Star Language by Charon Dunn

SPSFC 2023

Melina is super unlucky when it comes to mothers; hers is an abusive greedy drugged-up nightmare who sells her to traffickers. She’s a lot luckier when it comes to boyfriends – her big strong alien bae makes everyone thirst. The one department where her luck is absolutely on point has to do with her talent – a flair for learning languages that makes her the only one capable of performing translation duty once the aliens reach Earth. Trigger warning: SA, ultraviolence, 18+, explicit badness.

Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler by Charon Dunn

SPSFC 2022

Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler is about a teenage girl who was innocently trying to listen to some live music … her favorite boy band happened to be playing a festival on a dinosaur planet … when bad things suddenly happened. Now she and her trusty robot are all alone in the wilderness, picking up survival skills and looking for her favorite singer, Sebastian Rose, just in case he needs to be rescued. There’s hard science, explosions, plenty of dinosaurs (with feathers), diversity, no sex (although there are a few references to it), less violence than many dinosaur stories, cliffhangers galore, and a little bogus science just to honor the fine tradition of speculative fiction (what if raptors had syrinxes and could sing like birds?).