Sci-fi. A scientist who has developed sophisticated human cloning technology that works but that has not yet been broadly commercialized finds out that her husband is somehow having an affair with a clone of her. Told in a first-person voice that wonderfully conveys (particularly in the audiobook) the suffer-no-fools, brilliant, not really very nice, damaged, …
Middle grade/YA. Contemporary fantasy, I suppose. Follows a teen Lipan Apache girl on not-quite-our-Earth and a cottonmouth snake animal person in the world of animal people that is a sort of reflection of Earth, an alternate dimension with which it was once wholly joined but which is now only connected through a small number of …
Speculative short stories. I’ve known Link’s name and reputation for years but never read anything by her before…well, I should say I have never read any entire books by her before, because I realized part way through listening to this one that I had encountered one of the stories somewhere else, though I don’t remember …
Literary fiction that is both historical and has a bit of a speculative element. Coming of age in the impoverished, queer, artistic fringe of the Black Atlantic in the 1990s, coupled with an unexpected look at the burgeoning surveillance culture of that era. Captures the feel of a moment that is passing, of a time …
Sci fi. Set far enough in the future that there has been a major climate crisis-related collapse on Earth and then a recovery, as well as expansion of humanity to points within the solar system and even to the stars beyond. It is a universe with no non-human sentient species, at least so far, and …
A wide ranging work of nonfiction drawing out the connections between the climate crisis and colonialism. Though I had not previously heard of him, the author is a well-known novelist and essayist, and while this book is intellectually substantive enough to be a work of scholarship, it has very clearly been written by a *writer* …
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.
Contemporary fiction. Short stories. All of them centre Black women, I think particularly Black women in or from the US South, in a range of relations with faith and family and love and friendship and desire. Short, readable, and engaging. Generally speaking, when I read short fiction, I prefer it to be either genre or …
History. Examines the interconnections between colonialism in the British Empire and slavery in the United States, primarily over the period from the abolition of slavery in the former in the 1830s to its abolition in the latter in the 1860s. At least in part because of how history is so often written in national silos, …
Historical sf/f. Steampunk. In the late 19th century, idealistic (but somewhat misguided) socialists from Europe and formerly enslaved people from North America purchase territory in what is now the Congo from the brutal colonial regime of Belgium’s King Leopold II, and join forces with those already living there (some of whom have mysterious access to …