March 2012

March's New in Paperback roundup includes HALT'S PERIL and THE EMPEROR OF NIHON-JA, the last two installments in John Flanagan's Ranger's Apprentice series, which sees Will and his band of Araluens fending off master Senji warriors intent on overthrowing the emperor; SCORPIA RISING, Anthony Horowitz's final Alex Rider novel, in which the teen spy tries to track down the world's most dangerous terrorist organization once and for all (only this time, he might not get away with it); THE DREAMER by Pam Muñoz Ryan, the enchanting tale of a young Chilean boy named Neftalí, who later becomes the famous poet and politician Pablo Neruda; and CRUNCH, a timely family story about sticking together and never giving up hope, from the award-winning author of WAITING FOR NORMAL.

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Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

The United States is no longer whole. It has sold of great swaths of itself to corporations with societies within these segments existing in a state of anarcho-capitalism. The Metaverse has overtaken the internet; essentially a Second Life-style other world by which people interact. A new pseudo-narcotic is becoming all the rage: Snow Crash. The effects of the drug exist in real life AND in the Metaverse and is distributed via churches. SNOW CRASH is a remarkable novel, a merging of virtual reality and Sumerian mythology that proceed at a remarkable pace. While there is much here to remind a reader of William Gibson, Stephenson presents his own unique ideas and touches them with doses of humor. SNOW CRASH stands alongside Gibson's NEUROMANCER as iconic moments in cyberpunk sci-fi.

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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. A parallel universe, England, 1985. Thursday Next is a Literary Detective. She handles literary crime. In this world, a device has been made which allows a sinister villain to enter a book and change the story, thus changing the books on the shelves. More dastardly, he has entered into Jane Eyre...and kidnapped her. Thursday must enter the novel and stop her foe while also setting things right and restoring the text. Jasper Fforde is a marvel at taking an extraordinary amount of literary references and combining them all together in such a way that instead of confusion you end up with one of the funnest, most hilarious, and exciting novels you will pick up. This is the first in a series of novels.

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The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

At Oxford University, historians have accessed time travel and in order to conduct field research they travel to the past as observers. Kivrin Engle, a medieval historian, travels back to 1320 against the better judgment of her instructor. The technician in her present soon dies and Kivrin is subsequently stranded in the past. Soon it is discovered that Kivrin has ended up in the wrong time. She has instead landed in the time of the Black Plague. As people around her succumb to the disease, people in present day Oxford are also dying from plague. In THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, Connie Willis gives us history, intensity, sorrow, the sense of humanity no matter what time one finds themselves in, and that despite our insistence on boxing eras into segments of time, we are not so neatly separated.

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The Children of Men by P. D. James

Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

An incredibly interesting dystopian novel that lays out a future in England where the men have had their sperm counts plummet to zero. Infertility has taken up the minds of residents as the population begins to decline. In the midst of this distraction, democracy has been revoked. A group of anti-government resistance fighters are on the run and things take a turn when one of them is found to be pregnant. THE CHILDREN OF MEN is a richly layered and serves as a great "what if" novel. It also had a feature film based on it, though the film contained several alterations to plot and theme.

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Neuromancer by William Gibson

Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

One of the most stunning debut novels ever. William Gibson's NEUROMANCER is the seminal work of the sub-genre known as cyberpunk and it struck a serious chord upon its release. Though critically ignored for the most part, it gained a following and became a multi-award winner. Since then, the story of a drug-addled hacker being hired to undertake the ultimate hack by a mysterious employer has exploded in popularity and is rightly acclaimed in most sci-fi circles. The vision of the world of Gibson's future, a romantic idea enmeshed with the digital age, makes for a story once seen as highly radical but which ultimately fell short of where we have evolved to. A fantastic look back at what was cutting-edge imagining of the possibilities of "cyberspace." Often attempted to be made for the screen, and failing each time, a new effort is underway for a possible release next year.

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

Margaret Atwood has given us one of the most striking dystopian novels, set in a world where the US government has been usurped by a totalitarian theocracy. Following a coup disguised as an Islamic terrorist attack (keep in mind, this was published in 1985), women have now had their rights revoked, nearly all of them are forbidden to read, and with birthrates declining they are kept as concubines. Offred recounts this tale, with flashbacks to her life before and during the coup, and her attempts to escape the new Republic and find her husband and daughter. Atwood's work is gritty and believable, and her vision of the world as it moves to collapse, including her ideas for how life played out for women prior to the coup, is surprisingly realistic.

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Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh

Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

CYTEEN is a twisted take of humans and cloning and the ripple effect of the death of a prominent scientist named Ariane Emory. Who killed Ariane? And why? She is a super genius who has led the political and scientific life on the planet of Cyteen. With her dead, a powerplay emerges with one faction attempting to take her vacant seat. The other faction attempts to raise Ari, a clone of Ariane, and do so in a manner that will make her just as brilliant and ruthless as her namesake. It's total immersion into a very vivid world and a questioning of what it is to be "alien" and the morality of control.

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