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Hello, my little medieval cogs! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I have stuff to share about a new trend in sci-fi books, information about something the Star Trek TV show stole from an old movie, a peek at Queen of Faces by Petra Lord, and more!
And apropos of nothing, I just realized my two current sci-fi reads are The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde and Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills. (Bunnies! Bunnies! It must be bunnies!)
One of 2026’s most anticipated YA novels is Queen of Faces by Petra Lord, a dark fantasy about a trans girl at an academy for assassins. Anabelle Gage has spent her life trapped inside a boy’s body, and it’s starting to break down. And unlike many of the wealthy citizens, she can’t afford to buy a new one. So she decides to steal a new body using her magic, but instead, is caught by the headmaster of Paragon Academy. As the head of a school for assassins, he is, of course, not very lenient, but he tells Ana that he won’t turn her in if she becomes his personal assassin. With no choice but to accept, Ana soon aligns herself with a band of renegades, and as time goes by, the lines between good and evil start to blur.
You can read an excerpt from this exciting novel on Reactor, and take a teeny peek below!
“I can make you a Grey Coat this term,” said Carriwitch. “Give you a real shot at becoming a student. Call it a perk of what I’m offering. I’ll tell my colleagues you died on this bridge, and that I couldn’t find your original body.”
“Don’t belong,” I mumbled. “N-not genius material.”
Carriwitch looked again at my letter and shrugged. “Fifty-three years ago, the Eldritch Guard named me chief mage of their entire body. Care to guess why?”
“Because you’re good with magic? With science?”
Headmaster Carriwitch shook his head. “Not quite. That helped, of course, but why did they put me in charge? What did they see in me?”
“I—” I coughed. “I don’t know.”
“Tonight, when you fought my students, I stayed back to watch. I guessed your Whisper Codex stopped working at twenty yards, when you ran away and Nell and Samuel started looking at you again. Then, when I could, I dealt you a fatal blow.” Carriwitch pointed at me. “Tactics. Creativity. A tranquil focus in a sea of blood. I possess all of these qualities. And so do you. Ninety-eight in strategy, ninety-seven in psychology. All of which led you to trounce two of my best, with next to no training. You showed marvelous talent for knife-work tonight, young lady. And you showed it on your first day on the job.”
“Job?”
Carriwitch floated a pitch-black envelope out of his pocket and set it down next to me. “I’d like you to work for me. To help protect our country as a witch of the coin.”
I understood in an instant. He wanted me to become an illegal mercenary. A hired mage, like Clementine, who would kill whomever he wanted, and take the blame if things went wrong. If I made enough money, I could buy a new, healthy chassis. And, as a Grey Coat, I could become a real student and get a free body. If I took Carriwitch’s offer, both paths would be open.
But they would come at a price.
I am a huge fan of Charlie Jane Anders and try to read everything she writes, books and articles. Recently she discussed a recent trend she was seeing in sci-fi books: memory sharing.
“Just recently, I’ve loved a ton of books on this theme. The notion of copying, storing, and sharing memories isn’t exactly new—in fact, I played with it quite a bit in my novel The City in the Middle of the Night. (Yoko Ogawa’s influential The Memory Police also deals with the ways our memories are controlled and overseen.) But this new wave of novels is using the concept to explore deep questions about personal identity, as well as the ways that our memories can be politicized and policed by repressive regimes. “
To learn more about it, Anders interviewed four authors whose books have included memory sharing—Karen Russell, Mia Tsai, Seth Haddon, and Yiming Ma—and their answers were fascinating!
“Tsai says she’s always been fascinated by the concept of memory. “Memory is magic!” she says. “How can something so crucial and something we stake our lives and personalities on be so easily tampered with?” Tsai points out that a lot of books that came out in the past year were probably acquired in 2023, and written in 2020-2022, if not earlier. And there’s one thing about the early 2020s that seems especially relevant to her.
Says Tsai:
I think the wave of memory-related books has a lot to do with how we’ve been gaslit as a nation over how devastating Covid has been and continues to be (plus the global gaslighting over the genocides to which we’re daily witnesses). What we experienced and what we remember does not match up with what we’re being told. And invalidating a memory is so deeply personal. It’s hurtful and provocative to say, “No, that’s not how it went.”
(And now you will be able to share this article with someone else someday!)
In a recent article, SlashFilm explains how the sound that we associate with phasers on Star Trek was actually lifted from the hovering sound of the Martian war machines from an earlier, famous science fiction movie.
“Phasers have been a common element of “Star Trek” since the beginning, and the phrase “set phasers on stun” has leaked into the pop lexicon, even outside of “Star Trek” circles. The sound the phasers make — a prolonged, high-pitched trilling — is deeply embedded in the brains of Trekkies everywhere. It was used dozens of times throughout the run of the 1966 series.
The phaser sound was once analyzed by sound designer, editor, and director Ben Burtt, perhaps best-known for his sound work on Star Wars movies and the Indiana Jones franchise (but with dozens of credits besides). Burtt spoke with TrekMovie back in 2009, and with the sharpest ears in the business, he was able to identify that the phaser sound effect was actually a repurposed version of the Martian warship sound effects from Byron Haskin’s 1953 movie War of the Worlds.”
Color me stunned! (Sorry, not sorry.) Did you know this fact?
We are big fans of C.L. Polk here at Book Riot. Their novels like Witchmark and Even Though I Knew the End get recommended all the time because they’re awesome. So I was wildly excited to learn they have a new book headed our way, and it’s a cozy fantasy romance heist set in a brand-new world inspired by Dungeons & Dragons! The Feywild Job is about two exes who end up having to work together after discovering they are part of the same team hired to steal a gem called “The Kiss of Enduring Love.”
From the publisher’s description:
“The last time Saeldian saw Kell, things hardly ended on good terms. A kiss became a betrayal, leaving Kell hurt and confused for almost a decade. But Kell can’t just walk away—not when this job might finally be his ticket back to the Feywild.
Forced to work together again, their adventure takes them from high-society parties to Feywild couple’s therapy. But as Saeldian and Kell rekindle their chemistry, they realize the gem is much more than a fey bauble, and their simple heist has summoned powerful enemies. . . .”
The Feywild Job by C.L. Polk will be out from Random House Worlds on June 30!
Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and on Bluesky and Instagram.
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