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Goodreads Review: New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention

New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention

New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Short stories are one of my favorite art forms, but some readers don’t seem to like them. Perhaps, in school, all the short stories they read were old, depressing, pedantic, and hard to parse. (But new, uplifting, entertaining, unperplexing short stories are written all the time.) Or perhaps, some readers don’t like them because unlike novels, short stories are too fast, too intense, and send readers back into the world a little breathless. (Is that a bad thing?) Or perhaps, readers just don’t hear about them as much as novels.
Now hear this: New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention is a great way to start your 2025 reading. It offers two dozen science fiction and fantasy short stories united by the idea of personal change. Themes include time travel, Greek myth, fairy tales, foreseen death, odd dystopias, programmed memory loss, and manufactured life. Many are quite short, and the tone varies from playful to horrific.
I enjoyed them all, like eating a box of chocolates or bento box, and was sometimes left a little breathless. The anthology was published by the Viable Paradise writing workshop 2023 cohort as a Kickstarter that was funded in less than 12 hours.

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Usurpation: Love will be ferocious

The novel Usurpation is the third in the Semiosis trilogy. The first book, Semiosis, takes place on a distant planet called Pax where the dominant species is an intelligent plant, rainbow bamboo. Stevland is the reigning bamboo. At the end of the second book, Interference, Stevland has sent his seeds to Earth, where the rainbow bamboo are flourishing, but no one knows they’re intelligent.

Then, at the end of Interference, Stevland sends a message to the bamboo on Earth: “…I must share a secret about humans. They are ours to protect and dominate.”

A bamboo named Levanter asks, “Tell us how.”

Stevland’s response finally arrives in Usurpation: “…Compassion will give you courage. Love will be ferocious.”

That’s all I can say without spoilers. In fact, I’ve probably spoiled enough already.

Usurpation will be released on October 29. I’ll be celebrating at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 30, at Volumes Bookcafé, 1373 N. Milwaukee Ave., in Chicago, with Alex Kingsley, whose first novel, Empress of Dust, has just been released. You’re invited!It’s the day before Halloween, so you’re encouraged to cosplay.

You can see me at a Speculative Literature Foundation event read the opening of Chapter 3 of Usurpation in this 3-minute video. (All the novels in the trilogy are available as audiobooks, narrated by Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas May, who do a much better job than me.)

You can read a few reviews of Usurpation at NetGalley, and a recent review of Semiosis at Space Cat Press. Semiosis was named one of the 75 best science fiction books of all time by Esquire Magazine.

If you want an autographed copy of my next novel and you can’t come to the launch party, you can order it through Volumes Books here.

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A chat at SciFiScavenger

Over at SciFiScavenger on YouTube, I spend a half-hour chatting with host Jon Jones about plants, Usurpation, and my other books, and I share some recommendations for books I love.

Here’s the list — by the way, you can find more of my book opinions at Goodreads.

Life Beyond Us, edited by Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest. The European Astrobiology Institute created this anthology of 27 short stories by top authors about first contact with life unlike our own. Each story is matched with an essay by a scientist. Exciting and educational.

Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you liked Semiosis, you’ll like this. Similar theme, lots of spiders, and a transcendent ending.

Meet Me in Another Life, by Catriona Silvey. If you like romance novels, this is the science fiction novel for you. Two people keep meeting, but why? I wept like a baby at the ending.

Langue[dot]doc 1305, by Gillian Polack. If you like historical fiction, this is the science fiction novel for you. Scientists travel back in time to France in 1305, and they underestimate the people who live there. Worse, they don’t listen to the historian traveling with them.

Babel, by R.F. Kuang. As a translator, I found the magic system fascinating and meticulously constructed. Better yet, the story is solidly anchored in historical fact.

17776: What football will look like in the future, by Jon Bois and Graham MacAree. This is a daring multimedia SF experiment, and not really about football. I’ll never forget the tragic death of the heroic light bulb. Find it here: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

The Marlen of Prague: Christopher Marlowe and the City of Gold, by Angeli Primlani. Magic is the only thing that might save Europe from the Thirty Years’ War. The author clearly understands Prague and the theater.

In Defense of Plants, by Matt Candeias, PhD. How can you resist a book with an entire chapter about “The Wild World of Plant Sex”?

The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai. Not SFF at all, sorry, but I live in Chicago, and this novel accurately reconstructs the disaster of AIDS in the gay community in the 1980s. You might consider it historical fiction.

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“When Star-Stuff Tells Stories” – now on sale

“If and when aliens make first contact, who should answer? Maybe humankind should turn to people like me, translators of science fiction. We’ve already thought through this kind of problem.”

That’s the opening sentences of my essay When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder. Calque Press has just published a limited edition of it as a 24-page pamphlet, and you can learn more and buy it here.

It’s one of a series of essays and other short works published by Calque. They’re meant to provide an opportunity for writers to think aloud about their own experiences and knowledge — and they are beautifully printed on high-quality paper. The publisher is fussy about the look and feel.

Here’s Calque’s description of When Star-Stuff Tells Stories:

Starting from the very earliest forms of human communication, the ways in which language developed into languages, and created the role of the translator, Sue Burke offers an invaluable guide to the importance and difficulties of translation on Earth, and gives us fascinating speculation about what might happen if we ever do come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. This pamphlet addresses questions of what communication is, and how the translator is uniquely positioned to work at escaping the bounds of the medium and bringing pure meaning into an intelligible form.

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My Goodreads review of ‘Alien Clay’

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Because this novel won’t be available in the United States until September, a fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky in Britain sent me a copy of the book, knowing that I’m a fan, too.

In Alien Clay, Tchaikovsky creates a world so hostile and hungry that no one wants to explore it. Instead, Earth sends convicts to work as forced prison labor, including Arton Daghdev, a scientist who has no use for orthodoxy. At some point, a life-form on the planet had created buildings and writing. Where did those intelligent beings go?

The story moves fast and in a direction that allows for exploration of the philosophy of life and life forms, which Tchaikovsky does especially well. Answers emerge as to what kind of life could thrive in the planet’s continual chaos, and what that kind of life will do to humans if it gets the chance. In the last two pages, the book takes a turn that is logical, reasonable, and very creepy.

Thank you to the mutual fan who sent this! I enjoyed it immensely and now find myself asking a lot of “what if” questions: What if this kind of biology worked with the life-forms I encounter here on Earth?



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