I can’t believe it’s just nine days to our TENTH annual celebration of SciFiMonth – 30 days of wall to wall geekery exploring other worlds, parallel dimensions, alternate timelines and weird science through November. So what are we cooking up for the crew?

I haven’t made as much noise about SciFiMonth as our tenth birthday deserves, but expect (virtual) cake and a lot of balloons when we blast off on November 1! It’s never too late to get involved, and we’ve quietly been making some plans to help the month trip along.

Top tens for our tenth year

We loved having weekly Favourite Fives for Wyrd & Wonder’s fifth birthday, so it’s only right to go full Top Tens for SciFiMonth’s tenth! But what are those weekly topics?

• Previously, On SciFiMonth: SFnal books / films / shows / games you enjoyed or were introduced to during SciFiMonth in the past
• Turn Back Time: feature tales about time travel or shout about classic SF titles
• To Boldly Go: contribute to RunalongWomble’s excellent #SmallPressBigStories initiative with a top ten focusing on stories published by independent and small presses
• One Small Step: sure we love a sprawling space opera, but this week is for celebrating short stories, novellas and novelettes
• Can’t Stop The Signal: SciFiMonth is all about the community – share your favourite SF blogs we should follow

I’ll be sharing my Top Tens weekly each Tuesday (hey, it’s traditional), starting on November 1st. Feel free to share yours on any day you choose.

Read-along

After some soul-searching and a reality check, I have had to admit I don’t have the bandwidth to run a classic / backlist SF read-along this year (sorry folks), but Lisa will be leading us on our final adventure to the Wayfarers universe with The Galaxy And The Ground Within by Becky Chambers. Reading will commence in November, with weekly discussions starting November 12th – Lisa has the full details over at Dear Geek Place.

The SciFiMonth Challenge

We’ve once again got a prompt a day through November to help inspire your blog posts, Twitter threads, TikToks, book photos or whatever else you choose to make of them. SciFiMonth is what you make it – you can ‘take the Challenge’ and try to answer every prompt (day by day, or combining prompts into a blog tag) or you can pick out a couple that sing to you and just answer those. There’s no wrong answers and the prompts are deliberately open to interpretation (although if that makes you nervous, there’s some suggestions in the Master Schedule).

Don’t worry – there’s a text-version of the prompts too.

What else will be going on?

…whatever we all choose to do as the month progresses! We’re looking forward to a month of reviews, discussions, recommendations, opinions, fun and nonsense as the crew shares their enthusiasm for all things science fictional. I’m lining up some reviews and hope to feature a couple of guest authors in addition to my weekly top tens; I’m trying to keep my aspirations under control as I’m barely keeping my head above water at work at the moment.

Brand new for this year we have set up a Discord server – if you’d like to join us to chat in the virtual crew mess, join the crew so we have your email address and ping me or Lisa for an invite.

Join the crew…

If you’d like to join us, you’re very welcome – just sign up to call yourself a member of this year’s crew. Want a taste of what to expect? Dip into the archives of our previous missions.

…and enter the sign-up giveaway

In honour of SciFiMonth’s tenth birthday, we have an amazing sign-up giveaway bundle of recent SF releases courtesy of our friends at Rebellion Publishing. The giveaway is open internationally – entering is as easy as signing up for SciFiMonth and making a SciFiMonth post by November 5th.

Banners and buttons

ARTWORK: this year’s SciFiMonth artwork is by the amazingly talented Simon Fetscher.

If you’re on the crew and would like to boost the SciFiMonth signal on your own channels, you’re welcome to use our banners and buttons (including top ten and Challenge graphics). Please do not make any changes (except to resize) and always credit the artist.