Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Monday, August 28, 2017

INCOMING


  • John Joseph Adams, editor, Wastelands:  Stories of the Apocalypse.  SF anthology with 22 stories, one original, by a great line-up:  Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mary Rickert, Jonathan Lethem, George R. R. Martin, Topbias S. Buckell, Jack McDevitt, Cory Doctorow, James Van Pelt, Catherine Wells, Jerry Oltion, Gene Wolfe, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Octavia E. Butler, Carol Emshwiller, Neal Barrett, Jr., Dale Bailey, David Gregg, and John Langan.
  • Lee Child, Tripwire.  A Jack Reacher thriller.  "Jack Reacher's anonymity in Key West is shattered by the appearance of a private investigator who's come to town looking for him.  But only hours after his arrival, the stranger is murdered.  Retracing the PI's cold trail back to New York City, Reacher is compelled to find oput who was looking for him an why.  He never expected the reasons to be so personal, so dangerous, and so very twisted."
  • Martin H. Greenberg & Larry Segriff, editors, Far Frontiers.  SF anthology.  "Thirteen of today's top authors blaze new pathways to worlds beyond imagination from:  a civilization of humans living in a Dyson sphere to who the idea of living on a planet is pure mythology...to an ancient man so obsessed with an alien legend that he will risk ship and crew in the Void in the hopes of proving it true...to the story of the last free segments of 'humanity,' forced to retreat to the very edge of the galaxy in the hope of finding a way to save themselves when they is nowhere left to run..."
  • Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan:  The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History.  Nonfiction.  A look at Earl Derr Biggers' famous sleuth, the real-life Hawaiian cop Chang Apana who inspired the character, and the historical atmosphere of a territorial Hawaii, and the cultural impact Charlie Chan has had.  It even has an appendix listing Charlie Chanisms.
  • "Simon Lawrence" (R. Karl Largent), The Pond.  Horror novel.  "Clayborn, Alabama, was a sleepy southern town that seemed to be free from the problems of the modern world.  Crime was nonexistent, the people were friendly, and the local company kept the town prosperous.  To all appearances, Clayborn was the perfect place for a family to live.  That was what Taylor Fredricks thought -- until his teenage son came to him with a tale of murder and mutilated corpses, a tale so unbelievable it couldn't be true.  But before long, Fredricks discovered his son had stumbled onto a conspiracy of greed and corruption that lay hidden beneath the town's serene surface.  For the people of Clayborn had a secret so evil that its revelation would destroy the town and everyone in it."
  • David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus.  Classic fantasy novel.  "The book is not allegory but vision.  Lindsay's imaginary. often drawn from music, is burning and impressive.  He uses words violently and cares nothing for grace....But what emerges after sympathetic reading is...a sense of the remarkable profundity and coherence of the vision.  The message is uncompromiosing in its purity.  The achievement of the book exactly balances the ambition of its intention.  This, surely, is rare." -- London Times.  
  • Brad Ricca, Super Boys:  The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster -- The Creators of Superman.  Biography of the two young men who created one of the world's most recognized icon on a kitchen table in Cleveland and how fame and fortune slipped from their grasp.   
  • Norman Spinrad, Greenhouse Summer.  SF eco-thriller.  "About a hundred years from now, pollution, overpopulation, and ecological disasters have left the rich nations still rich, and the poor nations -- the Lands of the Lost -- slowly strangling in drought and pollution.  New York City is below sea level, surrounded by a seawall.  The climate of Paris is much like the twentieth-century climate of long-drowned New Orleans.  And Siberia, Golden Siberia, is the cropland of the world...But it may be all coming to a terrible end:  a scientist has predicted Condition Venus, the sudden greenhouse downfall of the entire planet -- but she can't say when.  So now the attention of the world is focused for a week on a UN conference on the Environment in Paris, where all hell is about to break loose."

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