The Leaning Pile of Books is a feature in which I highlight books I got over the last week that sound like they may be interesting—old or new, bought or received in the mail for review consideration (the latter of which are mainly unsolicited books from publishers). Since I hope you will find new books you’re interested in reading in these posts, I try to be as informative as possible. If I can find them, links to excerpts, author’s websites, […]

I have a Sci-Fi Month confession to make: I didn’t think I liked science fiction for a long time. I once thought it was a dry and dull genre, full of flat characters who owed their existence to the need for someone to deliver tech-heavy exposition. Now I know the genre encompasses a wide variety of stories after reading many wonderful science fiction books and discovering television shows like Firefly, but the point is: had my introduction to science fiction […]

Burndive, Karin Lowachee’s Prix Aurora-nominated second novel, is also the second book set in the Warchild Universe. It follows the phenomenal Warchild, a Philip K. Dick Award nominee that was published after it won the Warner Aspect First Novel Award. The third book in this setting, Cagebird, was also a Philip K. Dick Award nominee and won both the Prix Aurora Award and the Spectrum Award. As the son of Captain Azarcon and Austro Station’s senior public affairs officer, Ryan […]

Warchild by Karin Lowachee won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 2000 and was published a couple of years later. It was followed by two related novels set in the same universe, Burndive and Cagebird. Both Warchild and Cagebird were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award during their publication years. Eight-year-old Jos Musey’s parents taught him to hide when he hears the alarms. Afterward, they always return and praise him for remaining in his hiding place, but this […]

A couple of days into this year’s Women in SF&F Month and, judging by the Twitter response and other social traffic, it looks like people are well into the swing of it!  I’m so very happy about the response from the community and can only say that we’ve just scratched the surface of the great posts that people have contributed. We’re continuing today with science fiction and fantasy author Karin Lowachee! She’s best known for her books set in the […]

The second annual Women in SF&F Month starts tomorrow! The entire month of April will be dedicated to highlighting the contributions of women to speculative fiction. There will be guest posts by women who write speculative fiction and women who share their love for the genre with others on their blogs throughout the month. Like last year’s series, some guests will be discussing the subject of women writing speculative fiction, but not necessarily, since the goal is to get some […]