Sci-Fi

Guest Review: THE THREE BODY PROBLEM by Cixin Liu (Tor Books)

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Liu-ThreeBodyProblemA satisfying start to a Hugo Award-winning Sci-Fi trilogy

With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple-award-winning phenomenon from China’s most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.

Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

Reviewed by Ryan Frye

It is hard to believe that The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo award for best novel. Not because it isn’t deserving of the accolade — it is — but because, when I read it, I felt like I was reading a classic work of Science Fiction. The Three-Body Problem tackles the classic genre idea of whether or not there is other intelligent life in the universe. While the book is rooted in a question that could be traced back to the earliest beginnings of the genre, this book takes a markedly different and unique approach from the very first page. Continue reading →

Upcoming: CENTRAL STATION by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon)

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Tidhar-CentralStation2Ok, I already have this, and featured it in a Books Received post a couple months back. But, today Tachyon unveiled that superb new cover, above, for Lavie Tidhar’s highly-anticipated new book, Central Station. It’s comprised of a series of novellas/short stories, stitched together to create a larger story. It sounds fantastic and, while the previous cover was also really nice, now it also looks magnificent. Here’s the synopsis:

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik — a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation — a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness — are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive… and even evolve.

Central Station is due out in May 2016. Tachyon have also shared a pair of travel posters for Central Station, which are rather fantastic:

Tidhar-CentralStation-Posters

Review: ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY by Charlie Jane Anders (Titan/Tor)

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AndersCJ-AllTheBirdsInTheSkyUKOne of the most anticipated novels of the year… fizzles

Patricia is a witch who can communicate with birds. Laurence is a mad scientist and inventor of the two-second time machine. As teenagers they gravitate towards one another, sharing in the horrors of growing up weird.

When they later reconnect as adults, Laurence is an engineering genius living in near-future San Francisco, trying to stop the planet failing apart through technological intervention. Meanwhile, Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the magically gifted, and works with her fellow magicians to secretly repair the earth’s ever growing ailments.

As they each take sides in a cataclysmic war between science and magic, All the Birds in the Sky sees Laurence and Patricia try to make sense of life, sex and adulthood on the brink of the apocalypse.

This novel is perhaps one of the most anticipated of the year — with glowing reviews proliferating around the internet, and praise coming in from such luminaries as Michael Chabon, expectations have been high pretty much since it was announced. Anders writes quite beautifully, at times, and there’s little doubt that she is an author of talent. I know a lot of people who have loved this novel. Unfortunately, however, All the Birds in the Sky failed to ever take off for me. Continue reading →

Interview with JACEY BEDFORD

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BedfordJ-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Jacey Bedford?

I’m a British writer who qualified as a librarian and then spent twenty years as a full-time folk singer touring the world with vocal trio Artisan. Since the band retired from the road I’ve become a booking agent, fixing music tours for other performers. I work from home and split my time between my music business and my writing. I’ve sold short stories to anthologies and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. My first two novels for DAW, Empire of Dust and Crossways, both science fiction, came out in 2014 and 2015 respectively and Winterwood, my first historical fantasy, comes out in February 2016. Continue reading →

Review: Recent HORUS HERESY Short Fiction

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HorusHeresy-2016eBooks

It’s been a while since I read anything set in Black Library’s ongoing Horus Heresy series — even longer when you just consider novels (I’m now two behind). I’m also having a rather long, frustrating bout of reader’s block. Over the past week or so, BL released a handful of new eBooks, and I thought the familiarity of the series and the slim length of the stories might help knock me back into a reading rhythm. Some of these stories were published before in other formats (as audio-dramas, for example).

Featuring: John French, Graham McNeill, James Swallow, Gav Thorpe, Chris Wraight Continue reading →

Quick Review: FOREST OF MEMORY by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor.com)

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Kowal-MR-ForestOfMemoryAn intriguing, thought-provoking near-future story

Katya deals in Authenticities and Captures, trading on nostalgia for a past long gone. Her clients are rich and they demand items and experiences with only the finest verifiable provenance. Other people’s lives have value, after all.

But when her A.I. suddenly stops whispering in her ear she finds herself cut off from the grid and loses communication with the rest of the world.

The man who stepped out of the trees while hunting deer cut her off from the cloud, took her A.I. and made her his unwilling guest.

There are no Authenticities or Captures to prove Katya’s story of what happened in the forest. You’ll just have to believe her.

This is the first thing by Mary Robinette Kowal that I’ve ever read. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I really liked what I found. This won’t be the last thing of Kowal’s that I read.

The synopsis above really tells you everything you need to know about the story — it’s not only short enough that any more detail would spoil everything, but Kowal’s world-building within the text is sparse and sometimes vague. At times, I really wanted to learn more; but for the purposes of the story, it’s actually unnecessary. For example, we never learn any specifics about Katya’s employers, or the motivations of a person she stumbles across in the forest. If we had, then the story might have felt a little bit more substantial, true, but it’s still a satisfying read.

The novella is presented as a typed account by Katya (typos and all), and she has an interesting voice. If you take the purposeful typos out of the equation, this is very well-written, and Kowal’s prose is excellent. Unwittingly, Katya’s writing highlights the complete dependence her society has developed on mobile and networked technology. It’s a nicely-composed critique, perhaps, of today’s ever-increasing addiction to cell phones, tablets, the internet and, especially, social media. There are references to “captures” and feeds, painting a picture of willful, conscious abdication of privacy. The subject is well-presented, and lacks the heavy-handedness of, for example, David Eggers’s The Circle — a novel that practically bludgeons the reader with a critique that borders on technophobia. I’d be interested in reading more fiction in this setting.

If you like your near-future sci-fi thoughtful and thought-provoking, then Forest of Memory is for you. Recommended.

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Forest of Memory is published by Tor.com next month. For more, check out the author’s website, and follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads. The author’s next novel is Ghost Talkers, due to be published by Tor Books in July 2016.

Upcoming: THE MIRROR THIEF by Martin Seay (Melville House)

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SeayM-MirrorThiefUSAnother novel that has frequently popped up in my Goodreads and Amazon recommendations, as well as a number of “Most Anticipated Books of 2016” lists, The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay sounds pretty fascinating:

A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining literary masterpiece in the tradition of Cloud Atlas.

One of the most audacious and confident debuts in years, The Mirror Thief is a masterful puzzle: a genre-hopping novel that combines an intricate, fast-paced mystery with serious literary ambition. Set in three cities in three eras, The Mirror Thief calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its serendipitous mix of entertainment and literary merit.

The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world’s most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination — was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing? — the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, however — a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose — has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city’s terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten …

Meanwhile, in two other iterations of Venice — Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today — two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret…

All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding tour-de-force that is impossible to put down — an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice… and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of literary art.

The Mirror Thief is due to be published by Melville House, in May 2016.

Cover: WOLF MOON by Ian McDonald (Tor)

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McDonald-Luna2-WolfMoonUS

Spotted this on Edelweiss, and thought I’d share it here. Wolf Moon is the second novel in Ian McDonald‘s Luna series, and sequel to New Moon. I still haven’t had a chance to read the first novel, yet (I do have it), but it is very high on my priority list. Here’s the synopsis for Wolf Moon, which is due to be published in the US by Tor Books in September 2016:

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.

New Moon is also published by Tor Books in North America, and is published in the UK by Gollancz — who will also be publishing Wolf Moon, although I’m not sure when.

McDonald-Luna1-NewMoonUSPB

Interview with LAWRENCE M. SCHOEN

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SchoenLM-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Lawrence M. Schoen?

What? I thought you knew? Isn’t that why you invited me here? Hmm… this is why they give me those little table tents with my name at conventions, right?

Okay, more seriously I’m yet another overeducated, middle-aged, heterosexual, nearsighted, overweight, bearded, bespectacled, egocentric white male. You know, like usual.

Your new novel, Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, has been published by Tor Books. It looks rather fantastic: How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

I made up postcards to describe the novel in under 20 words. Ready?

Prophecy. Intolerance. Loyalty. Conspiracy. Friendship.

A Drug for Speaking to the Dead.

Also Elephants, in Space. Continue reading →

Excerpt: STARBOUND by Dave Bara (DAW)

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BaraD-LC2-StarboundUSDave Bara‘s Starbound is the sequel to the author’s debut science fiction novel, Impulse. The author was one of the many hotly-tipped new science fiction authors of the past 12 months, and the novel seems to have clicked for a good number of SF fans. (There were so many interesting new series and SF novels published this past year.) I’ve not had a chance to read Impulse, yet (I do own it, though), but I’m certainly intrigued in the series. Here’s the synopsis for Starbound:

THE FIRST EMPIRE HAS RETURNED.

THE NEW GALACTIC UNION HANGS IN THE BALANCE…

The Lightship Impulse is gone, sacrificed while defeating First Empire ships the fragile new galactic alliance hoped it would never see again. 

For Peter Cochrane, serving as third officer on the Starbound and tasked with investigating a mysterious space station in a newly re-discovered system, the wounds of battle may have healed, but the battle is far from over.

Due to be published in North America by DAW Books in January 2016, the publisher has sent me this following excerpt to share. Continue reading →