Hitchhiker's Guide to Booze and Books

Two novellas. One meeting. Under 265 pages total.

This month we're kicking off with a double feature. Two short books that ask the same question from completely opposite directions: what does it mean to be conscious in a body the world wasn't built for?

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler (100 pages) A murdered elephant researcher's consciousness is downloaded into a woolly mammoth to lead a de-extinction herd across Siberia. Winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novella.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (164 pages) A crew of abandoned food service robots in post-war San Francisco do the one thing no one programmed them to do: open their own restaurant. USA Today bestseller. Nominee for Goodreads Readers' Favorite Science Fiction (2025).

I'll be in town for this one. See you then. -Leif

A civil servant is assigned to help a real historical Royal Navy commander, rescued from the doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition to the Arctic. Her job is to help him adjust to modern life. Teach him about electricity, supermarkets, bicycles, the internet. File reports. Keep it professional.
It does not stay professional.

Part time travel romance, part spy thriller, part workplace comedy, part meditation on displacement, empire, and what it means to belong somewhere that was never built for you.

Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Science Fiction. Hugo Award finalist. 339 pages.

Charles is a robot valet. One morning he cuts his master's throat with a straight razor and has no idea why. So he does what any good butler would do: he tidies up, folds the towels, and eventually walks out the front door into a world where humanity has quietly collapsed and nobody thought to tell the robots.

What follows is an existential road trip through the ruins of civilization, as Charles wanders from one broken system to the next, encountering other machines still performing tasks that no longer have any meaning. A gardening robot trimming hedges around a collapsed building. A security system protecting an empty facility. Every robot is still doing its job. None of them can explain why.

376 pages. Clarke Award shortlisted. Goodreads 4.04 with over 20k ratings. The audiobook, narrated by Tchaikovsky himself, is reportedly excellent if you prefer to listen.

I'll be in town for this one. See you then. -Leif

A consciousness once distributed across thousands of networked bodies is reduced to a single body. What was a starship and its corps of repurposed soldiers becomes one human frame, walking among the people of the empire that did this to her, working slowly toward revenge against the immortal ruler who is herself distributed across thousands of linked bodies and may be fighting a civil war against herself.

400 pages. Won the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and BSFA. Goodreads 4.06 with 200k+ ratings.