Welcome to final SciFiMonth Mission Status for this year. What a month it’s been: over 330 blog posts plus a treasure trove of tweets, pictures and comments! Thank you all so much for making it our most epic SciFiMonth yet.

The most mentioned books of the month have to be the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells and the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, which garnered much love from all quarters. Hats off to SJ Higbee for being this year’s most prolific blogger!

You can find a round-up of the final batch of reviews over at Dear Geek Place. Now grab a cuppa, settle in and we’ll revisit your discussions, memes,  recommendations and giveaways.

Regular Features

It’s a short week this week, so just a few regular features put in an appearance.

Lauren at Always Me got our final week off on a suitably climactic note with a Music Monday focused on Avengers: Endgame.

For Teaser Tuesday, SJ Higbee looked at Navigating the Stars by Maria V Snyder.

Beth of Before We Go focused on Fahrenheit 451 for First Chapter, First Paragraph.

Midweek sees Waiting on Wednesday at The Bibliosanctum and Future Fiction at Books, Bones & Buffy. There was also a WWWednesday check-in at Maxine’s Obsessions and Jessticulate’s weekly bout of Shelf Control.

This week’s Friday Face-off closed out this year’s SciFiMonth regular features with a celebration of 60s SF covers from:

• Lynn’s Books | Perfectly Tolerable | The Bibliosanctum | S J Higbee | Books, Bones & Buffy

List and Recommendations

TBRs beware! These are the posts where we found any excuse to champion our favourites and enthuse about the next big thing we want on our shelves.

Annemieke of A Dance with Books had some great recommendations for time travel and dimension hopping narratives, and while Mervi of Mervi’s Book Reviews noted that the lines between time travel and alternate realities can be blurred, she was happy to share some favourites.

Annemieke at A Dance with Books asked how many of the last 5 years’ SF award-winners she has actually read (can you say 2020 challenge?). Here at There’s Always Room For One More, I picked out some current SF authors I really need to try. Lauren at Always Me zeroed in on upcoming SF she can’t wait to read, while Maxine of Maxine’s Obsessions gave us a recap of 2019 SF reads she hasn’t had time to review yet.

A few people are ready to call it! The end of SciFiMonth saw some Best of 2019 lists coming together, so brace yourself for the must-reads of the year from:

• The Quill To Live
• Tammy at Books, Bones & Buffy (note: all eligible for her giveaway!)
• Mogsy at The Bibliosanctum

But it wasn’t all books! Cupcakes & Machetes shared her Favourite SF Movies, and Louise of Exploring By Starlight celebrated the SF Media she’s thankful for.

Discussions and interviews

Just because we’d turned for home didn’t mean we’d stopped asking questions! Jess(ticulates) asked whether Frankenstein was really the first AI novel, while Annemieke explored whether scifi is ‘just’ escapist fiction. Lydia Schoch took a look at the real-world science that seems straight out of scifi. The Captain put her questions direct to crewmate SJ Higbee in a Parley with an Author.

On the terribly serious side of genre, Adri at Nerds of a Feather ranked robot pals in SF (opinions may vary. Adri’s post, Adri’s faves 🤣). Lydia Schoch celebrated protagonists who know how to make mischief, while Louise flew the flag for her favourite SF heroines.

Memes and tags

There’s always time for some fun aboard the good ship SciFiMonth:

• Mogsy at The Bibliosanctum presented her SF A to Z
• The Bookish Muggle wrote spine poetry – our trickiest challenge prompt!
• Tammy at Books, Bones & Buffy took the SF TV Shows Book Tag
• I had my second stab at Six Degrees of SFnal Separation here at There’s Always Room For One More

Giveaways

It’s not too late for a bit of giveaway action:

• Tammy has two giveaways to celebrate our journey:
  • Two lucky winners can win their choice of one of the books she discussed this month! Open internationally – enter via Rafflecopter before December 7th.
  • Win a stack of ARCs (US only) on Instagram before December 7th.
• Lauren has a copy of Recursion by Blake Crouch to give away (US only). Entry via Rafflecopter before December 7th.

See you next year…

And that’s it for SciFiMonth 2019. Thank you again for being an amazing crew to fly with – we hope to see you aboard next November! …unless we can tempt you into some swashbuckling fantasy adventures with our Wyrd and Wonder event in May (watch this space for details in the new year).