|
Science Fiction April 2017
|
|
|
|
| Three Years With the Rat by Jay HoskingScience Fiction. Grace is gone. The brilliant and obsessive graduate student has been missing for eight months, along with her boyfriend, John, who also studies psychophysics (the study of temporal subjectivity). When Grace's younger brother goes to the couple's apartment, he discovers a strange contraption and embarks on a quest to solve the mystery of his sister's disappearance. Thought-provoking and stylistically complex, this debut by Canadian author and neuroscientist Jay Hosking slowly reveals its secrets through a nonlinear story divided into three interlinked sections. For similarly mind-bending books about the nature of time, try Dexter Palmer's Version Control or Robert Dickinson's The Tourist. |
|
| Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav KalfarScience Fiction. Chosen for his country's first space mission, Czech astrophysicist Jakub Procházka views the opportunity as a chance to redeem his family's reputation (his father tortured dissidents as part of the previous Communist regime). Jakub boards the JanHus1 and, en route to his destination (a cosmic dust cloud known as Chopra), begins to question his life choices. At once erudite and emotionally intense, this introspective novel may appeal to fans of other character-driven stories about astronauts, such as Meg Howrey's The Wanderers. |
|
|
Roboteer
by Alex Lamb
The starship Ariel is on a mission of the utmost secrecy, upon which the fate of thousands of lives depend. Though the ship is a mile long, its six crew are crammed into a space barely large enough for them to stand. Five are officers, geniuses in their field. The other is Will Kuno-Monet, the man responsible for single-handedly running a ship comprised of the most dangerous and delicate technology that mankind has ever devised. He is the Roboteer. Colonization of the stars has turned out to be anything but easy, and civilization on Earth has collapsed under the pressure of relentless mutual terrorism. Small human settlements cling to barely habitable planets. Without support from a home-world they have had to develop ways of life heavily dependent on robotics and genetic engineering. Then out of the ruins of Earth's once great empire, a new force arises - a world-spanning religion bent on the conversion of all mankind to its creed. It sends fleets of starships to reclaim the colonies. But the colonies don't want to be reclaimed. Mankind's first interstellar war begins. It is dirty, dangerous and hideously costly. Will is a man bred to interface with the robots that his home-world Galatea desperately needs to survive. He finds himself sent behind enemy lines to discover the secret of their newest weapon. What he discovers will transform their understanding of both science and civilization forever... but at a cost.
|
|
|
Luna : Wolf Moon
by Ian McDonald
A Dragon is dead.Corta Helio, one of the five family corporations that rule the Moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed .The remaining Helio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parent’s violent deaths, is now a ward--virtually a hostage-- of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished of the surface of the moon. Only Lady Sun, dowager of Taiyang, suspects that Lucas Corta is not dead, and more to the point—that he is still a major player in the game. After all, Lucas always was the Schemer, and even in death, he would go to any lengths to take back everything and build a new Corta Helio, more powerful than before. But Corta Helio needs allies, and to find them, the fleeing son undertakes an audacious, impossible journey--to Earth. In an unstable lunar environment, the shifting loyalties and political machinations of each family reach the zenith of their most fertile plots as outright war erupts.
|
|
|
Wolves
by D. J. Molles
Ten years after the collapse, Huxley had built a good life again. He had a loving wife, a farm with fields of golden barley, and a daughter with a strange and wonderful gift. Then the slavers came. Working out in the fields during the attack, Huxley returns too late. His daughter has been taken and his wife is bleeding out, her last whispered words about a man with a scorpion tattoo on his neck. Where do the slavers go? Huxley has no idea. He only knows that they headed east and so will he. But eighteen months later, dying of thirst in the open desert, he doesn’t expect to see another day. Then a man appears out of the desert and offers Huxley water from his canteen—an unheard of kindness in these savage times—and he gives Huxley a new purpose. Together, Huxley and Jay carve a path of destruction across the remains of a once-great land. The slavers are brutal, but they have no idea what’s coming for them. Huxley has found something to live for again: blood and vengeance.
|
|
|
The Collapsing Empire
by John Scalzi
Our universe is ruled by physics and faster than light travel is not possible -- until the discovery of The Flow, an extra-dimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transport us to other worlds, around other stars. Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war -- and a system of control for the rulers of the empire. The Flow is eternal -- but it is not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well, cutting off worlds from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that The Flow is moving, possibly cutting off all human worlds from faster than light travel forever, three individuals -- a scientist, a starship captain and the Empress of the Interdependency -- are in a race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.
|
|
|
Martians Abroad
by Carrie Vaughn
Polly Newton has one single-minded dream, to be a starship pilot and travel the galaxy. Her mother, the Director of the Mars Colony, derails Polly's plans when she sends Polly and her genius twin brother, Charles, to Galileo Academy on Earth--the one planet Polly has no desire to visit. Ever. Homesick and cut off from her own plans for her future, Polly cannot seem to fit into the constraints of life on Earth, unlike Charles, who deftly maneuvers around people and sees through their behavior to their true motives. Strange, unexplained, dangerous coincidences centered on their high-profile classmates begin piling up. Charles may be right--there's more going on than would appear, and the stakes are high. With the help of Charles, Polly is determined to find the truth, no matter the cost.
|
|
| Eifelheim by Michael FlynnAlternate History SF. Eifelheim should have been resettled. Although plague decimated the tiny German town in 1349, modern-day historian Tom, who uses mathematical models to predict settlement patterns, can find no reason why Eifelheim, ideally situated in all respects, shouldn't have bounced back after the Black Death. As Tom and his partner, Sharon, a theoretical physicist, puzzle over this anomaly, readers learn how 14th-century village priest Father Deitrich welcomed extraterrestrials to Eifelheim, setting the stage for a confrontation between the otherworldly visitors and the Church. Readers who enjoy intricately plotted speculative fiction that delves deeply into history, science, and religion may also enjoy Wolfgang Jeschke's The Cusanus Game. |
|
| The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce SterlingAlternate History SF. In this version of 1855, Charles Babbage actually builds his Analytical Engine and, in doing so, ushers in a new age of computer-driven technology more than a century ahead of schedule. The plot centers around a set of missing punch cards and three individuals affected by their disappearance: courtesan Sibyl Gerard, daughter of a Luddite agitator; paleontologist Edward "Leviathan" Mallory; and diplomat-spy Laurence Oliphant. However, the book's real draw is its atmospheric and richly detailed retrofuturistic Victorian setting. Originally published in 1990, The Difference Engine played a significant role in bringing Steampunk into the mainstream. |
|
| Radiance by Catherynne M. ValenteAlternate History SF. The daughter of one of Earth's most acclaimed movie directors, Severin Unck blazes her own artistic trail by making documentaries about obscure and overlooked cultures within the solar system. However, her latest project, a film about a lost colony on Venus, becomes her controversial final work when she disappears during the shoot. In a "found footage" narrative style that compiles transcripts, news items, eyewitness accounts, and more, Radiance -- described by its author as a "decopunk alt-history Hollywood space opera mystery thriller with space whales" -- is a must-read for SF fans seeking a lush, lyrical outer space adventure. |
|
| Burning Paradise by Robert Charles WilsonAlternate History SF. In 2014, 19-year-old Cassie Klyne's world has been at peace since the Armistice of...1914? (That's right: in this timeline, World War I ended almost as soon as it began, while the Great Depression and the Second World War never happened.) Of course, this peaceful and prosperous society has some steep hidden costs: it's controlled by extraterrestrials, who strategically intervene to create their desired outcomes. They also deploy lethal "sims" to dispatch anyone who tries to reveal the truth. Cassie's parents died as a result of their attempts to expose their alien overlords; now Cassie's about to meet the same fate, unless she can escape and locate her deceased parents' former allies. |
|
|
|
|
|