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Book review: The Levee by Damon Norko

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Everybody from J.G. Ballard to Paolo Bacigalupi to George Miller has tackled the “extreme drought” future, but few have taken it quite as far as Damon Norko has done in his latest novella, The Levee. The world of The Levee is one in which not only have the rivers and lakes dried up, but so have the oceans. Barsoom-like*, humanity now dwells on the dead sea bottoms, and water, pumped from deep under those bottoms, has become so scarce and precious that it is used as currency, making for a weird and cumbersome economic system that I’ll expand upon later in this review.

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My Superpower: Aidan Doyle

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My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Aidan Doyle. My superpower is reading the air. I taught English in Japan for 4 years and I once heard my students referring to someone who was KY. I learned this meant kuuki yomenai — literally unable to read the air. Unable to read the unspoken messages others are trying to convey. Unable to grasp the context of the situation.

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Book Review: City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

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City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty is as elusive and complicated as its main character, Nahiri. When we meet Nahiri, it is 18th century Cairo under tenuous French control. She lives in a poor section of the city, not far from the Necropolis. She’s a healer, a con artist, and a thief who is willing to rob places while the owners are away. And yet she has power and ability she herself does not quite understand, a nature that is fragile as is her position. This sets up the novel starting off, anyway, as a historical fantasy, a historical urban fantasy at that. The novel switches gears, however, when Nahiri accidentally summons a djinn. Soon on the run, Nahiri and the djinn, Dara, are traveling across the Middle East to a hidden city of the djinn, Daevabad. There, they encounter Prince Ali, already chafing under the reign of his father and the future reign of his brother, and a city on the edge of change, or destruction. We get intrigue, political agitation, ancient secrets and much more within the bounds of the city.

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Book Review: New Reality by Jessica Payseur

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New Reality by Jessica Payseur is a sweet and sensual gay romance that warms the heart.  It’s a relatively fast read at just under 50 pages, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I’d classify this novella as more of a romance that is sci-fi adjacent, but I enjoyed reading it for the characters and their love story.  With well-timed tension and a slight danger factor (this is mostly in space, after all), Payseur sets the stakes in her universe and follows through with them.  Her character-driven love story with a squee-worthy ending is worth a read.  It is NSFW at times, so you may want to be wary of anyone reading over your shoulder. This is the story of Connell, a tired courier of slightly less-than-legal goods, drifting across the stars alone after the sudden death of his former partner in smuggling and in bed, left bereft and abandoned in the middle of a world he’s not sure he wants to fit into anymore.  On his journey across the stars, picking up the odd job and the odd man, he somehow connects with a mysterious man through their seemingly shared dreams.  Wystan Kreeger has been stranded on a distant planet for seventeen years, trapped with no possibility of escape.  Their shared dreams send Connell on the haul of a lifetime: a lover, a planet, and a happiness that neither man could have ever predicted.

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The Intersection: Ghosts in the Genre Machine

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The other day I heard a rumor about DC’s future plans for Wonder Woman that really pissed me off: the writers are considering ‘shipping Wonder Woman with Bruce Wayne. On the surface, that sounds harmless enough—that is, until you consider this thing called “context.” With that in mind, I’m going to make an unambiguous statement. Repeatedly demonstrating via story (in media and literature) that women are not complete beings without being in a relationship with a man is damaging. It props up patriarchal narratives on the non-value of women. It reduces them to one fate: being the property of a man. “OMG! How can you say that, Stina? Aren’t you married?” Why, yes, I am. I’m all for relationships in general. They make humans more empathetic. We don’t live in a world filled with an overabundance of love and empathy. Let’s have more, please! Confused? Let’s go back to that ‘context’ word. You see, there’s a reason that two of the most powerful fictional women on television when I was a child (Samantha from Bewitched and Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie) had their powers taken from them and/or were severely restricted when they married.

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