#SciFiMonth2022 – Set Your Course (SciFi Month TBR)
Happy November everyone! November is #SciFiMonth, hosted by Lisa at Dear Geek Place and Imyril at There’s Always Room for One More. This year they are celebrating 10 years!! of hosting SciFiMonth, which is amazing. You can find Imyril’s post with a short introduction and the list of prompts for the month here. And of course please do explore both Lisa and Imyril’s blogs for more SciFiMonth goodness. I’ll try to be doing these prompts both here and on my Bookstagram. The first prompt is: “Set Your Course – SciFi Month TBR.”
I’m a mood reader, so I definitely don’t stick to TBRs. Or even make them haha. My TBR is just an overall general term, not like a monthly thing. So I’ll just talk about a handful books that I own and would like to read sooner rather than later!
I didn’t purposefully pick these to make a rainbow, but I love that they do!! One of the reasons I chose to highlight these five is that they are all pretty under-hyped. Caveat that A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is the exception haha. I mean this in the sense of under 2500 ratings on Goodreads, and that I rarely see them on Bookstagram. I saw a challenge on Bookstagram for “No Hype November”, run by @bookswithmitch. If you know me you know I love trying to promote less-well-known books. So I’d really love to read these soon, and then tell more people about them!! So for now, I’ll leave you with the Goodreads summaries and links for each book.
August Kitko and the Mechas from Space
Jazz pianist Gus Kitko expected to spend his final moments on Earth playing piano at the greatest goodbye party of all time. And maybe kissing rockstar Ardent Violet, before the last of humanity is wiped out forever by the Vanguards–ultra-powerful robots from the dark heart of space, hell-bent on destroying humanity for reasons none can divine.
But when the Vanguards arrive, the unthinkable happens–the mecha that should be killing Gus instead saves him. Suddenly, Gus’s swan song becomes humanity’s encore, as he is chosen to join a small group of traitorous Vanguards and their pilots dedicated to saving humanity.
(Read my review for the first book of the author’s other series here!)
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home.
They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe.
Becky Chambers’s new series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter?
They’re going to need to ask it a lot.
Firebreak
Like everyone else she knows, Mallory is an orphan of the corporate war. As a child, she lost her parents, her home, and her entire building in an airstrike. As an adult, she lives in a cramped hotel room with eight other people. All of them working multiple jobs to try to afford water and make ends meet. And the job she’s best at is streaming a popular VR war game. The best part of the game isn’t killing enemy combatants, though—it’s catching in-game glimpses of SpecOps operatives, celebrity supersoldiers grown and owned by Stellaxis, the corporation that runs the America she lives in.
Until a chance encounter with a SpecOps operative in the game leads Mal to a horrifying discovery: the real-life operatives weren’t created by Stellaxis. They were kids, just like her, who lost everything in the war, and were stolen and augmented and tortured into becoming supersoldiers. The world worships them, but the world believes a lie.
The company controls every part of their lives, and defying them puts everything at risk—her water ration, her livelihood, her connectivity, her friends, her life—but she can’t just sit on the knowledge. She has to do something. Even if doing something will bring the wrath of the most powerful company in the world down upon her.
Bluebird
Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.
That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.
Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister – but for once she’s not alone. She has help from her network of resistance contacts, her taser-wielding librarian girlfriend, and a mysterious bounty hunter.
If Rig fails and her former faction finds what she stole from them, trillions of lives will be lost–including her sister’s. But if she succeeds, she might just pull the whole damn faction system down around their ears. Either way, she’s going to do it with panache and pizzazz.
Destroyer of Light
Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the four habitable areas of the planet—Day, Dusk, Dawn, and Night—the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:
*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.
*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes.
*A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.
Their stories, often containing disturbing physical and sexual violence, skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all—human and alien—balances upon a knife’s-edge.
And there’s my very tentative, probably won’t stick to it, SciFi Month TBR! Have you read any of these? Do you have a SciFi Month TBR?
Note: header artwork is by Simon Fetscher
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