Tasha Suri

Kinda like, um, in The Hunger Games, "Today is the day of the reaping-" You don't know what it is, but you are hooked, and you are gonna eventually figure it out through context clues.

Um, from the books that I've represented, the opening scene that stands out to me still all these years later is, um, Tasha Suri's Empire of Sand.

Um, it's so, it's so beautifully done.

Um, she did something that I for years had heard was a no-no, but it was obviously not an issue for me, and that was, uh, to have your character wake up at the beginning.

And I was like, guys, I think we've done something here.

I remember Tasha Suri texting me one day and being like,

the sixth death of the same book

it's the

Have a meltdown, lay down, stand up, it's done.

And then I would also say, again, like, I would say, like, a lot of backlist stuff is There are some beautiful hidden gems.

And I'm going to point to also Tasha Suri's first two books, Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash.

And Realm of Ash in specific, like specifically, like the love interest for that is a wet cat librarian.

Yeah.

I know, right? [laughs] We're gonna do Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri today, and holy shit, this book was impossible to recap.

Um, I kept trying and failing, and finally Tabitha was like, "Maybe we should just chat like a book club," and that sounded great to me because my brain is not working well this summer.

I think we all have kind of, like, this weird, like, seasonal depression.

Yes

...

it would probably not surprise anyone to know that Tasha Suri is a librarian.

Um, [laughs] and I do find it very interesting, and this is my little aside, like the [sighs] how archives generally speaking are very much about whose stories get told and how those stories-

These included a typically delightful K.J. Charles M.M. Regency, How to Fake It in Society, in which a likable nebbish stumbles into an unexpected fortune and gets tangled up with an equally likable fake aristocrat who promises to help him find his feet in high society.

I also listened to The Island's Silver Sea by Tasha Suri, which tackles the power of story and has several poignant queer romance threads.

As part of my reading for the Hugos, I listened to Automatic Noodle by Anneli Newitz, which is about a group of robots setting up a fast food shop in a post-war dystopia.

In fact, a fair amount of the Hugo finalist short fiction this year poked at ideas around artificial intelligences and fabricated personalities, with an oddly positive spin considering the contemporary landscape and discourse around generative AI.