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Science Fiction to Look for November 2020

The days are growing shorter and shorter, which means it’s time to recall that old adage: spring ahead, fall back into an easy chair with a good book. We can help you with finding one.

For space opera fans, I recommend C.S. Friedman’s This Virtual Night, in which an action-junkie explorer takes a side job and winds up partnering with a game designer who’s the only hope of stopping a digital pandemic. For variety, you’ve got Tim Pratt’s The Fractured Void, in which a  small crew on boring patrol duty gets all the excitement it could ask for. It’s the first novelization from the Twilight Imperium board game, and it’s fast and fun.

Closer to Earth, you’ve got Nucleation, Kimberly Unger’s debut, a hardcore space procedural with some very interesting ideas about micro wormholes, nanomachines, and entangled communications, set in a first contact situation and a conspiracy.

Leaving space behind, we’ve got three very different novels. Refraction by Christopher Hinz follows the now-adult subject of a government experiment as he seeks answers and tries to stay alive, while W. Michael Gear’s  The Alpha Enigma is full of action as the inmates at a high-security military psychiatric facility turn out to be our world’s last hope. For something completely different, you can head to the coast of Maine to chill with author Jonathon Lethem’s The Arrest, set in a post-apocalyptic organic farming community…at least until a refugee from Hollywood blows into town in his atomic RV.

Finally, it’s the 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, and Elizabeth Schaefer has put together a terrific collection of short stories about the film’s minor characters, From a Certain Point of View.

There are always books I can’t get to in time for the column and wind up on the Other Recommendations list, but three deserve special consideration. Ernest Cline continues Wade Watt’s virtual adventures in a Ready Player Two. In Firefly Generations, Tim Lebbon deepens the Firefly backstory when Mal and his gang find one of the original ships that brought humans to the ‘verse, and Christopher G. Nuttall provides a satisfying conclusion to an interstellar civil war in Debt of War.

Reviewed:

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Science Fiction to Look for October 2020

Originally published: https://amazingstories.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=232782

October surprised me by not offering up tales of futuristic hauntings and horror, and I’m not complaining. Ghosts in the machine are fine by me, but that’s where I like to keep them. 2020 has been scary enough already.

What we did get was several good space operas, including a return to Elizabeth Bear’s White Space universe; a new book from Kim Stanley Robinson on how to save the planet from mankind and live to tell about it, the last of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother novels about life in times of future DHS, and a sexy police procedural from Amanda Bridgeman that will make you long for the 80s. It was also a good month for anthologies, and I take a look at Ben Bova’s favorite picks as well as a curated collection of really fine stories from Escape Pod’s fifteen years of podcasting. Finally, there’s a collection of stories from Cixin Liu, most from his earlier work that gives a window into both author and culture.

Reviewed:

Corvette Meet (1984)

Shot with my Nikon FM and Kodachrome, though I don’t remember which lens I was using. I scanned this from the slides using a KODAK Mini Digital Film & Slide Scanner which produces a 22 Megapixel JPEG from slides or negatives and costs just over $100.

Science Fiction to Look for October 2020

Here’s the into and list from my October Amazing Stories Column. Feedback encouraged. – Ern

October surprised me by not offering up tales of futuristic hauntings and horror, and I’m not complaining. Ghosts in the machine are fine by me, but that’s where I like to keep them. 2020 has been scary enough already.

What we did get was several good space operas, including a return to Elizabeth Bear’s White Space universe; a new book from Kim Stanley Robinson on how to save the planet from mankind and live to tell about it, the last of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother novels about life in times of future DHS, and a sexy police procedural from Amanda Bridgeman that will make you long for the 80s. It was also a good month for anthologies, and I take a look at Ben Bova’s favorite picks as well as a curated collection of really fine stories from Escape Pod’s fifteen years of podcasting. Finally, there’s a collection of stories from Cixin Liu, most from his earlier work that gives a window into both author and culture.

Reviewed: