Just finished: Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest by Nick Mamatas. This was excellent—basically what I said last week, then it gets super weird at the end (much like Girls Against God did, except that unlike that one, I enjoyed the more narratively straightforward first three quarters of the book). I'm not educated enough to know if there are other authors besides, say, Silvia Federici, who really explore Prospero-as-colonizer, but I do think Nick might be the only one to tie that to a cyberpunk future, in particular our cyberpunk present where dystopia is driven primarily by billionaires' fear of death and fantasies of immortality. Which is to say there's a lot going on in this little book and you should check it out.

Currently reading: To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy by Jon Tattrie. You ever read a bio of someone you've never heard of? It's an interesting experience. It's kind of shameful that I hadn't heard of Charles R. Saunders until his induction into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame this year, but that's kind of the point—he died broke and unknown and was buried in an unmarked grave before his friends and fans figured out where he was and crowdfunded a memorial. He was a Black author and journalist from the US who fled the draft and eventually settled in Halifax, and he pioneered the genre of sword and soul, which is Conan-inspired stories set in fantasy Africa. Again. Hadn't heard of it. Tattrie worked with and was friends with Saunders (he was one of the aforementioned crowdfunders) so Saunders' life story is interwoven with Tattrie's investigation into what happened to him and why. He also gets a big assist from Charles de Lint (!!) who kept all of the many letters that Saunders wrote to him. I am reading this for podcast-related reasons but I'm genuinely fascinated by this story and will probably check out Saunders' novels based on this if I can find them.