Happy SciFiMonth to those who celebrate! Every day has a prompt that you can find here. I’ll be doing a few of the daily prompts and posting some reviews of sci-fi books throughout the month.

We are starting out with our TBRs for the month. I’m not going to pick a lot of books because it is well known around here that I can’t stick to a TBR list for anything.

“The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle.

On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems.

Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together.”

I like sci-fi that is basically another genre that happens to be set in a future world or on another planet. I’ve had Malka Older books on my TBR lists for a while but have never read one. I figured this is a good place to start.

rise of thered hand

“The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders lead luxurious lives inside a climate-controlled biodome, dependent on technology and gene therapy to keep them healthy and youthful forever. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with discarded black-market robotics, a society of poverty-stricken cyborgs struggling to survive in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs.

Ashiva works for the Red Hand, an underground network of revolutionaries fighting the government, which is run by a merciless computer algorithm that dictates every citizen’s fate. She’s a smuggler with the best robotic arm and cybernetic enhancements the slums can offer, and her cargo includes the most vulnerable of the city’s abandoned children.

When Ashiva crosses paths with the brilliant hacker Riz-Ali, a privileged Uplander who finds himself embroiled in the Red Hand’s dangerous activities, they uncover a horrifying conspiracy that the government will do anything to bury. From armed guardians kidnapping children to massive robots flattening the slums, to a pandemic that threatens to sweep through the city like wildfire, Ashiva and Riz-Ali will have to put aside their differences in order to fight the system and save the communities they love from destruction.“

I think I’ve had this one on my SciFiMonth TBRs in the past but never gotten to it. It’s available at my library now so I’m going to try to get it this year.

I’m not going to read this book this month because I’m putting it on my birthday/Christmas list. It is one of the books being featured in the giveaways for SciFiMonth. Look at that cover and description. It is like someone wrote a book just for me!

“Stepping off a long-haul star freighter from Earth, Saras Kaveri has one bag of clothes, her little flying robot Kili… and an invitation to compete in the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show. Interstellar MegaChef is the showcase of the planet Primus’s austere, carefully synthesised cuisine. No one from Earth–where they’re so incredibly primitive they still cook with fire–has ever graced its flowmetal cookstations before, or smiled awkwardly for its buzzing drone-cams. Until now.

Corporate prodigy Serenity Ko, inventor of the smash-hit sim SoundSpace, has just got messily drunk at a floating bar, narrowly escaped an angry mob and been put on two weeks’ mandatory leave to rest and get her work-life balance back. Perfect time to start a new project! And she’s got just the idea: a sim for food. Now she just needs someone to teach her how to cook.

A chance meeting in the back of a flying cab has Saras and Serenity Ko working together on a new technology that could change the future of food–and both their lives–forever…”