Dark Vampire Fantasy, Scads of SFF Stories, and More Great Recommendations
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Welcome back, space fans! It’s time to add more nerdy fun to your TBRs with four exciting SFF recommendations. Set your phasers to fun!
Bookish Goods
Believe in Yourself sticker by WildFoxFarmCo
You go, little alien. I believe in you! This shop also has lots of other great stickers for readers. I find that people who love books also love stickers, and one can never have too many stickers—just ask my office walls. $4.
New Releases
Mistress of Lies (The Age of Blood Book 1) by K. M. Enright
First up: a debut romantic dark fantasy with vampires! Shan LeClaire is set on getting revenge for her life as the disgraced daughter of a Blood Worker. Samuel Hutchinson has discovered the first victim of a magical serial killer and winds up in the court of the vampire king. With Samuel’s secret ability, Shan’s need for revenge, and the help of Blood Worker Isaac, the trio are plunged into treacherous schemes, desire, and vengeance. This is just one of many books with vampires headed our way in the next few weeks. There are always new books about vampires because vampires—say it with me—never get old. (Sorry, not sorry.)
New Adventures in Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan
Holy cats, this collection of 15 sci-fi space stories has an AMAZING line-up of SFF authors. Check this out: Ann Leckie, Becky Chambers, T. Kingfisher, Charlie Jane Anders, Anya Johanna DeNiro, Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar, Arkady Martine, Aliette de Bodard, Karin Tidbeck, and more! With the sheer amount of talent and imagination in one place, space travel never sounded so good!
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
I don’t get to drive Swords & Spaceships very often, so I thought I would recommend two of my favorite older SFF titles. (Because I do read other sci-fi books besides Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, I swear!)
All the Names They Used for God: Stories by Anjali Sachdeva
This is one of my favorite story collections. It’s an incredible array of speculative stories infused with science and history, set in many different eras and places. There’s a woman who decides to change her living arrangements while waiting for her beloved to return from war; a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid shadowed everywhere by a huge shark; genetically modified septuplets fall ill to a mysterious disease; a terrible accident occurs in a factory; and much more!
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Before I fell in love with the WTF-ery of Gideon the Ninth, this novel sunk its rusted fangs in my brain. It’s a wild, bananapants novel about a group of siblings who were taken in as children by Father, a cold and distant god. Father raises the children in his library and teaches them all his customs and the wisdom of the universe. But now they are adults and Father is missing, and some of the siblings are behaving better than the others. Grabs for power, brutal acts of violence, mind-bendy situations, and a whole lot of humor drive this wildly original novel. If you like to say, “What the hell did I just read???” when you finish a book, this is the novel for you!
That’s it for me today, star bits. I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me make lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and in our New Books newsletter.
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