imyril @ There's Always Room For One More Giveaways, SciFiMonth, SciFiMonth 2021

#SciFiMonth Mission Log: week one

SciFiMonth 2021 (1-30 November): Words full of hope and threat, like the stars

Hailing all channels: it’s time for your weekly SciFiMonth round-up! If you’ve been off exploring your own favourite corner of the multiverse, you may have missed what your fellow crew are up to. Don’t worry: Lisa and I have been manning the comms and we’ll take you on a tour of the fun so far. 

Each week, Lisa and I split the logs between us to bring you a full update of everything that’s been going on. This week, you can head on over to Dear Geek Place for a round-up of crew introductions, TBRs, read-alongs, interviews and giveaways, or keeping reading for an overview of the reviews, recommendations, discussions and tags. 

Housekeeping

Before I get started, a gentle reminder to please add a link to your posts to the master schedule. We do our best to monitor the tag on Twitter and to keep an eye on posts pinging into our inboxes, but the schedule is the only way to be sure we’ll see your content. Don’t worry – whenever you add it, we’ll include it in the following week’s log, so you haven’t missed your chance if you didn’t get an early post in this week. 

Right, on to the fun!

Crew update

We’ve had a few new crewmates jump aboard as we headed out of orbit, so a warm welcome (and in some cases welcome back) to: Alma Raymer, Bookish Linda, Mackenzie of Colour Me Read, Haunted Reading, Ollie of Infinite Speculation, RJSThumbelina, and Tanja of Where Stories Lie 🚀

Book Reviews

Media Reviews

Lists and recommendations

As we boarded the good ship SciFiMonth, someone mentioned looking for recommendations – so gird your TBRs and reinforce your shelves, the crew are here to help…

Out now

Alex kicked off proceedings with some suggestions of midlist and older SF novels that are worth exploring, grouped by subgenre. Not sure what subgenre is what? Louise provided a handy overview of her favourite subgenres with examples of books and movies for each. Crini shared favourite queer SF from the past 10 years and has some on point suggestions for queer SF to read if you loved Max Max: Fury Road. Back at Book Blurb, Alex took a long look at the difference between first contact vs alien invasion, complete with some classic suggestions (yes, Annihilation is a modern classic, fite me).

Annemieke looked back at 14 SF books she’s read since last SciFiMonth and a host of interesting 2021 releases that she is yet to get to. Jess looked at the SF on her TBR, and Lauren walked us through the SFnal shows and movies she plans to watch this month. John shared 5 great novels he’s lined up for SciFiMonth, while I took at look back at some of my favourite scifi novellas and forward to the novellas I’ll be reading.

Coming soon

Over at Books, Bones & Buffy, Tammy took an in-depth look at future fiction by KS Covert, Jayne Cowie and Khan Wong. Looking ahead to 2022, Tammy shared 12 SF releases to start getting excited about and Amanda added another 14 for your TBR. Mogsy is waiting for on Jessie Mihalik’s new book Hunt The Stars (out in Feb 2022).

In the futures we dream for ourselves, Lauren considered what SF books she’d love to see get a TV/Movie make-over.

Top and Tail

The week in features always starts with Music Monday – Lauren at Always Me started SciFiMonth off by celebrating the music of 90s classic The Rocketeer.

The Friday Face-Off hosted at Lynn’s Books ushers in the week-end. The first SciFiMonth prompt was the first SF book read and/or reviewed – Tammy delved into Google to identify a long-ago library read while Mogsy looked back at one of the first SF books she reviewed for the Bibliosanctum. For Lynn herself it all started with a classic…

In other Friday fun, Lauren celebrated The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal for the Friday 56 (with Book Beginnings) – her first 5 star read for SciFiMonth!

Book / Blog Tags

We all love a tag, and the crew have got the month started with an array you might like to explore:

The SciFiMonth Challenge

The biggest tag of them all – the SciFiMonth challenge is our set of daily prompts to help provoke pics, recs, discussion posts or whatever else you choose to do with it. I’m only going to showcase blog posts this week, but check out the SciFiMonth tag on Twitter for some awesome pics and rec lists coming through on the other prompts / days too!

  • Day 1: SciFiMonth TBRs – head on over to Dear Geek Place for the other half of the Mission Log where there’s a lot of TBR action in the intro posts
  • Day 2: Hello Dolly #TropeTuesday (clones) |
  • Day 4: #ThrowbackThursday – rated fresh (at least 2 years old)
    • Lauren shared 4 YA SF faves from 2019 at Always Me
    • Mackenzie limited herself to 10 favourites and 10 on the TBR at Colour Me Read
    • Alex featured In The Dark Spaces by Cally Black at Book Blurb
  • Day 7: Fun and games
  • Day 17: Remote Moon Reads – hey, it’s SciFiMonth, why should time be linear?
    • I dived in early to share the rules and take the new SciFiMonth book tag (yes, it’s an SF version of Wyrd and Wonder’s Desert Island Reads, shh) at There’s Always Room For One More. What 8 books and other gubbins would you want with you if you were stranded on a remote moon with no comms?

Made a post we haven’t mentioned? Add the link to the Master Schedule and we’ll include it next week. The cut-off for adding to the schedule is an arbitrary time on Sunday, depending on what life has thrown at us.

Right – time to set our course for another week and see what delights SciFiMonth has in store…