This story is a part of our fall Book Club conversation about ‘New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction By People Of Color.’ Want to participate? Join our new online community space or record a voice message on the Science Friday VoxPop app.

The Science Friday Book Club is back this fall! And after a year of nonfiction reads about the brilliance of birds and the invasive species of the Great Lakes, we’re dipping our toes back into the imaginary worlds of fiction. 

And we thought: why choose just one story, or one world? So we’re reading an anthology: New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction By People of Color (Bookshop) (Indiebound). Edited by Nisi Shawl, this 2019 collection of short stories takes us not only to other planets, but also Houston, the subway system of a nameless city, and a North America on the brink of colonization.

We’re still in the middle of planning our upcoming radio coverage, where we’ll dive deep on a sampling of these stories with help from guest experts—and encourage you to read the rest of the stories, because they’re good! But this is a pandemic, among other things, and some systems we’ve relied on in the past aren’t working for everyone. So we’re giving you an early heads up about the book title: we won’t actually kick off the club until late September or early October.

As always, we encourage you to start with Powell’s Books, our Science Friday Book Club partner, when looking to get your copy of the book.

And as you start reading, join our NEW online community: the Science Friday Book Club is now on Mighty Networks, a platform where we can gather and read together. We’ve built this community space because you told us you wanted a better way to be connected with other SciFri Book Clubbers, and we hope you’ll join us there. You can learn more about why (and how) we created this new space here.