Ann Leckie

Or, maybe not that recently, I am very behind.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Look, you should just read this. Rivers is nominated for the Campbell (Not a Hugo) this year on the strength of this book. It would have been an entirely worthy Best Novel finalist, quite frankly. I was late to it partly because I have lots of things to read and very little time to do it in, and also because I was aware that it would be a difficult read–as in, full of violence and death and heartbreak. That’s all true. This is a fabulous book.

Rosewater by Tade Thompson

Read this one, too!

Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry and the helpless – people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.

I read an ARC of this, it’s out in September. Seriously, it’s excellent.

Langue[dot]doc 1305 by Gillian Polack

When a team of Australian scientists–and a lone historian–travel back to St-Guilhem-le-Désert in 1305 they discover being impartial, distant and objective just doesn’t work when you’re surrounded by the smells, dust and heat of a foreign land. They’re only human after all.

But by the time Artemisia is able to convince others that it’s time to worry, it’s already too late

I have to admit I’m mostly not a fan of time travel stories. For various reasons, but this one really worked for me, not least because Gillian is an actual historian.

Also, since I’m actually really, truly done with revisions on The Raven Tower, I decided to indulge myself and actually…re-read a book! Which I haven’t been able to do for a very long time, even though I used to read favorites over and over again, way back in the day. Anyway, I went back and read The Goblin Emperor again and it was just as good the second time, if not better.

Yes, it’s time again for Some Stuff I Have Read and Liked Recently. As always–I am not a reviewer or any sort of critic, and I’m not going to try to be one.

Everfair by Nisi Shawl

Ever since I heard that Nisi was not only working on a steampunk novel set in the Belgian Congo, but that she had gone and sold that novel to Tor, I’ve been eager to read this. I finally got around to it, and I highly recommend it. It’s pretty epic, really, it covers a couple decades in time, from the POVs of a wide variety of characters. Seriously, check this out if you haven’t already.

Transcendent 2: the Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction edited by Bogi Takács

This is a nice anthology of short fiction by authors I’m already a fan of–like Charlie Jane Anders, Keffy Kehrli, and An Owomoyela–as well as authors I’m very happy to be introduced to. I’ve read way too little short fiction lately, and this was an enjoyable first step toward remedying that.

The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

These two books were first published in the 1950s and have not always been well-regarded. In the first, the narrator is a young man devoted to drinking palm wine. The person who works tapping palms to bring him that wine dies, and the narrator goes looking for Dead’s Town so he can find the man and bring him back. In the second, a young boy is separated from his family and ends up in the bush, where he encounters lots of dangerous supernatural creatures. Both are picaresque, their plots essentially one adventure after another, and both are told in the first person in a way that feels to me very much as though these stories were meant to be read or spoken aloud. They were written in a variety of English that may take a few pages to get familiar with, but once it’s in your ear it just goes nicely and enjoyably along. I couldn’t find an ebook version, and my nearby libraries didn’t have it,so I bought a used paper copy. It may be in a library near you!

BONUS the title of the second novel in this volume may seem familiar if you’ve heard of the Brian Eno and David Byrne album of the same name. If you haven’t heard it, or heard of it, give it a listen.

I’ve read some things lately that I enjoyed!

I got an advance copy of Emergence, the next volume in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series. Look, I’m a longtime fan of these, and I enjoyed the heck out of this one. If you’ve read the previous volumes, you’ll enjoy this one. If you haven’t, DO NOT START THE SERIES HERE. Give Foreigner a go–that’s the first volume–and see what you think.

I’m kind of behind schedule on reading A Matter of Oaths by Helen S Wright. Well, it’s not out until November 23–but it was first published in 1988, and was apparently available for free on the author’s website for a while. This is fun, quick-moving adventury space opera–and this new edition has an introduction by Becky Chambers. There are immortal Space Emperors–two of them!–and a pilots guild, and romance. One major character is an older woman, and another major character has been memory-wiped and has a Mysterious Past. The original cover was whitewashed, a mistake the new publisher has fortunately avoided. I really enjoyed reading it, you might, too.

I’ve not read as much short fiction as I’d like–certainly not as much as I used to–so I’m behind in catching up with Rose Lemberg’s Birdverse stories. This summer Beneath Ceaseless Skies published their story “A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power” (that’s part 1, part two is linked at the end of the page), which I only recently read, and I highly recommend it. This is kind of a bonus, because it’s right there on the web, and much shorter than a novel! And they have plenty of other published fiction (the Birdverse stories are marked as such in that list, if you’d like those in particular). They also have a Patreon.