Rivers Solomon Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

Rivers Solomon
Author Rivers Solomon writes about life in the margins, a place that fae feels very much at home.

Originally from the United States, Solomon got faer MFA in Fiction Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Comparative Studies in Ethnicity and Race from Stanford University.

Rivers grew up in Indiana, New York, California, and Texas. Faer literary influences are authors like Doris Lessing, Zora Neale Hurston, Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, and Jean Toomer.

Rivers has been nominated for two John W. Campbell Awards and a James Tiptree, Jr. Award for Best Book. It was also a finalist for a Hurston/Wright and a Locus Award, as well as others. In 2020, she won a Lambda Award and was shortlisted for a Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award.

Rivers’ second novel, called “The Deep”, was inspired by the Hugo-nominated song of the same name by Clipping, an experimental hip-hop group, and it portrays a utopian underwater society that was built by the water breathing descendants of pregnant slaves.

Solomon’s short work has appeared in places like the New York Times, Guernica, the New York Times Magazine, Tor.com, Black Warrior Review, Best American Horror and Dark Fantasy, as well as other places.

Rivers’ debut novel, called “An Unkindness of Ghosts”, was released in the year 2017, and faer’s work is from the science fiction and literary fiction genres.

“An Unkindness of Ghosts” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 2017. Aster, who is obsessive, odd-mannered, and withdrawn, doesn’t have much to offer to folks in the way of a rebuttal when they refer to her as freak and ogre. She has grown used to the names, but only wishes there was more truth to any of them. If she were truly a monster, like they accuse, she would be powerful enough to destroy the walls all around her until nothing remained of her world, except for the stories that are told around the cookfire.

Aster lives in the low-deck slums on the HSS Matilda, which is a space vessel organized a lot like the antebellum South. For generations the Matilda has ferried what remains of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way the ship’s leaders have imposed some deep indignities and harsh moral restrictions on the dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster herself, whom they believe is less than human.

The autopsy of Matilda’s sovereign uncovers a startling connection between his death and her mom’s suicide some 25 years prior, Aster retraces the footsteps of her mom. Embroiled in a grudge with a savage overseer and planting the seeds of a civil war, she learns that there might just be a way to get off of the ship. Assuming she will be willing to fight for it.

“The Deep” is a stand alone novella that was released in the year 2019. The water-breathing descendants of African slave women that were thrown overboard built their own underwater society, and have to reclaim the memories from their past to shape their future.

Yetu hangs onto the memories for her own people, the water-dwelling descendants of those pregnant African slave women that got thrown overboard by slave owners, that live some idyllic lives down in the deep. Their past, which is too traumatic to be recalled on a regular basis, has been forgotten by everybody, save one. The historian. It is a demanding role has been bestowed onto Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everybody, and the memories, wonderful and painful, horrible, traumatic, and miraculous, are ruining her. And so, she flees up to the surface, so she can escape from the memories, the responsibilities, and the expectations. She finds a world that her people left behind a long time ago. She is going to learn a whole lot more than she ever thought about her own past, and about her people’s future. If they will all survive, they are going to need to reclaim their identity, the memories, and own up to who they truly are.

“The Vela: Complete Season 1” is a stand alone novel written by SL Huang, Becky Chambers, Yoon Ha Lee, and Rivers Solomon that was released in the year 2020. In the fading light of one dying star, a mercenary hunts for a missing refugee ship and finds a universe ruining secret.

Asala Sikou is a refugee, mercenary, and orphan and doesn’t think that much about the end of civilization. Her system’s star is burning out, and the only person that she can afford to look after is herself.

A ship called The Vela disappears during what was meant to be a flashy rescue operation, a hesitant Asala is hired to team with Niko, the kid of a wealthy inner planet’s president, to locate it and the outer system refugees on it.

However this ain’t your ordinary rescue mission, as The Vela holds a secret which places the fate of the entire universe right in the balance. It all forces her to choose: in a dying world where evil and good are far from black and white, who exactly deserves to survive?

“Sorrowland” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 2021. A novel that follows a young woman through a recognizable yet nightmarish landscape while she tries creating a new life for herself and her kids.

Vern, who is a hunted woman all alone in the woods, gives birth to twins and she raises them away from the influences of the outside world. However something is wrong. Not with them, however with her body. It is changing and it is stronger. It isn’t normal.

In order to understand her body’s metamorphosis, she has to investigate the secluded religious compound that she fled from and the violent history of medical experimentation, dehumanization, and genocide that produced it. During the course of her reclaiming her own darkness, she learns that monsters are not just individuals, however whole histories, nations, and systems.

This is a memorable work of Gothic fiction which wrestles with the marginalization of society’s undesirables and the tangled history racism in America.