New & Notable Books, June
Ashton, Edward Mal Goes to War (St. Martin’s 4/24) Ashton made a splash years ago with SF novel Mickey7, and this new volume blends thrills with satire. Mal, a free AI who lives bodilessly in the Infosphere, finds the war between augmented Federals and puritanical Humanists tedious and pointless… until a salvage job goes wrong and he finds himself trapped in the corpse of a cyborg soldier, suddenly responsible for protecting the life of a modded girl.
Baker, Kage Maelstrom and Other Martian Tales (Subterranean Press 3/24) This collection by the late master of SF includes five stories set on a near-future Mars, where society is run by a company inspired by the British East India Company, including the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning novella “The Empress of Mars”.
Cathrall, Sylvie A Letter to the Luminous Deep (Orbit US 4/24) Mystery, fantasy, and romance commingle in this debut epistolary novel set among academics in an underwater world, first in the Sunken Archive series. E. lives a solitary aquatic life beneath the waves until she sees a strange creature outside her window, and begins a correspondence with scholar Henerey Ciel, which blossoms into a romance… until both vanish in a seaquake, leaving their siblings to piece together what happened.
Cotman, Elwin Weird Black Girls (Scribner 4/24) This new collection by the author of Philip K. Dick Award finalist Dance on Saturday: Stories features seven original works of short fiction that run the gamut from the fantastic to the surreal, to horror both cosmic and psycho logical, all featuring his signature inventiveness and surprising sense of humor.
Egan, Greg Morphotrophic (self-published 4/24) The exemplar of hard SF pushes biology to the edge in his latest novel, set in a world where multicellular life took a very different path: animals (including people) reproduce by budding, and are composed of multiple colonies of cytes that can go their own way if the overall organism fails… and yet, some innately human elements remain familiar.
Greer, Sierra Annie Bot (Mariner 3/24) This debut near-future SF novel has drawn praise from mainstream as well as genre critics. It’s the story of an AI robot designed to be an ideal girlfriend, who strives to become more human for her owner… which includes teaching herself to tell lies. As she learns more about humans, though, she starts to wonder if her “boyfriend” really wants the things he says he does. Since she’s programmed to meet his emotional and physical means, she has to decide what’s best for him…. and herself.
Langan, Sarah A Better World (Simon & Schuster/Atria, 978-1-9821-9106-1, $28.99, 354pp, hc) Langan is a multiple Bram Stoker Award winner best known for her incisive horror, but her latest book is a satirical near-future dystopian thriller. It’s still plenty dark, though, as a woman tries to protect her family by moving them into a walled-off suburban utopia… but the locals have their own ways of doing things, and peculiar customs, that might prove more dangerous than the world outside.
Little Badger, Darcie Sheine Lende (Levine Querido) YA novel Elatsoe won a Locus Award, and this prequel has been collecting starred reviews and building lots of buzz. Lipan Apache teen Shane works with her mother and their ghost dogs to track down missing persons in an alternate 1970s America – but when her mother and a local boy go missing through an unpredictable fairy ring, Shane and her friends and family set off on a journey across time and worlds to find them. “Darcie Little Badger is so good at what she does, and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.” [Alex Brown]
Mills, Samantha The Wings Upon Her Back (Tachyon 4/24) This eagerly awaited debut novel by the Sturgeon, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning short fiction author is a tour de force of science fantasy featuring Zenya, member of a sect of warriors with mechanical wings, who becomes disillusioned with enforcing the power of an increasingly fascist state – and when she makes one mistake (an act of mercy), she’s cast down, and struggles to understand the true nature of her world, and herself.
Oyeyemi, Helen Parasol Against the Axe (Riverhead 3/24) The inventive and ambitious author delivers a mind-bending novel set in – and narrated by – the city of Prague (where the author has lived for a decade), featuring characters who own copies of a peculiar book called Paradoxical Undressings (also set in Prague), which seems to change depending on who reads it, and when. “What shines through… is Oyeyemi’s offbeat imagination and her boundless passion for Prague.” [Ian Mond]
From the May 2024 issue of Locus.
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