If we have multiple, should we make separate comments?

The canon: Reality What: Reality Where: All around us; telescopy images Quick pitch: It is so much fun to imagine being a moon of a planet, or a star forming, or a galaxy whirling... More: Some of my earliest memories are these imaginings and I really love sharing them with people now.

The canon: Avenue 5
What: TV show. Seventeen 22-minute episodes—a *very* quick watch.
Where: HBO Max in the US and Sky One in the UK.
Quick pitch: 8-week space cruise gets thrown off course and all these people get trapped together on a ship. Chaos (and comedy) ensues.
More:
- I have cry laughing harder and harder on every rewatch
- It's executive produced (and partially written) by Armando Iannucci, who also made The Thick of It and Veep. This was less funny than The Thick of It to me on my first watch, but on rewatches I think it's as good.
- Starring Hugh Laurie playing a canonically bisexual polyamorous depressed disaster (this is *canon*, not vibes, I cannot stress this enough)
- Also more bi men? It's actually the most bi men I've seen on a show that isn't explicitly about sexuality somehow
- Hot, competent women. Multiple!
- Josh Gad playing an Elon Musk/Richard Branson parody (which he really leaned into when the Twitter debacle started and made a very clear point of it on Twitter). It's also probably the funniest I've ever found him.

Here's a trailer for s1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8Zr3f-_Ft8

The canon: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
What: Novel
Where: Bookshop.org / WorldCat library search
Quick pitch: An OT3 of ancient Chinese emperors use mecha to fight aliens and the patriarchy.
More: In a world where mecha can only be piloted by boy-girl pairs, Wu Zetian becomes a concubine pilot as part of a plot to murder her* sister's killer. As a pilot, she's incredibly powerful, while in the physical world, she can barely walk on her bound feet. As her star rises, she leans into the image of a ravenous, beautiful femme fatale and try to stay unpredictable.

Once a scholar, Li Shimin is now the Iron Demon, a musclebound convicted killer. Studying calligraphy, he overcame the stigma he faced as a half-Rongdi, but all that was lost when he murdered his father and brothers to save a girl from being raped. After committing the ultimate crime of patricide, he was imprisoned and enslaved by the government. He succumbed to despair and alcoholism, not for those things, but for the guilt of allowing concubines to die in his place. Despite being expected to act like an animal, he remains committed to basic human decency and treats Zetian and Yizhi with gentleness and respect.

Gao Yizhi grew up as the nerdy son of a rich media mogul, a world away from Zetian's peasant upbringing, but he was drawn to her from the moment he first saw her as a kid. Despite the secrets he keeps from her, his bond with her is genuine. He loves her with all his heart and will do anything to protect her and take care of her. And now that he's met Shimin... he wants to do the same for him too.

Featuring: Mecha made out of alien corpses! Shared dreamscapes! Cryostasis! Healing after abuse! Ethical non-monogamy! Smashing the patriarchy! Bi4bi4bi romance!

[*Zetian repeatedly mentions wanting to be between male and female, but other characters and the promo material consistently describe Zetian as a girl and with she/her pronouns.]

Note: The sequel is Heavenly Tyrant.

Content warning: Unavoidable spoilers for book 1. (This book stands alone, but shares some characters with the rest of the series.)

The canon: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (Wayfarers book 2)
What: Standalone novel
Where: WorldCat / Bookshop.org
Quick pitch: Sweet found-family space opera. A newborn robot tries to decide what to do with her life while pretending to be human and struggling with the limitations of her software. An escaped slave girl struggles to survive while rebuilding a spaceship to escape her home planet with the help of a kindly AI.
More: The past: Jane 23 escapes the factory where she's lived her whole life. She finds herself in a junkyard and meets Owl, an abandoned ship's AI who becomes her adoptive parent. They spend years struggling to fix the spaceship so they can get off the planet. In the meantime, they have to get Jane enough food, or she'll starve before they can take flight.

The present: When beloved ship's AI Lovelace is badly hurt, her crew tries to save her by rebooting her, but it goes wrong. Lovelace is restored to factory settings, with all her memories of her crew wiped. Pepper, who was formerly known as Jane 23, steps in and offers Lovelace a choice. She can stay on the ship with the grieving crew. Or, she can leave in a highly-illegal body kit that lets her pretend to be human, and forge her own path forward. Naturally, she chooses the latter option. But it's hard living in a body that her mind wasn't designed for.