Science Fiction and Fantasy - January 18, 2018

Thursday, January 18, 2018

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New Books

Burn Bright
by Patricia Briggs

They are the wild and the broken. The werewolves too damaged to live safely among their own kind. For their own good, they have been exiled to the outskirts of Aspen Creek, Montana. Close enough to the Marrok's pack to have its support; far enough away to not cause any harm. Charles and Anna are on call when an SOS comes in from the fae mate of one such wildling. Heading into the mountainous wilderness, they interrupt the abduction of the wolf--but can't stop blood from being shed. Now Charles and Anna must use their skills--his as enforcer, hers as peacemaker--to track down the attackers, reopening a painful chapter in the past that springs from the darkest magic of the witchborn...

Head On
by John Scalzi

Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers, with the goal of carrying your opponent’s head through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, the sport would be impossible, but the sport thrives as “threeps”—robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome—take the place of the living. But then one star drops dead on the playing field. FBI agents and Haden-related crime investigators Chris Shane and Leslie Vann are called in to determine the truth. But in a sport so profitable and brutal, the investigators may find that targets aren’t limited to those on the field.

Beneath the Sugar Sky
by Seanan McGuire

When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can't let Reality get in the way of her quest - not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can't find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn't have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests...

The Papyrus Trilogy
by Zoran Živković

A series of mysterious deaths in the Papyrus Bookstore brings literature-loving police inspector Dejan Lukic to investigate. Together with the attractive owner, Vera Gavrilovic, they discover the elusive Last Book is responsible. Seemingly causeless deaths multiply, the National Security Agency, a secret apocalyptic sect, and others are drawn in, and the secrets of immortality, death, and reality itself are revealed in a masterful trilogy that demonstrates the magical and ultimately benevolent power of literature.

The Infinite Future
by Tim Wirkus

The legendary book The Infinite Future was the brainchild of a forgotten and reclusive Brazilian science-fiction author, existing only in the minds of those obsessed by the world of lost books. Three such obsessives—a struggling writer, a journalist turned librarian in Sao Paulo and an excommunicated Mormon historian—join forces to discover if the fantastical book ever existed. Journeying through Brazil, the American West and into outer space, the trio edges closer to the revealing the truth—if they can get their minds around what that truth may be.

Djinn City
by Saad Z. Hossain

Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super dense, super chaotic third world capital Of Bangladesh. Denied schooling by his loutish father and virtually ignorant of his mother, Indelbed can only trust his wise-cracking cousin, the slacker Rais. When Indelbed’s father falls into a mysterious supernatural coma, the truth is revealed: Indelbed’s father was a magician and a trusted emissary to the Djinn, or genie, world. And the Djinn are displeased. Now the hunt is on by the Djinn to find Indelbed, and the boys find themselves on the run, unwitting inheritors of the fallout from an ancient war, with ramifications for life as we know it.

Crosstown
by Loren W. Cooper

Zethus is a sorcerer who makes his home in CrossTown. There, the manyworld hypotheseis of modern physics manifests itself, and possibilities and probabilities overlap. The recent death of his master, Corvinus, plunges Zethus into the final project Corvinus was working on at his death—a project that powerful forces wish to have wiped from memory. Zethus discovers that the core of this project lies deep in the origin of CrossTown’s fractured reality, but in order to make the dangerous journey to the heart of history, Zethus must face the prospect that the answer may threaten everything he holds dear—including his own humanity.