This week, I’m hungry for some Speculative Fiction and I have three great books ready to feed me,

‘New Suns: original speculative fiction by people of color’, edited by Nisi Shawl, is a collection of seventeen short stories that I picked up because I like two of the authors, Karin Lowachee and Rebecca Roanhorse, and I’m hoping to find at least of a couple of new writers to follow.

There’s no common theme to this collection other than that all the writers are people of colour, so I’m hoping for a wide spread of syles and ideas. 

Megan Giddings’ debut novel, ‘Lakewood’ is a story about race and class and exploitation.

It focuses on a young, poor, black woman who drops out of college to help pay off the family debt and takes a too-good-to-be-true job as a volunteer subject in a secret research project in a remote town.

Yeah, nothing to worry about there. I’m sure everything will be fine. It’s not like anyone would treat black lives as disposable assets or anything.

‘Planetfall’, by Emma Newman, has been on my TBR for a while now. People I trust keep recommending it to me as a future classic, so I’ve brought it to the top of the pile.

What appeals to me about it is that it takes a conventional space colonisation premise and twists it into something personal and difficult by having the colony being founded on a lie. A lie that my soon be publically exposed.

I think most stories about how things are founded veer away from the truth and slowly become encrusted in convenient myths. I’m interested to see what happens when deliberate deception is in the mix.