FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic by Stefan Ekman is FREE on Amazon US, UK
Non-fiction.

Urban fantasy, the genre of fantastic literature in which magic and monsters meet modern society, is fairly young but has old roots. Stefan Ekman’s book, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, examines the genre in depth, including its inherent social commentary, its historical development, and its interplay between modernity and the fantastic.

The author draws on a wide range of urban fantasy texts from five decades, combining detailed analysis of dozens of novels and other media with broad discussions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre across three sections. The first section presents an overview of what the genre looks like today—both in terms of its common traits and its variety of settings—and how it has developed over time, including the history of urban fantasy scholarship. The second section examines urban fantasy’s core concern with the unseen, for example through a focus on unseen individuals overlooked by society or hiding within it, and on ignored urban spaces or labyrinthine undergrounds. The third section addresses how urban fantasy explores the relationship between the supernatural and modernity. Ekman offers readings of fiction by Ben Aaronovitch, Lauren Beukes, P. Djelí Clark, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Max Gladstone, Kim Harrison, N.K. Jemisin, and Megan Lindholm, among others.

Urban Fantasy will appeal to teachers and students of the fantastic as well as to urban fantasy enthusiasts and literary scholars. Ekman illuminates the genre’s evolution and defining traits, inviting readers to rethink urban fantasy as a creative tool for using magic to explore modernity.

[Quoth]

Almost all folktales were once "Urban Fantasy".

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Almost all folktales were once "Urban Fantasy".

[Dr. Drib]

"Almost all 'Urban Fantasies' were once 'Urban Cowboys '"

[salty-horse]

Comet Weather by Liz Williams is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
First in a series. Reissue by Open Road. Other Open Road reissues are also bundled. There's no such offering at the moment, but I'd wait for it.

Levelheaded Bee still lives at Mooncote, the family home in Somerset, where she has an unconventional boyfriend of whom her sisters are unaware. Stella, a DJ who’s just done some gigs in Ibiza, has vowed never to return to Mooncote after a row with Bee. Single mother and fashion designer Serena lives in Notting Hill with growing doubts about her relationship with her longtime boyfriend, a rock musician. And Luna, the youngest, is a wanderer living out of a horse-drawn van while she follows a trail of horse fairs across the country.

The four Fallow sisters are scattered like the four winds. But now, with the comet due, they’re drawn back together, united in their desire to find their mother, free-spirited Alys, who disappeared a year ago. They have help, of course, from the star spirits and the no-longer-living, but such advice tends to be cryptic and is hardly the most dependable of guides . . .

[salty-horse]

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll is FREE as an open-access web page on the University of Minnesota Press website
There's also a good podcast on that page.

Reveals the alt-right’s project to claim science fiction and—by extension—the future

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.

[Quoth]

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future.

Two lies:
1) Plenty of not-white-men SF&F that are brilliant,
2) Almost no decent SF is about "invent a high-tech future". Ray Bradbury paraphased "It's about futures I don't want to see".

It's mostly egotistic sociopathic rich "white guys" running big USA companies that mistakenly think SF is blueprints. They are creating dystopias writers warned about over 70 years ago. See 1928 to 1978 SF & F.

Nazis tried this game with Germanic folk tales.

The paper/book looks interesting. I jumped to the conclusion on the website.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Sorry, that's not Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy.

[WillAdams]

J.R.R. Tolkien's (by way of Brian Sibbley) _Fall of Numenor_ is on sale:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1DVP4J3

[salty-horse]

Cross-posted to Horror.
Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Novella. First in a series.

A dark and dreamy tale of horror, corruption, and identity spun into the stickiest of webs.

Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.

It’s now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull’s invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they’re so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.

But patients aren’t the only ones with trouble on their minds, and although the spider’s been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.

[salty-horse]

Neon Hemlock are having a sale on their website. 50% until the end of the year with coupon WINTER2024.

I'm getting The Transitive Properties of Cheese (which is supposed to NOT be funny), and A Mourning Coat.

[salty-horse]

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Cordelia knows her mother is . . . unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms—there are no secrets in this house—and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend. Unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him.

But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t evil sorcerers.

When her mother unexpectedly moves them into the manor home of a wealthy older Squire and his kind but keen-eyed sister, Hester, Cordelia knows this welcoming pair are to be her mother's next victims. But Cordelia feels at home for the very first time among these people, and as her mother's plans darken, she must decide how to face the woman who raised her to save the people who have become like family.

[salty-horse]

Asunder by Kerstin Hall is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Was on my wishlist. Recommended for fans of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence.

We choose our own gods here.

Karys Eska is a deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying eldritch being—three-faced, hundred-winged, unforgiving—who has granted her the ability to communicate with the newly departed. She pays the rent by using her abilities to investigate suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When a job goes sideways and connects her to a dying stranger with some very dangerous secrets, her entire world is upended.

Ferain is willing to pay a ludicrous sum of money for her help. To save him, Karys inadvertently binds him to her shadow, an act that may doom them both. If they want to survive, they will need to learn to trust one another. Together, they must journey to the heart of a faded empire, all the while haunted by arcane horrors, and the unquiet ghosts of their pasts.

And all too soon, Karys knows her debts will come due.