Sistah Scifi | Bookstore

✨ @dangerouswomeninc calls The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays a SFF mystery romance. And then asks the question nobody else is asking: why does everyone want to know if the mystery was hard to write, but nobody asks about the romance?

This is bigger than one book. This is about the border guards and keep-out signs around genre. The ones that say science fiction lives over here. Romance lives over there. Mystery gets a seat at the literary table. Romance gets a side eye.

Andrea has been crossing those boundaries since childhood. A Black girl growing up in 1950s Pittsburgh, headed for physics and mathematics, told to enter any realm that intrigued her. A weeping willow tree at age six. A playwright by college. A novelist by way of Octavia Butler and Clarion West. A career built on ignoring every sign that said stay in your lane.

The result is a novel that sits in the intersection of three genres and refuses to pick one. The way the best stories always do.

📖 Read the full article at https://crimereads.com/andrea-hairston-on-crossing-genres-science-fiction-and-taking-romance-seriously/

📚 Flyers went up across West Oakland this week.We spent the day getting the word out for tomorrow's A is for Afrofuturism Family Storytime.

The blue house at De Fremery Park. The halls at KIPP Bridge. The West Oakland Public Library where we'll gather.

Afrofuturism in the communities it's for.

Tomorrow @isisasare and children's author @angeladalton_author sit down with the little ones for an afternoon of books, wonder, and Black futures. In partnership with the Oakland Literacy Coalition as part of Oakland is a Reading Town, made possible through an Oakland Literacy Coalition microgrant.

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧

An Unkindness of Ghosts by @rivers.solomon is set on the HSS Matilda, a generation ship organized like the antebellum South. Aster works the lowdeck slums, gets called ogre and freak by people who've never once tried to understand her, and starts digging into what really happened to her mother. What she finds threatens to blow the whole ship's order apart.

🌌 @cincinnatiopera premieres Lalovavi this July. Four hundred years in the future, an empire is hoarding a gene that grants eternal life, and the one person who has it has to run. She ends up becoming Lalovavi, a liberator.

The opera is written and composed by Kevin Day and Tifara Brown, and it's the first of Cincinnati Opera's Black Opera Project, a three opera commitment to stories written and composed by Black creators.

We talk a lot about Black futures living in books. This is a reminder they live everywhere imagination does.

🍷 Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesday is happening today.

@clpolk pulls up to talk THE FEYWILD JOB, a cozy Feywild heist romance where bitter exes get roped into stealing back a gem called the Kiss of Enduring Love. Con artist meets charming bard meets a decade of unfinished business.

If you've ever wondered whether you could stay professional next to someone who broke your heart, this is your book.

Grab a glass and pull up with your Sistah Scifi Siblings 🌌

📍 Wednesday, July 15 ⏰ 5PM PST / 8PM EST

🌌 Pulled up to the @moadsf last week with my people for EXECUTIVE ORDER, part of MoAD's LIMITLESS Film Series.

We walked through UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe first. The exhibition moves through three thematic clusters, earthly to astral, grounded to cosmic. Stood with Barkley L. Hendricks' Eclipse. Traced the gold serpent frame on Allison Janae Hamilton's Brilliant Sky. Sat with M. Carmen Lane's Mami Wata installation, an altar built from film, cloth, and ancestral memory.

Then the film. EXECUTIVE ORDER imagines a near future Brazil where a lawyer, played by @alfieenochofficial (Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter films, Wes Gibbins in How to Get Away with Murder), sues the government for reparations owed to descendants of enslaved Africans. Stayed for the conversation after with curator Cornelius Moore and UC Berkeley professor @saudadelight. Left with more questions than I walked in with. Usually a good sign.

Two more screenings before the series closes: 🎟 MAMI WATA — Thursday, July 23, 6-9pm at MoAD. C.J. "Fiery" Obasi's Sundance winning fable about the water deity worshipped across the diaspora. Conversation after with Cornelius Moore and UC Santa Barbara professor Jude Akudinobi. Free with museum admission. Register: https://www.moadsf.org/event/limitless-a-film-series-mami-wata

🎟 BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions — Thursday, July 30, 6-9pm at SFMOMA. Kahlil Joseph spans 247 years of Black memory aboard an imagined transatlantic liner. Conversation after with Joseph and MoAD's Key Jo Lee. Tiered pricing, $0-$30. Tickets: https://www.moadsf.org/event/limitless-a-film-series-blknws-terms-conditions

📍 A Is for Afrofuturism is happening Saturday, July 18th at West Oakland Public Library.

@isisasare and author @angeladalton_author talk Afrofuturism. Free event, made possible through a microgrant from the @oaklitcoalition.

🗓 Saturday, July 18 ⏰ 3:30 to 4:45 PM PDT 📍 West Oakland Public Library 🎟 Free

📚 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