New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Cover Art by Julia Lloyd

Allan, Nina. The Race [Titan, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

A child is kidnapped with consequences that extend across worlds… A writer reaches into the past to discover the truth about a possible murder… Far away a young woman prepares for her mysterious future…

In a future scarred by fracking and ecological collapse, Jenna Hoolman lives in the coastal town of Sapphire. Her world is dominated by the illegal sport of smartdog racing: greyhounds genetically modified with human DNA. When her young niece goes missing that world implodes... Christy’s life is dominated by fear of her brother, a man she knows capable of monstrous acts and suspects of hiding even darker ones. Desperate to learn the truth she contacts Alex, a stranger she knows only by name, and who has his own demons to fight… And Maree, a young woman undertaking a journey that will change her world forever.

The Race weaves together story threads and realities to take us on a gripping and spellbinding journey…

Why We Want It: Originally published by the smaller Newcon Press in 2014, The Race received a significant amount of buzz for how good it was. Now it is receiving a larger publication push from Titan, so we'll all get the chance to read it.

Photo by Shirley Green, Illustration by Don Sipley, Design by Lauren Panepinto

Carriger, Gail. Imprudence [Orbit, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

Rue and the crew of the Spotted Custard return from India with revelations that shake the foundations of England's scientific community. Queen Victoria is not amused, the vampires are tetchy, and something is wrong with the local werewolf pack. To top it all off, Rue's best friend Primrose keeps getting engaged to the most unacceptable military types.

Rue has family problems as well. Her vampire father is angry, her werewolf father is crazy, and her obstreperous mother is both. Worst of all, Rue's beginning to suspect what they really are... is frightened.

Why We Want It: I may be a touch behind on my Gail Carriger reading, having only read the first two books of The Parasol Protectorate and Imprudence is the second volume of the sequel series The Custard Protocol. But Carriger's novels of Victorian era manners, steampunk, and urban fantasy are simply not to be missed and the publication of Imprudence serves to remind me that I simply need to get cracking.

Cover Artist Unknown

Higgins, C.A. Supernova [Del Rey, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

C. A. Higgins’s acclaimed novel Lightless fused suspenseful storytelling, high-caliber scientific speculation, and richly developed characters into a stunning science fiction epic. Now the dazzling Supernova heightens the thrills and deepens the haunting exploration of technology and humanity—and the consequences that await when the two intersect.

Once Ananke was an experimental military spacecraft. But a rogue computer virus transformed it—her—into something much more: a fully sentient artificial intelligence, with all the power of a god—and all the unstable emotions of a teenager.

Althea, the ship’s engineer and the last living human aboard, nearly gave her life to save Ananke from dangerous saboteurs, forging a bond as powerful as that between mother and daughter. Now she devotes herself completely to Ananke’s care. But teaching a thinking, feeling machine—perhaps the most dangerous force in the galaxy—to be human proves a monumental challenge. When Ananke decides to seek out Matthew Gale, the terrorist she regards as her father, Althea learns that some bonds are stronger than mortal minds can understand—or control.

Drawn back toward Earth by the quest, Althea and Ananke will find themselves in the thick of a violent revolution led by Matthew’s sister, the charismatic leader Constance, who will stop at nothing to bring down a tyrannical surveillance state. As the currents of past decisions and present desires come into stark collision, a new and fiery future is about to be born.

Why We Want It: I reviewed Lightless back in March and found it a delightfully good science fiction novel. Though Lightless worked as a complete story on its own, I am very much into seeing what else Higgins does with this setting.

Cover Artist Unkown

Rowling, J.K., Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two [Scholastic, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

The Eighth Story. Nineteen Years Later.

Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, a new play by Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series and the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage. The play will receive its world premiere in London's West End on July 30, 2016.

It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn't much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children.

While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.

Why We Want It: While there is a "Definitive Edition" coming early next year, I don't know if I'll be able to hold off reading the "Special Rehearsal Script Edition" because, come on! It's a new and official Harry Potter story! Reading the script is as close as I'm going to come to seeing the play for any number of years. New Harry Potter!

Cover Art by Les Edwards

Strahan, Jonathan (editor). Drowned Worlds [Solaris, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

We live in a time of change. The Anthropecene Age - the time when human-induced climate change radically reshapes the world - is upon us.  Sea water is flooding the streets of Florida, island nations are rapidly disappearing beneath the waves, the polar icecaps are a fraction of what they once were, and distant, exotic places like Australia are slowly baking in the sun.

Drowned Worlds asks over a dozen of the top science fiction and fantasy writers working today to look to the future, to ask how will we survive? Do we face a period of dramatic transition and then a new technology-influenced golden age, or a long, slow decline?  Swim the drowned streets of Boston, see Venice disappear beneath the waves, meet a woman who's turned herself into a reef, traverse the floating garbage cities of the Pacific, search for the elf stones of Antarctica, and spend time in the new, dark Dust Bowl of the American mid-west.  See the future for what it is: challenging, exciting, filled with adventure, and more than a little disturbing.

Whether here on Earth or elsewhere in our universe, Drowned Worlds give us a glimpse of a new future, one filled with romance and adventure, all while the oceans rise...

Why We Want It: I'm a sucker for any number of things, but included in that epically long list are anthologies from Jonathan Strahan, the literary destruction of our world, and giant floods. Drowned Worlds is just what I'm looking for, isn't it?

Cover Artist Unknown

VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (editors). The Big Book of Science Fiction [Vintage, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

Quite possibly the greatest science fiction collection of all time—past, present, and future!

What if life was neverending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the pope were a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia E. Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut, alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, you’ll find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the New Wave, and more. Learn about the secret history of science fiction, from titans of literature who also wrote SF to less well-known authors from more than twenty-five countries, some never before translated into English. In The Big Book of Science Fiction, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Immerse yourself in the genre that predicted electric cars, space tourism, and smartphones. Sit back, buckle up, and dial in the coordinates, as this stellar anthology has got worlds within worlds.

Including:
· Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin
· An unearthed sci-fi story from W. E. B. Du Bois
· The first publication of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch in twenty years
· A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Cixin Liu

Plus:
· Aliens!
· Space battles!
· Robots!
· Technology gone wrong!
· Technology gone right!

Why We Want It: Some 750,000 words and 1200 pages of science fiction goodness curated by the VanderMeers. One hundred years of science fiction, with fiction from some of the legends of SF as well as works being translated into English for the first time. This is a must read.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004. Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015, editor since 2016. Minnesotan.

Microreview [book]: Lightless, by C.A. Higgins

Excellent Character Driven Science Fiction

When asked in an interview with Paste Magazine about the reason each section of Lightless is introduced with a different law of thermodynamics, author C.A. Higgins notes that

If you interpret them more dramatically than perhaps you should—as, of course, I did—then chaos always increases and the universe is going to end. So how the characters and their situation evolved corresponded to the laws of thermodynamics. They start out in a position of equilibrium, and then things get more chaotic and reach maximum chaos. So the laws divide up the “acts” of the book.

Lightless opens with a highly secret military research ship being boarded by two intruders / space pirates / potential terrorists. Though they are quickly captured, it is this which upsets the equilibrium so carefully preserved by the crew of three. One of the intruders just as quickly escapes, though he is assumed dead and is out of the picture nearly from the start. The intruders are identified as having ties to the terrorist Mallt-y-Nos, though of course the remaining captive, Ivan, denies this quite vociferously.

This is where everything goes wrong. Ivan and Mattie (the two criminals in question) downloaded some sort of virus into the Ananke (the military ship in question). Did they somehow know what ship they were attacking? The rest of the novel is a quietly tight cat and mouse game as this ship's mechanic, Althea, attempts to undo the damage to the software and restore the ship to fully operational capacity. Meanwhile, an interrogator from the System (the autocratic galactic government) arrives to get the truth from Ivan. As we are repeatedly told, Ida Stays is never wrong and she knows that Ivan has ties to the Mallt-y-Nos.

While it is interesting to think on Lightless as an examination of how the laws of thermodynamics work, this would be a gross misrepresentation for what the novel is and how C.A. Higgins wrote it. This is a very accessible science fiction novel focused on character, and while there is a strong underpinning of science, Lightless is a taut novel that never leaves the ship and continually ramps up the tension as the damage to the Ananke seems to compound and makes the situation on board increasingly perilous. The single minded focus of Ida and how her interrogation is more important than anything else going on with the Ananke does not help matters.

Though Higgins focuses the novel so tightly on Althea, Ivan, and Ida, it is through the interrogation and side conversations the political and social landscape of our solar system is revealed. The Mallt-y-Nos begins to take on a bit of a romanticized vibe of the Irish Republican Army in fighting for the independence of humanity away from the oppressive governance of the System. I'm stretching the parallel a bit, but that's part of the feel. But, the Mallt-y-Nos (who is mostly only referenced in Lightless) is a terrorist who is directly responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people and uses bombs to, theoretically, send a political message. On the other hand, the reality of life in the System is that of perpetual surveillance with no personal privacy and swift reprisals for breaking the law. True freedom, if that is something to be valued, is essentially non-existent.

As Higgins mentioned earlier, Lightless follows the path of increasing chaos and late in the novel when she describes a corpse, she is also describing the major structural shape of the novel and what she has been building towards the entire time.

"Of course, once decomposition set in, after the initial cooling of death, [redacted's] corpse would heat up again and grow chaotic, a thousand individual beings now existing where once there had been one will, one organism, one creature, one system. They would destroy the body hosting them, make it swell and stink, limbs bloating, flesh weakening and splitting, liquefying until the body was no longer recognizable as the organized system it once had been." pg 251

Lightless is excellent character driven science fiction and is a very strong debut from author C.A. Higgins. Though there is a forthcoming sequel, Supernova, Lightless succeeds at telling a complete story which can stand on its own while still leaving room for additional stories in this universe.



The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for causing me to look up what the Mallt-y-Nos actually was. +1 for the dedication of Althea and the officious obnoxiousness of Ida Stays.

Penalties: -1 because I would almost prefer this to be a single volume novel rather than the first in a series / trilogy. -1 for the somewhat flat feel of the characters Domition and Gagnon

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 "A mostly enjoyable experience."  See more about our scoring system here.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004, Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015. Minnesotan.

Reference: Higgins, C.A.. Lightless. [Del Rey, 2015]