Tak! commented on Countess by Suzan Palumbo
A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella, inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, in which …
The #SFFBookClub pick for April 2025
#sffbookclub
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Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …
Short and bitter
5 stars
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a vignette about working through guilt and self-loathing toward self-forgiveness.
There's a lot going on in terms of themes: gender, transhumanism, anarchy and fascism, cloning, all mixed into a more standard crime plot.
Although the main thread is satisfactorily wrapped up, there's definitely room to explore the world further - I want more Dora!
Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …
I hadn’t seen Juan in years, not since I left the commune.
— These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein
enne📚 commented on These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein
Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …
The #SFFBookClub pick for March 2025.
Tak! reviewed Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
Those Beyond the Wall
5 stars
A very different book than The Space between Worlds, but equally good.
While TSBW kind of revolved around the interworld travel premise, Those Beyond the Wall is firmly rooted in "Earth 0"'s Ashtown. Mr. Scales has a wildly different perspective on the Ashtown oligarchy and culture than Cara did, and it's kind of fascinating to see some of the blind spots the author built in. Despite the very different plot foci, there are similar strong themes of antifascism, anticolonialism, and the struggle for justice.
It's even more gritty than the original, yet potentially more hopeful as well.
I would strongly recommend reading TSBW first, because a lot of the setting is taken for granted here.
Tak! quoted Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
Stories should never be believed, but they should always be trusted.
— Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Tak! quoted Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
They call me Mr. Scales because I’m a snake.
— Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Tak! commented on The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
‘My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used …
I've had this one on my to-read list for ages - I'd better start it now if I'm going to finish in time to read Those Beyond the Wall for #SFFBookClub February
Tak! commented on Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
The #SFFBookClub pick for February 2025
enne📚 commented on Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács
Power to Yield is a collection of speculative tales exploring gender identity, neurodivergence, and religion …
I added this to the SFFBookClub poll for the month of January because I super enjoyed it.
If you don't know about it, the SFFBookClub is our informal fediverse science fiction and fantasy book club. I figure that folks from bookwyrm probably might be more interested in reading and talking about books so I wanted to post this here as well. We vote, read a book together, and then discuss via the #SFFBookClub hashtag over the course of the month. Take a look if any of these books sound interesting to you and you want to read along with others.
See: weirder.earth/@picklish/113660284130610947 for January poll
See: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/ for more general details
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
5 stars
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is a deeply dark yet eventually hopeful look at the continuation of current societal structures into space.
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
He spoke with an odd accent, intelligible but mushy, as if he held a small object in his mouth.
Ah, space danish
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The woman woke to the crackling of her anklet and knew the boy had come upstairs. She leaned toward her clock: the numbers glowed 06:00. The stars outside the window were growing pale. She would not sleep again now.
my every single morning
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The boy was taken upstairs without warning, unprotesting as he had been through all the changes in his seventeen years, the shifts from cell to cell each time he outgrew the bolt on his ankle and the Doctor came to exchange it for a larger one, an operation performed with a tool the Hold people called the Mallet, which jarred the whole leg and sometimes made the blood spray from the anklebone, and caused a sense of queasiness and superstitious awe in the boy, who would glimpse, for the instant during which the bolt and chain were removed, the shiny and alien-looking patch of underexposed skin on his leg which, according to the prophet, housed the seat of the soul.
That … is quite the #OpeningSentence
Tak! commented on The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The #SFFBookClub pick for December 2024