1) "Once A Witch" by Carolyn MacCullough
Growing up Talentless in a family of witches has been hard on Tamsin, particularly since her older, perfect sister Rowena oozes Talent. When a mysterious, handsome stranger mistakes her for Rowena and asks her to “find” something his family lost, is it so awful that she doesn’t correct him and accepts the challenge? Well, yes, of course. Her very Talented childhood friend Gabriel has moved back from the West Coast to attend Juilliard, and, in addition to being totally hot, he’s willing to help her. Together Gabriel and Tamsin Travel to the past to recover the lost object, an action that lands Rowena in the clutches of the stranger and threatens Tamsin’s whole family—and the rest of humanity to boot. While MacCullough’s setup and plot may not shake the world with their originality, she has created an enormously sympathetic character in Tamsin, whose itchy relationship with her family will resonate with teens struggling to define themselves. Characters, setting, conflict—all develop nicely to create a light urban fantasy that goes down easy and will have readers asking for its sequel. (Fantasy. 12 & up)
2) "When the Heavens Fall" by Mac Turner
Gods, zombies, kings, wizards, and death-magic battle to the, well, death in a story that’s sparked more by its denizens and their deeds than its standard fantasy backdrop.
For centuries the mages of the Black Tower kept a dangerous artifact owned by Shroud, the Lord of the Dead, hidden and quiescent. But with the Black Tower now a spent force, ambitious mage Mayot Mencada steals the Book of Lost Souls, though he lacks the ability to unlock the book’s protective wards. A meddlesome goddess, the Spider, Shroud’s rival, removes the wards, whereupon Mencada unleashes the book’s power to create a vast army of the dead. The tide of death-magic draws other interested parties whose motives only gradually reveal themselves. Guardian Luker Essendar, a warrior with Will-powered magic, constrained to serve an emperor he despises, agrees to investigate only because Kanon, his old mentor, was dispatched earlier and has not been heard from since. As Mencada’s zombie warriors threaten to overrun Galitia, its prince, Ebon Calidar, realizes he must quell the source of the death-magic. A mysterious and seemingly immortal necromancer, Parolla Morivan, has overwhelming personal reasons for wanting to confront Shroud. And the Spider sends Romany Elivar, her hedonistic high priestess, to pick off the agents Shroud directs to retrieve his book. None of the players can afford to trust any of the others. This basic, satisfying plot displays enough original elements to make it intriguing. The characters, whose personalities drive the narrative as much as the clash of magics, battle through page after relentless page of grim, desperate, surprising, and often enthralling action. Equally satisfying, the ending wraps things up without annoying and taunting cliffhangers.
A splendid launch. Turner’s unquestionably a newcomer to watch.
3) "The Inverted World" by Christopher Priest
4) "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner
This is quite a marvelous projection in which John Brunner landscapes a future that seems the natural foster child of the present. Roughly, it follows the careers of two individuals--Norman Niblock House, a young, super-geared ""Afram"" working for the monolithic General Technic Corporation, with its megabrain computer ""Shalmanser"" and its plan to buy and monopolize the backward company of Beninia. Racial tensions have eased but not evaporated and Norman is the product of Black Awareness that has turned into Black Self-Consciousness. His roommate, Donald, is a mild student when first met, but he had been recruited by the Secret Service years before. During the course of operations, he is activated, programmed as an assassin, and sent to another remote country to investigate the announcement that a genetics genius has managed to come up with the happy combination that will make all unborn children predetermined prodigies. Everything compounds into a fractured tomorrow here--from the population explosion to Marshall McLuhan to the Territorial Imperative to the underground press, in this case a marvelous manifesto called ""the Hipcrime Vocab."" It would be a Squarecrime for the Sci-Fi audience to miss this.
5) "Eon" by Greg Bear
A big, ambitious, highly imaginative but less than fully persuasive novel from the author of Blood Music (p. 62). In the near future, after a limited nuclear war, a large asteroid--the "Stone"--takes up orbit around the Earth. The Stone is hollow, containing six huge, apparently abandoned chambers, cities, lights, forests, and whatnot--and a mind-boggling seventh chamber, a corridor that somehow continues beyond the exterior length of the Stone! As the Western allies explore the Stone (the Russians are mostly excluded), they find books detailing the Stone's past (it was built in an alternate universe) and future (a full-scale nuclear war is about to happen). Then a Russian invasion of the Stone duly triggers the war on Earth; so the surviving invaders and occupants alike are marooned in the Stone--where they're being observed by ghostlike beings from the mysterious corridor. Thereafter, things get complicated. The corridor, or "Way," extends indefinitely in time as well as space; along its length are openings, "Gates," into other worlds. Far down the Way, Axis City is the hub of a large inter-Gate trading complex--but it's threatened with invasion by the enigmatic, hostile Jarts. The humans in the Stone, led by administrator Garry Lanier and mathematics whiz Patricia Vasquez, become integral to the Axis City political disputes stirred up by agent Olmy: one faction favors accelerating the City along the Way to shut out the Jarts; others agitate for a return down the Way to help out their hapless ancestors on the devastated Earth. An impressive and often absorbing enterprise, but patchy and problematic, from the unconvincing characters and poor descriptions to fizzling subplots and the prolonged, dull opening. And even when the narrative finally gathers momentum and excitement, the many dazzling ideas here are never firmly under control.
6) "A World Out of Time" by Larry Niven
7) "Blindsight" by Peter Watts
Alien-contact tale in which humans are at least as weird as the aliens.
Eighty years from now, denizens of Earth become aware of an alien presence when the sky fills with bursts of light from dying Fireflies, tiny machines that signal to a supergiant planet far beyond the edge of the solar system. With orders to investigate, the vessel Theseus carries an artificial intelligence as its captain, along with expedition leader Jukka Sarasti, a brooding, sociopathic and downright scary vampire; Isaac Szpindel, a biologist so mechanized he can barely feel his own skin; the Gang of Four, a schizophrenic linguist; curiously passive warrior Major Amanda Bates; and observer-narrator Siri Keeton, a synthesist with half a brain (the remainder destroyed by a virus) enhanced by add-ons and advanced algorithms. They meet a huge alien vessel that calls itselfRorschach and talks eagerly but says nothing of consequence. Indeed, the Gang of Four suspects that the alien voice isn’t truly sentient at all. As Keeton begins to hallucinate, Sarasti orders a team to break into the alien vessel despite its lethal radiation levels. Still unable to decide whether the aliens are hostile, Sarasti devises a plan to capture one of the creatures that apparently thrive within Rorschach’s peculiar environment. They succeed in grabbing two specimens. These scramblers, dubbed Stretch and Clench, resemble huge, bony, multi-limbed starfish. They have no brains but show evidence of massive information-processing capability, which brings Theseus’ crew to the crucial question: Can intelligence exist without self-awareness?
Watts (ßehemoth: Seppuku, 2005, etc.) carries several complications too many, but presents nonetheless a searching, disconcerting, challenging, sometimes piercing inquisition.
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