Want to try something new, but aren't sure where to start? Many readers are looking for a comfortable book to help them ease into a new genre or new type of reading. Sometimes it is hard to make that choice on your own. Our New Adventures Book Club helps introduce readers to new genres each month by selecting welcoming "first reads" into new genres. This will be a virtual book club led by Bookmarks' Bookseller Cat. This month, we will be discussing The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E.
Alix E. Harrow was born November 9, 1989 in Idaho and grew up in Colorado and Kentucky. She went to Berea College at age 16, graduating in 2009 with a degree in history. She worked various jobs, including as a research assistant, cashier, housekeeper, instructional designer, and migrant farmworker, before earning a master’s in history at the University of Vermont. She taught history at Eastern Kentucky University before becoming a full-time writer. Harrow lives in Kentucky with her husband and two children.
She began publishing with story “A Whisper in the Weld” in Shimmer (2014) and won a Hugo Award for short story “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” (2018), also a World Fantasy and Nebula Award finalist. “Do Not Look Back, My Lion” (2019) was a Hugo Award finalist, too.
2020 was quite the year for science fiction, but it wasn’t all about escaping to other worlds. It’s easy to imagine flights of fancy in a spaceship to be a reprieve to reality, but science fiction and fantasy literature is the product of people with real concerns about the real world, and accordingly, they write about the challenges that we see in the world around us. Over the last 12 months, I’ve been thinking about the value of speculative literature in a time like this. There’s a meme going around that reading is a collective hallucination that we get by staring at bits of a dead tree. That’s certainly accurate, but I like to think of science fiction as a sort of cheat guide or rough map of directions.
Extreme strength. Super speed. Telepathy. These types of powers and more tend conjure up images of superheroes and typically, superheroes are the realm of comics, TV shows, and movies. In books? Not as much. And though my superhero novel
We Could Be Heroes arrives on January 26th, it doesn’t have too many contemporaries featuring traditional tights-and-capes superheroes. However, superpowers do wind up in books much more than you might think. It may come in the form of magic or science-based evolution, but the idea of ordinary humans having extraordinary abilities has shown up in some of the most acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels of recent years and here are five of them worth checking out.
Over the Woodward Wall (Tor.com Publishing 10/20) Baker is an open pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, and
Over the Woodward Wall began as a book-within-a-book, a middle-grade fantasy discussed in McGuire’s 2019 novel
Middlegame. The full-length version is a deliberately classic children’s fantasy and begins the Up-and-Under series. “Delectable, a ripe treat for lifelong readers…. It’s filled with adventure and wisdom, and navigates well-worn ideas with fresh enthusiasm.” [Katharine Coldiron]
Terry Brooks,
The Last Druid (Del Rey 10/20) Brooks began exploring the world of Shannara, setting of his bestselling and influential epic fantasy series, with
The Sword of Shannara in 1977. Now, after more than 40 years and 30 volumes, through prequels and spin-offs and sub-series, we have the concluding volume of both the Fall of Shannara saga and the series as a whole, as the heroes defend their land against the invading Skaar.