Here are 18 new books to add to your TBR for the rest of September

Fall seems to have arrived quickly here in Vermont this year. The leaves are starting to change into their vibrant shades of red, orange, and yellow, and the temperatures are starting to dwindle into comfortable levels. I haven't been reading much outside as a result, and I'm starting to switch over to reading in more comfortable places around the house, usually with a blanket and a pot of tea.

One book I finished while on the road to visit family last weekend was Christopher Brown's A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, which came out earlier this month. I'm a big fan of his newsletter Field Notes, and this is an outstanding look at our relationship to the land around us and our place in it. I'm going to be thinking about this for a while, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'll likely have a review in the nearish future.

Also on my TBR is a cozy-ish mystery novel set in Vermont, Agony Hill by Sarah Stewart Taylor, about a new detective who's investigating the death of a farmer in 1960's Vermont. It's an interesting, light read so far, and perfect reading for the fall here in Vermont.

Also, if you read James S.A. Corey's The Mercy of Gods and you're in the Slack channel, stop by #books-print to chat about it! Here's my review from last week.

Okay, here's 18 new SF/F/H books to check out over the course of the rest of the month:

The Strangest Fish by Katherine Arden  and illustrated by Zahra Marwan (September 3rd)

I'm a big fan of Katherine Arden's books, and really enjoyed her novel The Warm Hands of Ghosts when I read it earlier this year. She's doing something a little different for her next outing: a picture book called The Strangest Fish.

This is a delightful read: it's about a young girl who wins a strange-looking goldfish at a fair, and as she cares for it, it begins to transform into something wonderful. I've really enjoyed reading it to my daughter the past couple of nights.

The Rack: Stories Inspired By Vintage Horror Paperbacks edited by Tom Deady (September 3rd)

This looks like a fun anthology as we barrel toward October: The Rack, which features a number of stories that are inspired by the types of cheap horror paperbacks that you‘d find at a grocery store wire rack. A friend of mine, Kristin Dearborn, has a story in it, and it looks like a packed TOC of other spooky stories.

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by by Matt Dinniman (September 24)

Ace Books acquired the hardcover rights to Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series (a self-published series that blew up in recent years), and after releasing the first installment, Dungeon Crawler Carl, last month, they've moving on to the next installment this month. In Carl's Doomsday Scenario, Carl, a Coast Guard veteran and his ex-girlfriend's cat Princess Donut are dealing with a world transformed into a video game-like dungeon for the amusement of an intergalactic audience.

They've survived so far, but the dungeon is getting even more dangerous, and they're now faced with a new challenge: a quest. They're brought to Over City, an urban arena now in ruins with dangers all over the place. They have to figure out the mystery behind a devastating spell before time runs out.

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton (September 17th)

Peter F. Hamilton is known for his sprawling space operas, and in his latest, he jumps into the world of Exodus, a major AAA video game that's set to be released ... at some point in 2025? 2026? It looks like they're getting a jump on things early with this new book.

In this world, humanity left Earth 40,000 years ago, traveling across the galaxy in generation ships, eventually ending up at Centauri. There, they found a cluster of stars and some habitable planets and after arriving, we thrived and evolved. When this story kicks off, humanity is ruled by five great houses, who now have to contend with the arrival of other arkships filled with Earth's original inhabitants.

One of those new arrivals is Finn, who grew up in the Centauri worlds, and chafes under the oppressive rule of the Celestials. When a new arkship arrives, he finds that he has a chance to escape and become a Traveler, journeying out into the depths of unknown space to find new worlds.

The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison (September 24th)

A quarter of a century ago, the Midnight Club, a group of friends from a small Vermont college's literary magazine, last assembled. They're bound not just by friendship, but from the tragic death of one of their classmates, Jennet, who died while they were students.

They've now been brought back together with a mysterious invitation, and upon arriving on campus, they realize their host has a task for them: find out the story for how Jennet actually died, and offers them the opportunity to not only remember, but relive their past lives.

Publishers Weekly says "Harrison meticulously weaves flashbacks, elaborate time-travel twists, and the perspectives of each main character into a suspenseful saga about regret and missed opportunities."

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy (September 24th)

I enjoyed Margaret Killjoy's novellas The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion and Barrow Will Send What It May when I picked them up a couple of years ago, and her new trilogy, Daughters of the Empty Throne, looks to be just as interesting. It follows Lorel, who's long wanted to learn magic, fight monsters, and become a witch. There's a problem: she was born a boy, and when a local coven claims her friend, she disguises herself as a woman and takes her place, leaving her home behind.

She finds a world hostile to the witches: dark magic is spreading across the kingdom, and people have blamed a tree-killing plague on them. As Lorel learns more about this world and her powers, she's worried that her new companions will force her out if they learn her secret.

Over at Ancillary Review of Books, Roseanna Pendlebury says "Killjoy has written a story that is attempting to challenge some of the givens of the fantasy genre, in its approach to worldbuilding particularly. For someone who has read a lot of fantasy, whose mind is well worn into those familiar grooves, The Sapling Cage is an invitation to step out onto fresh ground."

Ultra 85 by Logic (September 17th)

I'm always interested in off-beat storytelling, and rapper Logic's latest project fits the bill nicely: Ultra 85 is his second novel and is set in 2115. Earth is uninhabitable, and most of humanity lives on a giant space station called Babel. We follow two pilots, Quentin and Kai who are tasked with heading off to a secret planet called Paradise where humanity's best and brightest are permitted to live. The pair encounter Quentin's estranged father and discover that the planet is not what they imagined it would be.

The book comes after Logic released his latest album (also titled Ultra 85) in August, and it's something that I'll have to add to my to-listen list. It sounds like a fascinating project.

Darkside by Michael Mammay (September 24th)

In this latest installment of his Planetside series (Planetside, Spaceside, and Colonyside), Michael Mammay follows Colonel Carl Butler as he sets out to enjoy his retirement on a distant planet, only to get reluctantly brought in on another mission when a 12-year-old asks him to track down her missing father, Jorge Ramiro, an archeologist who was supposed to be working a dig on a distant moon called Taug. Even more worrisome, the moon is controlled by a pair of mining conglomerates that have tried to kill him in the past. When he arrives with a friend and a security squad, he finds that not only is the man missing, but there are plenty of other secrets on the moon's dark side.

Library Journal gave the book a starred review, saying "Readers who can’t resist that world-weary voice, enjoy SF/mystery capers such as Suzanne Palmer’s “Finder Chronicles” and the soldier stories of John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” series, or simply like their military SF with multiple twists will be thrilled by Butler’s latest misbegotten adventure."

The Armageddon Protocol by Dan Moren (September 24th)

One series that I've been desperately trying to get back to is Dan Moren's excellent Galactic Cold War series, which kicked off a couple of years ago with The Caledonian Gambit and continued with The Bayern Agenda (my review), The Aleph Extraction and The Nova Incident. The series follows some agents working on behalf of the Commonwealth of Independent Systems as they operate in an interstellar cold war against the Illyrican Empire.

In this new (and final) installment of the series, we rejoin agent Simon Kovalic and the Special Projects Team after a terrorist attack on the planet Nova. They're targeted by the head of the Commonwealth Intelligence Directorate and arrests him and General Adaj for treason, and the rest of the team is forced to go on the run to try and find an Illyrican mole within the intelligence community.

Publishers Weekly says that novel's "the two subplots run in parallel until the very end, when Moren ties things up in a way that feels both plausible and rewarding."

Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik (September 17th)

Naomi Novik brings together 13 of her shorter stories, ranging from stories of a bride who gambles with Death, a reimagining of Pride & Prejudice... with dragons, and a story set in the world of a new epic fantasy series, Abandon.

I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin (September 24th)

This looks like an entertaining thriller: a woman named Ether  approaches Abbott Coburn, a Lyft driver in L.A. and offers him $200,000 to transport a large black box across the country to Washington DC. The catch? He can't look inside, ask questions, tell anyone, has to leave right now, and can't take any tracking devices with him. As rumors begin to fly that it might be part of a terror plot, it turns out that the box's contents are stranger than you might think.

Kirkus Reviews says that it's "wacky, thoughtful, and fun."

Rumor Has It by Cat Rambo (September 24th)

Cat Rambo brings out a third installment of her Disco Space Opera series (You Sexy Thing and Devil's Gun), in which the crew of You Sexy Thing have set out for Coralind Station to regroup and figure out their next steps as they work to take down a notorious pirate, Tubal Last.

While Niko works on trying to figure out some of the logistics (insurance payouts are a pain even in the future, it seems), they work on tracking down an old friend who might be able to help them find Last. But there are other threats lurking at the station, and they're going to have to face them down or risk losing everything.

Publishers Weekly says that "luscious extraterrestrial foods highlight Coralind’s attractions, while the diverse alien species Rambo delineates so well provide stories-within-stories that spice up the main plot."

The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories by Francis Stevens (September 17th)

Lisa Yaszek introduces a new installment of MIT Press's latest installment from Joshua Glenn's Radium Age series, a series of books from the early 20th century that helped shape the science fiction genre as we know it today.

This collection is a roundup of one of the early genre's pioneering writers, Francis Stevens, who penned tales of interdimensional jumps into dystopian worlds and quite a bit more. This looks like an excellent way to rediscover an excellent writer.

Irradiating SF

MIT Press is reissuing Joshua Glenn’s The Radium Age series

Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (September 17th)

There's a running joke in the TO Slack channel about how Adrian Tchaikovsky is enormously prolific, and how we're all for it. His latest book is Alien Clay, which is set on the planet Kiln, where the tyrannical Mandate oversees a prison colony. For most prisoners, it's a death sentence, and when one political dissident, xeno-ecology professor Arton Daghdev, is sent there he discovers that humans aren't the only intelligent life on the planet: there's a long-lost civilization in ruins there. He's curious, and despite the harsh conditions, sets out to find some answers about his new home, answers which could transform Kiln and Earth.

Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying "A savagely satirical take on the consequences of repressive doctrine and the power of collective action."

Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente (September 24th)

A number of years ago, Catherynne M. Valente wrote a book that I absolutely adored: Space Opera, where Earth is dragged into an intergalactic singing competition as a means for joining the collective. If they win, they'll be invited in, but if they lose, they'll be wiped off the map.

In this sequel, the Metagalactic Grand Prix is back on and Earth's fate is once again in the balance as a handful of planets that have opposed humanity have been working to take them out, and it's up to Decibel Jones – now on tour – to save Earth once again. Publishers Weekly said that it's "dense, elaborate, and wacky, this reads like Douglas Adams writing on a sugar high."

Where I End by Sophie White (September 24th)

Sophie White’s novel Where I End is getting a new edition after it won the 2022 Shirley Jackson Award last year.

This gothic horror follows a young mother named Aoileann who’s lived her entire life on an isolated island off the coast of Ireland. Her mother is bedridden, and she takes care of her along with her grandmother. The island she lives on is cursed, and only Aoileann hears its whispers. When a woman named Rachel and her newborn daughter arrives on the island, she awakens something in Aoileann, bringing a darkness to the island that will force her to confront the secrets behind her mother's ailment and potentially upend their lives.

Writing in The Guardian in 2022, Christobel Kent says "White embraces a visceral revulsion at what lies beneath the skin and behind the eyes, in a language pulsing with slippery energy. But what the writers have in common is an uncanny ability to tune in to the frequency of madness without allowing it to drown out subtlety."

Pilgrim Machines by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (September 17th)

Back in 2020, Sri Lankan author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne published an excellent space opera novel, The Salvage Crew, about an artificial intelligence that oversees a salvage mission on a distant planet. As it turns out, the planet is inhabited by massive aliens, and the crew is confronted by another salvage team trying to scoop up their prize from under them.

Wijeratne's been working on another couple of installments of the series, and is finally out with his next one: Pilgrim Machines. In this new adventure, the crew of the long-range freighter PCS Blue Cherry Blossom have been tasked with a voyage into the center of the galaxy to survey an unimaginably complex alien presence and to study it. This was an insta-buy for me: I'm really excited to see what's in store for us in this one.

The Battle of Space Fort Jefferson and Other Stories By Timothy Zahn (September 24th)

Timothy Zahn has long been a favorite author of mine, and before he was known for his Star Wars novels (and other excellent space operas), he was known for his short fiction. He's got a new collection of 13 short stories now out, which looks like a fun way to dip into some of his back catalog.

If you missed it, you can read the first list for September over here, and other past book lists here.