Ann Leckie

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.