#sffbookclub

He spoke with an odd accent, intelligible but mushy, as if he held a small object in his mouth.

— The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

The woman woke to the crackling of her anklet and knew the boy had come upstairs. She leaned toward her clock: the numbers glowed 06:00. The stars outside the window were growing pale. She would not sleep again now.

— The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

The boy was taken upstairs without warning, unprotesting as he had been through all the changes in his seventeen years, the shifts from cell to cell each time he outgrew the bolt on his ankle and the Doctor came to exchange it for a larger one, an operation performed with a tool the Hold people called the Mallet, which jarred the whole leg and sometimes made the blood spray from the anklebone, and caused a sense of queasiness and superstitious awe in the boy, who would glimpse, for the instant during which the bolt and chain were removed, the shiny and alien-looking patch of underexposed skin on his leg which, according to the prophet, housed the seat of the soul.

— The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

“Your mother is going to be a star,” said the man in the gray uniform.

— Counterweight by Anton Hur, Djuna

A crack echoed through the boreal landscape, a momentary chaos in the still afternoon air.

— Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice