It's the first picture of the new Arboreality in the wild! The new version has a silky matte cover, gold foil title text, and aged and distressed Ursula K Le Guin Prize and Philip K Dick awards medallions + more!
Another post about this cool book I'm currently reading: "The Sol Majestic" by Ferrett Steinmetz. Gotta love that name.
Have you ever wondered how a top-rated restaurant might function on a space station? Light years from any planet? Well, Ferrett Steinmetz thought about it and came up with:
-artificial gravity used to cook things using the heat generated by enormous planetary-scale pressures instead of direct heat
-stasis fields instead of fridges (duh) but also speeded-up time field used to sneak a week's worth of work into an hour
-an alien sourdough culture that MIGHT be sentient
All of this is an excellent backdrop for a story of a young boy finding (gay) love, seeking independence from his parents, and exploring questions of philosophy, truth, capitalism, and marketing. It's not #SolarPunk, but it has that homey vibe.
I really enjoyed the book. An android with human-like features is nothing new in sci-fi, but I really liked this version. The main character android is very likeable.
@timgatewood@bookstodon@peachfront@EvaLie@Omom4075
Oh, I love this series. Book 2 may be my favorite (ART is the best). Or maybe the more recent full length novel. Or the murder mystery Sam Spade-esque stand alone novella (set just before the longer novel). So hard to pick!
The #Kindle edition of "Shards" is now available for #free on Amazon's various international storefronts. This will be the case until October 4th, so get while the getting's good.
@markdevries@bookstodon@horror@scifi Sadly, I haven't had much luck publishing eBooks anywhere else. My first two novels for example were available on other platforms such as Apple Books and Google Play for years but never sold enough to justify keeping them there when compared to being Amazon exclusive via Kindle Unlimited. Fortunately, things aren't quite so locked down on the print side of things, at least for paperbacks, and those can now often be found in (or ordered by) various places.
Taking the form of an extended mission message to earth from an intergalactic exploratory mission, Becky Chambers' #scifi novella, To be Taught if Fortunate (2019), is a quick read. While lacking narrative fireworks its a pleasing matter-of-fact description of space exploration & the ethical dilemmas it will encounter. While ultimately rather melancholy, it is an interesting afternoon's read if you like procedural #speculativefiction @bookstodon
Heinlein did about the ultimate gender reassignment in "I Will Fear no Evil"...when Johann Sebastian Bach Smith's brain is transplanted into Eunice's body, and it turns out the body had a "mind" of its own.
!!! Sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter for this super cool Ukrainian SFF anthology launches! Many stories, both translated from Ukrainian and written originally in English.
As a heads up to my #readers, I'd highly recommend catching up on any of my first six #books that you might have missed by the end of this year. My 7th, while still a standalone, is very much tied to everything that's come before it and will likely hit a lot harder for you if you're at least somewhat familiar with one or more of my previous works. #readingcommunity
@michaelshotter@bookstodon "Red, White & Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston is a romantic novel. Find out how two friends were forced to fake a friendship for political reasons, but their feelings deepened into a secret romance that challenges their lives and the world's perception. https://bit.ly/445UfVI
Esko Suoranta will defend his dissertation "The Sky Above the Port Was the Color of Capitalism: Literary Affordance and Technonaturalist Speculative Fiction" in a public examination at the #UniversityOfHelsinki on Saturday, August 26, 14:00 (Helsinki time).
Everyone can attend the event on Zoom at https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/62861691846,
or, should you find yourself in Helsinki at the time, you can join us at Porthania, room PIII, Yliopistonkatu 3, 00100 Helsinki.
@bookstodon My #review of #TheThickandTheLean by #ChanaPorter is now live! Another read that left me thinking for a long time after. I wish some things about it had been different, but overall, it's great.
@kamreadsandrecs@bookstodon Odd. And tropey. Yes, it's true that given that this is a book published in 2023, there's likely more to this story than what appears. I'll be diplomatic about this since I'm a SingleIssueWonk and this isn't my issue. However, AFAICT it doesn't explain anything about the story's HiddenDepths; the review merely outlines its genre conventions, portraying what is likely not genre fiction as mere genre fiction. The problem likely isn't the book, but the review./gen
@FlorriePuddlefoot@qurlyjoe@yerald@bookstodon start at the beginning with Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. the sequels mostly stand alone but the first book builds the world and has great found family vibes
During the hourly wake of the city's mourners,
I escaped
to where none of us dared venture,
with the gynandromorphophile's long shadow
over my shoulder,
I escaped
to where no other nectar but yours—the XY-code's,
was harvested by the drones…