Books Received, March 26 — April 1
2 Apr, 2022
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The Last Crown by Elzbieta Cherezinska
Across Baltic shores, English battlegrounds, and the land of Northen Lights, The Last Crown is the follow up to The Widow Queen, and the epic conclusion of Swietoslawa’s journey from Polish princess to Queen of Denmark & Sweden and Queen Mother of England.
New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction Neil Clarke & Xia Jia & Regina Kanyu Wang
New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extraterrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It’s not the easiest future to build, but it’s one that just might be in reach. “A Half-Built Garden deserves to be the first contact novel that defines a generation.” –Seanan McGuire On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm – and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn’t agree, they may need to be saved by force. The watershed networks aren’t ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they rose up to exile the last corporations to a few artificial islands, escape the dominance of nation-states, and reorganize humanity around the hope of keeping their world liveable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they’ve started to heal the wounded planet. But now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if any one accepts the aliens’ offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone’s eyes turned skyward, everything hinges on the success of Judy’s effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.
The Picture Bride Lee Geum-Yi
An incredible story of female friendship, inspired by the real-life experience of Korea’s ‘picture brides’ — women who travelled to Hawaii to marry Korean labourers, having seen only a photo of their intended husband. In 1910, in Korea, three women stood in line at the immigration office, planning on immigrating to Hawaii in hopes of a better life. But different fates awaited each of these women, who bravely left behind their home and their parents in search of a better life. Hong-ju, who dreams of a marriage of ‘natural love’ meets a man who looks twenty years older than his picture; Song-hwa, who wants to escape from her life of ridicule as the granddaughter of a shaman, meets a lazy drunkard. And then there’s Willow, whose 26-year-old groom, Taewan, looks just as he did in his picture … In trying to escape their lives of poverty and oppression, these women took an incalculable risk. And while things don’t turn out quite as they’d hoped, even for Willow, they do find something that makes their journey worthwhile — each other.
Baldemar by Matthew Hughes
In a Dying Earth of wizards and walled cities, a boy climbs out of poverty when he becomes an assistant to a moneylender’s debt collector, then enters a career as henchman to a young, ambitious thaumaturge.But
Baldemar’s career as a wizard’s minion goes sideways after a powerful entity left over from the creation of the cosmos finds him useful for its own ends.
Now he must tread a perilous path peopled by dukes and demons, spellslingers and secret agents, assassins and academics, plus a pair of vengeful wizards who want their stolen treasures returned.
His course will lead him through the Underworld and Overworld, and along shadowy paths in the tenebrous realm known as the Glooms, to a final confrontation that will test Baldemar’s hard-won knowledge to the utmost.
Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove
From New York Times bestselling author Harry Turtledove, the modern master of alternate history, a novel of alien contact set in the tumultuous year of the Watergate scandal.It’s 1974, and Jerry Stieglitz is a grad student in marine biology at UCLA with a side gig selling short stories to science fiction magazines, just weeks away from marrying his longtime fiancée. Then his life is upended by grim-faced men from three-letter agencies who want him to join a top-secret “Project Azorian” in the middle of the north Pacific Ocean — and they really don’t take “no” for an answer. Further, they’re offering enough money to solve all of his immediate problems.Joining up and swearing to secrecy, what he first learns is that Project Azorian is secretly trying to raise a sunken Russian submarine, while pretending to be harvesting undersea manganese nodules. But the dead Russian sub, while real, turns out to be a cover story as well. What’s down on the ocean floor next to it is the thing that killed the sub: an alien spacecraft.Jerry’s a scientist, a longhair, a storyteller, a dreamer. He stands out like a sore thumb on the Glomar Explorer, a ship full of CIA operatives, RAND Corporation eggheads, and roustabout divers. But it turns out that he’s the one person in the North Pacific who’s truly thought out all the ways that human-alien first contact might go.And meanwhile, it’s still 1974 back on the mainland. Richard Nixon is drinking heavily and talking to the paintings on the White House walls. The USA is changing fast — and who knows what will happen when this story gets out? Three Miles Down is both a fresh and original take on First Contact, and a hugely enjoyable romp through the pop culture, political tumult, and conspiracies-within-conspiracies atmosphere that was 1974.
The Last Dreamwalker by Rita Woods
From Hurston/Wright Legacy Award-winning author Rita Woods, The Last Dreamwalker tells the story of two women, separated by nearly two centuries yet inextricably linked by the Gullah Geechee Islands off the coast of South Carolina — and their connection to a mysterious and extraordinary gift passed from generation to generation.In the wake of her mother’s passing, Layla Hurley unexpectedly reconnects with her mother’s sisters, women she hasn’t been allowed to speak to, or of, in years.Her aunts reveal to Layla that a Gullah-Geechee island off the shore of South Carolina now belongs to her. As Layla digs deeper into her mother’s past and the mysterious island’s history, she discovers that the terrifying nightmares that have plagued her throughout her life and tainted her relationship with her mother and all of her family, is actually a power passed down through generations of her Gullah ancestors. She is a Dreamwalker, able to inhabit the dreams of others — and to manipulate them.As Layla uncovers increasingly dark secrets about her family’s past, she finds herself thrust into the center of a potentially deadly, decades-old feud fought in the dark corridor of dreams.The Last Dreamwalker is a gripping, contemporary read about power and agency; family and legacy; and the ways trauma, secrets, and magic take shape across generations.