New Books, 5 November 2024
Boop, David, ed.: Last Train to Kepler-283c
(Baen 9781982193768, $18, 272pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 11/05/2024)
Original anthology of 13 Weird West space stories, third in the series. Authors include Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, Mark L. Van Name, Chesya Burke, Kevin Ikenberry, David Mack, and John Stith.
Compiet, Iris & Bende, S.T.: Star Wars Bestiary, Vol. 1
(Insight Editions/Titan Books UK 9798886630985, $40, 208pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 11/05/2024)
Art Book, first in a series of two, featuring all new original artwork of otherworldly species and monstrous creatures in the Star Wars universe, with text descriptions of each lifeform.
Correia, Larry: Graveyard of Demons
(Baen 9781982193737, $28, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
SF novel, fifth in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series. As Ashok Vadal traverses deserts, battles sea demons, and navigates political treachery, he grapples with his identity and the heavy burden of his newfound purpose.
Deneen, Brendan, ed.: Shadow Lab
(Blackstone Publishing 9798212342797, $26.99, 240pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Anthology of seven stories. Authors include Ed Cho, Brian Francis Slattery, Nicholas Sansbury Smith, and Rebecca Webb.
Doubinsky, Seb: The Sum of All Things
(Meerkat Press 9781946154392, $14.95, 200pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 11/05/2024)
SF noir dystopian novella, third and final in the City-States Cycle series. In New Samarqand the king is very ill with no successor, terrorist groups plague the city, and a new museum exhibit, displaying the magnificent tomb of two Amazon sisters who fell in battle together, causes chaos.
Fisher, Sharon Lynn: Grimm Curiosities
(Amazon/47North 9781662515712, $16.99, 299pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Historical fantasy novel. In 1851 in old York, Lizzy Grimm is struggling to save her father’s antique shop when she meets a man whose sister suffers the same affliction as Lizzy’s mother — both stricken silent and unresponsive after speaking with ghosts. Then a book collector arrives at the shop, very eager to buy the rare book that might hold the clue to curing the stricken women.
Fox, Richard: Men of Bretton
(Baen 9781982193744, $28, 256pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 11/05/2024)
Military SF novel. Soldiers newly dropped on Dharien fight through a deadly jungle to hold the planet for the Hegemony, but rebel Flags have made more gains than expected, and one lost soldier, the only survivor of an ambush, struggles to make his way back to Hegemony-controlled territory.
Frost, Gregory: Beyond Here Be Monsters
(Fairwood Press 9781958880265, $18.99, 276pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 11/05/2024)
Collection of 14 dark, sinister, and comic stories.
Glover, Nicole: The Improvisers
(Harper Voyager US 9780063293595, $19.99, 464pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Fantasy mystery novel, a standalone set in the Murder and Magic world. Barnstorming pilot, former bootlegger, and wielder of celestial magic, Velma Frye also investigates arcane oddities for a magical rights organization, including when a pocket watch instigates a magical brawl after one of her flight shows.
Ibañez, Isabel: Where the Library
Hides
(Hodder & Stoughton UK/Hodderscape 9781250822994, $16, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Young-adult fantasy novel, the second in the Secrets of the Nile duology. Inez Olivera traveled across the world to Egypt, seeking answers into her parents’ recent mysterious deaths, but to get her inheritance she may have to marry Whitford Hayes, a former British soldier with his own secret reasons for staying in Egypt.
Lacelle, Pascale: Stranger Skies
(Simon & Schuster/McElderry 9781665939300, $21.99, 608pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Young-adult dark academia fantasy novel second in the Drowned Gods trilogy. Emory and Romie find themselves in a twisted, rotten version of the Wychwood and a sinister force has awoken with their arrival. Meanwhile a mishap pulls Baz and Kai back in time.
Lakshminarayan, Lavanya, ed.: Interstellar MegaChef
(Rebellion/Solaris UK 9781837862337, $16.99, 400pp, formats: trade paperback, audio, 11/05/2024)
SF novel, first in the Flavour Hacker series. Saras Kaveri is headed to be the first Earthling to compete in the prestigious cooking show Interstellar MegaChef, when she meets an inventor who wants to create a food sim and needs the help of a chef.
Leong, Julie: The Teller of Small Fortunes
(Ace 9780593815915, $19, 336pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Fantasy novel. Tao is a wandering fortune teller who travels between villages telling “small” fortunes, because she’s learned that big fortunes come with big consequences. But a small fortune unexpectedly becomes something more and she’s recruited into a band of misfits desperately searching for a lost child. A first novel. Includes a readers guide.
Lyle, Jennifer D.: Snow Drowned
(Sourcebooks Fire 9781728270944, $11.99, 304pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Young-adult horror novel set on a remote New England island. On Fall Island, the snow storms have a spooky way of claiming people, making them disappear without a trace or driving them mad, and as a hundred-year storm now approaches, those who have chosen to remain on the island also have to deal with a ritual murder.
Marino, Andy: The Swarm
(Orbit US/Redhook 9780316563994, $19.99, 512pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Horror novel. A detective is working to solve a bizarre murder case when swarms of deadly insects begin emerging from the ground. Barricaded in a motel with a group of strangers, they try to unravel the terrible purpose behind the invasion before humanity goes extinct.
Sheffer, Marguerite: The Man in the Banana Trees
(University of Iowa Press 9781609389956, $18, 160pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 11/05/2024)
Collection of 18 stories (four new) with touches of SF and fantasy, in settings ranging from the American South to Jupiter.
Taylor, Travis S. & Johnson, Les: Crisis at Proxima
(Baen 9781982193751, $28, 320pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 11/05/2024)
SF novel, second in the Orion’s Arm series. First contact with the seemingly impossible human civilization at Proxima Centauri is not going well. The Earth ships sent to render aid have not been able to reverse the contagion ravaging their population and worse, many Proximans are now wondering if the humans from Earth are there for other, not so charitable, reasons.
Thomas, Charlene: Streetlight People
(Penguin Random House/Dutton 9780593618868, $19.99, 320pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
Young-adult fantasy novel. Kady tries to use her ability to hold and change time to relive her relationship with her absent boyfriend, but the more she manipulates time, the more enemies she attracts, eventually revealing the dark secret of her town, Streetlight.
Wellington, David: Revenant-X
(Orbit US 9780316569347, $19.99, 512pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 11/05/2024)
SF horror novel, the second in the Red Space trilogy. Earth’s first deep space colony goes silent, and investigators go to find out why. What they find is a deserted site, except for a few colonists who are no longer human.
Wilson, Lorraine: We Are All Ghosts in the Forest
(Rebellion/Solaris UK 9781837861446, $24.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 11/07/2024)
Literary SF novel. After the internet collapses, it leaves digital ghosts, hungry and haunting the world. Katerina escapes to her grandmother’s village until a wordless boy finds her with her name in his pocket. After he arrives, a digital disease stirs up the ghosts. Katerina is accused of witchcraft, and must flee to the forest, mysterious boy in tow.
The collapse was caused by the end of the internet, not in a transcendent singularity, but in a ‘‘paroxysm of entropy’’: All the information that used to flow through the web scattered, diffused into the atmosphere, islanding the world and suffusing it with remnants. The remnants are called ghosts, and while some of them look like people (“a silhouette of a man, monochrome-lit and fraying at the edges”) they can take any form, from an audio clip of birdsong to a glitching photograph of a burning building. All of them have a tendency to latch on to new potential homes, which can be anywhere capable of storing a pattern: books, “with all their tempting hollow spaces”; organisms, in particular those that already organise themselves into networks, such as forests and beehives; and human brains. Ghosts of stories without a home might latch on to a complementary pattern in a person’s mind; and that rarely goes well for the person.
