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the anthology compiled by Jonathan Strahan for Harper-Voyager, available beginning July 7, 2020.
A diverse collection of sci fi and fantasy stories and poems about Western and Eastern dragons and their relationships with families and humans, blood and gold.
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Cover Art for Engines Beneath Us by Malcom Devlin. Art by Richard Wagner. Description: Close-up of a boy’s face. His eyes are bright blue and pierce the dark shadow over half of his face. He is foregrounded by a chain-link fence that dissolves in the shadow on his face. Behind him is complicated machinery that looks like a scene of boilers and exhaust pipes with an industrial walkway.
Looking for your next read? Check out Malcom Devlin’s Engines Beneath Us available now from TTA Press.
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A new anthology of dark speculative fiction is out from Undertow Publications. Find out what we think of select stories and dare to dive in yourself! With everything happening this summer, dark spec fic might be just what the doctor ordered.
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Cover art for Thin Places by Kay Chronister. Image description: A veiled woman stands alone in a darkening room. Cover art by Stephen Mackey. Cover design by Vince Haig.
You won’t want to miss this haunting debut collection. Thin Places by Kay Chronister available now from Undertow Publications.
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Mark Bradford, Realness, 2016. Mixed media on canvas; 108.25 x 168.5 in. Denver Art Museum Collection
For Black History Month, some favorite short stories and novels by new and classic black SF/F writers.
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Riot Baby by Tochi Onybuchi cover art features a close-up photo of the face of a young black woman with the title jumbled across it. Cover design by Jaya Micele. Cover photo © Getty Images.
Reader be warned: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, coming out from Tor.com, is not for the faint of heart. That said, you should definitely read it. This book is violent because the lives of the children of Compton in the ‘90s were violent. Whenever a book opens with violence told nonchalantly, you have to know you are in for a lot of it. If you liked HBO’s Watchmen, you will also enjoy Riot Baby. The book opens with a scene on a school bus with the kids inside throwing Crip signs at the Bloods on the street. When a Blood boards the bus and holds a gun to a kid’s head, we see that our narrator, Ella, is an astute observer of her world.
“Ella can see in the gangbanger’s eyes that he’s got no compunctions about it, the guy would meet disrespect with murder.”
This is the reality of Ella’s world. Ella’s not only a keen observer; her powers are supernatural and continually unfold throughout the book. When we first meet her, we see that she can perceive the future for herself and for others. This ability comes at a cost—she not only experiences the emotional trauma of seeing people dying around her but also feels it physically. Coming from a neighborhood where violence is quotidian, this is a heavy burden for Ella to bear.
Onyebuchi’s language is spare but there is poetry in the beauty of his observations and in the way he renders relationships.
“Brother Harvey says a prayer for all of them; then he sends them back out to their parents or grandparents or people who act like their parents because they need to.”
The absence of family stability is clear but so too is the way the community comes together to take care of each other. There is love in this hard place. Ella’s family is no exception: her biggest source of stability is a woman she calls grandmother, though they are not related, and the love between them is big. She has an unreliable extremely religious pregnant mother. She does not have a father. She has some friends and connections, but she is a lonely character because of her powers, which her family demands she keep secret, and the foreknowledge that she will always be leaving.
The story is set against the backdrop of violence perpetrated against black communities in America. The first time marker is the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, which set off the L.A. Riots. Ella’s brother, Kev, a.k.a. Riot Baby, is born as the chaos begins. When the family emerges from the hospital, they see their city burned to the ground. Other markers include the police murder of Sean Bell, Oscar Grant III, Walter Scott and the Charleston Church shooting. He also seems to allude to the shooting of Tyrone Harris Jr. at the Michael Brown anniversary protest, though I wasn’t sure. (I’d be interested to hear from anyone more well versed in the topic as not all events are given names.) Riot Baby moves through Compton, Harlem, Rikers and Watts, and the violent incidents carry us from 1991 to 2015 through the terrifying America we know and then moves into a speculative future of the America we might get.
This book touches on a theme I have been curious about for a long time and that is the notion of freedom. How much do we actually have? What makes a person feel free? Something that I love about genre literature is the capacity it has for tackling big questions and for dealing with villainy at the systemic level. This book does both beautifully.
“Prison’s weird like that. All types of absurd shit happens here, and you just need the patience to step back and watch it happen. Maybe that comes with time. Maybe not. Maybe you spend your entire sentence here getting the shit kicked outta you. Maybe they kill you in here. But maybe you make it out. Not from behind bars, but out of wherever it is they try to put you when they put you behind bars.”
This book is great for readers who are looking to learn about the modern oppression of Black Americans while reading an entertaining story about siblings, power and freedom and whether the right course of action is just to burn it all down.
Riot Baby is available now for pre-order. Get it from your local bookstore in person or online. Or, if you must, the evil empire will certainly have it too.
Victorians liked to tell ghost stories around the hearth at Christmas. Here’s an old-but-timely one you can share around yours, even if it involves Zoom and/or the Yule Log channel.
We’re almost done with this, um, interesting year. That in itself is cause to celebrate. (photo credit:Patrick A. Mackie)
In this final novel of The Daevabad Trilogy, Ali, Nahri, and Dara are morally challenged beyond endurance by the rise of death magic in their beloved kingdom. How they respond changes everything.
We’ve had enough tricks already in 2020, so here’s a treat instead.
Craig Laurance Gidney’s Marsh-bell Queen is half muse, half greedy ghost, and all fascinating.
There is so much out there to read, and until you get your turn in a time loop, you don’t have time to read it all to find the highlights.
Butterfly Lampshade is Aimee Bender’s first novel in a decade and the follow-up book to her incredible short story collection The Color Master (2013). A book about memory and isolation that we didn’t know we needed.
Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones & The Six is an exhilarating take on 1970s rock ‘n’ roll told in a fun and unique way. Reid pulls back the curtain on “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” to get to the heart of the experience of female artists in this entertaining “behind-the-scenes rock documentary” about a (fictional) rock ‘n’ roll legend.
Books are the perfect gift and we’ve got suggestions for everyone on your list.
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Cover Art for Wonderland edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane from Titan Books. Image features a white rabbit wearing a ruffled collar his jacket is patterned with dripping blood-red hearts. He is holding a Mad Hatter hat and a flamingo. At his feet are a little Jabberwocky and roses, a deck of cards cascades down the left side.
If you love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland you won’t want to miss this anthology, a collection of seventeen original works that will make you reexamine your own relationship to Wonderland.
Read moreCarmen Maria Machado’s genre-bending memoir is a formally dazzling and emotionally acute testimony of an abusive queer relationship.
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Ormeshadow book cover. Image description: a golden “O” floats above the a photograph of seaside cliffs. Cover Design by Henry Sene Yee. Photo from Shutterstock.com.
You won’t want to miss the latest from Priya Sharma. Ormeshadow is a quick read that packs an emotional punch.
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Cover art for All The Things We Never See. Art by David Álvarez Design by Vince Haig. Description: black and white drawing of three men huddled in one large jacket, only their eyes and noses are visible, they look like they are up to something. Book title printed on the jacket in yellow dots.
Don’t miss this latest release from Undertow Publications: All The Things We Never See by Michael Kelly. It will have you itching to create, which will be a good use of the time you used to spend sleeping.
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Description: A fox headed woman holds surgical scissors like a knife in front of the darkened open door way that reveals the story collection title. Book Cover of Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro. Art by Stephen Mackey. Jacket Design by Vince Haig.
A Review of the excellent Sing Your Sadness Deep by British Fantasy Award winner and Shirley Jackson Award finalist Laura Mauro.
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Photo of fireworks behind tree, turquoise sky. Photo by Julie Tupas on Unsplash
Happy 4th of July! The Unbound Writers are taking the week off but have left you a little something fun: staff kudos and zombies loving fireworks!
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The beautiful and utterly dangerous cover art for This House of Wounds by Georgina Bruce. Original artwork by Catrin Welz-Stein, jacket design by Vince Haig. A beautifully dressed pale white woman wearing a masquerade mask, her hair adorned with fancy flowers, face serene and rib cage exposed and filled with flowers.
If you are interested in the themes of mirrors and mothers, bodies as machines, daughters and madness, flowers and blood, then Georgina Bruce’s debut story collection is for you!
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Dystopia can be fun, in the right hands, but time loops probably aren’t. Example: our own era. Fiction Unbound writers Gemma and Catie explore stories that consider what the future may bring based on where we are presently, in the new collection A People’s Future of the United States.
Read moreIt’s time for the Fiction Unbound 3rd annual roundup of speculative fiction recommendations to gift your beloved. Sure to please.*
*Not a legally binding guarantee.
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Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Five Edited by Robert Shearman and Michael Kelly
Undertow Publications is a small press that has won the Shirley Jackson award for best edited anthology. Their lauded anthology, Year’s Best Weird Fiction went from endangered to extinct with Volume 5. Come celebrate this beautiful volume and learn about this press, which despite this set back, has amazing books on offer this year.
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The new year - fresh and crisp as an ancient glacier. Lake Fryxel, in the Transantarctic Mountains. Photo credit: National Science Foundation.
It’s been a year. Our contributors look back on the Fiction Unbound highlights of 2018.
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Photo credit: Winter dawn by Carmel Mawle
The holidays are here again. The days are short and the nights are long. Best stock up on stories that will see you through the long dark.
Read moreWriter Gabino Iglesias’ new book Coyote Songs hit book stores this week. Check out this interview for ideas about writing, the horror of murder and living interstitially.
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Cadwell Turnbull's new novel — the first in a trilogy — imagines the hard, uncertain work of a fantastical justice.