Your reading list isn’t long enough! You can
always use another stack of science fiction and fantasy books — and luckily,
March is full of exciting reads. Including new Terry Pratchett and Brandon
Sanderson, but also loads of magic, time travel, apocalypses and fun. Here are
the March books you can’t afford to miss.
The Memory of Sky: A Great Ship Trilogy by
Robert Reed (Prime Books)
Anyone who reads a lot of short fiction knows that Robert Reed is one of
the most thrilling and consistently entertaining writers out there. But he also
writes novels — and now he’s returning to the Great Ship setting of some of
his previous work, a huge ancient starship that’s been colonized by some
humans. In Memory of Sky, a peculiar
boystarts to explore the world his
parents have always kept him away from, and discovers that human communities
have evolved in strange directions.
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava
Lavender by Leslye Walton (Candlewick)
This generations-spanning magical realism novel sounds pretty unique —
it follows a girl who’s born in 1944 with the wings of a bird. But we also
follow her great grandmother, her grandmother and her mother, throughtheir own experiences with tragically foolish
love. People are praising the beautiful language and comparing it to Erin
Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and
Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
The long-awaited second book in Sanderson’s
Stormlight Archive series is out now! Catch up with Shallan,
Kaladin, Dalinar, and Adolin as they face more challenges in the epic realm of
the Cosmere. This time around, Shallan is desperate to stop the Voidbringers
from coming back and ending all of civilization — but stopping them requires a
journey to the Shattered Plains.
Questionable Practices: Stories by Eileen
Gunn (Small Beer Press)
The indispensible short-story author is back with another collection full
of unfeasibly strange experiments. As we said in our review, “Questionable
Practices contains a number of sardonically weird looks at the future and
the strangeness of corporate culture. But her insatiable eye for weirdness
branches out this time around, featuring a number of different takes on the
fantastical.”
https://gizmodo.com/eileen-gunns-strange-thought-experiments-will-unravel-1496740494
The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher (Tor)
Christopher has made his mark with his
superhero novels — but now he’s trying his hand at space opera. A former war
hero, Abraham Idaho Cleveland, is stuck on a backwater space station, where he
receives a mysterious signal, that could be a warning of an ancient, cosmic
threat to all existence.
Death Sworn by Leah Cypress (Green Willow)
Ileni is a sorceress who is losing her magic — which is usually the end
of the road for a sorceress. She’s sent to the Assassins’ Cave to be killed,
but instead she finds love and companionship with Sorin, who may be the next
leader of the assassin band.
Lockstep by Karl Schroeder (Tor)
Toby gets lost in space when he’s just 17,
and puts himself into cryo-suspension — never expecting to be woken up. When
he does wake, though, he discovers that his family rules a vast space empire.
And his brother Peter has become an awful tyrant, who sees Toby as a threat.
Off to Be the Wizard (Magic 2.0) by Scott
Meyer (47North)
This is one of the more offbeat ideas for a novel we’ve come across
lately. Martin Banks discovers that reality is a computer program, and he can
hack it, tweaking reality to make it more to his liking. Unfortunately, his
edits to the universe haven’t gone unnoticed, and he faces prosecution for
reality-hacking. So he goes back in time tothe Middle Ages and becomes a wizard in the time of King Arthur. Bet
you’ve never seen that story before.
Pharos: A Ghost Story by Alice Thompson
(Thomas Dunne Books)
This ghost story, set in the early 19th century, is being compared by the
publisher to The Turn of the Screw
and other similar works. It’s about a mysterious woman who turns up on the
shores of Jacob’s Rock, near a remote lighthouse, with no memory of who she is
or where she comes from. The lighthouse-keeper and his assistant take her in,
clothe her, and look after her — but she’s not who or what she seems.
Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun (Hogarth)
Yet another literary apocalypse novel — except that instead
of zombies, children’s voices making adults sick, or a mysterious plague, this
time it’s insomnia. The most terrifying thing of all, perhaps. Nine out of ten
people is unable to sleep, at all, and slowly descends into madness and
paranoia — while the 10 percent of humans who can sleep are forced to sleep in
hiding, because the rest of the human race will kill them on sight. Check out
Calhoun’s essay about being an accidental science fiction author.
The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan (Tor)
The sequel to Brennan’s great Natural
History of Dragons once again follows Lady Trent as she explores strange
creatures. This time around, Isabella is braving the heat and danger of the
war-torn continent of Eriga, where the serpents are exotic — but her
companions might be the death of her.
The Weirdness: A Novel by Jeremy P.
Bushnell (Melville House)
“Weirdness” sounds like an apt description of this novel, in
which a struggling novelist gets a visit from Lucifer, who promises to get him
a great book deal if he helps save the world by retrieving Satan’s magical
Welcome Cat. Yes, you read all that correctly. It sounds pretty random, but by
all accounts it’s a fun, clever ride from the creator of the tabletop game
Inevitable.
The End is Nigh edited by John Joseph Adams
and Hugh Howey (CreateSpace)
The first of three
volumes of fiction about the apocalypse — this one is
“pre-apocalyptic,” so the stories stop just short of everything ending.
There’s an all-star roundup of contributors. (Full disclosure: I
have a story in here.) There’s a
wide range of apocalypses and styles here, so it doesn’t feel as repetitive as
you’d worry it might. And there’s something especially interesting, in the
times we live in, about looking at tales that take place just as the apocalypse
is getting ready to happen.
https://gizmodo.com/when-the-world-is-ending-the-only-thing-to-do-is-make-1536369556
The House at the End of Hope Street: A
Novel by Menna van Praag (Penguin Books)
Alba Ashby, a young grad student at Cambridge University,
has the worst night ever — and then she winds up at a magical house at 11 Hope Street. The
house can help her turn her life around, but there’s just one rule — she has
to leave in 30 days, having sorted out all her problems by then. Previous
inhabitants, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf, are still
there inhabiting the pictures on the wall.
Raising Steam (Discworld) by Terry
Pratchett (Doubleday)
The 40th Discworld book finally reaches the steam age, as trains and
other engines come to Ankh-Morpork, adding to the city’s already booming
industrial revolution. As Ben Aaronovitch writes in the Guardian, “Pratchett’s
themes are the big ones: the threat and promise of change, the
individual’s search for meaning within their own society, and the fine moral
judgments that have to be made between competing rights and freedoms.”
Blood and Iron (The Book of the Black
Earth) by Jon Sprunk (Pyr)
This is billed as a sword-and-sorcery version of Spartacus, and early reviews have praised the “incredible
feat of world building” in this book. A soldier gets shipwrecked and finds
himself enslaved by the people he was sent to kill — until they discover he
has the potential to wield magic, and then he’s suddenly lifted up to the
Queen’s court and caught up in palace intrigue.
Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall (Egmont
Books Ltd)
In this zippy middle-grade adventure book, Earth has been invaded by a
race called the Moror, and when things get really bad 300 kids are evacuated to
Mars, to train as cadets in the Exo-Defence Force. Then all the adults on Mars
mysteriously vanish, leaving 300 kids with zero adult supervision. It’s not quite
Lord of the Flies on Mars, but more
like a weird adventure novel with laser-shooting
goldfish and stuff.
The Time Traveler’s Almanac edited by Ann
VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer (Tor Books)
Any book that starts out with Douglas Adams and then moves
on to Isaac Asimov and Kage Baker has got to be worth a read, right? This is
basically just the best time travel fiction of all time, and the list of
contributors includes everybody you have ever loved or admired.
Sources: SF
Signal, Locus
Magazine, Amazon and Publishers’ Catalogs
