For the Friday paid recommendation, we have a story of future crime...
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
Before we take a look at the Friday paid recommendation, I just want to thank all of you – we got to the second week of the newsletter! I ironed out all the issues with Buttondown (thank you Justin and Ben for your help!), people are managing to sign up for paid subscriptions too, and I think everything is proceeding seamlessly – I hope that is your experience too.
I really like the Buttondown interface, it makes it easy to send out these newsletters and keep track of them.
And now onto the book, because for today I got you a novella that’s published as a book...
Author: Leigh Harlen
Title: A Feast for Flies
Venue: Dancing Star Pres, November 2023
Type: Novella (I don’t know the word count – I read it in print)
Themes: Science fiction, mystery, police, disability, telepathy, service animal
Where to read: Standalone book, buy on Amazon US / on Bookshop.org (associate links here & following)
Disclosure: I got this as a print review copy from the author.
A Feast for Flies was one of my favorite novellas in all of 2023 and it’s going on my award ballots. The protagonist lives in a really rather terrible space habitat that has that kind of setup that is both authoritarian and yet allows for crime to flourish. She is forced to work for the police because of her telepathic ability, but she’s trying to escape this situation – together with her service dog.
There is a lot of thoughtful stuff in this novella about being disabled and neurodivergent that is never in your face or preachy; and at the same time, there’s also a fast-moving, twisty crime plot that’s not pro-police or pro-authoritarian. I’m not sure how all that fit in there, but it did, without the story feeling overpacked. Oh and there are also scenes of queer life and actual queer cultures, sometimes I feel that SFF completely misses the community aspects of queerness.
This is the second novella from Dancing Star Press I read, and I really enjoyed the first one too – A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis. (Not having to insert images makes me much more likely to insert links, I’m finding. Here is A Ruin of Shadows on Amazon US and on Bookshop.org.) So I clearly have to pick up more of their lineup.
Unrelatedly, the Kraken & Friends Booksale has a bunch of cool indie SFF at 99 cents per ebook right now, I think only this weekend. I especially liked Werecockroach by Polenth Blake (the best cockroach story since Kafka, and very different from that one) and Sanctuary by Andi C. Buchanan (I blurbed this book).
Wishing you a great weekend,
Bogi.