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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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Priest of lies
by Peter McLean
Running from the Queen's Men and with half of his city reduced to ashes, Tomas Piety heads to Dannsburg, where the nobility fight with words, not swords in the second novel of the series following Priest of Bones.
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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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We cast a shadow : a novel
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
In a near-future South where an increasing number of people with dark skin endure cosmetic procedures to pass as white, a father embarks on an obsessive quest to protect his son, who bears a dark, spreading birthmark.
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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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Replay [electronic resource]
by Ken Grimwood
A time-travel classic in the tradition of Jack Finney's Time and Again, Ken Grimwood's acclaimed novel Replay asks the provocative question: "What if you could live your life over again, knowing the mistakes you'd made before?" Forty-three-year-old Jeff Winston gets several chances to do just that. Trapped in a tepid marriage and a dead-end job, he dies in 1988 and wakes up to find himself in 1963, at the age of eighteen, staring at his dorm room walls at Emory University. It's all the same...but different: Jeff knows what the future holds. He knows who will win every World Series...every Kentucky Derby...even how to win on Wall Street. The one thing he doesn't know is: Why has he been chosen to replay his life? And how many times must he win-and lose-everything he loves? Winner of the 1988 World Fantasy Award for best novel and published in eleven languages, Replay unravels the answers in a masterful skein that captivates our imagination.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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BRAZORIA COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM 912 N. Velasco Angleton, Texas 77515 (979) 864-1505bcls.lib.tx.us |
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