#SFFBookClub

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery country called England (which was bound and determined never to get too excited about anything), a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambitious glamrock messiah by the name of Danesh Jalo was born to a family so large and benignly neglectful that they only noticed he’d stopped coming home on weekends when his grandmother was nearly run over with all her groceries in front of the Piccadilly Square tube station, stunned into slack-jawed immobility by the sight of her Danesh, twenty feet high, in a frock the color of her customary afternoon sip of Pernod, filling up every centimeter of a gargantuan billboard.

— Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Everything is more powerful when you don’t understand it.

— Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

Once a craftsman offered six times to enchant the drawings for him so they would never decay. Kua refused. Things must end, his mother used to say. Even memories. Only then can they become something new.

— Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

It is funny how the lessons you teach your children to protect them end up becoming a wall that separates you.

— Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

Esi is turning into water. This is the only way Jinn knows how to describe it— like they are all floating on a lake that was once a pond and that will grow into a sea. Like nothing knows how to be solid anymore.

— Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

The first time I realize my sister wants to leave, we are in the White World.

— Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

Preconscious algorithms periodically threaten to bury authors beneath an avalanche of debased language reduced to gray goo. Such regurgitating formulae are capable of churning out words like factory-baked slices of fungal bread, devoid of understanding or communion.

— Sunward by William Alexander

Lately I’ve served as research assistant in a long-term study of Mercurial bugs.

— Sunward by William Alexander

It was too easy to drift into my own haphazard time zone of unscheduled naps instead.

— Sunward by William Alexander

There’s no such thing as an encrypted transmission.

— Sunward by William Alexander

Agatha Panza von Sparkles settled into Needle’s pilot seat for the very first time.

— Sunward by William Alexander