Prefect Tom Dreyfus, his protégé Thalia Ng, Prefect Sparver (a hyperpig) and others who debuted in The Prefect (2007) return in Alistair Reynolds new book in his Revelation Space universe. Following their adventures stopping an AI from taking control of the Glitter Band, a civilization of orbital habitats managing a pretty good democracy through neural implant consensus, Tom and his colleagues are faced with two new threats to the civilization they are sworn to protect. There’s an influential rabble rouser seeding dissent and urging habitats to secede on the one hand and a mysterious string of deaths spread across the worlds that defies analysis and seems to be increasing exponentially. If the Glitter Band doesn’t dissolve in discontent, it might fail from mass pandemic unless Dreyfus and the agents of Panoply can find out who or what is behind the deaths and restore the public trust.
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The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt
Callie Machedo is the scruffy, emotionally damaged captain of the cargo/gunship White Raven, and when she discovers a derelict human spaceship in trans Neptunian space she doesn’t know if it’s a box that will hold gold or spiders, but she’s not the sort that doesn’t want to find out. The ship shouldn’t be there at all, considering that it left 500 years before to seed a new colony, but its navigation logs show that it reached its destination and jumped back using a drive that nobody has ever seen before, or at least, no human. The alien race that showed up a few centuries after the ship left, bringing wormhole access and other advanced tech may be all too familiar with the technology that allowed the ship to make a point to point jump, and it scares them to the center of their starfish shaped beings. Continue reading
Sue Burke Interview: Semiosis, Spanish SF, and What Comes Next
SFRevu: How did Semiosis come about? Did it spring from a short story? Did it come before or after your Clarion experience, and what did you think of that?
Sue Burke: It started with real life. A couple of my houseplants got into fights with other houseplants. A pothos wrapped around another plant and killed it, and a philodendron tried to sink its roots into a neighbor. That seemed suspicious, so I did some research and discovered that all plants in a given place are, as one botanist put it, “in a state of war with regard to each other.” (War on my windowsills!) That seemed like a good source of conflict for a story, but how?
Espalier, National Art Gallery
Samsung S7, NIK BW fliter post production
The Memory Detective: A Novel by T. S. Nichols
Publisher Info: Alibi (January 23, 2018)
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Detective-T-S-Nichols-ebook/dp/B072L4LKT1
Gumshoe Review:
Imagine that the technology to retrieve the memories of recently deceased people existed. Maybe you’d want to save the memories of someone you cared about, a spouse, parent, or child. Those aren’t the memories that Cole gets. He gets the ones that no one claims because they died alone and friendless, and they died because someone killed them. He’s their only hope for justice, and the cost is for him to carry their brutal deaths around inside him, along with their smashed hopes, dreams, and loves. He’s the Memory Detective, and it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.