S5.14 Outskirters

The Steerswomen Series

by Rosemary Kirstein

Steerswomen — always seeking, always investigating — have gathered more and more knowledge about the world they traveled, and they share that knowledge freely. Until the day that the steerswoman Rowan begins asking innocent questions about one small, lovely, inexplicable object…

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

by Philip José Farmer

Hugo Award-winning beginning to the story of Riverworld, Philip José Farmer's unequaled tale about life after death. It seems that all of Earthly humanity has been resurrected on the planet. But why? And by whom?

That's what adventurers are determined to discover as they construct a boat and set out in search of the river's source, thought to be millions of miles away.

A Wizard of Earthsea

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.

Blackadder

Thomas Covenant Series

by Stephen R. Donaldson

Before GrimDark was a thing, he was fantasy's loathesome antihero.

Thomas Covenant had been sick; now, in what felt like a dream, he is better than ever before. Through no fault of his own, he had been outcast, unclean, a pariah. Now he was regarded as a reincarnation of the Land's greatest hero.

Dreamsnake

by Vonda McIntyre

In a far-future, post-holocaust Earth, a young healer named Snake travels the world, healing the sick and injured with her companion, the alien dreamsnake. But she is being pursued. . . .

The Peripheral

by William Gibson

2014 science fiction mystery-thriller set in near- and post-apocalyptic versions of the future. The story focuses on a young rural-town American woman who lives in the near future, and on a London publicist who lives 70 years thereafter.

Gravity’s Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. And at this point we could insert 500 pages of lorum impsum and people will claim to have read it.

Mayflower Poultry Company

The Mayflower Poultry Company shows up twice in Infinite Jest, (but not on the cover?) on neither occasion with that name given.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

The City & the City

by China Miéville

An award-winning police procedural novel set in two cities that exist side by side, each of whose citizens are forbidden to go into or acknowledge the other city.

It was adapted for television in 2018.

Sarah Avery

She claimed the entire Beltresan world came to her while dozing next to Julia during Intro Art History, like, a million years ago. There exists a massive but unpublished rough draft of the beginning of an epic series. To date, we have just the novella.

Just start throwing money at her.

Boston Gang Map

The infamous “Bloody Bean” is now mostly history. Despite gentrification, the South End, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan remain home to numerous Boston hoods, all contributing to the city’s unique identity.

The Round House

By Louise Erdrich

Set on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, the novel follows the story of a 13-year-old boy who sets out to find his mother's attacker with the help of his best friends.

It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012.

Uprooted

“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”

A Darker Shade of Magic