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Fantasy and Science Fiction February 2020
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| Highfire by Eoin ColferIntroducing: Wyvern, Lord Highfire -- "Vern" for short. This 3,000-year-old dragon, the last of his kind, spends his days drinking vodka and watching TV in the Louisiana bayou.
What happens: a corrupt local cop has designs on Vern, prompting the dragon to enlist the aid of his teenage employee Squib. What follows is a noir-ish series of events that The Guardian describes as "True Detective meets Swamp Thing." |
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| The Vanished Birds by Simon JimenezWhat it's about: Captain Nia Imani guards a child who crash-lands on the colony world of Umbai-V, a mission that links her to aerospace engineer Fumiko Nakajima, creator of the space stations that have allowed humanity to spread across the galaxy.
Why you might like it: Spanning a thousand years and multiple shifts in perspective, this haunting debut employs space opera tropes to explore the complexity of human relationships.
For fans of: Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea." |
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| Zed by Joanna KavennaIn a world... where AI "Veeps" assist humans with everything (and collect their data), megacorporation Beetle's proprietary "lifechain" system -- a set of predictive algorithms for human behavior -- is under threat from "Zed" events (like murders) that the software fails to spot.
For fans of: the darkly humorous explorations of surveillance capitalism found in Rob Hart's The Warehouse, Marc-Uwe Klings's Qualityland, or Nick Harkaway's Gnomon. |
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| Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuireWhat it is: Book 5 of the Wayward Children series, set several months after the events of Every Heart a Doorway and featuring many of the students from Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children.
Starring: twins Jack and Jill Wolcott, whose backstories were revealed in Down Among the Sticks and Bones.
Want a taste? "Once a wayward child, always a wayward child. The school's doors would always be open; the lost and the lonely would always be welcome, whenever they wanted to come home." |
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| Riot Baby by Tochi OnyebuchiWhat it's about: Siblings Ella and Kev Jackson possess supernatural powers that, so far, have failed to protect them from the brutal consequences of being Black in America. But now Ella is plotting a revolution...
About the author: Tochi Onyebuchi is well known to YA readers as the author of Beasts Made of Night and its sequel, Crown of Thunder.
For fans of: Ayize Jama-Everett's The Liminal People. |
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| Life After Life by Kate AtkinsonStarring: Ursula Todd, born on a winter's night in 1910 England -- again and again, as each death brings her back to the same point in time and space. Does Ursula choose her path(s) in life, or do they choose her?
You might also like: Jo Walton's My Real Children, which also offers a haunting meditation on life and death, fate and free will, by recounting an ordinary 20th-century British woman's alternate lives. |
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| Recursion by Blake CrouchWhat it is: an intricately plotted, thought-provoking technothriller about the power of memory and well-intentioned science gone awry.
What went wrong: When she invented a way to reintroduce lost memories, neuroscientist Helena Smith was just trying to help Alzheimer's patients. But now someone is using her technology to give people false memories, and the fate of reality itself is on the line.
You might also like: Virtual Sabotage by Julie Hyzy; Three Laws Lethal by David Walton. |
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Rewrite : Loops in the Timespace
by Gregory Benford
A thematic sequel to the award-winning Timescape finds a history professor transporting back to 1968, the year he was 16, and encountering mentors who share his time-travel abilities, including Robert Heinlein, Albert Einstein and Philip K. Dick.
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The psychology of time travel : a novel
by Kate Mascarenhas
The granddaughter of a noted time-travel scientist is alarmed when she receives a mysterious newspaper clipping from the future reporting the murder of a woman who she suspects may be her grandmother.
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This is How You Lose the Time War
by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
What happens: Two time traveling operatives from competing futures fall in love, expressing their longing through letters composed in lava flows, glasses of water, tree rings, and more.
Why you might like it: Fritz Leiber's The Big Time meets Ian McDonald's Time Was in this lyrical epistolary love story.
About the authors: Lebanese-Canadian author Amal El-Mohtar is the author of The Honey Month; Campbell Award nominee Max Gladstone is best known for his popular Craft novels.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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