18 Apr, 2024
Special Requests
Stephen Embleton’s 2020 Bones & Runes is a stand-alone modern fantasy novel.
Mlilo, an isangoma, is ambushed and mugged. The attackers do not seek mere money. They steal Mlilo’s sacred amathambo (bones used in sacred rites).
Mlilo has a good idea where his relics were taken. It’s not somewhere prudent living mortals venture alone. Or really, at all. Mlilo’s relics are in Abaphansi, the world of the heavens.
12 Mar, 2024
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2023’s The Hexologists is the first volume in Josiah Bancroft’s Hexologists secondary-world fantasy-mystery series.
Isolde “Iz” Wilby and Warren “War” Wilby are professional problem-solvers, using hexology and a bewilderingly wide assortment of magical artifacts to deal with the vexing challenges so common in their modern magical industrial revolution world.
The Wilbies are very much not monarchists. Bad news for the royal representative determined to hire the pair.
16 Jan, 2024
Special Requests
Melissa Scott’s 2023 Fallen is the second book in her Firstborn, Lastborn space opera series. It shares no characters with the first book, Finders, and is set in a different period. More on that second detail later.
The invention of nigh-godlike AIs provided the Ancestors with everything they could have wanted… until they found themselves at war with the AIs. Civilization collapsed. Centuries later, civilization has recovered, although at a lower tech level than the Ancestors enjoyed.
Luckily for the revived civilization, space is littered with Ancestor relics. A few of these relics aren’t existential threats.
11 Jan, 2024
Special Requests
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael F. Flynn’s 1991 Fallen Angels is a near-future science fiction novel.
The future! A cabal of feminists, greens, Evangelicals, Luddites, mystics, and Wisconsin dairy farmers has taken control of America, enforcing stringent environmental laws. Without the protective layer of air pollution, Earth rapidly cools. A new ice age dooms most of Canada and the northern US.
The only surviving remnant of American technological prowess is Space Station Freedom. Together with the Russian space station, the stations have declared independence. The habitats cling to life thanks to a small lunar facility and precious nitrogen skimmed from the upper atmosphere.
Having pestered his way into piloting one final skimming mission, Alex MacLeod repays the trust that the community has placed in him by getting himself, the irreplaceable scoopship Piranha, and fellow astronaut Gordon Tanne shot down. Alex manages to land Piranha safely … but the ship will never fly again. What is to become of the two castaways?
9 Jan, 2024
Special Requests
2020’s The Empire of Gold is the third volume of S. A. Chakraborty’s historical fantasy Daevabad Trilogy1.
Tyrant Ghassan is dead! Banu Manizheh e‑Nahid now rules the Djinn city of Daevabad. The people of Daevabad are about to learn that as bad as Ghassan was, matters could always be much worse.
14 Dec, 2023
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Laura Frankos’ 2021 Broadway Revival is a stand-alone time travel novel.
Widowed David Greenbaum has lost his husband to drugs. He deals with his crushing grief by scheming to rewrite history itself. David could not save Ramon, but perhaps, just perhaps, David can save George Gershwin.
Step one: steal a time machine.
12 Dec, 2023
Special Requests
1986’s The Cross-Time Engineer is the volume that launched Leo Frankowski’s increasingly dire Adventures of Conrad Stargard, a Morganade1 adventure series on a long-suffering world.
Hungover, Conrad Schwartz sets out on an ill-fated hike. One temporal mishap later and the American-trained Polish engineer found himself somewhere he only knew from text-books.
Or rather, somewhen.
16 Nov, 2023
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Em X. Liu’s 2023 The Death I Gave Him is a vengeance-filled SF novel of revenge.
Hayden Lichfield returns to his father’s laboratory where he finds a corpse and a mystery. In the brief time that Hayden was gone, someone murdered his father Graham and erased the Elsinore Labs security camera footage. While direct evidence is now lost, the list of people with the necessary access is not long.
In fact, it would not even fully populate a hamlet.
26 Oct, 2023
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2022’s Locklands is the third and final volume in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders Trilogy.
Thief turned revolutionary Sancia Grado, girlfriend Berenice, and her friend Clef have triumphed over the merchant house of Tevanne!
Also their actions facilitated the rise to power of something predatory, inhuman, inhumane, and expansionist, compared to which the merchants were but a minor threat. Having doomed the world to worse than slavery, Sancia and company search for a way to undo their new foe.
17 Oct, 2023
Special Requests
J. G. Ballard’s 1975 High-Rise is a thrilling tale of modern lifestyles.
Recently divorced doctor and lecturer Robert Laing is persuaded by his sister to sell his Chelsea home and move into a very modern tower block. Forty floors tall, the edifice offers the inhabitants of its thousand apartments every amenity a late-20th century British person could want. If humans could build a modern-day urban Eden, it would look like Laing’s new home.
This modern-day Eden goes as well as the mythological Eden.
[Pet lovers may want to stop reading at this point.]