#SFF Book Events

[gollancz]

That's right baybeeee - ten years after it first launched, Gollanczfest is back and it's bigger than ever!

WHEN?

16th March 2024

Leonardo Royal Hotel, London

Tickets go on sale Friday 6th October at 10am UK time!

Early presale for tickets available exclusively to our newsletter subscribers

WHO?

Our headliner? Only VICTORIA AVEYARD

Other confirmed authors: Joe Abercrombie, Natasha Pulley, Garth Nix, Dhonielle Clayton, Joe Hill, Ben Aaronovitch, @joannechocolat, Aliette de Bodard, Sarah Hawley, @jonnywaistcoat, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson . . . and MANY more

Plus: YOU

PLUS

All tickets come with a goodie bag full of Gollancz goodies work at least £30

VIP tickets are available with access to the green room, priority tickets to panels, and additional goodies

FREE SFF quiz run by the greatest quizmasters (allegedly, this may be a title they've claimed themselves and I cannot verify) Joe Abercrombie and Garth Nix!

We'll be announcing panels soon, but this is going to be a fun, friendly and festive day, full of nerdery, excitement and probably a lot of harried looking Gollancz staff stuffing their faces with sandwiches and trying to find where distracted authors have wandered off to.

PARTY TIME

[leannareneehieber]

Darlings! I'm heading into an event every upcoming weekend! (And 3 book deadlines! EEK!) SO, that means I'll be scarce here BUT you can come find me at any of the following places in Chicago, Ohio or Vermont this month!

Chicago Steampunk Exposition - April 12-14 - I'm so thrilled to be a featured guest! Theme: VAMPIRES!! Come hear me talk about all things Gothic and Stoker-inspired! Books available for sale and signing! More info here.

Ohioana Book Festival - Columbus Library - Main Branch - April 20th, I'm so excited to be on the HORROR panel! Books available for sale and signing! FREE to attend! More info here.

Vermont Sci-Fi & Fantasy Expo! - Champlain Valley Expo Center - April 27th & 28th! I'll be discussing the importance of ghost stories and the importance of women writers in genre fiction! More info here.

Further upcoming: If you go to Key City Steampunk in Gettysburg or DragonCon in Atlanta, I'll also be a featured guest again this year at both events!

Hope to see you there! Happy Haunting! BOOP!

*pause*

SUPER BOOP!

[lilareviewsbooks]

Books for Good Omens fans!

Are you emotionally scarred by the ending of season 2? Is the wait for season 3 going to be excruciating for you? Are you looking for something that’ll fill those voids? Look no further, Good Omens fan! I have some media for you to consume!

The Tea Dragon Series, starting with The Tea Dragon Society, by K. O’Neil

71 pages (first book)

Contains: tea magic!; a cute sapphic romance; queer rep all around :)

If you like Good Omens because of how fluffy it can be (though that season finale was not fluffy), I highly recommend this series! The Tea Dragon Society is a comic book trilogy following Greta, who is swept into the world of caring for tea dragons, tiny little creatures that grow tea leaves on their foreheads. 

As is the case with Good Omens, this trilogy includes a lot of queer representation. It’s written by a non-binary author, K. O’Neil, who introduces us to queer characters of all identities. Also much like Good Omens, there is no discussion of homophobia or transphobia. There’s also a sapphic romance between Greta and her love interest, which is very sweet! This is perfect if you need a pick-me-up after season 2, and if the fluffier aspects of Good Omens are your favorites!

The Greenhollow Duology, starting with a Silver In The Wood, by Emily Tesh

112 pages (first book)

Contains: the fae!!; enchanted woods; middle-aged gay people!!

If what brings you joy in Good Omens is it’s middle-aged leads, I give you Silver in the Wood, and its companion Drowned Country. These two stories are quite episodic – much like Crowley and Aziraphale’s little adventures – and feature a pair of middle-aged men who fall in love against the backdrop of supernatural things afoot.

Apart from representing the older portion of the queer community, The Greenhollow Duology is also brilliantly written and very atmospheric. It will place you inside the cottage where most of the action happens, and you will be able to feel the magic in the air. Both of the books are novellas, and so are quite short reads you can enjoy whenever!

A Series of Unfortunate Events, starting with The Bad Beginning, by Lemony Snicket

176 pages (first book)

Contains: adults that are incompetent; children that are very competent; quirky writing!

If your favorite aspect of Good Omens is its quirkiness, I give you: A Series of Unfortunate Events! This middle-grade series follows a trio of siblings as they are passed from distant relative to distant relative after their parents’ mysterious death, all the while being chased by the evil Count Olaf.

This series reminds me of Good Omens for its tongue-in-cheek humor. Mr. Snicket is a master at metatextual comedy, that is, making jokes about the text itself. I’ve always had a lot of fun reading his writing! A TV show adaptation of this series has been made, and it’s on Netflix, but I haven’t watched it all the way through and can’t speak to how good it is, but it’s worth a shot if you’re feeling like watching something! Though I have to warn you: no gay people here :( 

A Master of Djinn, by P. Djeli Clark

438 pages

Contains: alternate history; a steampunk Cairo; muslim rep!!

A Master of Djinn is for those among you who want to see gay people save the world. I give you: gay people saving the world. This one follows Agent Fatma of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities in an alternate, steampunk-y Cairo, where magic was brought to life by mage Al-Jahiz, many years ago. Fatma is faced with a mysterious murder and must join forces with her lover Siti to find out what happened – except it’s waaay more complicated than it seems…

I think this reminds me of Good Omens the most because there’s a very cool dynamic between Siti and Fatma. Much like Crowley and Aziraphale, they have opposing views on a lot of things, religion for instance, and must reconcile that with their love for one another. They’re also very much ride-or-die for each other, and go on many supernatural adventures together, just like our favorite couple in Good Omens! It also features elements of fantasy being woven into a “normal” world, in this case even affecting history as we know it, to build an alternate reality! 

But, be warned: there is discussion of homophobia and sexism in this book!

This is part of larger universe, namely the Dead Djinn Universe, which includes two other novellas. You can read them in this order, or choose to start with A Master of Djinn. The novel is self-contained and will explain everything you need to know!

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older

169 pages

Contains: a murder mystery; a second chance romance; humans living on one of Jupiter’s moons!

Another one for gay people who just like a nice couple they can follow around as they unravel some intrigue, and who were desperately infatuated with “detective Aziraphale”: The Mimicking of Known Successes is a Sherlock Holmes-like story following Pleiti and Mossa, a couple of ex-girlfriends whose paths cross again when Mossa begins investigating a mysterious murder. This one takes place on a human colony in one of Jupiter’s moons, but, apart from that, is not very hard sci-fi. There’s not really any science-y bits that I can remember. Mostly, it’s just a murder mystery, but set in space!

It’s perfect for Good Omens fans who love following a couple with a long history. Not to mention, it also has an almost grumpy/sunshine dynamic that kinda reminds me of Crowley and Aziraphale. And since I know most of us Good Omens fans were once deep in the Sherlock trenches, I thought I’d add this one to cure your heart’s many, many wounds (oh, Steven Moffatt… One day, one day you will pay…)

This is not currently part of a series, but a second novella,  The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, will be published in 2024.

That’s all I got, everyone! If you’d like some more books that, just like Good Omens, don’t delve into homophobia or transphobia, I have a whole list of books that fit the bill! :) 

[dulcegal]

my transition into a Beatles fan is soooo slow it’s not even funny

[dramyhsturgis]

Free Online Star Trek and Star Wars Book Events!

Everyone is welcome! I'm delighted to announce a weekend of free online events celebrating two anthologies from Vernon Press, Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier and Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away, edited by Emily Strand and Yours Truly. We hope you'll join us!

Register for Sept. 9 event here.

Register for Sept. 10 event here.

See more about the books here.

[sarahreesbrennan]

Goodbye, September!

Being Barnes & Noble’s SFF Book of the Month meant getting to sign piles of books wherever I went, having LONG LIVE EVIL in windows, seeing cool displays and my fabulous poster, having a wonderful event with the lovely Rachel Gillig, seeing other books on my Evil Table - it was especially thrilling when I saw books that were inspirations for LONG LIVE EVIL (shouted out in my acknowledgments!) like Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora, anything Leigh Bardugo, Spinning Silver and THE PRINCESS BRIDE ON MY TABLE DO YOU SEE IT.

I’m mostly a text girl on my tumblr, but it was a wonderful time. Overwhelming (I was a slug with the amnesia for a week there) but wonderful. I was really sure, after cancer and losing many professional friends and contacts and after people in publishing TOLD me I was done, that I was done. I am so grateful to see Evil being embraced, to my publisher and my readers for giving me a chance. Publishing is a strange game, and it’s early days yet. This could all fall through. Sometimes you go into strange worlds for one brief adventure and sometimes they become home. But I want to be very joyful, even if just for a moment.

(Also yes I stole a book trolley and ran around B&N Union Square. That’s not important at this time.)

LONG LIVE EVIL has been on US bestseller lists for 4 weeks.

Farewell, September. Farewell, Evil Tables. You were a hell of a birthday month. I’ll miss you. I’m happy you happened.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Adult SFF Books Bracket: Round 1

Book summaries below:

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

1883. Thaniel Steepleton returns home to his tiny London apartment to find a gold pocket watch on his pillow. Six months later, the mysterious timepiece saves his life, drawing him away from a blast that destroys Scotland Yard. At last, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori, a kind, lonely immigrant from Japan. Although Mori seems harmless, a chain of unexplainable events soon suggests he must be hiding something. When Grace Carrow, an Oxford physicist, unwittingly interferes, Thaniel is torn between opposing loyalties.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a sweeping, atmospheric narrative that takes the reader on an unexpected journey through Victorian London, Japan as its civil war crumbles long-standing traditions, and beyond. Blending historical events with dazzling flights of fancy, it opens doors to a strange and magical past.

Fantasy, historical fiction, mystery, science fiction, adult

The Burning Kingdoms series (The Jasmine Throne, The Oleander Sword, The Lotus Empire) by Tasha Suri

Author of Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, beginning a new trilogy set in a world inspired by the history and epics of India, in which a captive princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden magic become unlikely allies on a dark journey to save their empire from the princess’s traitor brother.

Imprisoned by her dictator brother, Malini spends her days in isolation in the Hirana: an ancient temple that was once the source of the powerful, magical deathless waters — but is now little more than a decaying ruin.

Priya is a maidservant, one among several who make the treacherous journey to the top of the Hirana every night to clean Malini’s chambers. She is happy to be an anonymous drudge, so long as it keeps anyone from guessing the dangerous secret she hides.

But when Malini accidentally bears witness to Priya’s true nature, their destinies become irrevocably tangled. One is a vengeful princess seeking to depose her brother from his throne. The other is a priestess seeking to find her family. Together, they will change the fate of an empire.

Fantasy, epic fantasy, politics, secondary world, series, adult

[so-i-did-this-thing]

Hi, I’m so glad you’re living somewhere (relatively) safer and kinder. I moved to north Florida for work last fall (lived in CT, worked in NY) and I was wondering if you had any advice on finding one’s people in a state full of … not one’s people or just acclimating to southern life in general. There are some interesting things to do and places to go but i mostly go alone because I feel like I’m constantly navigating a minefield every time I try to make new friends.

Also I have moved All Creatures to the top of my list for 2025, just have to decide if I start with the book or old or new series. Thank you for all the positivity you provide.

ACGAS: The books aren't necessary, but it's fun to see what bits get adapted and some things are funnier if you know the book stories. :)

As for the culture shock, I'll let folks weigh in. I'm a bit of a homebody (or just do things solo) and most of my queer & arty community come via the cosplay/fandom scene.

The major cities in Florida are, of course, going to run more blue. Orlando and Tampa both have big Pride events. Random places of interest can be surprisingly affirming, The Birds of Prey center outside Orlando being a favorite LGBTQ+ ally.

Since you're in north Florida, if SFF conventions are anything up your alley, Dragoncon in Atlanta (Labor Day weekend every year) is a great way to possibly find your people. But, that's only once a year and a very specific event.

I've been out of Florida too long now to know how certain clubs and whatnot run. So, I'm hoping other people can chime in with suggestions for meeting people who are accepting and creative. I'm sad you're feeling isolated right now, and I hope there are opportunities for you to make friends. <3

[whilereadingandwalking]

Do you prefer paperbacks or hardcover? Also, where/how do you find new books to read? Love your blog! 💕☀️

I'm a paperback girl! I like to read on the go, whether it's walking, on public transit, or in line at events. I don't like my book to be bulky or heavy when I can avoid it, and I'd love for it to fit well in my hands—so I generally prefer paperback. Especially now that I have the fibro, too, my hands can get achy, so even at home, reading a big (size-wise, hardcovers feel top-heavy in your hands) or heavy book can be a bit painful for me. So unless it's a very pretty book or first edition, I usually try and go for paperback.

Now, I'm very lucky to be in the middle of a really lovely book community, so I hear about great books from every direction. I follow readers who I find interesting or who like similar things as I do on Instagram and on here, and see what they're reading or what they recommend. I hear from my fellow Book Riot writers and trawl through lists of upcoming SFF releases to see if there's anything I missed. And sometimes, I do the old classic: I wander an indie bookstore and look for things that catch my eye or come staff-recommended!

[wearethekat]

Anticipated New Releases of 2024

**As anticipated by Me. Mostly SFF. Links are to goodreads because that's what I use, sorry. Anything marked "new to me" I haven't read anything by that author before and therefore can't vouch for the quality. I just think the premise is neat.**

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands, Heather Fawcett (16 January)

Sequel to the charming novel about the fairy anthropologist.

Exordia, Seth Dickinson (23 January)

Well, it isn't a new Baru Cormorant, but this modern SF about first contact may be the next best thing.

City of Stardust, Georgia Summers (30 January)

New to me. A young woman descends into the underworld in order to break her family's fatal curse.

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (6 February)

New to me. A sherlock holmes flavored duo solves the mystery of the murder of an imperial official in a labyrinthine fantasy realm.

What Feasts at Night, T Kingfisher (13 February)

The sequel to the mushroom horror book What Moves the Dead.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden (13 February)

A ghost story set in WW1 about a woman searching for her missing brother.

The Fox Wife, Yangsze Choo (13 February)

New to me. A detective in 1908 Manchuria investigates a young woman's death in an area full of mythical foxes.

Redsight, Meredith Mooring (27 February)

New to me. Unpowered priestess and Imperial pawn is set on a collision path with a pirate with a grudge for the Imperium (Gay romance).

Sunbringer, Hannah Kaner (12 March)

Sequel about the professional godkiller Kissen.

Jumpnauts, Hao Jingfang (12 March)

New to me. A SF novel in translation from Chinese, with three scientists joining forces to deal peacefully with a first contact situation.

The Woods All Black, Lee Mandelo (19 March)

I liked Mandelo's debut novel very much so I'm excited to read this queer horror novella set in 1920s Appalachia.

Floating Hotel, Grace Curtis (19 March)

New to me. A series of cozy character vignettes on a space cruise ship after a murder has occurred. One of the four (!) space hotel murder crimes books coming out this year.

The Emperor and the Endless Palace, Justinian Huang (26 March)

New to me. Reincarnation gay romance set in 4 BCE China, the 1740s, and modern-day LA.

Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (28 March)

Far future space xenoarchaeology by a man trapped on a prison planet.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (2 April)

New to me. Bizarre lesbian cannibalism monster romance from the point of view of the monster.

The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo (9 April)

Glad to see Bardugo writing more adult fantasy, and this one is especially exciting because it's a fantasy set in early modern Spain with a Jewish main character. Fun to see a more original historical period.

A Sweet Sting of Salt, Rose Sutherland (9 April)

New to me. Lesbian selkie romance.

Death in the Spires, KJ Charles (11 April)

Charles branching out from romance into historical Oxford murder mystery about a group of friends with dark secrets.

Audrey Lane Stirs The Pot, Alexis Hall (22 April)

The new Hall thinly veiled british baking show romcom. Libby says it's releasing in April but I've heard nothing from the author so I think it may be Alecto'd (shifted to next year)

Necrobane, Daniel M Ford (23 April)

Sequel to the dungeons and dragons-esque low fantasy lesbian necromancy book.

A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Sylvie Cathrall (25 April)

New to me. Sweet underwater epistolary academic romance.

How To Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, Django Wexler (21 May)

New to me. A young hero caught in a fantasy time loop gives up and tries being the villain in an attempt to escape.

Goddess of the River, Vaishnavi Patel (21 May)

Another woman-centered retelling of Hindu mythology, this time based on the river goddess Ganga.

Escape Velocity, Victor Manibo (21 May)

New to me. Evil and toxic private school alumni jockey for position in a space hotel event in an attempt to escape a dying Earth.

The Fireborne Blade, Charlotte Bond (28 May)

New to me. Gay dragon slaying knight novella.

Evocation, ST Gibson (28 May)

New to me but looks very cool. Attorney and medium David attempts to escape his deal with the devil with the help of his ex boyfriend and his ex boyfriend's wife (Poly romance).

Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky (4 June)

In an SF future, a robot kills its human owners and ventures out into a world where human supremacy is beginning to crumble.

Lady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow (4 June)

New to me. A con artist seeks revenge on the man who hurt her sister, who's coincidentally also on a space cruise ship (Sapphic romance subplot).

Triple Sec, TJ Alexander (4 June)

An actual mainstream published poly romance (!!) by trans author Alexander.

Running Close to the Wind, Alexandra Rowland (11 June)

Gay! Pirates! Scheming! Alt fantasy world! Monks! I liked Taste of Gold and Iron a lot and I'm very excited for this one.

The Knife and the Serpent, Tim Pratt (11 June)

New to me. Space opera about an interdimensional organization. Also, there's a sentient starship.

The Witchstone, Henry Neff (18 June)

A childhood favorite of mine's adult debut, featuring a demon who suddenly has to shape up at his curse keeper job after eight hundred years of slacking.

Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (18 June)

VERY excited to read more weird queer sff from this author after a fantastic debut. Looks weird. I'm in.

Foul Days, Genoveva Dimova (25 June)

New to me. A witch in a Slavic fantasy inspired world flees her evil ex, the Tsar of Monsters. There's also a plague and a detective.

Saints of Storm and Sorrow, Gabriella Buba (25 June)

New to me. Filipino inspired anticolonialist fantasy novel about a nun who is secretly practicing the religion of her goddess.

The Duke at Hazard, KJ Charles (18 July)

A queer regency with an incognito duke by one of my particular favorite romance authors.

Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan (30 July)

!!! Very excited to see a new adult fantasy by Brennan. A reader is dragged into a fictional world and finds herself the villain.

A Sorceress Comes to Call, T Kingfisher (20 August)

A retelling of The Goose Girl from reliably good fairy tale stalwart Kingfisher.

Buried Deep and Other Stories, Naomi Novik (17 September)

Collection of Novik's short stories.

Swordcrossed, Freya Marske (8 October)

VERY excited to see a new book by talented writer Marske. A man falls in love with the duelist hired for his arranged wedding. MEANWHILE. details of the fantasy world wool industry.

Feast While You Can, Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta (29 October)

New to me. Small town queer cave horror.

The Last Hour Between Worlds, Melissa Caruso (19 November)

Multiple reality murder mystery spy vs spy type antics, with lesbians.

[abigailspinach]

You’ve seen it before: The hero drops his voice into its lowest register, so you know he means business. I never want to see you again. The love interest’s eyes fill up with tears. Is this real? Why are you doing this? Beneath his stony façade, he’s heartbroken too, but there’s no help for it. For her own safety, he has to nobly deny his own happiness, and hers, and go off into the night, a lone wolf once more. If not, what of his enemies? Etc.

I have seen this scenario play out, conservatively, one trillion times without anyone asking any follow-up questions like “Doesn’t Doc Ock already know he cares about MJ, though?” or “Why does she think this will solve her problems?”

My private trope rule is that the required level of in-universe plausibility for deploying a given trope stands in direct proportion to the plot significance the trope is being asked to bear. If there’s only one bed for a couple of chapters or a single TV episode, I don’t need a ton of groundwork from the writers on that. If the characters are enemies who then become lovers, and that’s the whole arc of the book, then I am going to need some solid basis for their starting enmity, and I will then need it to be resoundingly overcome. Put in the litcrit language of Tumblr nerds, I need the load-bearing tropes to have a rock-solid Watsonian grounding.

The formulation of Watsonian vs Doylist explanations distinguishes between in-universe and extra-textual reasons why certain things happen in a story. The Watsonian explanation draws only on in-universe context: Spider-man has trauma from what happened to Gwen Stacy, so it makes sense that he would try to protect MJ by breaking up with her even though they are in love. (This doesn’t help us explain what Tobey Maguire’s problem is, but I do not have time just now to get into all the various Spider-mans and my feelings about Gwen Stacy.) The Doylist explanation acknowledges the motives and intentions of the writers: If the hero’s relationship is all sunshine and roses in between supervillain attacks, a narrative avenue is foreclosed. If he gets together with his girlfriend once, and then he breaks her heart to save her, that means the writers, and the readers, have the fun of getting them together a second time.

It is fun. I do like it. But I’m damned if I can think of a romance trope that’s gone so thoroughly un-deconstructed.

For whatever reason, authors count so much on readers recognizing and enjoying this trope in SFF romances that they don’t bother coming up with a plausible Watsonian reason for its inclusion. It’s just what happens when a certain brand of SFF protagonist has a romance that stretches over more than one movie/book/season. I want writers to ground this sequence of events in character and relationship, but it’s maddeningly rare for them to actually do it. The audience is asked to take it as read that the heartbreaker is acting in their partner’s best interests, and that the heartbreakee eventually comes to understand this, doesn’t mind too much, and is prepared to move the relationship forward as soon as the heartbreaker stops actively trying to break their heart. Until this literal year, nobody, not once not ever, has bothered putting in the work to convince me that any part of this sequence of events made plot or emotional sense.

This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

At the end of the second book, Painted Devils, Vanja leaves Emeric for his own good, on the principle that their enemies will use her against him if they’re together. She’s really cruel about it, to make sure it sticks. She takes off with the Wild Hunt and intends never to see him again. Then you will never guess what happens in Holy Terrors. Yes! She sees him again! Now he’s engaged! And you know what, I talked a big game earlier about my expectations for load-bearing tropes and what the authors owed me, but I have to be honest right now and admit that Margaret Owen had me for cheap. I didn’t need her to unpack one single thing. I love these characters. I had been waiting several years. Emeric shows up engaged, and I’m like, yes, good, great, I accept. Vanja left him for his own good. Now he is engaged to someone else, and they have to stop a magical serial killer together. Daiyenu.

But these books are operating on a different, better level, and a good chunk of Holy Terrors is dedicated to unpacking what Vanja did and why she did it. Margaret Owen does with the trope what you’re supposed to do with tropes: She uses it to tell us more about these two characters and how they relate to each other and what that means for their future. Vanja’s starting point, at the end of Painted Devils, was her certainty that she would always be a weapon someone would use against Emeric. (What of his enemies?) No matter how often he promised her it wouldn’t happen that way, she knew he’d eventually be forced to choose between his life’s work and his relationship with her. So she leaves. She breaks his heart, to save him.

Or… Is that what she does? Is that why she does it?

In a book about the many lives we could have lived, Owen produces a world of possible answers to those questions. The deepest, most painful reason for why Vanja did what she did is that she can’t believe she’s good enough for Emeric. When she thinks about staying with him, she remembers how her mother—who abandoned her when Vanja was four years old—used to say of her, “Whatever she touches falls to ruin.”

Each section of the book begins with a story about a choice Vanja could have made differently, and what her life would have looked like, then. It’s a hint at the story the book is telling. In one version of her life, Vanja goes straight and wonders if that has made her “worthy of a prefect.” In another, she and Emeric stay with each other, but it comes—as Vanja always feared—at the price of Emeric’s professional success. A voice in her head asks her, “How could someone like you ever be anything but a burden?”

At one point in the main narrative, a bruised and angry Emeric tells Vanja coldly that he knows why she left. “You needed to do to me what your mother did to you,” he says. “You needed to understand her, so you repeated her actions. You were trying to find answers by abandoning me.” It’s not the story Vanja’s been telling herself, the story of choosing to give up her happiness to protect the possibility of Emeric’s, but it’s not a million miles off the truth, either. Owen’s been showing us all along that Vanja’s relationship with her mother left behind fault lines that Vanja has had to learn how to live with. When a friend asks her if she still believes what her mother told her, that she could only bring harm to Emeric, Vanja says with all the honesty she can muster, “I’m trying not to, these days.”

This—the recognition that the heartbreaker is operating from a place of internal damage, rather than rational good sense—is already ten thousand times more interesting than any other version of breaking someone’s heart to save them than I’ve ever encountered in my life before. But Margaret Owen’s not done. In one confrontation, Vanja finally manages to articulate what Emeric was contributing to their dynamic. When they were together, before she left him, when she tried to point out problems to him, or voice her uncertainties, he hastened to insist the problems didn’t exist and he had solutions for her uncertainties. Without ever intending to, he made her believe that the only version of her he could love would be one that fit neatly into his life, the life of a prefect. “You saw someone you wanted to see in me,” Vanja tells him. “Not someone I ever could have been.”

So yeah: there was more to it than breaking his heart to save him. She messed up. He messed up. The thing is, though, none of that is the real problem, just the substrate for the real problem. The rupture in Vanja’s relationship with Emeric still matters, is still a thing to be repaired; but the truth she arrives at, ultimately, is that she couldn’t be with Emeric until she grew into a person who could be with Emeric. If this sounds like a tautology, it’s the tautology that underlines the romance genre. The best romances are stories of becoming. Romance protagonists don’t just happen to meet the loves of their lives. They have to become the self that can receive the love that will carry them into their happily ever after.I didn’t realize how much I was craving a proper Watsonian explication of the break-his-heart-to-save-him trope until Margaret Owen came along. She took the trope by the scruff of its neck, put it through its paces, and shook like seventeen different emotional truths out of it. I complained recently about romantasy’s tendency to reproduce tropes without bothering too much about them, and Holy Terrors is the glorious antithesis to that trend. This is tropes done right, the absolute acme of playing with tropes in SFF romance. Margaret Owen’s setting the bar that I’ll now always be asking the genre to meet

[voyaging-too]

March books and such

Recs Bolded.

Books

William Gibson: Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy 2). Sequel to Neuromancer. The plot is somehow too simple and too complicated at the same time, but I don’t really mind because the characters (one elite mercenary, one disgraced art dealer, one suburban kid in way over his head) are just as lost as I am, wandering around a complex lived-in world full of wonderful subplots and supporting cast. Top-notch classic cyberpunk with corporate espionage and simulated virtual realities and weird AI gods.

William Gibson: Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl Trilogy 3). Concludes the trilogy with yet more cyberpunk shenanigans and yet more hapless humans (world-famous influencer, yakuza heiress, traumatised reclusive artist, penniless teenage addict), caught up in the inscrutable machinations of all-powerful international corporations and rogue AI. Probably my favourite in the trilogy, because of the drop-dead gorgeous writing, the humour, the massive amounts of idiosyncratic weirdies populating the plot, and the return of an older, wiser Molly Millions. Gibson is not great at writing women, but here he made a concerted effort, and as a result, we have three very distinct female POV characters, all of whom I love but especially Mona herself.

Doris Lessing: Shikasta (Canopus in Argos 1) I’ve seen this book brought up as an example of what happens when a literary author decides to write sci-fi without a solid grounding in the genre’s conventions and possibilities. And that’s kind of true, but it’s only a small part of why this book is so weird. Lessing was already weird, her literary books were already doing weird things to pacing and structure. This novel is like… a novella about the fall of a prehistorical civilisation, then a few tales reinterpreting the events of the Old Testament, then a long compilation of very short stories, most of them brief fictionalised biographies of individual people in 20th century Britain, then a first-person novella about three siblings in a dystopian near-future, then an epistolary novelette about some teenagers doing a mock trial against the whole of Europe, which runs into another epistolary story about preparing for nuclear annihilation, these disparate pieces glued together by a framing device that involves aliens who observe and try to influence human history. Weird inconsistent book, but the good parts are extremely good. Some of the best short stories I’ve read in my life pretending to be a novel.

Andrea Dworkin: Right Wing Women. This is a feminist nonfiction classic for a reason. Easy to read, hard to forget. Yes, a fair bit of it is hastily written analyses of specific 1970s questions and conflicts, but the rest of it is painfully applicable even today. It’s a stark statement about how much of our society is built on facilitating marital rape, and how many women make the rational choice to accept and shore up that system in order to avoid even worse violence.

JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit. (German practice reread.) Everybody knows what the Hobbit is, it’s still good on reread although very much an episodic children’s book that swerves into a tragic war story at the very last minute. It sure has a lot of vocabulary that I didn't have before, most of it related to trees.

Jo Walton: Among Others. I loved the premise, loved the semi-autobiographical perspective of a teenage Welsh SFF-fan in the 1970s, I absolutely loved the low-key and hard-to-interpret fairy magic. But the book itself didn’t work for me, the writing didn’t work for me, too much of it felt like inert padding between the few fragile pieces of plot, and the constant name-dropping of 1970ies SFF titles didn’t give me a real connection to the character or a real sense of the historical fandom, instead I felt like I was reading a version of Ready Player One for people who actually read.

Star War

Revenge of the Sith. A double tragedy. A tragedy because if the characters made slightly different choices they could have had a happy ending, and a meta-tragedy because if the filmmakers made slightly different choices they could have made a good tragedy, as opposed to a frustrating muddle. Key parts of the plot are cribbed from Dune: Messiah and applied without context. Padme is written so atrociously badly it loops around and becomes a bold feminist statement on how a relationship can turn you into a shell of your former self.

Clone Wars Season 1. The dialogue and the moral lessons are written for eight-year-olds, the setting and the war story plots are written for fifty-year-old dads, it is dumb and doesn’t mesh well. There are some flashes of something almost interesting, and I’m told that that there’s more of that in later seasons.

A More Civilized Age Podcast, Season 1. Four people with varying levels of knowledge about Star War watch and discuss a star war. It’s funny, it’s smart, sometimes they yell at the show for being dumb and bad, sometimes they give it incredible amounts of grace and basically invent the secret good version of it, it’s fun.

Theatre

Ariane Mnouchkine & Théatre du Soleil: Ici sont les dragons. A play about 1917: I expected either the bloody yet justified glory of the revolution, or the justified yet bloody execution of the tsar. Instead I mostly got endless political discussions between various revolutionary factions in various rooms. This play said: the original sin of the Russian Revolution wasn’t killing the tsar, and it wasn’t even killing the tsar’s children, all that hardly matters now: the original sin of the Russian Revolution was killing the emperor and then choosing to remain an Empire. Suppressing non-bolshevik revolutionary parties, even fellow socialists, and deciding not to let Ukraine go, Lenin let the Russian Empire survive, and it survived Socialism and the fall of Socialism and survives today. A dark bitter weird play in five languages with subtitles, metafictional digressions, long quotes from memoirs and history books, and historical figures portrayed by actors in rubber face masks of Lenin, Stalin and so on, yes really, it was a hard watch, except for a gorgeous five-minute farce about Lenin in his pyjamas.

Exhibitions (I got to go to Paris last month)

Louvre: Revoir Cimabue. Religious art from the 13th century, when some people had already started painting interesting, differentiated faces, but everyone was still indicating holiness by drowning the painting in golf leaf. Strange arched features, hooded eyes and green-tinged skin in a sea of gold, altarpieces just shining with divinity. Works by Cimabue and also all of his contemporaries and precursors and students because not even the Louvre has enough Cimabues to fill a small room.

Pompidou: Suzanne Valadon. May be my new favourite artist. She started modelling for painters as a teenager, she features in works by Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and a dozen other great Parisian painters at the turn of the century. She learned painting from being painted, and started making her own work, first drawings, then eventually oil paintings. Her work is idiosyncratic and meanly realistic but also warm. Her portraits and her nudes are all wonderfully mundane. She was one of the first women to paint not only female but also male nudes, from life. (But the Salon of Independents made her add a strategic leaf or they wouldn’t exhibit it. No! Let her paint cock!) My absolute favourite painting from her was also centred at the exhibition, because look at it, The Blue Room is just perfect, she doesn’t give a shit, she’s in her pyjamas.

But I also loved Lady with Little Dog, partly because of the little dog, partly because of the colours of the drape, partly because the androgyny of the model.

[inkcurlsandknives]

2024 has been a complete and utter whirlwind of a debut year. My Debut novel Saints of Storm and Sorrow came out in June, it was named Spotify's best of 2024 so far, was Amazon editors pick for top SFF in July and made @reactorsff best books of 2024 . I had my first nonfiction anthology placement with @thewithlovebook and my first specifically queer fantasy anthology with Of Stardust a Fantastical Queer Anthology

From launching Saints of Storm and Sorrow in London with AY Chao and then book tour events in Texas and California with some of the coolest folks. All while working on Daughters of Flood and Fury

The outpouring of love and support for my angry little book has been overwhelming and I'm so grateful to everyone who reached out to let me know how Saints resonated with them, attended an event, left a review, requested saints at their library, wrote and talked and made art about Saints (Cosplayed Saints🙌🏽) and showed up in so many amazing creative ways

I got to have an event @kubo.lb in Long Beach with both my audiobook narrators Danice Cabanela and Dante Basco which was absolutely amazing

I presented in the @fanhs2024 conference with amazing Filipino authors, did panels for @write_hive was a community partner in the largest Filipino street festival in the south @htownfilfest

Truly I have no idea how I fit so much in

[dramyhsturgis]

Free Star Trek and Star Wars Book Event Online

Everyone is welcome! The Mythgard Institute at Signum University will be dedicating its upcoming "Mythgard Miscellany" Pub Night to a celebration of our two Vernon Press anthologies, Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier and Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away. You're invited to this free and informal event, live on Zoom at 6pm Eastern on Sunday, September 10.

Register here (it's free)!

[sapphoshands]

14 and 18 for the year end thing pls!

14. Favourite book you read this year?

i was hoping no one would ask this because i could NOT think of anything i'd read that really made an impact at first! so i went to see what i had bought this year and actually omg i DO have an answer. totally totally the steerswoman by rosemary kirstein (and sequels). they've been on my list for years but i think the last few times i looked, the library didn't have them, or didn't have the first one, or something. but i finally got the first one sometime this summer and devoured it and the other three, and then bought my own copies, and followed the author. and i am now part of her patreon to help fund the writing of the final books. these are incredibly inventive, unique, genre-defying novels with incredible characters and a fascinating world. if you like SFF and have not read them, i hugely recommend. and now i want to re-read them...

18. A memorable meal this year?

i answered this once, but i must've eaten more than one good meal, hm! you know what? every year i spend a week at a work event in a different city that involves four or five ten- to twelve-hour days inside a very black box. in 2023, we discovered a DELICIOUS food court salad place and ate probably half our meals from there, and i was genuinely excited to go back and order from it again, and it was just as good every time. it's THE most basic but during that ridiculous week it is so good and healthy and filling. (we also had a pretty decent mid-week meal at the v fancy restaurant attached to the building, but nah, i remember the salads.)

(year-end asks)

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Adult SFF Books Bracket: Round 1

Book summaries below:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers series) by Becky Chambers

Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.

Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.

Science fiction, adventure, series, adult

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.

2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.

Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?

Science fiction, time travel, alternate history, science fantasy, adult