Just in case you missed it on Friday... Apex Book Company is delighted to reveal the cover for Jason Sanford's upcoming reissue, Plague Birds: The Red Day Edition.
The always talented Marcela Bolívar created this amazing cover art, which was actually an alternative cover to the original design for Plague Birds!
The cover was designed by our favorite graphic-design magician Mikio Murakami of Silent Q Design, whose is always game for any challenge and creates incredible work.
Want to see this spectacular reissue gracing your shelves, so you can dive in and explore the world of the plague birds once more?
Preorder your copy now at the Apex Book Company bookshop with 30% off the cover price!
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Plague Birds: The Red Day Edition
Book Release: June 30th, 2026!
Finalist for the Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award!
Return to Jason Sanford's dark sci-fi world in Plague Birds: The Red Day Edition, newly updated and with an additional afterword and short story, "Little Fathers of Darkness," originally published in Robotic Ambitions: Tales of Mechanical Sentience.
Glowing red lines split their faces. Shock-red hair and clothes warn people to flee their approach. They are plague birds, the powerful merging of humans and artificial intelligences who serve as judges and executioners after the collapse of civilization. And the plague birds' judgment is swift and deadly, as Crista discovered as a child when she watched one kill her mother.
In a world of gene-modded humans constantly watched over by benevolent AIs, everyone hates and fears the plague birds. But to save her father and home village, Crista becomes the very creature she fears the most. And her first task as a plague bird is hunting down an ancient group of murderers wielding magic-like powers.
As Crista and her AI symbiote travel farther from home than she ever imagined, they are plunged into a strange world where she judges wrongdoers, befriends other outcasts, and uncovers an extremely personal conspiracy that threatens the lives of millions.
Plague Birds is a genre-bending mix of science fiction and dark fantasy and the epic story of a young woman who becomes one of the future's most hated creatures, with a killer AI bonded to her very blood.
