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Review: In the Quick: A Novel by Kate Hope Day

In the Quick: A Novel by Kate Hope Day | 02 Mar 2021|Randomhouse

In the Quick is Kate Hope Day’s second novel, after If, Then, a story where folks in a rural town get flashes of alternate realities. In the Quick doesn’t follow If, Then, but it is in a slightly alternate reality.

June, orphaned and living with her brilliant inventor uncle, also has a gift for invention, the ability to look at things and imagine how they might work, or work better. After her uncle dies, and June almost burns down the house fixing a boiler, she’s sent off to the academy where astronautic engineers and astronauts are trained, though she’s only 12, a few years younger than the rest.

When the fuel cells her uncle designed for a deep space mission fail, June wants to help but her age works against her and despite her intuitive understanding of the design, and her exposure to the design process as he and his students were creating it.

It isn’t until she’s graduated and working as an engineer on a station that she realizes there’s still a chance the deep space explorers are still alive, and she gets herself assigned to an outpost where James, one of the students who worked on the cell design, is now stationed. The design failure has been eating away at him, turning him inward and morose. It’s up to June to connect with him and see if they can work together to fix the flaws and see if there is a hope that the crew can be saved.

Day has done an outstanding job of creating a vision of a space program that’s not quite ours, with details like the NAP (National Space Program) and adding a planet (The Pink Planet) to our solar system. She’s clearly done her research and though she could have fit it all in our reality, she’s chose to twist it just enough so that the story stands on its own rather than be swallowed by the real.

The feel is somewhere between The Lady Astronaut and The Queen’s Gambit, and this book should find a broad audience.

Science Fiction to Look for February 2021

Whether you’re still in lockdown, snowed in, or just taking some time for yourself, I’ve got good news. There’s more science fiction coming out this February than you can shake a light saber at, and no matter what your taste, there should be something for you.

Fans of intelligent secret histories will enjoy a look back at the space race in Sylvain Neuvel’s A History of What Comes Next, while Gavin G Smith combines the Cold War with biowarfare in Spec Ops Z. Dan Frey takes a look at the consequences of foreknowledge in The Future Is Yours, and P.N. Shafa looks forwards a few generations to caution us about the one percent’s plans for Mars in Descendants of Power.  Humans cut off from the tribe, whether an abandoned colony or prisoners of war struggle for survival in A Search for Starlight by James Maxwell and Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh respectively, and I actually look at a science fiction romance in Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell, which I think would fit into Bujold’s Vorkosigan universe nicely.

If you want trouble, look no further than Gun Runner by Larry Correia and John D. Brown , or Tyger Bright by T.C. McCarthy. both out from Baen this month. More action with a ragtag crew and overbearing governments can be found in Any Job Will Do John Wilker and Christina Short.

Good ideas gone awry feature both the UK’s attempt to keep secrets save in The Minders by John Marrs, and the mess personal fusion reactors and life extension nanotech make of the world in Glow by Tim Jordan.

As always, I think the best way to get the sense of an author is through their short works, and this month features The Best of Walter Jon Williams with a look at an great author with a wide range of stories to tell. Luna Press, an independent Scottish publisher has just started a series of novellas, with an initial batch of 6, the first two of which, John’s Eyes by Joanna Corrance, and  Just Add Water by John Dodd, are science fiction so I gave them a go. Turns out Scots don’t pull their punches.

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Collections and Novellas

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Science Fiction to Look for January 2021

A new year, a fresh start, and lots of great books to read. I’ve got high hopes for 2021.

This month we’ve got two books with parallel world themes, Tim Pratt’s fanciful Doors of Sleep, in which a man wakes up in a new world every time he falls asleep. He’s a little Dr. Who and a little Gulliver.  In the other, Threader Origins, a young man standing too close to his fathers’ quantum energy experiment gets shifted a world over and does not find it an improvement.

Several books involve AIs that wish they had bodies, or have gotten them on the sly, including the Seven Samurai–esque Persephone Station.  Dealbreaker, which follows the events in L. X. Beckett’s Gamechanger from last year though a generation on, and Michael Kaufman’s The Last Exit: A Jen Lu Mystery, a police procedural about a detective with a brain implant that’s too smart for its own good.

Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories is an excellent introduction to her work from Library of America that the Library says is the first title in their “canonization of discomfort.” I know a lot of you might not be looking to be discomforted, and both this book and Nnedi Okorafor’s novelette Remote Control are anything but comfort food, However, I recommend them to you as windows into cultures that science fiction has historically used aliens to represent, but that now demand our unblinking attention.

Although I try to stick to books I’ve actually gotten my hands on, there are two upcoming titles I’m especially looking forward to though haven’t seen yet. Star Trek: Picard: The Dark Veil (2) by James Swallow is set before the series opens and has Riker in command of the Titan, Seeing Riker in the big chair in Picard facing down Roumulans made me want more of that, so hopefully this will deliver. Adrian Tchaikovsky is on my shortlist of authors to keep a close eye on and his second Expert Systems book, Expert System’s Champion, looks interesting. Check out these and more in my Other Recommendations section.

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Science Fiction to Look For December 2020

The end is near! The end is near! When it comes to 2020, that’s a good thing, but as Yogi Beara pointed out, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed a lot of good books this year, and we’ve got a few more coming this month to close the year out. I can’t promise a better year in 2021, but I know there are some great reads on the horizon. Meanwhile, don your kerchief or cap, settle down for a long winter’s eve, and read some of December’s books.

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