Lions. Lambs. Leopards eating faces.
The struggle to come up with a creative header Marches on.
Wrong Genre Book Covers
The Parable of the Sower as a quirky childhood introvert comedy was suggested by @DrWhippersnap. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.
Announcements
Upcoming book talk at the Welland Public Library
Rachel will be speaking at the Welland Public Library on March 22nd at 2 pm EST about the Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die. She may even be dropping some exciting news about future Sad Bastardry. (The exciting news can also be found here. Hint: please bring us your saddest recipes.)
Can’t make it in person? That’s okay! It’s on Zoom! And just like the ebook version of the cookbook, it’s free!
Click here to register!
Preorder Blight (The Sleep Of Reason #2)
Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo-award winning author of The Downloaded, says:
Rachel A. Rosen is a superb prose stylist and an incisive social commentator. Her post-apocalyptic Canada will haunt you forever. Predicting the future is supposed to be science fiction’s job, but Rosen shows that urban (and rural!) fantasy can do it, too, with sharp-edged commentary and real-world relevance. Look for this one on the award ballots.
Peter Watts, author of Blindsight, says:
A compulsive read: angry, articulate, and lyrical. […] Rosen is rapidly proving herself to be the twenty-first century’s answer to John Brunner.
In the unlikely event that we shake off our collective stupidity and cowardice enough to fight against the current trajectory of our society— not to mention that of the whole damn biosphere—I want Rachel A. Rosen leading the revolution.
Hyped yet? You can now pre-order Blight, the sequel to Cascade, in a bunch of different ways.
Pre-orders help summon the darkest of eldritch horrors—the Almighty Algorithm. You can pre-order here! It will be released in Spring 2025 through The BumblePuppy Press (and you can also buy it directly from the publisher).
Want to read it without paying money? I also need hype. You can sign up for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review somewhere that other people will see it. You can also download it through BookSirens, or find it on NetGalley!
If you haven’t read Cascade yet, what are you waiting for? I’m so excited for you to read Blight, but it’ll make much more sense if you read Cascade first. You can buy it anywhere online or through the publisher.
Show Cat
A LINE FROM A WIP
However, while all Politicians are schemers in the shape of Men, there is as much variation within these beasts as can be found among the more natural creatures of the wild.
Book Report Corner
by Zilla Novikov
Transmentation—Transience: Or, an Accession to the People's Council for Nine Thousand Worlds is Darkly Lem’s richly woven tapestry of a science fiction novel asks us who we are, deeper than the flesh and memories that imprison us, and if we can ever escape the societies that we belong to. Characters jump from universe to universe, from shell to shell, seeking to hold on to core identity that they're not always confident exists. In lieu of the certainty of self, they lean on that of belonging to something greater than themselves–even when their society betrays them, they cling tightly to this sense of meaning in their lives. As someone who suffers from mental illness, I found the themes of identity fascinating.
And as a fan of expansive, thrilling science fiction, I was equally drawn in. There were universes of political scheming to match the White Tower, and others of fighting bug-eyed monsters with stolen swords. There was love, or friendship, or some ambiguous tangle that's both and neither, lost beneath ambition. Each fantastical world is as richly detailed as the characters that inhabit it, and they're combined to tell a captivating, satisfying tale.
DID YOU KNOW?
Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.
Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.
Author Interviews
Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!
Zilla: Rachel and I both absolutely adored Gyre, Dale Stomberg's literary fiction novella about abuse, fate, the creative urge, and repeating our mistakes. We had to bring Dale in to talk about this work of art, so here he is! Dale, give us your best shot at putting the magic into words.
Dale: The story begins when Abigail is born with a fully formed adult consciousness and an awareness that she has lived a prior lifetime, albeit with no specific memories of her past life. As an adult mind in a baby’s body, she is physically helpless but also impossibly precocious. Her father, Raj, is overjoyed at how special she seems; her mother, Faye, is disquieted.
As Abigail grows up, scraps of memory from her prior life begin to return to her. She comes to understand that she did something terrible back then, and her wonder at being reborn clashes against her deep sense of shame and worthlessness. A family tragedy exacerbates the strain in Abigail and Faye’s relationship, and things start to spiral downward.
So the book ends up being a meditation on cycles of mistreatment, on the ways we struggle against our own pasts and ingrained predilections, and on how a sense of fate’s inescapability can come to tyrannise us.
Read the rest of the interview here.