October SFFKIT thread: Mysterious Artifacts

My personal obsession is artifacts we don't understand. Be they ancient, alien or whatever. Feel free to expand the definition of it fits your own interests!



I personally think a lot of stuff like Elizabeth Peters' series Amelia Peabody also fits. Enjoy!

Currently planning to read The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko, but I don't have anything I'm wildly enthusiastic about for this month's theme, so I look forward to seeing what other people are planning. Maybe something will inspire me.

I'm thinking about The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross but I won't be sure how well it fits till I actually read it :-)

It's the easy way out for me, but I plan to read the newly revised and expanded graphic novel of The Hobbit, written and illustrated by David Wenzel. Bilbo finds the One Ring and does not know what it really is, so I think it fits.

I am considering whether The Watchmaker of filigree street by Natasha Pulley could be a potential read for this month.
It has been on my TBR list for a while, and the description mentions a mysterious watch.

I am keen to continue reading Outlander - I am up to Voyager next. Do we think the standing stones count as mysterious artifacts?

>6 JayneCM: absolutely

>7 majkia: Thanks!

I think I'm just going to have to keep an eye on this thread and see if anything from my TBR pops up. I spent some time today reading random blurbs from my TBR, but didn't come up with anything that seems like a fit.

I have a lot of Elizabeth Peters so will read one.

I read Freya Marske's A Marvellous Light, in which the protagonists are searching for dangerously powerful magical objects.

Finished The watchmaker of Filigree street. A mixture of steampunk and fantasy, set in 1884 London, the eponymous watchmaker creates fantastical clockwork creatures and other artefacts. One of these is a watch, mysteriously left with an obscure synesthetic civil servant. It saves his life during a terrorist bombing and sets the whole plot in motion, as he befriends the watchmaker in his efforts to untangle the mystery. Includes mad women scientist, strange prescience, Japanese politics and assorted romances (in a blessedly oblique manner).

COMPLETED The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit

Children discover a magic ring. At first it seems to confer invisibility but actually its powers are more complicated than that.

I realized I have Deeplight on my TBR, which sounds like it will be a fit. Hopefully I'm right....

November thread is up here

Just a heads-up that I have created the 2026 Category Challenge group: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/24919/2026-Category-Challenge. Stop by to get a head start on planning next year's challenge!

(Cross-posted to a bunch of threads; sorry if you see this a thousand times!)

DNF The Atrocity Archives so I will never know if it fits here. Either way I am obviously not the target audience.

Currently reading Threshold by Jordan L. Hawk. A disc made of black rock is found in a coal mine in West Virginia. Before the inscription on it can be deciphered, the disc is stolen. Whyborne and Griffin are sent to investigate strange goings-on in the mining community where the disc was found.