Like many people, I discovered M. R. Carey‘s books with the excellent, best-selling The Girl With All the Gifts. I remember devouring that novel in two sittings, each time well into the night. He’s become an author who I’ll always look out for. Recently, he’s been writing a lot more science fiction, and while I have fallen quite far behind (curse the linear nature of time and limited number of books one can read while also having to work!),* each of his SF novels has looked fantastic — Outlaw Planet, in particular. Next year, Orbit are due to publish his latest, Orpheus, which sounds particularly interesting:

On a planet where one half is forever in sunlight and the other in endless night, a young colonist must venture into the deadly Nightside to uncover the truth about the disappearance of his mother…

HUMANITY CAN’T SURVIVE THE NIGHTSIDE

On the distant colony world of Tessix, the sun never moves in the sky. One side of the planet burns under endless noon, whilst the other is a frozen wasteland in perpetual darkness. Human life is only possible in a narrow strip of land where the terraforming project almost worked.

Growing up on the borderland between light and dark, under the fading sun globes of Tanner’s Hook, fifteen-year-old Bead Plessey clings to his friends and his fantasies. Bead dreams of one day escaping the grim realities of life on Tessix – the declining population, the ruthless autocracy of the Noonday government, and the monstrous Daspa that come out of the nightside to feed on human blood.

When a stranger turns up at Bead’s home asking for lodgings, he brings the possibility of change. But who is Jud Valery, and where has he come from? Is his interest in Bead benign or sinister? And how is he connected to the disappearance of Bead’s mother, Omrid, eight years before? Looking for answers, Bead assembles an ill-assorted band of allies – but their investigation takes them far beyond Tanner’s Hook, into the nightside and into the long-buried secrets that shaped their world.

M. R. Carey’s Orpheus is due to be published by Orbit Books in North America and in the UK, on February 16th, 2027.

Also on CR: Guest Post “On Writing Strong Women”; Review of The Girl With All the Gifts

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads

* This is basically a given, now. So maybe I should stop writing it into my posts…