2019 Recommended SF/F List

By JJ: This thread is for posts about 2019-published works, which people have read and recommend to other Filers.

There will be no tallying of recommendations done in this thread; its purpose is to provide a source of recommendations for people who want to find something to read which will be eligible for the Hugos or other awards (Nebula, Locus, Asimov’s, etc.) next year.

If you’re recommending for an award other than / in addition to the Hugo Awards which has different categories than the Hugos (such as Locus Awards’ First Novel), then be sure to specify the award and category.

You don’t have to stop recommending works in Pixel Scrolls, please don’t! But it would be nice if you also post here, to capture the information for other readers.

The Suggested Format for posts is:

  • Title, Author, Published by / Published in (Anthology, Collection, Website, or Magazine + Issue)
  • Hugo or other Award Category: (Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, Graphic Novel, Lodestar, Astounding, etc)
  • link (if available to read/view online)
  • optional “Brief, spoiler-free description of story premise:”
  • optional “What I liked and didn’t like about it:”
  • (Please rot-13 any spoilers.)

There is a permalink to this thread in the blog header.

384 thoughts on “2019 Recommended SF/F List

  1. Best Graphic Story: LaGuardia Vol 1, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford
    The first pages here

    In an alternative world, Earth is integrated in the galactic community and alien immigrants are moving to earth, facing prejudice and threat. In this world, five month pregnant Nwafor Chukwuebuka is eaving an Nigera plagues by anti-alien riots, smuggling with her an alien plant.

    This is a down to earth story, not about the larger power players, scientists or secrit organizations. Instead about human relations and how they are affected in a new world.

    On my longlist for now.

  2. +1 for Lady from the Black Lagoon — the author obviously starts and continues from a specific slant, but there’s a lot of corroborative detail holding the investigation together without being boring.

  3. Cate Glass, An Illusion of Thieves; Tor trade pb.
    Novel
    The Locus review says “Glass” is a pseudonym for someone with a couple of decades’ experience, so it’s not Campbell-eligible. Setting based on Renaissance Italy; a scattering of people have individual magical skills but are blamed for an old disaster, so they’re hunted (and executed if found). One of these, the narrator, was the ruler’s mistress, but loses that position when her 16-year-old brother acts stupidly (and the sun rose today…); she keeps her head down and is starting to make her way when she gets extorted into something too grim to be called a caper.
    I like that this felt real — plausible grime rather than grimdark-for-its-own-sake, some ploys work and some don’t, and the ending isn’t artificially/unbelievably happy but leaves room for a sequel that broadens the world the author builds.

  4. Novella
    This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, Saga Press
    – I listened to this one and found it a good fit for the fun with language in the letters.

    Novelette

    “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye,” Sarah Pinsker, Uncanny 29, July/August 2019
    – A mystery writer finds a mystery in her own life.

    Short story

    “Big Box,”Greg van Eekhout, Uncanny 29, July/August 2019
    – A big box store with a difference.

    “A Champion of Nigh-Space,” Tim Pratt, Uncanny 29, July/August 2019
    – A man learns about his girlfriend’s career.
    (Originally published on Pratt’s Patreon, 2019 copyright listed.)

    Linking the issue since I thought the whole magazine was strong in this installment.

  5. I recently read This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone. Pretty sure it’s a novella.

    I can’t emphasize how hard I fell in love with this book, an epistolary (more or less) novella between two rival time-traveling super-agents who gradually fall in love. Much poetry, much tenderness amongst the massacres, torture and space battles.

  6. I have c36,100 words noted down for This Is How You Lose The Time War, so absolutely a novella.
    I found it.a leeeetle bit too much in places but there’s no doubt it was beautifully written and I can see why so many people are loving it – it’ll be a serious contender.

  7. “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” by Ted Chiang, is one of the new pieces in Exhalation. A great (and very Chiang-ian) take on parallel universes.
    ISFDB lists it as a novelette (although it’s definitely on the longish side — I’d love to see a confirmed wordcount…).

    “Advice For Your First Time At The Fairy Market,” by Nibedita Sen, at Fireside. Beautiful piece that feels otherworldly and, at the same time, very, very familiar.

  8. Best Graphic Story: Alienation, by Inés Estrada (Fantagraphics)

    This book seems, to me, like the best of both worlds: A graphic story that takes full advantages of the uniqueness of the comic medium and a plausible science fiction story built on observations of the flaws of our current time.

    I defer to people more eloquent than I.
    https://www.popmatters.com/ines-estrada-alienation-2638702622.html

    https://www.npr.org/2019/05/04/719655355/virtual-reality-eases-the-reality-of-natural-destruction-somewhat-in-alienation

  9. The events of this past week have made me reticent to rec stuff here going forward, on top of questions I’ve been asking myself in regards to who the Hugos are “meant” to represent, if these recommendation lists are an earnest attempt at suggestion or an attempt to conform the results to one’s tastes, less of “here, check this out, you should consider putting this on your ballot” and more “you MUST vote for this. You MUST put this on your ballot,” and if I’ve been doing the latter instead of the former.

    Nevertheless, I’ll give it another go. Mainly because I want to highlight Part I of the Interface series, a compilation of the first 12 episodes which is going on my ballot for Dramatic Presentation Short Form. I’ve hyped it up here before and this is an excellent way to showcase it.

    Also going on my ballot; Amazon’s Undone had a bit of a disappointing ending, but until then had a collection of gems in its episodes, culminating in episode five, “Alone In This (You Have Me),” which sees a rift between protagonist Alma and her on-again, off-again boyfriend Sam. Alma inadvertently uses her powers to discovers similarly traumatic pasts shared by her and Sam, all while her father continues to edge her closer to unlocking her potential (and give her questionable advice). It showcases the unconventional, ambiguous, personal time travel story Undone attempts to tell (and tells exceedingly well at its heights).

  10. N, I’m honestly confused. How is this list any different from Renay’s Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom, or Didi Chanoch/Standback’s Hugo Nominee Wiki?

    I’ve found some great works via this list in the past that I might not otherwise have found, including from some of the recs you have made. Please keep posting them.

  11. @N,

    Please keep posting recommendations of stuff you love. There is no implicit expectation at all that anyone reading them must nominate or vote for them.

    It’s another way for those interested to be introduced to great stuff. I love it when people squee about stuff they love.

    (Also, try telling a WSFS member what to nominate or vote for, and like any other fan, they’ll roll their eyes at you.)

  12. @N

    For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never gotten the impression that you’ve been saying “you MUST” vote for anything. I’ve always thought you’re just squeeing about stuff you love, like I do.

  13. @N

    Not sure what is meant by events of this past week — possibly I’ve been under a rock, I don’t know. The Hugos represent the WSFS members who wish to participate in nominating and voting. For me this list is saying, “Here’s something I’m considering for my ballot. Take a look if it sounds interesting. Maybe you’ll like it too.” I haven’t gotten any other vibe from anyone posting here.

    And yes please keep recommending. You’re one of the few mentioning graphic story and dramatic presentation so far, and I definitely appreciate getting some “off the beaten path” ideas there.

  14. @N: FWIW, I haven’t gotten a “You MUST vote for this” vibe from any of your posts.

    Just finished Seanan McGuire’s In an Absent Dream, the latest installment in her Wayward Children series. I really enjoyed it–as usual, the world McGuire created for her protagonist to run away to was fascinating.

    Her (as Mira Grant) In the Shadow of Spindrift House was really good too, though that’s straight-up horror rather than fantasy or sci-fi. Interestingly, both books share the theme of a protagonist feeling torn between her biological family and her found family.

    I also loved M.E. Bronstein’s “Elegy of a Lanthornist” (short story, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies). A literary scholar has disappeared, and the notes she left behind on her work suggest some unsettling things about the poet whose writing she was studying. The “false form” format was well-done, the setting was intriguing, and the plot has the kind of slow burn I like for darker stories.

  15. Several recent stories in Clarkesworld I liked a lot:

    “The Second Nanny” by Djuna, Clarkesworld, August 2019. Originally published in Korean in BECAUSE WE STILL HAVE TIME, no original date given. Great world-building, high stakes, ticking clock scenario.

    “Dave’s Head” by Suzanne Palmer, Clarkesworld, September 2019. Set in a post-economic collapse US, a wild and funny tale wherein an animatronic dinosaur’s head cons its owner, accompanied by the protagonist’s intermittently senile genius uncle, into a road trip leading to an abandoned robotic amusement park, where they encounter… but I’ll leave the rest unspoiled. I got a RICK & MORTY vibe from the story.

  16. TRAPPED IN THE R.A.W. by Kate Boyes, from Aqueduct Press. When hordes of aliens (maybe) appear and begin slaughtering humanity, one woman locks herself inside the special collections library where she works and struggles to survive for weeks on limited resources and even more limited knowledge of the Big Picture happening outside. Told in the form of the woman’s journal, and the reports of investigators who find the journal decades later when human civilization is slowly reestablishing itself, it’s a very human-focused, very intense, and very engrossing narrative, with unexpected twists and turns.

  17. Best Novel
    Delta-V by Daniel Suarez

    This was a present for my birthday a couple of months ago. I believe it’s a stand-alone. This was a great book! I stayed up late several nights reading it.

    This is a somewhat-near-future hard SF novel about a billionaire who recruits people to train for a secret deep space mining expedition. Well, it’s not really about him. About a third is about the training/competition(1) there’s a sort of interlude, then things shift and the rest is about the expedition itself. The billionaire’s got too many secrets to be a POV character. 😉

    (1) Many are drafted into the training (like 400???), but there are only around 20 finalists at the end, vying for 8 spots.

    I liked the characters (even a few I didn’t like), the weird training/competition montage (can I call almost 1/3 of a book a montage?), the hard SF stuff, and the sensawunder about space and the Earth.

    I especially liked the idea that when putting together a team, you want more than just brilliant/skilled people who work well with others, but you want people who prioritize the team over the individual. For a massive undertaking like this, it’ll only succeed if everyone’s behind everyone else. I feel like I’ve read too many books where there’s a small group chosen solely for skills and half of them are jerks. Why wouldn’t you want a group, instead of a bunch of individuals? A group that cares about everyone succeeding together, whose members don’t say “look what I did,” but instead, “look what we accomplished”? Isn’t that the best way to succeed in an outrageous project like this? I’d like more narratives subtly promoting this idea, please, like this book did.

    ETA: I’m sure I’m greatly exaggerating re. the “too many jerks” syndrome; this book just felt refreshing in this respect for some reason. (And there are non-team-member jerks, don’t worry, heh.)

    I found one very late-book event wildly unbelievable. No, not a space disaster. I won’t even ROT-13 this, but it was just so illogical and plain stupid, especially given stated desires. Oh well, that’s just one very minor complaint.

    Anyway, I loved it. It’s a little quirky; it covers a lot of time, so there are a lot of short scenes and time jumps. This aspect may not be for everyone, but IMHO it does a good job fleshing out the characters, the project, the world, the problems, everything.

    NOTE: I haven’t read much 2019 fiction yet (blush), so I can’t say whether I will wind up nominating this, but I enjoyed it a lot. I love a good stand-alone SF exploration(ish) novel.

  18. Thanks for the rec, Kendall. That book’s on my TBR, as soon as I finish reading the Novellapaloozellas.

  19. Graphic Story:

    The aforementioned Alienation is going on my ballot. I’d like to also highlight a few other entries. The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited! (First Second) is volume 2 of the graphic novel series based on the popular roleplaying comedy podcast series of the same name. It’s an ongoing adaptation of the first arc, streamlined to fit better into a coherent narrative while keeping all the intrigue, drama and the distinctive McElroy brand of comedy. This volume, in particular, is better constructed than the first one as the series began to find its footing around this point. Magnus, Taako and Merle are a lovable bunch of barely competent doofuses and I’ll sing my praises of them to the high heavens.

    Also going on my ballot are Mister Miracle (DC) and Kill 6 Billion Demons Book 3: Seeker of Thrones (Image). The former is the trade collection of Tom King’s heartbreaking depiction of the titular escape artist, the latter is the third print publication of Tom-Parkinson Morgan (alias Abaddon)’s sprawling, yet approachable fantasy webcomic (still viewable online here.) I nominated them last year (the former in its separate issue form, the latter in its web form) and also mentioned them on 770, I think, so I was hesitant to renominate them, but On a Sunbeam‘s inclusion on the finalist list makes me think Graphic Story isn’t as strict as I previously thought. The category needs more blood and variety outside of the Image comic staples and I adore both of these comics, so they’re staying on my ballot. Someone please inform me if I’m mistaken about their eligibility.

  20. Oh, one more thing: Molly Mendoza’s SKIP (Nobrow) wasn’t my personal forte, but Hugo voters should still give it a look for its unique visual presentation.

  21. Novel
    Bryan Camp, Gather the Fortunes
    This is the second book labeled “A Crescent City Novel”, but it’s only vaguely a sequel: it’s five years after City of Lost Fortunes and the lead from that book is barely seen — instead the viewpoint character is someone who died then and is now in a sort of provided-by-the-powers half-life, charged with escorting remnants of the newly-dead to the first of seven gates/trials that lead to judgment. Things go pear-shaped quickly, when she makes a debatable bargain to keep an eye on a “client” — who turns out not to be in the expected path of a drive-by overshoot, leaving her holding the (empty/metaphorical) bag. There’s somewhat more infodumping in this book — not just parallel (/renamed?) gods, but also the mechanics of psychopomping and judgment — but it was mostly compact and didn’t get intrusive against the story of someone trying to hold her own against tricksters, people at her level with their own sometimes-debatable aims, minor powers, and serious powers playing power games with wildly-varying goals. The author obviously knows all of New Orleans and loves most of it, in all its grime; the fact that he’s a white guy writing about a black woman may be an issue for some, but ISTM that he doesn’t paper over the difficulties of living-while-black in NoLA a decade after Katrina.
    The author hasn’t kept up his website, so I don’t know whether he has an idea for a third book; if he does, the set will also be a good contender for the 2021 or 2022 best-series award.

  22. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

    Novel (first in a trilogy)

    If there’s one thing I love, it’s SFF novels that drop you into the middle of a fascinating world with minimal explanation or exposition. And when that fascinating world can be described as “queer space necromancers”, well, I’m pretty much sold. The characters and plot live up to the premise; if I have any issue, it’s that it was a little too easy for me to guess the perp in the whodunit aspect of the book. But that was a minor complaint in a book that tells a solid, propulsive, stay-up-late-to-finish-it story. Highly recommended.

  23. To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers

    Novella

    A well-written novella and a welcome paean to the concept of science for its own sake. I found the very end a little bit heavy-handed – I had already gotten what was being said without the need for it to be spelled out for me – but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the rest of the book.

  24. Best Novel: The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Morrow

    I’ve forgotten who first recommended this, but thank you. I just finished it, and my socks are somewhere in Venus’s orbit. What a lovely story, beautifully written, about the power of words, the power of stories, and the power of love.

  25. Best Novel: A Choir of Lies by Alexandra Rowland (Gallery / Saga Press)

    Reading right now and am hooked. Haven’t read Rowland’s previous novel but this works well as a stand-alone. Off the bat Rowland imbues her protagonist, Ylfing, with clear, sensitive voice that makes you want to root for him and follow his travails to assert himself as a Chant in the wake of his master’s betrayal.

  26. @Bonnie: Oh, I’m so glad!
    By sheer luck I got to beta-read Ten Thousand Doors, so I feel like I’ve been sitting on what an absolute treasure it is FOREVER now. And finally everybody else gets to catch up!
    So, umm, the first rec might’ve been mine 😛

  27. “Erase, Erase, Erase,” Elizabeth Bear. Published in F&SF Sep/Oct 2019.
    Hugo Category: Novelette
    The story’s narrator has always hidden away, or outright burned, memories of her pains and failures. But without them, there’s nothing left of her; she’s inches of fading away. And it’s in that state that she realizes she needs them all back.

    “I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgotten.”

  28. Novella

    Waterlines by Suzanne Palmer
    Asimov’s Science Fiction, July-August 2019

    The author of the Hugo-winning “The Secret Life of Bots” has hit it out of the park again.

    This is a far-future mystery story taking place on a wintry planet colonized by a few hundred descendents of the Earth diaspora, who share the planet by treaty with a race of humanoid-robot symbionts who live under the sea. When the aliens bring three human bodies to the colony administrator, he must figure out who they are (no one is missing) and how and why they were killed — but as he begins to investigate, he is targeted by the killers, who are hiding a very big secret.

    The worldbuilding is vivid — I felt the surroundings quite keenly, as if I was there — the plot is engrossing, and the characterization is excellent, with the added bonus of the author’s lovely brand of subtle snark. The story, about who gets to be considered as human, granted agency, and treated with respect, touches on themes of racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism.

    I’ve read more than 25 of the 2019 novellas at this point, and while some of them are good, this was the first one that made me jump up and down. It’s definitely going on my 2020 Hugo ballot for Novella.

  29. Question: Can Paul Kreuger’s Steel Crow Saga be slotted under the Lodestar category. Technically it’s an adult fantasy but it has young protagonists, and many readers and libraries are slotting it as a young adult book (if the publisher isn’t). Aside from some language and its length there isn’t much differentiating it from YA. Would the author have to weigh in?

  30. @N: the convention is that the Hugo administrator rules on clear mechanical issues — how long is the work, when was the first effective publication, etc. — while leaving issues of argument (e.g., YA vs adult) to the nominators. The Lodestar is so new it doesn’t have a track record, but my guess would be that the 2020 administrator would be guided by the ballots rather than attempting to impose their own taste, and that the author would be asked (as all are asked) if they accept the nomination as so determined. I thought there was a clause in the rules about all the nominations for a work being counted together even if they were in different categories, but I’m not finding it on a cursory search.

  31. Lodestar
    Laura E. Weymouth, Treason of Thorns
    HarperTeen 2019

    In another 18-century England, William of Normandy was “the Deedwinner”, not “the Conqueror”; he got control of six house-shaped ~sentient entities that bring fortune to large areas. But these entities are effectively enslaved; some of the Caretakers (who mediate the effects of each House) don’t like this, but discussing freedom is treason. The book follows the daughter of a Caretaker who was sentenced to slow execution some years ago for this treason; she loves the House and wants to clean up some of the mess, but hasn’t been granted power by the Crown (which still controls the Deeds). That’s just the first-few-pages’ setup; the story is what she works out to do, and how. I have mixed feelings about this book; the Acknowledgments say the editor kept asking what the characters feel, and at times I thought the question should have been put off, and the lines between the good ~guys and the bad are drawn very vigorously — but it seems unique to me (unlike, e.g., stories that simply turn an existing trope upside down) and held my interest.

  32. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

    Novel (Young Adult)

    I wasn’t at all sure what to expect from this book. What I absolutely did not expect was … a pretty good young adult dystopian adventure story. It was a bit jarring when I realized that was what I was reading, as if I’d discovered that The Hunger Games had somehow been intended as a direct sequel to 1984. It’s hard not to compare The Testaments to The Handmaid’s Tale, and in that comparison, it suffers — it’s not nearly as powerful, not nearly as original, and only one of the characters is as interesting as Offred. But just as The Hunger Games needs to be judged as a book in its own right (and I rank it highly, as it happens), and so does The Testaments. So how does it fare?

    It’s not bad. The world and its history still resonate frighteningly with current events. The writing is great on a prose level. The characters are … all right. The twists of the plot are a bit predictable, though, and some tension is lost as a result of the nature of the narrative structure. On the scale of Atwood’s writing, where the greats are classics of world literature (The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, Oryx and Crake, The Blind Assassin) and the worst is actually pretty bad (The Heart Goes Last, Hag-Seed), this ranks somewhere in the middle — a bit better than Alias Grace, maybe around the level of The Year of the Flood? That’s enough to get a good rating from me … but anyone hoping for another Handmaid’s Tale is going to be sorely disappointed.

  33. Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

    Turns out that one of the most hyped movies from Cannes, Bacurau, is a sci-fi flick! Doesn’t get a release in regular theaters (at least in the US) until January, but between Bolsonaro, the burning Amazon and mistreatment of Brazil’s aboriginal peoples, this movie looks like an extremely timely dystopian piece. My personal investment is high and I might even put in on my ballot (or at least, advocate for its eligibility to be extended).

  34. Novel: The Twisted Ones, by T. Kingfisher.

    This knocked my socks into… well, back into those woods, where I twisted myself around like the twisted ones, and I really, really don’t want to go look for them….

    Horror. Very, very effective horror. With odd touches of humor that kept me reading, because I really don’t DO horror….

    This’ll be on my Hugo ballot, no question.

  35. Pingback: Pixel Scroll 10/7/19 Yet There’s Much More To Be Said | File 770

  36. I think it’s important to remember that the Lodestar is Not a Hugo, and was made Not a Hugo in order to avoid demarcation disputes. YA remains eligible for the Hugo, and if you think a YA book is one of the top five SFF books of the year, that’s what you should nominate it for. (Which implies that, whatever the general rule is, nominations for the Hugo and the Lodestar should not be counted together, because they are nominations for two different things that are not incompatible.)

  37. Or at least, that is what I supposed. But looking at the rules, they do say that a work cannot be a finalist in more than one category, and they don’t explicitly say ‘Hugo category’, and the Lodestar is listed among the categories. Which does suggest that being a finalist for the Lodestar would make something ineligible for the Hugo. (Merely being eligible for the Lodestar doesn’t: I think that’s clear.)

    If this is right, I feel it undermines the point of the Lodestar; the worry about the idea of a YA Hugo was always that it might stop YA works getting the regular Hugo, and the Not-Hugo plan was created to overcome this. If it is going to stop works getting the Hugo anyway, why not call it a Hugo and have done with it?

    But I suspect this is a slip, possibly caused by a false analogy with the Campbell/Astounding, which, as it is not awarded by Worldcon, isn’t listed among the categories in the first place.

  38. Andrew M on October 8, 2019 at 1:52 pm said:

    I think it’s important to remember that the Lodestar is Not a Hugo, and was made Not a Hugo in order to avoid demarcation disputes.

    Correct. If nomination in the Lodestar made a work ineligible in a Hugo Award category, there would have been no point in having a separate award. The legislative history is obvious on this.

    Remember, when interpreting rules, you can safely discard an absurd conclusion, and it would be absurd to assume that the creation of the Lodestar Award (rather than a Hugo Award for Best YA Book) was done for the purpose of excluding any work eligible for the Lodestar Award from the Hugo Awards. There is a vast amount of legislative history on this, from both the proposals themselves, the debate in the minutes, and the recordings of the meetings where this was discussed. WSFS doesn’t hide elephants in mouse holes, to use a phrase that was thrown at me more than once when I found weird interpretations of the rules.

    Chip Hitchcock on October 7, 2019 at 11:38 am said:

    I thought there was a clause in the rules about all the nominations for a work being counted together even if they were in different categories, but I’m not finding it on a cursory search.

    There are such rules (they’re part of section 3.8) but they wouldn’t apply here because the Lodestar isn’t a Hugo Award, so you can’t move anything into or out of it from a Hugo Award category. The wording is consistent throughout in referring to the Lodestar Award separately from the Hugo Awards.

    The same work can be nominated (and win) both the Lodestar Award and a Hugo Award in the category appropriate by length.

  39. Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

    Novel

    Since the days of noir, the detective as emotional hot mess has been a staple of the mystery story. Ivy Gamble may have the dubious distinction of being the messiest yet. At first, I was concerned that this was derailing the story, but it works in the end because that is the story; this is, first and foremost, a genre-savvy urban fantasy about the characters who don’t end up being the Chosen One, or even chosen at all — the Petunia Dursleys and Neville Longbottoms of the world, and how feeling like a side character in their own lives affects and distorts their psyches. A drawback to this approach, however, is that the mystery in this fantasy mystery can be a bit obvious to a reader genre-savvy in that direction. It’s easy to feel three steps ahead of the detective in identifying both the perpetrator and the motive. But while I could have wished for a story that worked on both levels, on the level the book does work, it works very well indeed.

  40. BDP – maybe long, maybe short?

    Russian Doll

    I’m not going to describe it because this is a show best watched unspoiled. However, this is inventive, interesting, and written with real cleverness. I’m just going to nominate the whole show in long form, which will undoubtedly be futile, but it’s truly a single story.

  41. The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (Tor)
    Best Novel
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765392121

    Story follows a time traveller back and forth through time and a teenager in the 1990s and how they are connected. Also about memory, women’s rights, and Chicago in 1893.

    Okay. Um.

    Finished this on the train into work this morning, and my socks are currently orbiting Vega. This book drew me in from the very start. I went to a reading/signing on Monday and heard Annalee Newitz reading from it at Harvard Bookstore, which was wonderful, and I started it at lunch yesterday and finished it on the train into work this morning.

    There were moments when I wanted to pause and just absorb the enormity of what happens to the characters, and still wanted to gobble the book and find out what happens next!

    TWs for murder, rape, and abuse.

  42. Hi, I’m not sure where else to put this. If this is the wrong place feel free to say so/delete this.

    Would anyone be willing to help me sponsor a proposal for eligibility extension?

    I asked Kevin about it and he gave me the tools to write up a proposal for that Bacurau film I mentioned, since I think next year will be a better chance for it as more people will have seen it. The thing is, I’m voting in 2020 off of a Dublin membership so I’m hesitant to buy another Supporting membership for CoNZealand. If need be I’ll do so, but until then would 2 or more people here be so generous as to spend a little extra time at the Business Meeting? If so, what would be the best way to contact you?

  43. @N

    I’m not going to ConZealand but I already have my supporting membership. If you want to put my name on your proposal (you’d need some names of supporting members, wouldn’t you? I seem to remember that’s the case) you can DM me on Twitter at @redheadedfemme.

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