Future Fiction #151 – The #SciFiMonth Edition

Welcome to Future Fiction, my reimagining of the Waiting on Wednesday meme! There are so many amazing new books coming out, that I can no longer pick just one. My goal with Future Fiction is to share at least three new books each week, a combination of recent cover reveals and books that I’ve recently added to my TBR pile. I’m still going to be linking up with Wishful Endings/Can’t Wait Wednesday, and I also want to give a shout out to Jill at Breaking the Spine for starting the original Waiting on Wednesday meme. I hope you’ll find some new books to add to your TBR piles, and as always, I look forward to hearing what YOU’RE looking forward to:-D

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During the month of November, I’ll be highlighting upcoming 2022 science fiction releases! Here are three new covers spotted, take a look:

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Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space!

Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.

That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.

Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister – but for once she’s not alone. She has help from her network of resistance contacts, her taser-wielding librarian girlfriend, and a mysterious bounty hunter.

If Rig fails and her former faction finds what she stole from them, trillions of lives will be lost–including her sister’s. But if she succeeds, she might just pull the whole damn faction system down around their ears. Either way, she’s going to do it with panache and pizzazz.

Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot. Releases in February 2022 from Angry Robot. This sounds like a blast! This gorgeous cover was just revealed last week and I was so happy it happened during SciFiMonth so I could feature it today:-D

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In the tradition of Station Eleven, Severance and The Dog Stars, a beautifully written and emotionally stirring dystopian novel about how our dreams of the future may shift as our environment changes rapidly, while the earth continues to spin.

The year is 1873, and a buffalo hunter named Samson travels the Kansas plains, full of hope for his new country. The year is 1975, and an adolescent girl named Bea walks those very same plains; pregnant, mute, and raised in captivity by people who were not her parents, she lands in an institution, where doctors cannot decipher the pictures she draws of her past. The year is 2024 and, after a series of devastating storms, a tenacious engineer named Paul has left behind his banal suburban existence to build a floating city above the drowned streets that were once New Orleans. There with his poet daughter he rules over a society of dreamers and vagabonds who salvage vintage dresses, ferment rotgut wine out of fruit, paint murals on the ceiling of the Superdome, and try to write the story of their existence. The year is 2073, and Moon has heard only stories of the blue planet—Earth, as they once called it, now succumbed entirely to water. Now that Moon has come of age, she could become a mother if she wanted to—if only she understood what a mother is. Alone on Mars with her two alien uncles, she must decide whether to continue her family line and repopulate humanity on a new planet.

A sweeping family epic, told over seven generations, as America changes and so does its dream, Walk the Vanished Earth explores ancestry, legacy, motherhood, the trauma we inherit, and the power of connection in the face of our planet’s imminent collapse.

This is a story about the end of the world—but it is also about the beginning of something entirely new. Thoughtful, warm, and wildly prescient, this work of bright imagination promises that, no matter what the future looks like, there is always room for hope.

Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan. Releases in May 2022 from Viking. Any book compared to Station Eleven will always catch my attention, and I think this sounds fantastic.

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Underground hacker Eliza McKay is one of the best in the virtual space where people create personas that can interact as data. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim–for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky–it’s McKay’s job to extract them. And McKay’s job just got a lot more dangerous.

While on an assignment in Singapore, McKay is flagged by an investigative outfit led by Ellie Brighton. Brighton desperately needs her corporate superior extracted from the Swim. The brute-force hacking tactics of Brighton’s tech Rose have already failed. The executive’s personality remains trapped and fragmented; if left for much longer, he won’t survive.

But the job is turning out to be more dangerous than McKay initially thought: her house is broken into, her target is surprisingly reluctant to be extracted, and something is menacing her informational AI sprite, Spike. Something big.

The Extractionist by Kimberly Unger. Releases in July 2022 from Tachyon Publications. I love this cover! It’s so eye-catching and has that graphic novel feel to it. And the story sounds like fun. Plus there is a character named Spike, how could I resist? 😉

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What do you think of this week’s Future Fiction picks? Let me know in the comments!