New SF, Fantasy, and Horror books seen : March 2005 Week 4

Hard SF novel about astronauts investigating life on Pluto. It's a follow-up to The Martian Race (1999) and involves the two astronauts from that book.
• Warner's site has this description and an excerpt.
• Amazon has reviews from Publishers Weekly ("Hard SF fans will find this an adequate read, but Benford has done far better work in the past.") and Booklist ("Benford, a premier practitioner of hard sf, is in top form.")
• Paul di Filippo's SF Weekly review gave it an A. Gary K. Wolfe reviewed it in the March issue of Locus Magazine: "When Benford describes all this as an old-fashioned interplanetary tale, he's more accurate than he may have intended. The story indeed offers many of the delights of the classic space adventure, but also seems old-fashioned in the way it imagines the future..."

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SF novel, second in the Time Odyssey sequence following Time's Eye (2004), about alien Firstborn (who created the historical patchwork of Earth in the first book) and evidence that a sunstorm is building that will scour Earth of all life.
• Del Rey's site has this description, an author Q&A, and an excerpt.
• Amazon has reviews from PW ("will especially appeal to fans of hard SF who appreciate well-grounded science and humans with a can-do attitude to problem solving") and Booklist ("splendid sequel").
• Gary K. Wolfe reviews the book in the April issue of Locus, concluding: "With its disaster-movie use of multiple viewpoints, its relentless pacing, and its occasionally moving sketches of (for example) desperate Londoners huddling under a massive dome built to offer further protection from the storm, Sunstorm gets its job done as an efficient and readable thriller, if not as a particularly challenging work of SF."

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Fantasy novel, Book Three of Conclave of Shadows, following Talon of the Silver Hawk (2002) and King of Foxes (2003).
• The author's website, www.raymondfeistbooks.com, has a page about the setting, Midkemia, with a map, plus this description of the book with an excerpt.
• HarperCollins' site has this description, and a shorter excerpt.
• Amazon has the Booklist review by Roland Green: "The complexity of characterization here may surprise some, though not those who have followed Feist's work over the years and seen steady, across-the-board improvement in it. A must, of course..."

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Collection of 10 original stories (nominally YA), the first book published in the US by an Australian author.
• HarperCollins' site has this description and an excerpt from the first story, "Singing My Sister Down".
• Amazon has the same description, and a reader review from Gavin J. Grant.
• The book's Australian edition last year received much attention; it was included on the 2004 Locus Recommended Reading List, and included by Jeff VanderMeer in his Locus Online 2004: The Best of the Year: "The best story in Lanagan's collection, "Singing My Sister Down," is a shocking piece of anthropological horror that - although more or less a single note played to perfection - reminded me of the short fiction of J.D. Salinger in its tense sparseness."
• Both Faren Miller ("genius (not too strong a word)") and Gary K. Wolfe ("nothing short of brilliant") reviewed the book in the February issue of Locus.

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Young adult fantasy novel about a 15-year-old girl from the Australian outback sent to live with her fearsome grandmother in Sydney. First of a trilogy.
• The author's website has a description with links to a glossary, review excerpts, and background information, and an excerpt.
• Amazon has a brief description, and quotes from starred School Library Journal and Booklist reviews.
• Carolyn Cushman reviewed it in the March issue of Locus: "This is a good, if somewhat tense and grim, young-adult fantasy with some delightfully quirky characters."

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Collection of 9 previously-published essays. Subjects include Philip K. Dick, Star Wars, and comics.
• Doubleday's site has this description and an excerpt (from essay "Defending The Searchers").
• Amazon has reviews from PW and Booklist, and reader reviews. A John Leonard essay in The New York Review of Books covers this and two earlier books by Lethem.

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Fantasy novel, first in the Quickening trilogy, about a young ruler who receives an unusual gift from a witch about to be executed.
• HarperCollins' site has this description and an excerpt.
• The author's website has brief descriptions of the three books in the trilogy (the second and third are apparently already out in Australia), and numerous links to information about the author.
• Amazon has the PW review: "a tale of the eternal struggle between good and evil filled with magic, blood and jealousy."

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SF novel, fourth in a series set in a technological, religiously-governed world, following Archangel Protocol (2001), Fallen Host (2002), and Messiah Node (2003).
• The author's website includes descriptions of this book and its predecessors.
• The publisher's site has only this brief description.
• Carolyn Cushman reviewed it in the August 2004 issue of Locus Magazine: "You've gotta love a futuristic fantasy that opens with a lightly humorous church wedding between Satan and his Antichrist, Emmaline McNaughton. She's a cyborg, ex-Inquisitor priest in the American Catholic Church - only one of several candidates for the Antichrist in these troubled times, as outlined in the three previous books in this series..."
• The book was just given a special citation in this year's Philip K. Dick Awards, given to original paperbacks published in the US.
• (This belated notice is due to the book's nonappearance in local Borders and Barnes & Nobles until recently; copies seen last week at Borders bore stickers indicating a February '05 warehouse distribution date.)

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SF novel about uploaded human consciousness.
• Sawyer's website has this page about the book, with quotes from reviews and links to opening chapters, a typical passage, a reading group guide, dustjacket scans and text, and background material.
• Tor's website has a Rob & Bob tour section (for Sawyer's novel and Wilson's Spin, below), with links to a description, excerpt, and author bio.
• Sawyer's site also has a gallery of photos from the book's launch last weekend in Toronto.

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SF novel in which the stars go out -- Earth having been enclosed within a barrier, or membrane, to shield it from the effects of differential time passage with respect to the outside universe, by unknown 'Hypotheticals'.
• Tor's Rob & Bob tour section has this description with an excerpt and author bio.
• Amazon has the starred Publishers Weekly review, from its Jan. 31st issue: "an astonishingly successful mélange of SF thriller, growing-up saga, tender love story, father-son conflict, ecological parable and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres."
• Locus Magazine has run three reviews of the book: by Damien Broderick in the February issue, Gary K. Wolfe in the March issue, and Nick Gevers in the April issue. Gevers concluded that the book "is many things: psychological novel, technological thriller, apocalyptic picaresque, cosmological meditation. But it is, foremost, the first major SF novel of 2005, another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs."

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Julia turned her best side toward the camera, a three-quarters shot, and spread her arms. Okay, maybe a bit theatrical, but she had the backdrop for it.

Bisesa Dutt gasped, and staggered.

She was standing. She didn’t know where she was.

Music was playing.

We all went down to the tar pit, with mats to spread our weight.

Ikky was standing on the bank, her hands in a metal twin loop behind her. She'd stopped sulking; now she looked, more, starey and puzzled.

There wasn't anything special about this fight. Honest to God, there wasn't. Dad and I had argued a million times before, but nothing awful had happened. Oh, he'd thrown me out of the house a couple of times, and when I was younger he used to send me to my room or cut off my allowance. But nothing like this had ever occurred. I keep reliving the moment in my mind, haunted by it. It's no consolation that he isn't haunted by it, that he probably doesn't even remember it. No consolation at all.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.