had with Carrie Fisher.

If you wanted a gag reel for The Good Place, you’re in luck.

The SDCC Highlight Reel

Everything from SDCC about the MCU. A fun ranking of those announcements, though I strongly disagree with how low on the list Shang-Chi falls. Black Girl Nerds has a list of the black talent that will be involved.

I want to draw your attention to the casting of The Eternals, which is pretty exciting. If you, like me, have no idea who the Eternals are, here’s a guide.

An update from V.E. Schwab on the progress of her next two books.

Here’s four things Vulture learned about the His Dark Materials mini-series at the SDCC panel.

A roundup of trailers from SDCC.

Here’s a breakdown of the trailer for The Witcher.

Guillermo del Toro talked about the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark movie.

Trailer for The Expanse season 4!

George Takei was at SDCC to talk about his graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy. It’s an important work, considering current events.

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, book friends! You made it–and for those of you that survived the hideous heatwave, extra congratulations and electrolytes to you. It’s your ship captain, Alex, with news and fun stuff for Friday–and I come bearing congratulations to Team Japan, which won the Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship in Finland last week. (Coincidentally, that phrase is the most Finland thing I’ve read all year.)

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This newsletter is sponsored by Sourcebooks.

Exiled Charmer Leena Edenfrell is running out of time. Empty pockets forced her to sell her beloved magical beasts—an offense punishable by death—and now there’s a price on her head. With the realm’s most talented murderer-for-hire nipping at her heels, Leena makes Noc an offer he can’t refuse: powerful mythical creatures in exchange for her life.

Plagued by a curse that kills everyone he loves, Noc agrees to Leena’s terms in hopes of finding a cure. Never mind that the dark magic binding the assassin’s oath will eventually force him to choose between Leena’s continued survival…and his own.

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News and Views

Tade Thompson just won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel Rosewater!

Congratulations to the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award winners! Of particular interest to us are:

• Novella Winner: The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza
• Single Author Collection Winner: All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma
• Edited Anthology Winner: Robots vs. Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe

Argh, right in the nostalgia! There’s a sequel to The Last Starfighter in development, 35 years later.

Over at the SFF Yeah! podcast, they’re talking audio dramas and fiction podcasts.

The good news: Taika Waititi is back for Thor 4! The bad news: Live-action, Asian-cast Akira is dead and the studio excuse is B A D.

Mary Robinette Kowal and Ken Liu have some beautiful things to say about the Apollo 11 moon landing.  Kowal also just wrote a really good piece about the way unconscious gender bias is hampering female astronauts.

We’ve got a massive list of portal fantasy books for your perusal at Book Riot.

There’s a Harry Potter fashion collection debuting at SDCC.

An interview with Duncan Jones about his still-relevant-and-amazing film Moon.

Game of Thrones bags 32 Emmy nominations, which is a new record.

Free Association Friday

Look, three days ago it was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, and it’s still on my mind. If you’re the slightest bit into space history and you haven’t seen the new documentary that came out this year in honor of Apollo 11–called, simply Apollo 11–do yourself a favor and make it happen. It’s one that definitely belongs on the big screen.

But what about books, you ask? I’m so glad that you did? I know I’ve mentioned it several times before because I freaking love this book, but The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal are perfect books to read in this anniversary year. Mary’s also been putting all of her lady astronaut research to good use, like I mentioned above, writing about the challenges women have and still face trying to get into space. Another alternate history, Nigerians in Space by Deji Bryce Olukotun, is close to my heart because it’s about a lunar geologist.

But rather than focusing just on our moon, I want to talk space exploration instead, because that’s in the real spirit of the anniversary. So this’ll be a science-fiction heavy Friday. I promise next week it’ll be a whole lot of fantasy! I have to mention a couple of classics that have a major place in my heart: Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, which is a cute and fun adventure story that’ll teach you more about space suits than you ever wanted to know, and Frederick Pohl’s Gateway, which is one of those rare older SF books that still really holds up when you read it today–and it’s about exploration roulette using the technology of long-vanished aliens.

Newer, James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series, which starts at Leviathan Wakes, is space exploration with a hefty helping of human political intrigue. (Warning: I bounced pretty hard off the first book, but I don’t regret my choice to give the series a second chance with Caliban’s War, which is much better to its female characters.) Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion gives us space exploration in a decaying fleet that’s a necessity for survival. The Wanderers by Meg Howrey delivers a story about three astronauts training (on Earth) for the first mission to Mars.

If you want something a little more on the fantastical side, how about Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente, about a documentary filmmaker in a fantastical solar system. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber gives us an expansive universe with alternate dimensions to explore–or escape into.

There’s also a great list of 50 Must-Read Book Set in Space for your perusal at Book Riot, if you’re wanting more emphasis on the space part of the equation!

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 already Tuesday again–who let that happen?–so it’s me, Alex, with your new releases and some news. But I want to start you off with two things I saw on Twitter just now that made me howl with laughter: A thread of “Authentic catlike poses I am looking forward to seeing replicated on Catwoman covers” and this short video from Chris Hemsworth.

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This newsletter is sponsored by Tor Books.

Set in the universe of the New York Times bestselling Three-Body Problem trilogy, The Redemption of Time continues Cixin Liu’s multi-award-winning science fiction saga. This original story by Baoshu—published with Liu’s support—envisions the aftermath of war between humanity and the extraterrestrial Trisolarans.

Yun Tianming found himself on the front lines of an interstellar war. Captured and tortured beyond endurance for decades, Yun succumbed to helping the Trisolarans subjugate humanity in order to save Earth from destruction. Nearing the end of his existence, Yun is recruited to fight an entity that threatens the universe––but Yun has a plan to save humanity’s future…

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New Releases

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone – Can’t summarize it better than this: “Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love.”

The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winters – The Omehi people are caught in an endless war; the entire culture is set for war and only war. A young man with no magical gifts intends to get himself injured so he can escape his fate as fodder for war–but when the people closest to him are brutally murdered, he fixates on revenge and changes his path forever.

The Unforseen by Molly Gloss – A career retrospective anthology of short stories, with three new stories.

The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall – A man enters the underworld by striking a deal with the “end-of-the-line-woman” at its entrance; the chaotic realm of warring gods and demons he finds contains secrets that threaten the land of the living.

Avatar, the Last Airbender: The Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee – The origin story of the longest-living Avatar, Kyoshi.

News and Views

Jeannette Ng (author of Under the Pendulum Sun) wrote a great piece about Mulan, “authenticity,” and retellings.

Don Cheadle has joined the cast of Space Jam 2.

A new species of fairy wrasse has been named in honor of Black Panther.

Holy wow, Paradise Hills looks GORGEOUS.

Tor.com started some shit on Twitter by asking if Godzilla is a dragon; the controversy is documented here. I am personally shocked and appalled that they did not include the definitive tweet on the topic, authored by my agent, DongWon Song.

Amazon is making a Lord of the Rings MMO.

Dare you take the hardest Lord of the Rings quiz?

Derek Kolstad, who created John Wick, has joined the writing team for the Marvel Falcon and the Winter Soldier series.

Take with an appropriately-sized grain of salt, but the Daily Mail is claiming Lashana Lynch will be the next 007.

Hayabusa 2 landed successfully on the asteroid Ryugu!

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-related news and views and something random to top it off. Today, I was awestruck by the gorgeous fashion on display at the inaugural Indigenous Fashion Week and its vision of the future. I am also in a different kind of awe that the Japanese title of Hobbs & Shaw is Wild Speed Super Combo because it is clearly going to be the greatest movie ever made.

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This newsletter is sponsored by Tor Books.

From Cherie Priest, the author of The Family Plot and Maplecroft, comes The Toll, a tense and scary treat for modern fans of the traditionally strange and macabre.

Titus and Melanie Bell have reservations in the Okefenokee Swamp cabins for a honeymoon canoeing trip. But shortly before they reach their destination, the road narrows into a rickety bridge, with room for only one car.

Much later, Titus wakes up lying in the middle of the road, no bridge in sight. Melanie is missing. When he calls the police, they tell him there is no such bridge on Route 177…

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News and Views

There is a new poster for Picard and it’s the most adorable thing ever.

The newest episode of the SFF Yeah! Podcast is about SFF books with non-gloomy futures.

You can read an excerpt from Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, which releases in a little over two weeks.

We’re starting to get some deets on the Game of Thrones prequel.

5 novels inspired by Peter Pan.

In a 20-page opinion, judges on the Ninth Circuit court of appeals cited a plotline “rendered meaningless” in Game of Thrones.

James McAvoy talks about It: Chapter Two.

The artwork for the new edition of Dune is gorgeous.

Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 3: Here’s a dive into the weird actual USSR experiments the show nods at.

Microsoft celebrates Stranger Things with a Windows 1.0 emulator.

In the running to be the greatest title ever given to a science paper: Fantastic yeasts and where to find them: the hidden diversity of dimorphic fungal pathogens

Hey, Virgin Orbit just dropped a rocket from an airplane.

Check out Snowball the dancing cockatoo, who was the subject of a super cute scientific study!

Free Association Friday

I don’t know about you, but I’m still riding a total high from the USWNT World Cup victory, with extra rainbow sprinkles on top thanks to articles like this: Why the USWNT’s open queerness matters. Or (warning for nudity!) Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird being the first gay couple to be on the cover of ESPN’s Body Issue, complete with excellent interview.

I’ve never been that into sports, but this has sure given me the spirit. So you know what, let’s talk about sports in SFF books! The first thing that sprang to mind immediately was Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch, in which the main character Sunny is a great athlete who loves playing soccer… and she really can’t, since she’s also albino and can’t be in the sun that much. (Don’t worry; by Akata Warrior she’s magic enough she can play all the soccer she wants. And there’s a wrestling tournament in the book too.) Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett is also about soccer (football, rather) and is a beautiful, loving send-up of English football culture, complete with hooligans.

S.B. Divya’s Run Time has a marathon challenge where the athletes are augmented in every way you could imagine. There’s a martial arts tournament in Jade City by Fonda Lee. Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay has all the chariot-racing scenes your heart could desire.

Of course, for entirely made-up sports, I don’t want to get pelted by tomatoes, so of course I’ll mention that Harry Potter has quidditch–and if you want to know everything there is to know about it there’s a book for that. Court of Fives by Kate Elliott revolves around an athletic competition called The Fives. My personal favorite is Hilketa, the ultra-violent sport in John Scalzi’s Head On that can only be played by remotely-piloted robot units.

GOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!!!! (Equal pay! Equal pay!)

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, me hearties! It’s Captain Alex, with some new releases and news hand-picked for you. And if you’re not already feeling like doing some serious fist pumping because it’s new release day, here’s the crowd at the World Cup after USA won chanting “Equal pay! Equal pay!“–and the first trailer for Disney’s live-action Mulan.

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This newsletter is sponsored by Tor Books.

Tor Books is the proud publisher of Dragonslayer by Duncan M. Hamilton, the first book in a fast-moving trilogy: a dangerous tale of magic, dragons, and honor. Once a member of the King’s personal guard, a disgraced hero is called upon to kill a dragon. Along the way he rescues a young barmaid harboring a vast reserve of raw magical power. Between his rusty swordsmanship and her unstable magic, what could go wrong?

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New Releases

Null Set by S.L. Huang – Sequel to Zero Sum Game. Cas Russell has decided to use her math powers to fight crime… and the current crime wave is kind of her fault.

David Mogo, Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa – There is no way I could come up with a more concise, better description than what the book already has: “David Mogo, demigod and godhunter, has one task: capture two of the most powerful gods in the city and deliver them to the wizard gangster Lukmon Ajala.”

Salvation Day by Kali Wallace – A salvage crew kidnaps the last survivor of a disastrous plague on an exploration ship so that they can get aboard and claim it for salvage. But something deadlier than a virus awaits them inside…

Eye Spy by Mercedes Lackey – Abidela, daughter of the Herald Spy of Valdemar and the King’s Own Herald, discovers that she has a unique magical gift… which could also make her a very good spy in her own right.

Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim – Maia disguises herself as a boy to take her ailing father’s place when he’s summoned to the royal court to compete with twelve other tailors for the job to sew magical gowns for the emperor’s reluctant betrothed.

The Need by Helen Phillips – A young mother with two children hears footsteps in her house. While she tries to ignore the sounds at first, the footsteps turn out to be real, belonging to an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family.

Mission Critical edited by Jonathan Strahan – An anthology of stories where people overcome incredible challenges in deep space. Authors include Yoon Ha Lee, Aliette de Bodard, Greg Egan, Linda Nagata, and Tobias S. Buckell.

News and Views

Short news section today; all the news generators were watching soccer this weekend, I guess!

The cat who played Goose in Captain Marvel answers some of our burning questions.

The Fiyah Lit Mag editorial team are trying to make it to Dublin for WorldCon, since they’ve been nominated for the Hugo for Best Semiprozine. If you’d like to help them get together, you can chip in a donation. The poetry editor, Brandon O’Brien, is also selling a bundle of games he’s designed to help with his travel expenses.

(Spoiler within!) There’s an LGBTQ character in this season of Stranger Things.

Tor.com has a helpful and scarily massive list of all the SFF/Horror/Comics adaptations that are currently in the works.

The creator of The Mask wants a reboot with a woman in the lead role.

I agree with most of this, having seen the movie: (Spoilers within!) 20 Things We Loved (and 6 Things We Didn’t) About Spider-Man: Far From Home. And if you’d like to dig in a little more about the mid-credits scene, SyFy Wire has you covered.

Weird. Very weird: How Sci-Fi Shaped the Players in the Gawker Lawsuit

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 from your host, Alex, and nothing but respect for my pink-haired queen, Megan Rapinoe. (Look, I don’t even go there and I’m super jazzed about the World Cup final on Sunday.) If you want some hilarious and beautiful non-genre reading, may I suggest: So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend by Sue Bird. And now it’s time for the genre news!

By the way, if you’ll be around the North American Science Fiction Convention taking place in Layton, Utah this weekend, say “Hi!” if you see me!

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This newsletter is sponsored by Tor Books.

Vivian Liao is prone to radical thinking, quick decision-making, and reckless action. Her enemies want to destroy her and her legacy. So, Viv puts a plan into motion, one that will allow her to save the world…by conquering it.

Instead she’s catapulted through space and time to a far future ruled by an ancient, powerful Empress. Trapped between a horde of sentient machines and a fanatical sect of warrior monks, Viv must rally a strange group of allies to confront the Empress and find a way back to the world and life she left behind.

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News and Views 

I was super excited to see Comma Press tweet about the first anthology of science fiction from Palestine, edited by Basma Ghalayini. Palestine+100 isn’t available on American Amazon yet, but you can order through the publisher. The concept of the book, imagining futures 100 years after the Nakba, is sibling to the publisher’s 2016 anthology Iraq +100.

An amazing essay about The Good Place and the meta ways it relates to privilege and our current social issues.

Blackfish City won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel published in 2018.

About Gori and Washimi’s bad bitch walk in Aggretsuko.

A Harry Potter prequel series is coming to television.

Dystopian YA never left, despite what Hollywood seems to think.

A new quarterly fantasy digest magazine with Mercedes Lackey editing will be launching soon via Kickstarter, with the Kickstarter intended to be a one-time thing. (This news via Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine column on Patreon.)

The newest episode of the SFF Yeah! podcast is about clones, twins, and doppelgängers.

Ars Technica takes a longitudinal look at the costuming of Spider-man, with Far From Home in consideration.

Halle Bailey will be playing Ariel in the live-action The Little Mermaid, and I’m excited! (Though I’ll admit, I first misread that as Halle Berry and I was so confused.) Cue the sound of a million Twitter racists who never gave a crap about The Little Mermaid suddenly being Very Concerned.

Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series will be directed by J.A. Bayona, who directed Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

A Reddit user put together a list of the top 100 most discussed fantasy books on Reddit from 2018-2019.

Ever wondered why fireworks just don’t look great on TV? Wired has the answer.

London is considering what sounds to add to its electric buses so people can actually hear them. The current array under discussion is “spaceshippy.”

Stranger Things Corner

Read with caution if you haven’t watched the full season in the three whole seconds it’s been out.

Very helpful: Everything you need to remember about seasons 1 and 2.

The 10 strangest things about season 3.

How the show mastered smudgeless eye make up in pool scenes.

Every pop culture reference Vulture could find.

A not-too-spoilery review of the whole season.

Free Association Friday

July 5 is an important nerd day. Do you know why? It’s the glorious day in 1687 when Isaac Newton (long before he was an official Sir) published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and laid the groundwork (if not the language we’re familiar with) for calculus, to the delight of some (like me) and the despair of others. (It’s also the dragon Temeraire‘s favorite book.)

Math is its own kind of magic, whether you understand it or not, and it gets weirder the more purely you get into the discipline. So let’s talk math magic! In Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang, math is a superpower that lets Cas Russell dodge bullets and kick ass. (You can pre-order the sequel Null Set now.) Math is destructive space opera magic in Yoon Ha Lee’s Nine Fox Gambit.

Mathematical equations allow magical travel in The Phantom Tollbooth. It’s used to similar effect in Ellen Klages’s Passing Strange, and becomes a tool to save desperate people in 1940s Europe. Math becomes magic in Mandelbrot the Magnificent by Liz Ziemska, which is based on the real life of Benoit Mandelbrot.

And there’s a million science fiction books about math (not all of which are about orbital mechanics) but that’s a subject for another time!

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, and I’m unspeakably excited about the new Hobbs & Shaw trailer…which might technically not look particularly SF, but I would argue that the entire Fast and Furious franchise is actually an original working-class superhero mythos (Hobbs has super strength! Dom has super car driving powers! Idris Elba is playing Black Superman!) that went straight to film without ever stopping first in comics and is remarkable both for its level of racial diversity and its dodging of toxic, gatekeeping geek fans. My name is Alex; welcome to my TED Talk.

Just kidding. Mostly. It’s Tuesday, so let’s get some new releases!

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This newsletter is sponsored by Dynamite Entertainment.

Underpowered and overwhelmed, Kenton tries to hold the Sand Masters together as forces political and personal conspire against them. Now, in one final push, Kenton must tap the most dangerous depths of his own abilities to combat the enemies within his own guild, and discover the truth behind the ambush that killed his father and almost destroyed the Sand Masters for good.

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New Releases

Note: it was a very limited pool in terms of author diversity for the new releases this week.

Sealed by Naomi Booth – A pregnant woman, concerned by rumors of a “skin sealing” epidemic in the city, moves to the mountains with her husband. But the remote mountains hold different kinds of danger…

The Beckoning Shadow by Katharyn Blair – A girl with the power to bring someone’s worst fears into reality competes in the fighting competition called the Tournament of Unraveling for a chance to rewrite the mistakes of her past.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig – A strange epidemic of sleepwalking, from which people cannot be awakened, hits America–and the sleepwalkers are all headed to a mysterious destination. Family and friends become “shepherds” who try to protect the sleepwalkers as society collapses around them. The source of the epidemic is a terrifying secret that can save the sleepwalkers…and may finish destroying the nation in the process.

Dragonslayer by Duncan M. Hamilton – With the dragons all dead, Dragonslayers have become redundant. Most are gone, and the one that remains is a disgraced drunkard. And then it turns out that there might be a dragon left…

Aftershocks by Marko Kloos – In a six-planet system struggling to recover from an interplanetary war, Aden Robertson, who picked the wrong side of that war, just wants to move on with his life and survive. But a brutal insurrection threatens the fragile system, and Aden has a chance to pick the right side this time… if he can figure out what it is.

News and Views

Congratulations to the winners of the 2019 Locus Awards! Of particular interest to us:

• Science Fiction Novel: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
• Fantasy Novel: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• Young Adult Novel: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
• First Novel: Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

You can read an excerpt of Nnedi Okorafor’s upcoming comic LaGuardia.

Ken Liu’s short story The Message has been acquired by the same people who brought us Arrival (adapted from Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life).

Tor.com has a great list of short fiction to read from June.

Looking for magical girl books? Here’s a list of 5 YA novels that fit the bill.

An acapella cover of the Star Wars cantina theme.

In infuriating news, Riz Ahmed wasn’t able to get to Star Wars Celebration because Homeland Security wouldn’t let him get on his flight.

Daisy Ridley shares a story about Carrie Fisher that, if you’re like me, will make you laugh and tear up at the same time.

Microsoft is closing its ebook store and will be removing purchased book from devices. At least it’s refunding the money? Not science fiction, but feels like it should be.

When Fandom is the problem.

These are cool as heck: Popmuertos. Black Nerd Problems has a great interview with Aaron, the creator.

George R.R. Martin talks about his successes and the coming spin-offs of Game of Thrones. 

Here’s a bonus SFF Yeah! podcast about Game of Thrones read-alikes.

If you’re curious about the new footage tacked onto the Endgame release but not curious enough to shell out to see the movie again, spoilers for you here.

Into the Spider-Verse is on Netflix now, by the way! And if you’ll be in the right bit of California (Alhambra), there’s a tribute art show under way.

Zendaya had a great dress at the Spider-Man: Far From Home premiere. And there’s a bunch of other great pics of her fashion in the link.

io9 has a round-up of all Dark Crystal-related stuff we’re getting in 2019.

Not sci-fi but cool: A new study of teeth finds that some ancient crocodiles might have been vegetarian.

Not sci-fi but worrying: A drone with a projector fooled a self-driving car.

You can use this neat tool courtesy of the LRO to tour the first Moon landing, step-by-step.

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 on the (Hugo-nominated!!!) Skiffy and Fanty Podcast or over at my personal site.