NPR (National Public Radio) announced “Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books of the Past Decade”, a list with a top 50 selected by Amal El-Mohtar, Ann Leckie, Fonda Lee, and Tochi Onyebuchi. Titles are separated into categories, such as “Worlds To Get Lost In” and “Will Mess With Your Head”, and include a range of subgenres and interests.
What is it about space opera that makes us love it so much? The action, the exotic settings, the colorful characters, the alien species? The promise of countless adventures in the face of the great unknown? The excitement of imagining what humanity may someday become and accomplish in the vast reaches of the final frontier?
Whatever your reason for loving the genre, this bundle has it in abundance. The ten books I’ve selected (one of them a five-book set, actually) are jam-packed with space opera goodness that will propel you out to the furthest reaches of the universe and give you all the best feels while provoking plenty of deep thoughts along the way. – Robert Jeschonek
For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of four books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.
Star Smuggler by T.S. Snow
Space: 1975 edited by Robert Jeschonek
Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Earth Concurrence by Julia Huni
If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all four of the regular books, plus six more books (including two StoryBundl exclusives), for a total of 10!
Project Charon 1: Re-Entry by Patty Jansen
Galactic Capers of the Amazing Conroy by Lawrence M. Schoen
Ardent Redux Saga Boxed Set – Complete First Season by J.L. Stowers
Ball of Confusion by Dean Wesley Smith (StoryBundle Exclusive)
Krimson Run by Craig Martelle and Julia Huni
Encounter at Vilahana by Blaze Ward (StoryBundle Exclusive)
J. Michael Straczynski told Facebook readers August 12th that The Last Dangerous Visions has been finished.
THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS has at last been completed. The final draft went off to the agency that will be handling the sale about fifteen minutes ago. This has been a massive effort…112,000 words…tracking down the estates of the original writers to be included in the book, and nailing down some newer A List writers; fans of Harlan’s who wanted to be a part of TLDV. (And for the record, Harlan continued to buy stories for the anthology right through the 90s, and stopped only due to illness. He saw TLDV as a living document, and fought to keep it relevant when some stories became less timely or were supplanted by real world events.)
I will have more to say about the contents at a later date, but suffice to say that they include some of the most visionary writers in the science fiction genre over the last 48 years.
Marvel’s new What If…? animated series takes us back to the beginning with a rewrite of Captain America: The First Avenger. In this version, it’s Peggy Carter who takes up the Mighty Shield—and the shield has a Union Flag on it.
I have to say I think this is the most pure fun I’ve had watching any of the Disney Marvel series so far?
— The Sheer Bloody Fun of What If…? “Captain Carter Were The First Avenger” by Leah Schnelbach at tor.com
The novel is usually regarded as a realist art form, and I’d go even further: By telling the stories we use to understand our lives, the novel helps create our reality. In novels, things go wrong—that’s plot. People then cope. That’s realism.
Utopia, on the other hand, is famously “no place,” an idealized society sometimes described right down to its sewage system. In utopia, everything works well—maybe even perfectly, but for sure better than things work now. So utopias are like blueprints, while novels are like soap operas. Crossing these two genres gets you the hybrid called the utopian novel: soap operas put in a blender with architectural blueprints. It doesn’t sound all that promising.
Then came Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Published in 1975, this was the first great utopian novel, and it demonstrated just how good the poor, misbegotten hybrid can be. Of course, there’d been earlier utopian novels, like William Morris’s News From Nowhere, or H.G. Wells’sA Modern Utopia, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’sHerland, or Aldous Huxley’s Island. These were all interesting efforts. But Le Guin’s book was a triumph. What she showed is that by describing a utopian society in a moment of historic danger, you create for it all kinds of problems that its characters must solve. It will get attacked from the outside, corrupted from the inside; things will go wrong, and so you have your plot. Le Guin combined an intriguing utopia with a compelling novel, and the result was superb. The people on her habitable moon, Annares, have formed an alternative society to the imperial capitalist world, Urras. They devised a system that is feminist for sure and either democratic socialist or anarcho-syndicalist, but in any case in a state of flux, its people doing everything they can to keep what’s best about their system while also fending off impositions from the home world. It’s political fiction at its best.
— “The Novel Solutions of Utopian Fiction,” Kim Stanley Robinson, The Nation, Aug 2nd
As was mentioned at the last Critical Mass, fanac.org have a channel at youtube.com. One of the interesting items was a slideshow from the 1964 Worldcon, featuring Fritz Leiber talking about Monsters and Monster Lovers.
The 2021 Cattitude Bundle, curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
Cats. The internet loves them because we love them. We love cats in all their incarnations—playful, magical, irritating, and yes, occasionally evil. This StoryBundle explores the range of cats and cat behaviors as well. From the familiars to winged space cats, from cats who facilitate romance to cats who rescue others, every type of cat appears in this StoryBundle. Perfect for a day at the beach (without a cat) or at home in the AC (with cats nearby).
There are 10 books (four StoryBundle exclusives!) in the bundle :
The books in the Storybundle
More details at StoryBundle — Note: available until 18th August
The 2021 judges are Phoenix Alexander, Nicole Devarenne, Stewart Hotston, Nick Hubble, and Alasdair Stuart, with Andrew M. Butler serving as the non-voting Chair of the Judges. The shortlist was selected from 105 titles submitted by 41 individual UK publishing imprints and independent authors. The winner will be announced in an award ceremony in September. For more information, see the Clarke Award website. (with thanks to Locus).
The Adelaide Fan Review 
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