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Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading.
Twitter: @MissLiberty
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Made you look! If you’re a sci-fi fan and you love to read, of course you wanted to see what books you might have missed. And it’s okay—no one can read everything. (Believe me, I keep trying.) But because I don’t have psychic powers (yet), obviously some people will have read the books in this post. I am basing my choices on their low number of ratings on Goodreads (but not on the actual ratings themselves, because that site is less trustworthy by the day.)
So let’s hear it for books! And let’s hear it for these books! These are books with small audiences but huge imagination. There’s a junk freighter broken down in space whose potential rescuers are from a future where the freighter is famous; a tech servant trying to escape a post-apocalyptic city with the secret inside her; a future where an imaginative solution to climate change leads to even bigger side effects; future humans looking to reconnect with the offspring from sleeper ships sent out into the universe generations back; and an excellent collection of speculative stories.
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Unity by Elly Bangs
In the wake of the apocalypse, a tech servant looks to escape the dangers of Bloom City. Danae is not only looking to get herself and her partner Naoto out, but also a secret that she is hiding inside her body, involving a collective. With the help of an ex-mercenary guide, Danae and Naoto traverse the broken world, while enemies old and new seek them out.
To Each This World by Julie E. Czerneda
Sleeper ships grow more and more popular in sci-fi as our own planet continues to fall apart. They’re ships that set out to find habitable new planets, designed to sustain humans in stasis for the long journeys. But what happens if Earth never hears back from them? In this exciting novel, three humans on Earth join up with alien allies to find these long-lost ships and discover what became of them, while something is making a move to control the universe for itself.
Swords and Spaceships
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Cyber Mage by Saad Z. Hossain
This is a wildly inventive novel in which humans are the solution to climate change. Literally. In future Bangladesh, scientists have figured out that by filling a city with biological nanotech, the dense population can actually moderate the temperature. But it means everyone has to stay where they are—for good. However, restless citizens and surprising side effects make it difficult to regulate everything that is happening, leading to some wacky adventures.
Under Fortunate Stars by Ren Hutchings
When the junk Freighter Jonah breaks down in space, it’s fortunate (pun intended) that another ship happens by and can help. What’s weird, though, is that the Gallion claims to be from over 150 years in the future. And even weirder, the Gallion crew recognizes the Jonah—it’s legendary in their time for bringing an end to a generations-long war. But no time for “Huh?”, Dr. Jones! First, both crews will have to figure out a way to get going before the very-much not-ended-yet war catches up to them.
The Runaway Restaurant by Tessa Yang
Last but not least, this excellent collection of speculative stories goes from not too far from reality to way out there. There’s the title story, about a woman searching for her missing daughter at a restaurant for runaways; a woman discovers love with a model partly made of biotech; a man begins having the same dreams as his girlfriend, but doesn’t understand why; and the survivors of a pandemic must decide if they should join a cult determined to repopulate the Earth.
Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and on Instagram.