OK listen, I can't keep up with this every week Tuesday releases shit, I missed all of May and I just realized it. I'm doing my best dahling, this is a hobby and nobody pays book influencers. And I don’t think you understand how long it takes to format these damn things with all the book pics, because I did it and copied it in here and lost it all, and that your attention span is already almost gone without a picture to distract your brain. I'm working on a really interesting article about the death of booktok, and I don’t want to suck more time away from that. You should watch out for it. (Hint hint)

So I'm going to do a big slog into every month instead, tell you what's coming, give you a chance to get those preorders in and SUPPORT THOSE AUTHORS! So what's coming out this month? Well NOT Alecto the Ninth, my lamentatious lyctoral league.

By genre:

SPACE OPERA

Recursion: Germinal Book 2 by Aric McBay (AK Press, indie) - June 9 – A pacifist society on a tiny green planet is invaded by Colonizers. I’ve had book 1 sitting on my shelf, because I cannot pass up fiction by AK Press, and I definitely need to pick up book 1 this week. It would be greeeeeeat if I could put down my phone and read a book. It’s summer and the kids need wifi free time too, so I guess I’ll be figuring out how to set up parental controls on the router this week, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

The Forgetting Navigations by Marlee Jane Ward (Interstellar Flight Press, indie) - June 9 – Our main character has eMoTiOnAl dAmAgE from being abandoned in a lifepod in space. A freight hauler rescues her and they bond over tea. Then the past comes a knocking, as it does in stories. This may be more of a litfic in space thing, but it’s honestly hard to tell without reading. I feel like Space Opera implies more action, but subgenres are not a science, so you will have to judge a book by it’s description.

The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press) - June 2 – In a bioship capable of reacting to a crew’s every need, a nine year old cultist with a brain enhancement investigates a planet infected with a plague. The crew also includes an assassin, an engineer who has been jigsawwed together with surgeries, an addict medic, and a “nonmodded” captain who doesn’t like the nine year old, this has all the makings of a found family space opera.

POST-APOCALYPTIC

Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth (Graywolf, and Indie Press) - June 9 – Kind of a romance between a woman raised in a pod in the ocean and a woman who may or may not be a robot. But also earth is now a charcoal briquette and everyone has gone to Mars except a handful of holdouts trying to construct a molecular collection of Earth stuff for people to eventually repopulate. And what the hell is a soul globule? You’ll have to read Earth 7 to find out. 

The Withers by Lee Upton (Regal House Publishing) - June 23 – I mean kinda dystopian but also kind of a thriller, this is a post epidemic book where scars from the disease are called withers. A woman is living with the surgeon who saved her and his preggo wife, in a world where organ traffickers roam the streets. They have to fight to protect the woman and her fetus, and they’re calling this a “Grimm’s fairytale” like story.

SPECULATIVE / LITERARY SCI-FI

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (Macmillan/Tor) - June 2 – Imagine you immigrate to a new country. But the rule is, you get cloned, and only the clone gets to go and you have to stay. You’re cut in two, and you can keep in touch with your other self or not. The MC of this book does not, until she’s called back to Korea for a funeral. She doesn’t know that her original self plans to switch places with her. Obviously, this is a deep dive into the psychological effects of immigration. Do you love the Doppelgängers trope?

Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Macmillan/Tor) - June 2 – Genetically engineered animals do the work while humans relax in the sun. A racoon is hired to track down a very important mouse. Why is the mouse important? It has something everyone wants. A familiar story if told about humans, but I’m interested to see it told from animals perspective. I’ve never read an Adrian Tchaikovsky book, any of my scifi besties want to give me some opinions on whether I should?

Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine Holmes (Bindery/Mareas Books, indie) - June 9 – In a fantasy retelling of a 1920’s era all-Black free town, women known as “carriers” pull traumatic memories from men so that the town is populated with men free of their pain, while the remnants of the past haunt the women. In a world where we expect Black Women to save us all, this book is an exploration of what it’s like to live with that expectation.

Voyagers by Meg Charlton (HarperCollins) - June 16 – a signal arrives from the edge of the solar system in a first contact story. While everyone on earth loses their collective shit, Alex’s old wounds are opened, because two decades ago, she and her friend Ana were abducted at age six. After which followed a media frenzy no child should endure, especially not after some trauma like that. Ana went on to be an advocate for the abducted while Alex tried to move on and forget. But now they are drawn back together in a story about friendship, family, and truth.

A City Dreaming by Maurice Broaddus, Book 3 in the Astra Black series (Macmillan/Tor) - June 30 – This series follows a young political leader, a woman in an elite military unit, and a captain of a starship, who are all part of the Muungano empire, a coalition of city states that stretches from Old Earth to Titan, in their quest to form an empire free of endless wars and oppression. This Afrofuturist spec fic series deserves a lot more press than it gets. Come on Tor, do better in your promotion!!!

The Moon Papers by Emmalea Russo (Arcade Publishing, Skyhorse) - June 30 – A controversial arts collective is going to launch a second moon from the Mojave Desert into Earth’s atmosphere in a project they are calling Moon 2. I am deeply concerned, but the book is coined as raucous, psychedelic, and humorous, which I am translating as publisher speak for, they think it’s funny as shit. But the description isn’t, so someone isn’t doing marketing properly. IDK, I need a preview to see if it’s any good.

The Young Die Old by Nguyễn Bình Phương with Khải Q. Nguyễn (translator) (Major Books, indie) - June 30 – This may be more of a fantasy, but in my searches for sci-fi it keeps popping up so the author must have filed it this way somewhere. Two feuding families fight for control of a buried treasure, but there reality blurs with hallucination, as spirits, doppelgängers, and collective guilt haunt the living. A society grapples with the aftershocks of war, repression, and silence, with a generation of children who age prematurely under the weight of unspoken histories. You won't find this one on Amazon, and hells yeah, fuck Bezos! You can find it here.

TIME TRAVEL

The Traveler by Joseph Eckert (Macmillan/Tor) - June 2 – at 7:51am, Scott Treder slips forward through time 24 hours. And every day, he slips again, losing double the amount of time each time slip. And while everyone ages normally, he doesn’t. His son ages beyond him. Years pass by in his marriage. It’s giving Click with Adam Sandler. I wonder how different it will be. Yall, this cover sucks. Nobody is going to buy this book based on this cover, what are you doing Tor???

Retro by Jessica M. Goldstein (Penguin Random House/Ballantine) - June 23 – An out of work actress takes a job as a time travel tour guide at a company called Retro, taking wealthy tourists on vacations to historical hot spots. She loves it, thrilling in the romance of an office crush and a 1937 private eye pursuing her. But slowly she notices some strange things happening to her memory and her relationships outside of Retro, and escaping into the past was never really an escape at all. I am wildly interested to see if this speaks to the escapism we justify with Netflix and doom scrolling and romance reading in the present.

ROMANCE

Moss'd in Space by Rebecca Thorne (Macmillan/Bramble) - June 30 – from the author of A Pirate’s Life for Tea comes this cozy sci-fi romance about a starship captain  who purchases a ship covered in Moss with an organic computer inside with a snarky attitude who loathes it’s builder because the immortal alien abandoned it. NGL, snarky AI’s in ships used to be my jam, but the way I’ve been feeling about real AI may change my enjoyment of them.

Plastic, Prism, Void by Violet Allen (LittlePuss Press, indie) – May 19 (shut your mouth, I missed this one and it deserves attention. It's pride month and this cover deserves praise alone, and that's before I've touched the book! Sue me. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.) Trans enemies to lovers in which a magical girl-gone-bad and a renegade mech pilot must find a way to stay on a date forever...even if it means destroying the world.

THRILLER

The Other by Annie Neugebauer (Shortwave Publishing, indie) - June 9 – this is a Book 2 Outsiders Sequence, which is a novella series. I’ve never read a novella series but I think I could get into that! Ten people head out on a backpacking trip, but the first night eleven set up camp. Everyone remembers everyone else. Who is the extra? That’s the premise of the first book. This one is about a couple on an outdoor retreat who meet their doppelgangers.

Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer (Macmillan/Tordotcom) - June 2 – An out of work OBGYN who has gotten publicly crucified for offering abortion care is kidnapped by a cult to help birth their babies. And she gets kidnapped on page friggin 10. If you’ve been in a slump this one’s for you, I read it in a single sitting, and I have 3 kids at home for the summer while I’m trying to run a business. I generally don’t DO that. Crazy, seat of your pants, worth a read.

Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay (HarperCollins/Morrow) - June 2 – So this semi professional gamer gets a nepotism job piloting a man in a vegetative state across the country, Weekend at Bernie’s style. He has an AI implant in his head and she can control his body using a cell phone. But he’s not dead. He’s living this grotesque hellscape where he doesn’t remember who he is or why there’s a rabbit tattoo on his arm. Their stories intertwine and they end up fugitives. Noooo, I didn’t give the plot twist away – it was right there in the book description!

ANTHOLOGY

Ring Shout on Saturn by Sheree Renée Thomas (Third Man Books, indie) - June 9 – Afrofuturist short stories that range from a prophet building a starship (very Noah’s Arc) to alien sisters navigating human complexities. And that cover? That’s an AMAZING cover and I’m here for it. This is actually book2 of the three book The Root and Sky series, but they're all short stories so there's no reason you can't go ahead and preorder this one, read it, then get the rest!

And an honorable mention to Lovecraft: Selected Stories, one of the Chiltern Classics being released on June 9. If you want to know more about my obsession with this set, read this. Or don't. Sometimes I'm convinced I'm living in a silo and nobody is reading any of this anyway. Either way, it's good practice writing, no?

See you next week. Because I'm still writing blogs, they just won't all be book lists of upcoming stuff. I need creative time as well as research time to feed my soul AND brain! (But not AI. Never that.)

— Zee

If you liked this and want more of whatever THIS is (unhinged book analysis, barely contained rage at the state of the world, and occasional Tamsyn Muir references and em dashes that I will never apologize for) consider subscribing for $5/month. Every cent goes to people who actually need it, because I have a day job and a cause, not a brand deal. This is my middle finger to Big 5 publishing, dressed up as a book blog. Come hold it up with me.