FanFare

The latest in Martha Wells's stellar Murderbot series, novella-length Fugitive Telemetry, is out. [more inside]
posted by Coaticass on Apr 29, 2021 - 20 comments

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on. Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on Jul 31, 2020 - 6 comments

Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story. Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math. Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet. Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained.
posted by dinty_moore on Jul 3, 2020 - 5 comments

Cairo, 1912: The case started as a simple one for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities ― handling a possessed tram car. Soon, however, Agent Hamed Nasr and his new partner Agent Onsi Youssef are exposed to a new side of Cairo stirring with suffragettes, secret societies, and sentient automatons in a race against time to protect the city from an encroaching danger that crosses the line between the magical and the mundane. [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on Jun 28, 2020 - 6 comments

Based off of the song with the same title by Clipping. The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society—and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future.
posted by dinty_moore on Jun 12, 2020 - 7 comments

The 2020 Hugo Award Winning Novellettes - works between 7,500 and 17,500 words, or roughly 30 - 70 pages. This is including works by NK Jemisin, Sarah Gailey, Sarah Pinsker, Caroline M. Yoachim, Siobhan Carroll, and Ted Chiang (full texts as they are available in the post) [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on May 23, 2020 - 2 comments

Hugo nominated short stories from Shiv Ramdas, SL Huang, Rivers Solomon, Fran Wilde, Alix E Harrow, and Nibedita Sen (links to the complete stories inside) [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on May 1, 2020 - 3 comments

I'm planning on going ahead with doing the Hugo Awards club again, doing one post a week between May 1st and July 31st. [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on Apr 29, 2020 - 3 comments

It has a dark past – one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…
posted by dinty_moore on Jul 18, 2019 - 13 comments

Shuos Jedao is awake.... and nothing is as he remembers. In his mind he’s a teenager, a cadet—a nobody. But he finds himself in the body of an old man, a general controlling the elite forces of the hexarchate, and the most feared—and reviled—man in the galaxy. Hexarch Nirai Kujen orders Jedao to reconquer the fractured hexarchate on his behalf even though Jedao has no memory of ever being a soldier, let alone a general. Surely a knack for video games doesn't qualify you to take charge of an army? Soon Jedao learns the situation is even worse. The Kel soldiers under his command may be compelled to obey him, but they hate him thanks to a massacre he can't remember committing. Kujen's friendliness can't hide the fact that he's a tyrant. And what's worse, Jedao and Kujen are being hunted by an enemy who knows more about Jedao and his crimes than he does himself..
posted by dinty_moore on Jul 15, 2019 - 4 comments

The multiple Eisner Award-winning series returns with a spacefaring adventure about fake news and genuine terror. Warning: Feelings. Collects SAGA #49-54 [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on Jul 11, 2019 - 4 comments

Beneath the Sugar Sky, the third book in McGuire's Wayward Children series, returns to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in a standalone contemporary fantasy for fans of all ages. When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest – not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can't find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests... A tale of friendship, baking, and derring-do. [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on Jul 8, 2019 - 11 comments

The mind-bending, time-warping adventure from Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang continues, as intrepid newspaper deliverer Tiffany is launched from the prehistoric past into the year 2000! In this harrowing version of our past, Y2K was even more of a cataclysm than experts feared, and the only person who can save the future is a 12-year-old girl from 1988. (Issues 16 - 20), colors by Matt Wilson.
posted by dinty_moore on Jul 1, 2019 - 4 comments

On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, including Washington D.C. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space, and requires a much larger share of humanity to take part in the process. Elma York’s experience as a WASP pilot and mathematician earns her a place in the International Aerospace Coalition’s attempts to put man on the moon, as a calculator. But with so many skilled and experienced women pilots and scientists involved with the program, it doesn’t take long before Elma begins to wonder why they can’t go into space, too.
posted by dinty_moore on Jun 17, 2019 - 12 comments

Creeper, a scrappy young teen, is done living on the streets of New Orleans. Instead, she wants to soar, and her sights are set on securing passage aboard the smuggler airship Midnight Robber. Her ticket: earning Captain Ann-Marie’s trust using a secret about a kidnapped Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God’s Drums.
posted by dinty_moore on Jun 3, 2019 - 2 comments

An Android, Jane 57821, attempts to break free from the constraints of a totalitarian society that forcibly makes Jane comply with its homophobic beliefs. [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on Jun 3, 2019 - 5 comments

While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last—and best—hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much larger and more terrifying than anything she could imagine.
posted by dinty_moore on May 27, 2019 - 11 comments

In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity's ancestral habitat. She's spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.
posted by dinty_moore on May 13, 2019 - 5 comments

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets the joy and glamour of Eurovision in Catherynne M. Valente's science fiction spectacle, where sentient races compete for glory in a galactic musical contest…and the stakes are as high as the fate of planet Earth.
posted by dinty_moore on May 6, 2019 - 16 comments

All of the novelettes (stories between 7,500 and 17,500 words) that were nominated for a Hugo this year. [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on May 4, 2019 - 11 comments

Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, the appearance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.
posted by dinty_moore on Apr 22, 2019 - 9 comments

We talked about this last year, but nothing really got set up. Is anyone interested in having a club everything related to the hugo award nominees this year? If so, which categories? What posting schedule would make sense? [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore on Apr 2, 2019 - 15 comments