Six Books with Annalee Newitz

Today, Annalee Newitz tells us about their Six Books

Annalee Newitz (they/them) writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the USA Today best-selling author of the novella Automatic Noodle, the books Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and the novels The Terraformers (a Nebula Award finalist), The Future of Another Timeline (winner of the Sidewise Award), and Autonomous (winner of a Lambda Literary Award). As a science journalist, they are a writer for The New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the three-time Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Sogdian Painting, by Guitty Azarpay. Azarpay was one of the world’s leading experts on Sogdian culture, which once ruled the silk roads and is now mostly forgotten in the west. Her book is an incredible collection of images and sketches of murals found in what remains of Sogdiana in Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. The Sogdians dominated silk road trade in the 5th-8th centuries CE, and their culture reflected the places they traveled; it was a hybrid of Iranian, Chinese, Turkish, and even a little European. You can see that reflected in their art. A painting might include a Zoroastrian story about the warrior Rustan next to a story about the goose who laid the golden egg. Or a Buddha reclining next to a Zoroastrian fire temple.

Sadly a lot of Sogdian cities and art have been lost or are not yet excavated, even though Sogdians were critical to global trade for hundreds of years. I just got back from a trip to Central Asia, where I visited a lot of Sogdian archaeological sites for a nonfiction book I’m writing on the ancient history of parties and celebrations. The Sogdians, being merchants who traveled far and wide, were excellent at throwing parties. Some of their paintings appear to include directions for playing drinking games. Azarpay’s book is basically the definitive guide to Sogdian paintings, with careful explanations of the myths and stories contained in them.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I can’t stop gushing about Mahmud El Sayed’s novel The Republic of Memory, which is an Arabfuturist story of a generation ship that goes through multiple revolutions—including one that purged all the AI embedded in people’s brains. We see a new revolution brewing through the eyes of several characters: a sweet Arab translator who just wants to marry his Japanese girlfriend, even though his family disapproves; a hotheaded revolutionary who wants to overthrow the ship’s conservative leadership; and a dangerous cyber-soldier who has been ripped out of cryosleep to solve a crime.

While many generations live and die on the ship, they are also carrying a massive number of OG people from Earth in cryosleep—which means that intergenerational rifts are very deep indeed. The characters are nuanced and sympathetic; the worldbuilding is impeccable; and the politics are never simple. El Sayed works as a translator, and he invented an entire multilingual cant for the younger generations on the ship, which is really next level worldbuilding. Best of all, it’s the first in a trilogy. I am definitely going to follow this ship all the way to its destination.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to reread?

I love this question, because I always feel so much pressure to read the NEXT thing, and rarely get a chance to go back and reread my faves. I’ve really been wanting to reread Octavia Butler’s Patternist books, because I haven’t read them in at least twenty years, and they made a huge impression on me. They’re all interconnected, though not strictly in a series, and tell the multi-millennia story of how humanity evolves into several different species—thanks in part to alien viruses and powerful, immortal mutants who have been secretly conducting a human-mutant breeding program for thousands of years.

What I love about Butler is that when you summarize her work it sounds like pure adventure, but as soon as you dig into it you realize how deeply political and unapologetically complex it is. Mutants who have been oppressed, living in the streets and committed to insane asylums, rise up to conquer Los Angeles. And then they have to grapple with the ethics of becoming the manipulators and mind-controllers of people who once did the same to them. Humans who pride themselves on their rationality struggle when alien viruses turns them into wolf-like creatures who go into heat and become feral. I hope I’m remembering all that right. This is why I need to reread these books.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?

I’m going to cheat a little bit and talk about a whole genre. So I was in love with science fiction when I was young, and read pretty much every scifi book in our local library. But my parents were both English teachers, and they looked down on scifi as “kid stuff”—when I turned 15 they started worrying aloud that I was somehow stunted because I was still reading Robert Silverberg and John Varley when I should have been reading grown-up literature by William Faulkner and Jane Austen. I’m ashamed to say that their campaign worked, and I gave up scifi for a long time. It wasn’t so bad: I read tons of beautiful literature; I became obsessed with Isaac Singer, Natsume Soseki, E.M. Forster, and Maya Angelou, among many other writers.

But then, once I was in graduate school getting a Ph.D. in English, I stopped feeling anxious about whether I was intellectually “stunted.” I got heavily into Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I started reading science fiction again. It started with Octavia Butler, and then snowballed into William Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Joanna Russ… and pretty much never stopped. I am so glad I found my way back.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

I think a lot about The Mouse and His Child, by Russell Hoban. I read it when I was about 8 years old, and I’m pretty sure that many of my own novels are still circling around ideas that book implanted in me. It’s about two mechanical dancing mice—a “father” and “child”—who are attached at the hands. When they get thrown away, they go on an existential adventure to figure out who they are. It’s full of metaphors about growing up—the mice eventually pry their hands apart—but also deals with who counts as a person, and what it means to really know yourself. There are some seriously weird, philosophical moments in the book. It was made into an animated movie, but I remember as a kid insisting that I would NOT be seeing it because no movie could possibly match the experience of the book. (On the other hand, his adult novel Turtle Diary was adapted into a movie written by Harold Pinter, and it is devastatingly great.)

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is called A Wall Is Also a Road, and it’s awesome because I was able to fulfill two personal dreams: to write accurately about the life of a sex worker in the Roman Empire, and to explore a romance between a human and a giant space amoeba with lots of tentacles. Also, it’s about trying to survive graduate school. Sapphic tentacle academia in ancient Pompeii. That’s a subgenre, right?

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Ale Presser and K.B. Spangler

There are two of us for this Six Books Interview!

Artist and co-creator Ale Presser is a very tired Brazilian mom who lives in Portugal with her husband and son. She lives and breathes comics. According to K.B., she’s a border collie who has to be working on comics every hour of the day or she’ll start to eat the couch.

Author and co-creator K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband and two completely awful dogs. She never stops writing novels, comics, and short stories. To hear Ale tell it, if left unattended, she’ll wander off and start another major writing project.

1. What book are you currently reading?

To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose, sequel to To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. I’m about a hundred pages in, and it’s got the same tone and pacing as the first book, so I’m really enjoying it. It’s one of those stories that operates on multiple levels, which I adore: the first level are the obvious challenges of the indigenous main character who is forced to operate in a white-dominated society; the second level are all of these baby living fusion engines just running around being adorable, with all the subtle implications of what it might mean that dragons can change physical matter at the elemental level; the third level is the folklore surrounding dragons and how each extremely different society claims they were saved from catastrophic climate crisis through forging bonds with these creatures. Blackgoose is building to something and I’m eager to learn how these themes are resolved.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This Machine Kills Billionaires by T.R. Napper. It’s a cyberpunk short story collection and Napper writes dark and hard, so basically it’ll be like consuming a little slice of fury whenever I’m in the mood for delicious hate cake.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I really love rereading The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik. It’s another one of those multiple-level stories where I find something new each time I read it. There are the monsters and the capitalism metaphor, of course, but on my last reread I realized that the man character mentions many times that the monsters will go after non-magical humans once they’ve eaten all of the tasty magic-enriched stuff. So if you extend the metaphor a little, nobody is safe from the harms caused by capitalism even if they can’t participate in it themselves. Plus you get phrases like “all the sense of an unvarnished deck chair” and, I mean, never. Not on my best day.

4. Is there a book that you love and wish that you yourself had written?

Watership Down, obvs.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

Same answer. Those bunnies, man. How do you do that with bunnies? Fiver is constantly shivering in my head somewhere…you know, I should probably reread that book, too.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

Well! That would be SideQuested, the first collected graphic novel of our webcomic of the same name. Here’s the cover copy:

Magic makes the world go round, but no one in Charlie Goldskin’s world knows precisely where magic comes from. This isn’t Charlie’s problem. She’s the adopted daughter of a woodcarver and is training to be a librarian. It’ll be a quiet life, but that’s fine with Charlie, as magic is summoned through conflict and she would like to avoid that, thank you very much!

Then her birth father shows up to take her from her village and bring her to the king’s court.

Prince Leopold is gifted in the noble arts of diplomacy and combat, but he’s never met anyone like Charlie. Falling in love with her wouldn’t be an issue, except he’s already engaged, and his fiancée is the daughter of a very powerful evil witch. Charlie, panicking, decides to break the news to Princess Robin...but then she finds love at first sight, too. To resolve this love triangle, the teens are sent on a quest to discover the source of magic! So much for Charlie’s plans for a quiet life...

I’m the author, and Ale Presser is the artist. Actually she’s the primary creator: she tells me what she wants to see in the story, and I slam words and plots into place, and then she illustrates my scripts. Ale is very firm about what I can and cannot do—she won’t let me kill off anyone!—and we’re both heavily influenced by Ranma ½ and other slapstick anime romcoms, so the story is constantly full steam ahead and beware of random giant mallets. Also, magical cults seeking to steal your life’s essence for their own nefarious purposes.

But the real joy is in the characters and how they interact. For example, Princess Robin and her mother, the all-powerful witch-queen Boopsie, know each other so well that it’s a joy to write their interactions. And they’re both very clever people so they’re constantly pushing each other’s buttons. Stack these characters with Ale’s amazing and expressive art, and it’s a wildly fun ride!

Thank you! 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with John Chu

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator by night. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Awards, won the Best Short Story Hugo for "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" and won the Best Novelette Nebula for "If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You." The Subtle Art of Folding Space is his first novel.

Today he tells us about his six books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Matching Minds with Sondheim by Barry Joseph. Stephen Sondheim, of course, is one of greatest writers of musical theater of all time. He was also a great creator of games and puzzles. This book explores this aspect of his work to give us more insight into his creative process. Also, it has some of the puzzles and games he created. As you read the book you are, in fact, also matching minds with Sondheim.

 2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed, the author who wrote The Fortunate Fall. It’s a bit lengthy, but I absolutely devoured it. The novel is unabashedly and unapologetically queer. It is an unflinching exploration of gender that takes place on a world whose native living beings have a genuinely alien lifecycle that defy our implicit categorization of living beings. ((I apologize for the awkward wording of that last sentence. I’m trying to avoid spoilers.) All of this takes place in an epically far-future milieu. There is so much to unpack with this novel and it is all fascinating.

I believe both Cameron Reed’s novel and mine have the same release date [April 7th]. Buy both!

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I don’t generally re-read books. I’m not the world’s fastest reader. Also, the day job and writing doesn’t leave much time for reading. So, I prioritize works that I haven’t read over works I have. At this point, my (virtual) to-be-read pile is so large that I don’t know whether I will ever make my way through. And yet, I keep adding to it.

That said, there are books like The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola that are so far outside my lived experience, I feel like perhaps I need to read it again before I can claim with a straight face that I have read it. In grad school, I rushed through The Book of the New Sun in my spare moments and I would love to experience those novels again at a more leisurely pace. While I’m at it, by sheer coincidence, I read A Fire Upon the Deep while I was studying network architecture. (A novel computer network is a tangential part of my PhD dissertation.) So much of that book referenced what I was also learning about and researching at that moment. It might be nice to revisit that book in a context where that is not the case.

 4.  A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

I read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire and was instantly smitten. It is a gorgeously written novel and very much the novel about assimilation that I wanted to write. The book is trenchant about the effects of imperialism and the contradictions it inevitably creates. Mahit is so true to life in that she both admires the culture of the empire, seeing its value, and understands viscerally the cost of that culture. She does this through, in part, the context of language, which is a topic near and dear to my heart.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

I’m going to mention two because I can’t decide. 

The first is The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster. Malka Older, who read it recently, posted about it on social media and from that I have to conclude, sadly, that the Suck Fairy has gotten to it. Fear of this is one reason why I never revisited or passed it on to my nieces when they were the right age for it. I gave them more contemporary books. The Phantom Tollbooth, I should note, was already pretty old when I read it. So, maybe the right time to read it was when both you and the world was young enough not to know better.

That said, baby me was absolutely delighted by the sheer invention of all the places Milo visited. I ate up all the absurdity and wordplay. 

That brings me to the second book, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. It’s another book that I’m afraid to revisit, lest I find out the Suck Fairy has gotten to that, too. This book almost sparked the love mysteries and sheer wordplay that I still have today. Again, tiny me eeked and gasped at every revelation. Tiny me reveled in the clever way Ellen Raskin manipulated words. 

There is a Chinese translation. One day, I may have to get my hands on it just to see how the translators navigated some potentially thorny issues as the wordplay is very much part of the mystery. (Again, I’m being vague so as to avoid spoilers for a novel that’s nearly 50 years old.) Maybe I should have mentioned this as a novel that I’m itching to re-read. (It depends on whether you call reading it in a different language re-reading.)

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest (read: first) book is called The Subtle Art of Folding Space and it comes out on April 7th from Tor Books. To reference question 4b, this is, to some extent, the book about assimilation that I did write. Right off the bat, the main character, Ellie, is accused of being insufficiently Taiwanese by her sister and, throughout the book, Ellie finds herself navigating the expectations of not just her family but multiple cultures. 

That, however, is the context for a story about the sometimes thankless job of making sure the world keeps working. Ellie is sent off by her sister Chris to the skunkworks, the machinery that generates the physics of the university, to replace a worn part. Chris can’t do it as she insist on being the one and only person to take care of their comatose mother. However, her cousin Daniel shows her that physics has been deliberately modified to keep her mother alive. It’s also causing spurious errors all over the universe. Right at the start, she is forced to make a decision no one should ever be forced to make: the life of her mother or the proper functioning of the universe.

The novel deals with family, assimilation, and the responsibility to make the world work, but it’s also a lot fun. It has both a secret cabal that threatens to topple the order of the universe and a man who makes food appear out of thin air on command. It has both a library with too many physical dimensions and a librarian who is a giant tree trunk mounted on top of a giant spider. It encompasses both the messy aftermath of a death and a car that spontaneously turns into a rhinoceros. I hope the novel captures the absurdity and joy of life and I hope people have as much fun reading it as I have writing it.

Thank you!

Thank YOU, John. 

You can also read a review of The Subtle Art of Folding Space here.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Aubrey Sitterson

Aubrey Sitterson is a comic book man. Based in Los Angeles, he is recognized for his ferociously idiosyncratic creator-owned work, blending literary aspirations with genre exploration. His best-known works of fiction include the geopolitical space opera Free Planet, fight comic character study No One Left to Fight, and populist superhero series BEEF BROS. Additionally, he is the writer of the exhaustively researched nonfiction tome The Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling.

Today he tells us about his Six Books

1. What book are you currently reading?

Recognizing the importance of a balanced diet, in addition to contemporary comics and other periodicals, I try to always keep a nonfiction and a historical comics read going simultaneously. Right now, the former is Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, a detailed, personality-based exploration of the 19th century military and intelligence sparring undertaken by the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. In addition to being the beginning of a dynamic that would continue through the Cold War with significant impacts today, it's also a rollicking, imperialist adventure story.

On the comics front, I'm finally reading Elfquest, which has always been an embarrassing gap in my comics knowledge; it's as wonderful as everyone says it is. Wendy Pini's control of gesture and character design are unparalleled, functioning within a newspaper and European comic strips tradition that, because of its remove from most contemporary US comics, hits like a ton of bricks today; not to mention how outrageously sensual all the character interactions are, without ever feeling salacious. Plus, like The Great Game--I'm discovering a theme--it's also a ripping adventure story.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

The Daniel Freedman anthology Stimulus. Daniel sent me a PDF of it months and months ago and I adored it, despite being keenly aware that--because we share a similar comics philosophy--reading it digitally was a pale imitation of the real thing. Working with a murderer's row of artists, all chosen for their specific talents, Daniel presents a collection of sci-fi stories that reward slow, careful reading and deliberate thought, with interlocking and recursive themes. And, as evidenced by how stoked I am to get the physical edition, it also rewards rereading.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Dave Sim's sprawling, experimental, abrasive, and controversial Cerebus isn't just one of my favorite comics of all time, I think it's the best comic of all time and one of the best works of written English in any medium. Sim accomplished what I aspire to: A comic that achieves novelistic depth not despite the medium but through it, utilizing, dusting off and innovating formal approaches that are always tied to his overarching fixations and the work's byzantine thematic layering. I read the full thing in college and it blew the top clean off my skull; over the past few years, I've been going back through the collections and am even more impressed than I was as a younger man. After I finish this volume of Elfquest, I'm planning to tackle the acclaimed Jaka's Story volume.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

It took me at least three running starts, over the course of half a dozen years, to make it through Dune. Well before the movie, I knew it was something that--on paper--I should love; in addition, I wanted to love it; I wanted to be a Dune guy. Not just because of the high regard in which it was held but because it was this big, sprawling, uncompromising text, so deep and complex as to feel esoteric. But on the first few reads, I found it punishingly dry; I think it was down to two things: 1) Trying to read it like an essay that has to be fully digested as opposed to a work of art meant to wash over you, and 2) Reading it--like a fool--digitally.


Eventually, something clicked for me and I devoured all of the Frank Herbert books. While I'm still torn on my opinion of the individual volumes, I adore them all as part of a whole; it's the platonic ideal of a long-running series, reveling in the freedom to explore different approaches, settings, tones and characters, while remaining in disciplined service to the work's overarching themes, layering in depth and complexity along the way.

5 What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

My favorite author in high school was Aldous Huxley; he still ranks extremely highly. While I dug Brave New World and Island was probably my favorite, the one that stuck with me the most is Point Counterpoint. It's a stunning piece of work, with a sprawling cast generally freaking out about the convulsions of the early 20th century. The character work is flawless, with Huxley simultaneously constructing and deploying instantly relatable archetypes, such that it feels both prophetic and timeless. But the aspect I've never stopped thinking about is the interplay between the characters' lengthy conversations, the larger issues lurking around the edges, and their relationships with one another, including the romantic.

Point Counterpoint is big, messy soap opera but it's also about big, messy ideas; concepts and challenges so complex and complicated as to defy the simple explanations found in parable and direct metaphor. Instead, Huxley mirrors the complexities of these challenges--political, social, economic, and moral--with the characters' ardently held but often inconsistent worldviews. I've always aspired to create work this challenging, with this type of depth; work brave enough to admit that there aren't any simple answers to questions worth asking, with complexity and ambiguity that inspire rumination in readers.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Free Planet, an ongoing series from the legendary Image Comics. Free Planet is space opera about what happens after the revolution is won. The Freedom Guard, a group of revolutionary heroes, is tasked with safeguarding the freedom of Lutheria from threats without and within. The problem, however, is that--just like in this great nation of ours--they all have completely different ideas about what complete freedom entails. It's informed by extensive research into real world revolutions and civil wars, with what Robert Kirkman calls "rich, intricate worldbuilding"; think "Cordwainer Smith meets Noam Chomsky" and "Sci-fi G.I. Joe defending space Venezuela" and you're partway there.

Throughout Free Planet's creation, cocreator/artist Jed Dougherty and I have aspired to utilize the comics medium to the utmost, attempting to match Huxley's depth and complexity through the use, not just of prose, but images, design, and their communication with one another on the page. It's a holistic approach to comics; rather than creating a story and breaking it into issues, panels, and pages, the book is ideated and written as an art object, built of overwhelming spreads featuring maps, graphs, charts, and infographics on top of all the sci-fi action and soap opera drama. It's not to be read quickly; it's a world you're meant to slow down and luxuriate within. And best of all? There's a full graphic novel waiting for you, with new issues landing at your local comic shop every single month.

--

Thank you, Aubrey!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Six Books with Alex Shvartsman

Alex Shvartsman (Brooklyn, NY) is the author of The Best of All Possible Planets (2026), Kakistocracy (2023), The Middling Affliction (2022), and Eridani’s Crown (2019). Over 150 of his stories and translations from Russian have appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Nature, Reactor, Strange Horizons, and several Year’s Best volumes. He won the WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction, was a three-time finalist for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Fiction, and was a two-time finalist for the BSFA Award. Read his work at alexshvartsman.com.

Today he tells us about his Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I tend to read or listen to a couple of books at a time: one in English and one in Russian. I’m finishing up Operation Bounce House, a standalone sci-fi adventure by Matt Dinniman (of Dungeon Crawler Carl fame), where a colony is invaded by remotely operated drones and mechs controlled by gamers from Earth. Although set in the far future, it has plenty to say about current gamer culture, politics, and AI.

I’m also reading Tunnel by Yana Vagner, the author whose novel The Epidemic was adapted into the To the Lake series which aired on Netflix. Tunnel is a thriller where hundreds of people are trapped in a tunnel underneath Moscow, the entry points shut due to an unknown catastrophe on the surface.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, coming out later this month. Children of Time is one of my favorite SF books of the past decade or so and I’m excited to see where he takes the series next.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to reread?

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is my favorite Russian-language book. I reread it every decade or so and it always feels fresh, benefiting from added perspective.

4. A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written?

Birthright by Mike Resnick; it’s not one of his better-known books, but it’s fantastic and quite ambitious in its scope. It tells the story of the human species from the moment we reached the stars and until humanity’s demise, spanning tens of thousands of years, and he does it through interconnected short stories that set up the universe he’s written many novels in.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

The Snow Queen and Summer Queen duology by Joan Vinge. I love those books dearly and really enjoy her other novels as well. That’s another set of books I need to reread!

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The Best of All Possible Planets is a space opera comedy. This book is inspired by Candide and structured as a series of Futurama episodes. It is full-on absurd and funny, and the sort of thing I love writing the most. The audiobook is narrated by Eli Schiff (Succession, The White Lotus) and Lewis Black (The Daily Show, Inside Out)! Plus there are corgis.

This book is presently on Kickstarter, and you can snag unique rewards as well as copies of the book itself in four different formats.



Thank you, Alex!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Stew Hotston

With a Celtic-Indian mother and a father of North African/Roma descent, Stewart Hotston is a somewhat confused second-generation immigrant living in the UK. His novels include the BFS and Subjective Chaos finalist Entropy of Loss, as well as the tech thriller Tangle’s Game and the science fiction novels based in UBISoft’s Watch Dogs universe—Daybreak Legacy and Stars & Stripes. He is also co-owner of one of the UK’s largest LARP systems, Curious Pastimes, and is an internationally competitive historical fencer with a PhD in theoretical physics.

Today he takes that diverse curriculum vitae and tells us about his Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I’m reading Blood over Bright Haven by ML Wang. For nonfiction I’m reading Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? I’m really enjoying both. Wang’s feels pretty timely, and an interesting take on a whole number of issues that are important to me (intersectionality, prejudice, colonialism) wrapped up in a meticulously crafted fantasy world.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Mahmud El Sayed’s science fiction novel The Republic of Memory is the one most on my radar. Having just seen the cover and read the first chapter, I’m really very excited for what he’s bringing to the genre—a unique cultural perspective, a fascinating stor, and what looks to be interesting structural choices.












3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to reread?

I’m not much of a rereader, but I have promised myself I’m going to reread The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez and the Tyrant Philosopher series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?

Annie Bot. I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind—I really disliked it when I first read it, but it then went on to win the Clarke Award, and I’ve promised myself I’m going to return to it and reassess to see if what I found so difficult the first time remains a sticking point on a second readthrough.












5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Oh, wow. That’s a difficult one because I read A LOT as a younger person and much of that has stayed with me. In terms of lasting influence on my writing, though? I think I was about 25 (I’m 50 now, so I’m going to let it count) when I read House of Leaves, and that really showed me that writing was more than content, more than delivering plot, that it could be about the words, the structure, the form itself. I’ve never written anything like it (and probably never will), but it remains a revelation to me that I return to again and again. Especially when I encounter people telling me there are rules to writing.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest is Project Hanuman, which is a space opera in the Culture mode, if that’s not too pretentious to say. More specifically, it’s also a retelling of how the god Hanuman lost his powers (and got them back), wrapped up in the collapse of a pan-galactic civilisation called the Arcology, and follows three of the survivors as they seek to build back. I am a trained physicist, and as a result this is one weird book, because modern physics says some incredibly strange things about reality, and I wanted to make those part of the story as much as the mythic elements around Hanuman.







Thank you, Stewart!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Six Books with Chloe N. Clark

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities (a pick for Best Books of 2020, NPR and The Brooklyn Rail), Patterns of Orbit, Escaping the Body, and more. She is a founding co-editor-in-chief of Cotton Xenomorph. Her next book, Every Galaxy a Circle, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press.

Today Chloe tells us about her Six Books!

1. What book are you currently reading?

What book am I not currently reading might be a fairer question at this point. After a period of not having much time to read, I've started carving out more dedicated reading time, and now I am feasting upon these long overdue delights. I can balance one non-fiction, one novel, and one short story collection at a time basically. Currently reading Why I Love Horror edited by Becky Spratford, Happy People Don't Live Here by Amber Sparks, and First Kicking, then Not by Hannah Grieco.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Oh gosh (depending on when this runs), I am looking forward to quite a few in my pile of TBR and pre-orders, including Ken Liu's All that We See or Seem, The Earth Room by Dana Diehl, Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee, and so many more! I am cheating so much at this one book thing!

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I love re-reading books, so I'm always hoping to re-read something. Right now, I want to re-read Victor LaValle's Devil in Silver before the show comes out.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?

There's a lot of books I've changed my mind about in a more negative manner (some because the book no longer connects to me and some because the author has turned out to be terrible). In positives, though, I think I had to age into Mary Oliver's poetry.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series had a profound effect on me as a child. I got deeply into exploring folklore because of them. I also think the very disturbing and almost impressionistic illustrations greatly inspired the way I think about describing horrifying things.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Every Galaxy a Circle. It's a collection of stories that spans almost two decades of writing and revision (it has a story that was my very first fiction publication way back in the prehistoric times). Story topics include pie, basketball, space ghosts, monsters, and the scariest thing that's ever existed—yes, I'm talking about leopard seals.











Thank you, Chloe!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.