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Listen to Into the Light by David Weber and Chris Kennedy; read by Ralph Lister. The Shongairi conquered Earth. In minutes, half the human race died. Cities lay in ruins. But the Shongairi didn’t expect the survivors’ tenacity. And they didn’t know that Earth harbored two species of intelligent, tool-using bipeds. One of them was us. The other, hidden in the European mountains, the subject of fantasy and legend. When they emerged and made alliances with humankind, the aliens didn’t stand a chance. Now Earth is once again ours. Aided by the tech the aliens left behind, we’re rebuilding fast.
Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s been one heck of a week again… though mercifully in a different way than last week (I hope. Please don’t prove me wrong, the 36 hours that elapse between Wednesday night and Friday). It’s Alex, with some SFF news and a random selection of books for your perusal.
Let’s make 2021 better than 2020. A good place to start? The Okra Project and blacklivesmatter.carrd.co
Need something to smile about? A cat named Oregano has you covered.
News and Views
Solaris has announced a New Suns 2 anthology, also edited by Nisi Shawl!
Good news! Author David Weber is out of the hospital.
The character Cyborg has been removed from The Flash movie. Cyborg’s actor, Ray Fisher, responds. This is some ugly stuff that involves a whole lot of institutional failure on the part of Warner Brothers and others.
Reading between the lines of the official synopsis for the Amazon Middle Earth series
io9 has an excerpt from Aiden Thomas’s next book, Lost in the Never Woods
Terry Brooks speaks very candidly about finishing The Sword of Shannara.
SparkNotes has a strong Twitter game. This tweet’s about dystopian novels.
Star Trek: Discovery‘s co-showrunning Michelle Paradise on the culmination of season 3–SPOILER WARNING!
Ubisoft will be developing a Star Wars open-world game.
Massachusetts is looking at picking a state dinosaur!
Oh wow and they’ve found a fossilized dinosaur still sitting on a nest of eggs!
How about a planet with three suns?
On Book Riot
This week’s SFF Yeah! is about most anticipated stand-alones of 2021.
What fairytale are you? Take this quiz to find out!
This month you can enter to win $100 to the bookstore of your choice, a 1-year Kindle Unlimited Subscription, or your own library cart.
Free Association Friday: Juicy
For absolutely no reason at all, I find myself thinking about fruit today! It’s delicious and nutritious, right? And also a part of a well-balanced SFF book. So here’s a few books in which you can find a bit of fruit…
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Humans land unprepared on an alien planet, only to find that they’re not the only intelligent life out there–and that intelligent life is nothing the humans could have ever imagined.
Where’s the fruit? The strange plants of this world bear many fruit, and it changes from day to day. Sometimes it’s delicious and addictive, others–poisonous.
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge
After the mysterious death of her father, Faith discovers a strange tree, which grows healthy and bears fruit only if you whisper a lie to it.
Where’s the fruit? The fruit of this tree, if eaten, reveals a truth. And the bigger the lie that made the fruit, the bigger the truth it uncovers when eaten…
The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk
A sorceress named Beatrice must choose between making a good marriage for the sake of her family and thus losing her connection to her magic, and asserting herself as a sorceress and remaining forever unwed.
Where’s the fruit? Beatrice makes her midnight bargain by feeding the spirit she summons delicious fruit… among other things.
Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston
Although the people would rather live in a green yesterday than face the dying, poisoned present, an old man and his apprentice teach them to hope again.
Where’s the fruit? One of the main characters befriends an elephant by feeding it fruit… and then later, Mango the Elephant becomes instrumental to the story.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
A future reeling from a multitude of ecological disasters sends expeditions to the past to observe what earth was like before humans ruined it.
Where’s the fruit? There really isn’t one, but the ship is named the Lucky Peach and I there’s something about that, you know?
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
An orphaned boy escapes his horrible aunts by rolling away in a magical, giant peach inahbited by enormous, friendly bugs.
Where’s the fruit? The peach is real, and giant. Worth reading once… or twice, even.
See you, space pirates. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.