New Books: 31 January 2023
Anthony, Piers: Apoca Lips 
(Open Road 978-1-5040-6693-8, $16.99, 200pp, formats: trade paperback, hardcover, ebook, January 31, 2023)
Fantasy novel, #47 in the Xanth series. As Prince Nolan goes on a quest to find his ideal bride, a “pundemic” spreads through Xanth.
Chen, Mike: Vampire Weekend 
(Harlequin/Mira 978-0-7783-8696-4, $17.99, 368pp, formats: trade paperback, hardcover, ebook, audio, January 31, 2023)
Urban fantasy novel. Lonely punk vampire Louise Chao, living on blood bags and night jobs, takes in a distant relative, a 13-year-old human teen with a dying mother, and revitalizes her love of music in 1980s San Francisco.
McDevitt, Jack: Village in the Sky 
(Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668004296, $28.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, January 31, 2023)
SF mystery novel, ninth in the Alex Benedict series. Humanity discovers new intelligent life light years away—only for it to disappear without a trace.
Newitz, Annalee: The Terraformers 
(Tor 978-1-250-22801-7, $28.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, January 31, 2023)
Far-future SF novel, a posthuman multigenerational epic about terraforming a planet over 5,000 years, focusing on the ever-changing genetically altered workers.
What might surprise readers expecting an abstract historical epic in the Foundation tradition – with which it shares a structure of novellas knitted together – is that the first of Newitz’s tales features a rather endearing moose romance, and that the last involves a cat and a train who fall in love. In other words, there’s a refreshingly playful sensibility at work here, while at the same time Newitz offers a deeply serious critique of capitalism as a mechanism for environmental management.
—Gary Wolfe, Locus, January 2023
Paasch, Megan: Dream to Me 
(Macmillan/Imprint 978-1-250-81705-1, $19.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, January 31, 2023)
Young-adult fantasy novel. After her father’s death, Eva discovers she has supernatural powers she must learn to control, as people she dreams about fall into comas.
Robinson, Gary: Billy Buckhorn and the Book of Spells 
(7th Generation 978-1939053473, $17.95, 304pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, January 31, 2023)
Young-adult fantasy novel, the first in the Thunder Child Prophecy series, about a Native-American teen chosen by the Thunders, who gets struck by lightning and develops powers, which he uses to fight mythical evil forces threatening the Cherokee nation.
Stewart, Quincy Thomas: Race in the Machine 
(Stanford University Press/Redwood Press 978-1-503631229, $26.00, 286pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, January 31, 2023)
SF Novel. An intelligent machine built to study methods of social warfare struggles to understand and communicate the lived experience of race.
Suarez, Daniel: Critical Mass 
(Penguin Random House/Dutton 978-0593183632, $28.00, 464pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, January 31, 2023)
Near-future SF technothriller, sequel to Delta-v. An unsanctioned commercial asteroid-mining project goes wrong, leaving two crew members stranded, and with Earth governments unwilling to mount a rescue, the crew has to build their own next-gen rescue ship.
Tran, Trang Thanh: She Is a Haunting 
(Bloomsbury USA 978-1547610815, $18.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, January 31, 2023)
Young-adult ghost story novel. Jade, a Vietnamese-American girl, goes to Vietnam to get to know her long-absent father, and discovers the family home he’s remodeling into a hotel is haunted.
Tudor, C.J.: The Drift 
(Penguin Random House/Ballantine 978-0-593-35656-2, $28.00, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, January 31, 2023)
Apocalyptic near-future survival thriller about the Retreat, a mountainside haven from plague for the select few, where a something with the power to consume all of humanity lurks in the shadows.
Victoire, Camila: Blood Circus 
(Blackstone Publishing 979-8-200-81608-8, $19.99, 350pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, January 31, 2023)
Young-adult near-future fantasy novel set on a climate-ravaged Earth, where humanoids called Klujns are hunted and killed for food and fertilizer — and in return force captured humans into deadly competitions.
Wehm, M. Darusha: Hamlet, Prince of Robots 
(in potentia press (NZ) 978-0-473-63888-7, $17.99, 160pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, January 31, 2023)
SF novel retelling Hamlet as a battle between robotics companies. Elsinore Robotics has trouble when their first AI android HAM(let)v.1 is permanently deactivated, apparently by wild malware, and Hamlet v.2 swears to avenge his progenitor, but uploading v.1’s backup is causing problems with his own neural network.
