A list of books I'll be keeping an eye out for over the next few months:
HG Wells, Five Great Novels. Gollancz, 608pp, UKP10.99 (pb). ISBN: 0575075724.
This omnibus edition of Wells' novels includes The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The First Men In The Moon, and The Time Machine.
Philip K Dick, Five Great Novels. Gollancz, 848pp, UKP10.99 (pb). ISBN: 0575075813.
A bumper collection of Philip K Dick novels: this volume includes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Martian Time Slip, Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly.
Peter Straub, lost boy lost girl. HarperCollins, 281pp, 6.99. ISBN: 0007142315.
"A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son.beautiful, troubled fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill.vanishes from the face of the earth. To his uncle, horror novelist Timothy Underhill, Mark.s inexplicable absence feels like a second death. After his sister-in-law.s funeral, Tim searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help him unravel this mystery of death and disappearance. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother.s suicide Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house on Michigan Street whispers from attic to basement with the echoes of a long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underhill comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain." Mass market paperback edition.
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives. Golden Gryphon Press, 295pp, USD24.95 (hb). ISBN: 1930846258.
The short novel 'The Atrocity Archive' (previously serialised in Spectrum SF), packaged with a sequel novella. It's a cyber-horror-sf-fantasy-satire mash-up, and it's a lot of fun.
Tricia Sullivan, Maul. Orbit, 416pp, UKP7.99 (pb). ISBN: 184149108X.
Mass-market paperback edition of last year's Clarke-nominated novel.
Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter, A Time Odyssey: Time's Eye. Gollancz, 272pp, UKP12.99 (hb). ISBN: 0575075309.
"1885, the North West Frontier. Rudyard Kipling is witness to a bizarre encounter between the British army and what appears to be an impossibly advanced piece of Russian technology. And then to a terrifying intervention by a helicopter from 2037. Before the full impact of this extraordinary event has even begun to sink in, Kipling, his friends and the helicopter crew stumble across Alexander the Great's army. Mankind's time odyssey has begun. It is a journey that will see Alexander avoid his premature death and carve out an Empire that expands from Carthage to China, beating the time-slipped army of Ghenghis Khan in a battle outside the ruins of Babylon in the process. And it will present mankind with two devastating truths. Aliens are amongst us and have been manipulating our past and our future. And that future extends only as far as 2037, for that is the date Earth will be destroyed. This is SF that spans countless centuries and carries cutting edge ideas on time travel and alien intervention. It shows two of the genre's masters at their groundbreaking best."
Hari Kunzru, Transmission. Hamish Hamilton, 400pp, UKP12.99 (hb). ISBN: 0241141702.
When Arjun is fired from his IT job in Redmond, Washington, he unleashes the virus he's been growing on his computer system. And as his digital creatures make their way out into the world, they begin to have tiny cascading effects on people's lives. Guy and Gabriella live in a luxury riverside apartment in London, but soon, through Arjun's unwitting agency, the operation of chance begins to smash up their perfect world. Everywhere new viruses and worms are being reported, all referring - either through picture, sound, text or code - to the film star Leela Zahir. Suddenly, Leela is the most famous woman in the world...
Ian R Macleod, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations. Golden Gryphon Press, 300pp, USD24.95 (hb). ISBN: 1930846266.
A second collection of short fiction from Ian McDonald, whose novel The Light Ages was one of 2003's best books. This volume brings together stories published in Interzone, Asimov's and SciFiction over the past few years; personal favourite is gorgeous first-contact-maybe story 'New Light on the Drake Equation.
Ian McDonald, River of Gods. Simon and Schuster, 608pp, UKP17.99 (hb). ISBN: 0743256697.
"August 15th, 2047. Happy Hundredth Birthday, India... In the mid twenty-first century, Mother India is all the things she is now - ancient and vibrant, poor yet staggeringly rich. Diverse, violent, beautiful and terrible, thrilling and bewildering. A nation choked with peoples and cultures, riven with almost seismic contrasts and contradictions. Nearly two billion humans crowd the subcontinent and her seething cities - the cyberabads - where timeless culture and the highest of high-technologies meet to spawn new societies, and - possibly - new sentient species. RIVER OF GODS is a book as big and brawling as its subject. Its magnificently diverse array of characters - from genetically enhanced 'Brahmins' to body-part runners, American scientists to 'Dharma-cops' (government Artificial Intelligence assassins) - are drawn in interwoven stories towards a cosmic-scale conclusion that will forever change the way we understand ourselves, life, and the universe we inhabit."
Tony Ballantyne, Recursion.
Alex Garland, The Coma, illustrated by Nicholas Garland. Faber, 160pp (40 ill.), UKP10.99 (pb). ISBN: 0571223079
"A young man is brutally assaulted in an underground train. Beaten unconscious, he lies for days in a hospital bed - but appears to make a full recovery. On discharge from hospital, Carl picks up the threads of his daily life, until he starts to notice strange leaps in his perception of time, distortions in his experience. Is he truly interacting with the outside world, or might he be terribly mistaken? So beings a dark psychological drama that raises profound questions about the boundary between the real and the imagined."
"'We are each the love of someone's life..." So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heart-breaking love story with a narrator like no other. Sitting in a sandbox, Max Tivoli is writing the story of his life. He is nearly 70 years old, but he looks as if he is only seven - for Max is ageing backwards. Set in San Francisco during the turbulent years at the turn of the twentieth century, Andrew Sean Greer has created a haunting tale of love lost, then found - in ways that are least expected."
Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten. Hodder and Stoughton, 360pp, UKP12.99 (hb). ISBN: 0340835583.
"The fourth and (for now) final Thursday Next novel sees the head of JurisFiction return to her native Swindon accompanied by a child of two, a pair of dodos and Hamlet, who is on a fact-finding mission in the real world. Thursday has been despatched to capture escaped Fictioneer Yorrick Kaine but even so, now seems as good a time as any to retrieve her husband Landen from his state of eradication at the hands of the Chronoguard. It's not going to be easy..."
Ray Loriga, Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore (translated from the Spanish by John King). Canongate, 272pp, UKP7.99 (pb). ISBN: 1841955000.
"A salesman for The Company searches hazily for his wife, grasping at memories just out of reach. When they ask after her he tells them she's dead. They say she may be in Tokyo. Set in the very near future, this novel presents a dystopian vision akin to Orwell's 1984 - while evoking the bewildering visual universe of Blade Runner."
Adam Roberts, The Snow. Gollancz, 288pp, UKP9.99 (pb). ISBN: 0575071818.
"And this is how the world will end ... 'The snow started falling on the sixth of September, soft noiseless flakes filling the sky like a swarm of white moths, or like static interference on your TV screen - whichever metaphor, nature or technology, you find the more evocative. Snow everywhere, all through the air, with that distinctive sense of hurrying that a vigorous snowfall brings with it. Everything in a rush, busy-busy snowflakes. And, simultaneously, paradoxically, everything is hushed, calm, as quiet as cancer, as white as death. 'And at the beginning people were happy.' But the snow doesn't stop. It falls and falls and falls. Until it lies three miles thick across the whole of the earth. Six billion people have died. Perhaps 150,000 survive. But those 150,000 need help, they need support, they need organising, governing. And so the lies begin. Lies about how the snow started. Lies about who is to blame. Lies about who is left. Lies about what really lies beneath."
Iain M Banks, 'SF Novel'. Orbit, 368pp, UKP17.99 (hb). ISBN: 1841491551.
"An explosive new SF novel from Iain M Banks: The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. They are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data and hunting their own young. Fassin Taak is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years. But with each day that passes a war draws closer - a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he's ever known."
Stephen Baxter, Exultant: Destiny's Children book 2. Gollancz, 608pp, UKP17.99 (hb). ISBN: 0575074280.
The second of three novels (following the Arthur C Clarke Award-nominated Coalescent) dealing with possible evolutionary futures for mankind.
Yann Martel, We Ate The Children Last: Stories. Canongate, 224pp, UKP14.99 (hb). ISBN: 1841955361.
"An updated edition of short fiction, originally published in 1993, dealing with such themes as storytelling, illness, war, music, death, bureaucracy, science and sex. These tales are inventive in form and timeless in content."
China Mieville, The Iron Council. Macmillan, 400pp; UKP16.99 (hb). ISBN: 0333989724.
China Mieville's fourth novel returns to New Crobuzon, the setting of his Arthur C Clarke award-winning epic Perdido Street Station.
"Part hard SF thriller, part interstellar adventure, part noir romance, Century Rain is the new bestseller from Alastair Reynolds.
Matt Ruff, Set This House In Order. Perennial, 496pp, UKP7.99 (pb). ISBN: 0007164246.
Paperback edition of this year's James Tiptree Jr. award-winning novel.
Concluding volume of 'The Baroque Cycle', a sprawling 17th century epic detailing the birth of scientific enlightenment.
Francis Spufford, The Backroom Boys. Faber and Faber, 290pp, UKP8.99 (pb). ISBN: 0571214975.
Paperback edition of Spufford's wonderful history of the british boffin, covering such diverse accomplishments as the development of Elite and the voyage of Beagle 2.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Stamping Butterflies. Gollancz, 400pp, UKP12.99 (hb). ISBN: 0743248112.
"One of the most exciting cutting edge SF authors in the UK joins Gollancz with his most ambitious novel yet. A circle may begin at any point - with a gun, or a an argument, or a butterfly blown by the wind. When someone shoots at the President on tour in Morocco, the shock is less than the mystery. Of all the recent Presidents, why this one? What to do with the shooter, dubbed Prisoner Zero? And - increasingly urgent - who IS Zero? Prisoner Zero will say nothing, and seems to have no past. He could be Arab. He could be American. He could be insane, he could be professional, he could be a lone gunman or represent a vast conspiracy. Maybe he has more than one past. Or maybe the answer lies in the future, where an emperor waits alone in the Forbidden City, for an assassin and a butterfly. Jon Courtenay Grimwood's gripping and brilliantly clever new novel confirms what fans of his Ashraf Bey series have always known - that he is one of Britain's most innovative writers."