Sistah Scifi | Bookstore

📚 Octavia E. Butler kept Survivor out of print on purpose.

She called it her Star Trek novel. A rush job. Not good enough. So she let it disappear, and for nearly 50 years, it stayed gone. This fall, it's back.

Grand Central Publishing is releasing Survivor on September 1 alongside a previously unpublished short story and essays from Butler scholars. The secondary market had been charging serious money for copies. Now you won't have to.

Worth noting: Butler was against this reissue. It's part of what you're holding when you read it. Patternist series. Black speculative canon. One of the most complicated publishing stories in the genre.

🍷🤎 We had @stayseajackson on Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesday and the conversation did not disappoint.

The Ephemera Collector is set in 2035 Los Angeles, choked in wildfire smoke, where a Black archivist is fighting to protect a collection from an underwater Black nation that hasn't even been founded yet. AI health bots, a corporate takeover, and Octavia Butler's actual archive woven into the plot.

Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review. Library Journal gave it a starred review. Mat Johnson called it "if Octavia Butler lived through COVID."

Watch the full conversation on our Youtube channel.

🗓️ Bay Area Siblings.

Women of Afrofuturism is up at SFO Museum right now. It is inside Harvey Milk Terminal 1, past security, in one of the country's busiest airports. Not in a gallery. In the terminal.

Tours run every Tuesday and Thursday at 10 AM through July 30. Six dates left: July 14, 16, 21, 23, 28, and 30.

To visit: apply ahead of time for a free Gate Explorer Pass at flysfo.com, bring your Real ID or passport, and go through TSA.

👉🏾 Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/exhibition-tour-of-women-of-afrofuturism-tickets-1991492995158

📚 Four preorders worth locking in before August hits.

📖 SEASON OF THE SERPENT by @suyidavies The Nameless Republic trilogy ends here. Bassa has fallen, the islands are gone, and what's left has to pick a side before the next war.

📖 THE INEVITABLE UNDOING OF ZAHARA DOUGLASS by @leslyepenelope A dancer's twin sister disappears, and the world rewrites itself so no one remembers her. Five years later, Zahara's still the only one who does. Y2K panic, a private investigator, and a truth someone worked hard to bury.

📖 THE TONGUE I DREAM IN by @shereereneethomas Poems, stories, and essays pulled from Black legend and myth. The 36th book in PM Press's Outspoken Authors series, from a three time World Fantasy Award winner.

📖 BLOOD RISING by @markusredmond The Blood Saga continues. The plantation's been reclaimed, but the old slaveholders aren't done fighting, and freedom isn't secure yet. Book two.

Preordering matters. It's how these books show up on bestseller lists in their first week. Lock yours in now.

🩸 The question none of the ""prestige horror"" panels ever ask: what happens when the monster is the system?

The Monsters We Know: Black Horror as Resistance brings together @tamikathompson (The Curse of Hester Gardens), @justinckey (The Hospital at the End of the World), moderated by @ayizejamaeverett (Heroes of an Unknown World) for a conversation on what Black horror does that other horror won't touch.

Sistah Scifi is proud to amplify this one, hosted by Frontier Tower and Aunt Lute.

📍 Saturday, July 11 🕑 2PM to 4:30PM PDT 📍 Frontier Tower, San Francisco 👉🏾 Details and RSVP at sistahscifi.com/pages/events

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧 Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Dana is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday in 1976 California when she is yanked across time to the antebellum South, summoned to save the life of a drowning white boy named Rufus. She keeps getting pulled back. Each trip lasts longer, costs more, and carries her deeper into a history that turns out to be her own.

This is the one people hand to anyone who claims the past is over. Butler doesn't let you watch from a safe distance. She makes you live inside the question of survival, kinship, and how much a person endures to exist at all.

Some books you read. This one rearranges something in you.

📚✊🏾 Four Wednesdays in July, four authors, and four books worth clearing your evening for.

July 1 - @tlotlotsamaase on House of Margins. A young writer vanishes from an exclusive residency inside a colonial mansion on Devil's Peak. The only record of what happened is a true crime podcast, and her sister listens to every episode knowing the truth is worse than the story being sold. Horror that sits in your chest long after.

July 15 - @clpolk on The Feywild Job. Saeldian swore off love as a literal magical pact, the source of their power. Then a heist goes sideways, and the crew they're forced to join includes the ex whose heart they broke a decade ago. A cozy fantasy where the real danger is feelings.

July 22 - @clarenceahaynes on The Broken Hearts Agency. Washington DC is unraveling under a ghost plague that leaves people wandering the streets with no memory. The one person tracking it is an empathic PI who feels every heartbreak around her. Orisha spirituality, urban fantasy, and a slow dread underneath the romance.

July 29 - @greg_burnham7 on The Search for Sadiqah. It's 1921. Thirteen-year-old Sadiqah flees the Black Wall Street Massacre with a torn map and two unlikely companions, heading west to find a place that may only exist in legend. History and folklore braided into one quest, carried by a girl who turns out to be far more than she knows.

🗓 Wednesdays in July

⏰ 5PM PST / 8PM EST

📚 Happy pub day, Siblings. THE FEYWILD JOB by @clpolk is out today.

Saeldian doesn't fall in love. Not because they're guarded, but because their magic depends on it. Give your heart away and you lose your power. So they keep things simple. Heists, no strings, a trail of broken hearts behind them. Then a job comes along that's too good to pass up. Steal a gem called the Kiss of Enduring Love and carry it into the Feywild. The complication isn't the magic or the danger. It's Kell. The bard on the crew. The ex they walked away from years ago, after a kiss turned into a betrayal.

A heist romance set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, from the author of the Kingston Cycle.

🗓️✊🏾 Three Saturdays. Three rooms worth being in. July is stacked, Siblings. 🩸 July 11 | The Monsters We Know: Black Horror as Resistance

Frontier Tower, San Francisco | 2PM to 4:30PM PDT

@tamikathompson and @justinckey on Black horror as truth-telling, survival, and resistance. Moderated by @ayizejamaeverett. 📚 July 18 | A Is for Afrofuturism

West Oakland Public Library | 3:30PM to 4:45PM PDT | FREE

@isisasare and @angeladalton_author in conversation on Afrofuturism at the West Oakland Library. Made possible through the Oakland Literacy Coalition. 🌌 July 25 | Octavia's Legacy: Imagining the Futures She Made Possible

Berkeley Public Library | 2PM to 3:30PM PDT

@besteadwell, Duane Horton, and Imani Sims on the worlds Octavia Butler opened up. And who's building in them now. Organized by Aunt Lute Books.

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧 The King Must Die by Kemi Ashing-Giwa.

Fen has spent her whole life surviving an empire that killed her family. When the Sovereign executes her fathers and marks her for the same fate, she runs. What she finds at the end of that road is messier than any rebellion she imagined.

This one is a slow build that earns every moment. Found family forged under pressure. A world that is starving and still full of beauty. Politics that make you question every side. Kemi Ashing-Giwa builds worlds that feel lived in, and this audiobook drops you straight into the middle of one.

👉🏾 Listen through our @Libro.fm partnership at https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781668154366-the-king-must-die or borrow free via @libby.app

✨Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine Spotlight ✨

Now available in the Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine at @naamnw

📚 Africa Risen

Winner of the 2023 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology and the 2023 Locus Award for Best Anthology, Africa Risen is a landmark collection edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight.

This extraordinary anthology features thirty-two original stories showcasing the brilliance, breadth, and power of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora. From ancestor-guided supercomputers to child robots on dying planets to descendants of rain goddesses discovering their inheritance, these stories are bold, imaginative, and unforgettable.

A 2023 NAACP Image Award nominee, a 2023 British Fantasy Award nominee, and an NPR and Book Riot Best of the Year pick, Africa Risen continues the legacy of the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthology series and reminds us that Africa is not rising—it’s already here.

🎨📚 Join us for the next meeting of the Sistah Scifi Graphic Novel Club!

We're discussing HoverGirls by the incredible Geneva Bowers, the WEBTOON sensation turned gorgeous graphic novel featuring magical girls, supernatural powers, family bonds, and monsters threatening an entire city.

✨ Meet cousins Jalissa and Kim Vasquez as they navigate a new city, newfound powers, and the challenges of becoming heroes when fame, friendship, and destiny collide.

📅 Saturday, June 27, 2026 ⏰ 4:00 PM PT / 7:00 PM ET 📍 Online

Whether you're a longtime comics fan or new to graphic novels, we'd love to have you join the conversation!

Register today and read along with us!

🔗 www.sistahscifi.com/pages/events

Please join the Fabulize book channel on Discord for updates and communication: https://discord.gg/KRqAcSjfq

📚🌌 Sometimes you need strange fiction to show you the truth.

The best speculative novels don't run from reality. They drag it into the light and make you look. Vaishnavi Patel pulled these together in the New York Times, and every one uses the impossible to expose something very real.

The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin. New York's five boroughs come alive as people, and the rot trying to swallow the city wears the face of bigotry itself.

The Dream Hotel, @lailawrites. An algorithm reads Sara's dreams and decides she's about to commit a crime. She hasn't. She gets detained anyway. Surveillance fiction that lands a little too close.

Lakewood, Megan Giddings. A young Black woman takes a job that's too good to be true: free housing, full coverage, secret medical research. The horror here isn't invented. It has a history.

Three books that hold a mirror to now. 🤎

📚 Grab your copies at www.sistahscifi.com, our Bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/SistahScifi, or on audio through @Libro.fm.

🌟 Starred and sealed.

Season of the Serpent just landed its first trade review, and Kirkus made it a star. That's the close of The Nameless Republic trilogy from @suyidavies, and the verdict is "a shattering, transformative conclusion." The continent is split, the islands have sunk, and Bassa is gone. What's left is the season of serpents. Lilong, Danso, and Esheme each have to choose a side or fall with the old world.

Two stars from Kirkus across this trilogy now. The kind of send-off this story earned.

🍷 Tonight, Siblings. Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesday is sinking into Year of the Mer.

@ellethevillain joins us to talk Year of the Mer, a dark sapphic reimagining of The Little Mermaid that has zero interest in the happily ever after.

Arielle got her fairy tale ending. Her granddaughter Yemi inherits the wreckage. A father assassinated, a mother dying of a poisoned wound, a kingdom that never thanked her family for what it cost them. Then the throne gets ripped away, and the only one left to bargain with is the sea witch. Legacy, fury, and what you'll trade for vengeance. We're getting into all of it tonight.

Grab a glass and pull up. Which deal would you make if the throne was yours to take back?

🗓 Tonight, Wednesday June 24

⏰ 5PM PST / 8PM EST

📚✨ Happy Pub Day to The Broken Hearts Agency by @clarenceahaynes!

Linda Villanueva is a queer private investigator with a gift for reading heartache. Literally. She can sense other people's pain, and she's built a whole mystical detective agency around it. But while helping a devastated client navigate a ghost-invaded DC, Linda starts picking up on something darker: people losing their memories, wandering the streets in a daze, and a force that seems to be feeding on desire itself.

Urban fantasy. Glam horror. A queer detective who sees through you before you open your mouth. This is the kind of story that doesn't let you put it down quietly.

🌌✨ June 22 hits different in the Sistah Scifi universe.

Today we celebrate two visionaries who share more than a birthday.

@octaviaebutler was born on this day in 1947. The Godmother of Afrofuturism. The first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. The author who looked at the future and wrote Black people into it like we always belonged there.

And @ibizoboi, born June 22, 1977. New York Times Bestselling Author. National Book Award finalist. The writer who gave us American Street, Pride, Punching the Air, and Star Child — a love letter in poems and prose to Octavia herself.

Same date. Different eras. One lineage.

Pull up and celebrate with us. 🤎