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Cinnamon Jones dreams of stepping on stage and acting her heart out like her famous grandparents, Redwood and Wildfire. But at 5'10'' and 180 pounds, she's theatrically challenged. Her family life is a tangle of mystery and deadly secrets, and nobody is telling Cinnamon the whole truth. Before her older brother died, he gave Cinnamon The Chronicles of the Great Wanderer, a tale of a Dahomean warrior woman and an alien from another dimension who perform in Paris and at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The Chronicles may be magic or alien science, but the story is definitely connected to Cinnamon's family secrets. When an act of violence wounds her family, Cinnamon and her theatre squad determine to solve the mysteries and bring her worlds together.

"Will Do Magic for Small Change sings from the page. This is a novel only Afrofuturism pioneer Andrea Hairston could write, full of myth, history, magic and intrigue, from 1980s Pittsburgh to 19^th Century Dahomey, West Africa. Hairston puts readers under a spell."   —Tananarive Due, American Book Award winner, author of Ghost Summer: Stories

Unpronounceable,
a novella by Susan diRende

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Earth has discovered it is not alone in the universe. The aliens—pink, shapeless, and peaceful—are very nice, but after a string of failed diplomatic missions, they ask Earth to stop with the crazies and send someone normal. In frustration, the UN devises a lottery to pick the next ambassador. 

Enter Rose Delancy, a Jersey waitress with a grudge against pretty much the whole world. Rose is not happy about winning; she's not particularly happy about anything. When she arrives on Unpronounceable—the planet having a name she refuses to attempt saying—she is nothing but rude to the Blobs, as she calls them, and they find it refreshing. She likes them; they like her. She settles in and starts teaching the natives all about junk food, movies, and sex. They show her a few things of their own involving the transformation of matter, but Rose is only interested in how it applies to sex.That is until she learns that she's been suckered to play the patsy for an interstellar takeover by Earth...

Visit Rose's blog for bonus material "for which you should be grateful."

Roadsouls,
a novel by Betsy James

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Writer and illustrator Betsy James explores in Roadsouls the power of art and creativity for transforming not only one’s own life but also the world one lives in. Timid Duuni has spent her life as abused and guarded property. Blind, arrogant Raím is determined to be again what he once was: hunter, lover, young lord of the earth. Desperate to escape their lives, the two lift up their hands to the passing Roadsoul caravan, and are—literally—flung together naked. Each of them soon learns that saying “yes” to the Roadsouls is more than just accepting an invitation to a new life—it’s a commitment that can’t be reversed. For Duuni and Raím, nothing is as it was. Lost to their old lives, hating each other, they are swept out of their cruel old certainties into an unknown, unknowable, ever-changing world of journey and carnival, artists and wrestlers and thieves. Behind them, inexorable, pads a lion. Inexorable, too, is Duuni and Raím’s inevitable encounter with it, an encounter that will change everything.

In this subtle fantasy, James (Listening at the Gate) follows two wounded young people as they move toward (and sometimes away from) each other.... The blossoming of Duuni’s artistic talents and the gradual process of Raím working through his anger are sensitively depicted, and the book has the rhythms of the road—meetings, partings, and new landscapes every day—at its heart. 
  —Publishers Weekly, January 2016

The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism
by Judith Merril
edited by Ritch Calvin

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Although Judith Merril is best known for her short fiction and her novels (in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth), she wrote a great deal of nonfiction. She wrote about SF fandom. She wrote about space and space exploration.And she wrote about science fiction. This volume collects Merril’s nonfiction from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Extrapolation, and her Year’s Best anthologies. In these collected pieces, Merril works through and develops her definition of “S-F” and what makes S-F good. She chronicles changes within the genre, including the emergence of the New Wave. And she provides a history of the genre: its writers, its publishers, and its magazines.

Decades ago, Samuel R. Delany declared that “Merril…is perhaps the most important intra-genre critic the field has had and…the absence of any of her critical work in book form, in a field aspiring to take itself seriously, is preposterous.… [O]ne cannot know the history of science fiction from 1956 to 1969 if one has not read the brilliant commentary that runs through Merril’s best-of-the-year anthologies for that period” —from Samuel R. Delany, Starboard Wine.

Now, in 2016, Aqueduct brings Judith Merril and her place in that history to today’s readers.