This is a really good month for everyone who is both a science-fiction fan and a New Scientist reader. Not only do we have a new sci-fi novel due from the magazine’s columnist Annalee Newitz (with a slime mould as its protagonist), but new books from New Scientist Book Club alumni Adam Roberts and Claire North to look forward to. And there’s more: Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife) is returning to her world of causal loops in a sequel to her bestselling 2003 novel, while Becky Chambers is here to bring us some more sci-fi fun.
Time to book a few days of holiday to binge through all this… Fans of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, rejoice: this month, there’s a new novel out from the mighty Becky Chambers, and it sounds great. Set on the planet Fortune, where a poisonous atmosphere alters the nature of life, we follow the adventures of Cora, a pilot who has a dangerous condition thanks to her bond with an alien animal, Colibri. Then Cora, in need of treatment but unwilling to seek it if it means losing her connection to Colibri, meets a botanist, Signy, who might be able to help her.
I have chortled over Jasper Fforde’s literary detective novels ever since the first, The Eyre Affair, starring Thursday Next. The publication of Dark Reading Matter marks Next’s eighth and final outing, in which she’s up against some Martians who have broken out of their H.G. Wells novel, as well as problematic Reality Field Distortion experiments.
The title, by the way, refers not so much to the hypothesised physical phenomenon but to the “realm where deleted books and unrealised literary ideas end up”. The author of the excellent Ascension turns to an organisation beneath the streets of London for his latest novel – an organisation conducting “strange experiments” that “blur the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, between life and death”. Arlo is a private investigator out to find Sophie Banik, who is apparently dead – but who had been digging into those strange experiments, and who might not be as dead as he thought.
We are big fans of Adam Roberts at New Scientist: his novel, Lake of Darkness, was a relatively recent pick for the New Scientist Book Club. This latest sounds very different. It’s a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the monster, “a splendid creature, in almost every respect superior to humanity”, goes on to conquer Europe, and rule the world.
It is, says the publisher, “a meditation on the nature of power”, and I can’t wait. Why Adam Roberts set out to write a sci-fi utopia, not a dystopia Another new novel from a New Scientist Book Club alum (Claire North’s space opera, Slow Gods, has been a top read this year for members). This time, North is tackling time travel, moving from Cal, who falls in love with a soldier in the French revolution who is fated to die – unless he tweaks history to save him, to Fadimatu, who finds her mummified corpse in a museum in 2018.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
