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Science Fiction and Fantasy |
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Monday, May 7, 2018 You have received this message because you signed up to receive Madison Public Library's Science Fiction and Fantasy email newsletter. View more Science Fiction and Fantasy: Blog View | Archived Newsletter View | Insider
New Books |
 The Tea Master and the Detective The Shadow's Child is a living mindship that was discharged from military transport service after an injury and now makes a living brewing mind-altering teas to help space travelers. When abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau requests a corpse from space for scientific study, the ship accepts the odd assignment. When the body she brings back turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow Child with her. |
 Armistice In a tropical country where shadowy political affairs lurk behind the scenes of its glamorous film industry, three people maneuver inside a high stakes game of statecraft and espionage: Lillian, a reluctant diplomat serving a fascist nation, Aristide, an expatriate film director running from lost love and a criminal past,--and Cordelia, a former cabaret stripper turned legendary revolutionary. Each one harbors dangerous knowledge that can upturn a nation. When their fates collide, machinations are put into play, unexpected alliances are built, and long-held secrets are exposed. Everything is barreling towards an international revolt...and only the wiliest ones will be prepared for what comes next. |
 Artificial Condition It has a dark past--one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself "Murderbot". But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART, Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks... |
 All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella's Stepmother We all know the story of Cinderella. Or do we? As stories of a cruel upbringing of the beautiful new princess circulate through the kingdom, her stepmother, Agnes, records the true story. Born into serfdom, Agnes is left to fend for herself as a laundress’s apprentice at a young age. Working her way up into independence, she is seduced by an older man who leaves her pregnant and penniless. Bound by a strong love to support her child, she returns to the servitude she thought she had left behind by becoming nursemaid to the otherworldly infant Ella. She struggles to love the child who eventually becomes her stepdaughter and eventual princess. The story of their relationship reveals that nothing is as it seems, that beauty is not always desirable, and the truth behind happily ever after. |
 Black Helicopters Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency's world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable. Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters. An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future. |
 By Fire Above All's fair in love and war," according to airship captain Josette Dupre, until her hometown becomes occupied by the enemy and her mother a prisoner of war. Before she can rescue her town, however, Josette must maneuver her way through the nest of overstuffed vipers that make up the nation's military and royal leaders in order to drum up support. The foppish and mostly tolerated crew member Lord Bernat steps in to advise her, along with his very attractive older brother. Between noble scheming, undertrained recruits, and supply shortages, Josette and the crew of the Mistral figure out a way to return to Durum--only to discover that when the home front turns into the front lines, things are more dangerous than they seem. |
 A Fistful of Elven Gold When someone starts killing his fellow bounty hunters in the port of Fairhaven, Drago Appleroot is happy to help his contacts in the City Watch with their investigation--for a reasonable fee, of course. But posing as an assassin-for-hire to draw out the killer attracts the attention of two separate groups from a far-off Elven kingdom whose private war is being fought on the streets of his home town. Pitched into a maelstrom of treachery and lethal politics, Drago is forced into a long and dangerous journey to the heart of the Sylvan Marches, where one determined gnome might just decide the destiny of a kingdom. If he can survive long enough to decide which side he ought to be on. |
 Time Was In the heart of World War II, Tom and Ben became lovers. Brought together by a secret project designed to hide British targets from German radar, the two founded a love that could not be revealed. When the project went wrong, Tom and Ben vanished into nothingness, presumed dead. Their bodies were never found. Now the two are lost in time, hunting each other across decades, leaving clues in books of poetry and trying to make their disparate timelines overlap. |
 The Soldier In a far corner of space, on the very borders between humanity's Polity worlds and the kingdom of the vicious crab-like prador, is an immediate threat to all sentient life: an accretion disc, a solar system designed by the long-dead Jain race and swarming with living technology powerful enough to destroy entire civilizations. Neither the Polity or the prador want the other in full control of the disc, so they've placed an impartial third party in charge of the weapons platform guarding the technology from escaping into the galaxy: Orlandine, a part-human, part-AI haiman. She's assisted by Dragon, a mysterious, spaceship-sized alien entity who has long been suspicious of Jain technology and who suspects the disc is a trap lying-in-wait. But others would like to attack the Polity and they plan to use weapons that could adversely change the power balance in the universe forever. |
 Medusa Uploaded The Executives control Oichi's senses, her voice, her life. Until the day they kill her. An executive clan gives the order to shoot Oichi out of an airlock on suspicion of being an insurgent. A sentient AI, a Medusa unit, rescues Oichi and begins to teach her the truth--the Executives are not who they think they are. Oichi, officially dead and now bonded to the Medusa unit, sees a chance to make a better life for everyone on board. As she sets things right one assassination at a time, Oichi becomes the very insurgent the Executives feared, and in the process uncovers the shocking truth behind the generation starship that is their home. |
