Science fiction. Set in Nigeria with the main timeline in 2066 and flashbacks to earlier moments. Alien life arrived on earth at least 50 years prior, but just *life*, most readily observably fungal life, and not little green people or slender grey entities in space ships or anything like that. Other than North America sealing …
Sci-fi contemporary novella. Sequel to Finna, featuring low-wage precarious retail employees of the same Ikea-esque big-box chain whose stores, because of the bizarre physics of their layout, sometimes connect with parallel worlds. This one begins, according to the author in the Acknowledgments section, from that one “otherwise inoffensive coworker that still somehow manages to earn …
Science fiction, of the political-intrigue-in-an-interplanetary-empire variety, with a quite sweet and well-done romance at the centre of it. The worldbuilding is nothing special (though I appreciate how gender and sexuality work in this universe) and I suspect a certain kind of genre snob (thank goodness I am not such a person!) might be inclined to …
Sci fi. Centuries ago, humanity fled Earth on generation ships. The ship at the centre of this book has survived because it came upon a herd of massive, vacuum-living space beasts. Originally, the beasts were just a source of resources, killed and harvested, but for many generations now the humans on this ship invade a …
Science fiction, I suppose, or maybe fantasy – anyway, kind of comic book-y in feel, and a world different from our own in that a small number of people have super powers, though this seems to be relatively new and not yet commonly known. Follows a not-very-good small-time super villain who robs banks, and a …
Short stories, most with some element of the science fictional or fantastical or speculative. A very quick read. Protagonists are mostly Black women, in fact mostly queer Black women. A worker employed to do the nightly retrieval of scooters for a bike share-style company encounters scooters that have achieved sentience. A pregnant woman in the …
Science fiction. Humanity has found a gate near the earth that leads to another solar system with a world inhabited by sentient life. Which they have conquered, or at least they think they have. The story is set in the English west country, which has declared itself independent and adopted a kind of isolationist and …
Science fiction. Future earth, a couple of generations post apocalypse. There are the walled cities where the privileged live in carefully controlled environments of plenty and ease, their security ensured by jealously guarded gates and the invisible violence of citizenship, and there are the settlements beyond the cities where everything has a Mad Max-like vibe. …
The…I guess fourth book (if taken in internal chronological order, which is not the same as publication order but is how Bujold recommends reading them) in the classic space opera series, the Vorkosigan Saga. Originally published in the ’80s. It is the first book to centre the character whom I believe is the protagonist from …
Science fiction. Short stories. I’ve known Delany’s name since I was a sci-fi-devouring teen, and I read and loved a memoir by him almost a decade ago, but this was my first time picking up any of his fiction. It certainly wasn’t the case in his writing about his own life, but I’d always had …