[nesfa-reading-group] book club recommendations

[Shelly Thomas]

Here are my 3 suggestions:

*The Black Grail, Damien Broderick*
A millennium from now, global warming has gone into retreat as the Sun's
dynamics convulse. The great ice returns, driving humankind back to its
primitive origins. Here, bands of brutal warriors wage war in the bitter
cold. Xaraf Firebridge, powerful young son of a barbarian chieftain,
enrages his sire by adopting the pacifistic doctrine of an outland mystic,
Darkbloom. Before he can break his vow and slay his father, he is drawn
into a temporal wormline and flung a further million years into the Earth
of the Failing Sun.

*Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel*
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by
steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe
at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the
Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an
airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book
tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon
colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty.
Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange
passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an
airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is
hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he
uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to
madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a
childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has
glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the
timeline of the universe.

Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling
<https://www.amazon.com/Bruce-Sterling/e/B000AQ0S3S/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1>

Schismatrix is a science fiction novel by Bruce Sterling, originally
published in 1985. The story was Sterling's only novel-length treatment of
the Shaper/Mechanist universe. Five short stories preceded the novel and
are published together with it in a 1996 edition entitled Schismatrix Plus.

On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 4:29 PM Liz P <lpatton88 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Book club recommendations
>
> The unincorporated man
> By dani kollin and eytan kollin
>
> The Unincorporated Man is a provocative social/political/economic novel
> that takes place in the future, after civilization has fallen into complete
> economic collapse. This reborn civilization is one in which every
> individual is incorporated at birth, and spends many years trying to attain
> control over his or her own life by getting a majority of his or her own
> shares. Life extension has made life very long indeed.
>
> Now the incredible has happened: a billionaire businessman from our time,
> frozen in secret in the early twenty-first century, is discovered and
> resurrected, given health and a vigorous younger body. Justin Cord is the
> only unincorporated man in the world, a true stranger in this strange land.
> Justin survived because he is tough and smart. He cannot accept only part
> ownership of himself, even if that places him in conflict with a
> civilization that extends outside the solar system to the Oort Cloud.
> People will be arguing about this novel and this world for decades.
>
> ===========================================================
> This is how you lose the time war by Max gladstone and amal elmohtar
>
> Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a
> letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely
> correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best
> possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a
> battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something
> romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
>
> Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them.
> There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.
> ===================================================
>
> Willful child by Steven Erikson
>
> These are the voyages of the starship, A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing
> mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag,
> to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life life-forms, to boldly
> blow the...
>
> And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain
> Hadrian Sawback - a kind of James T Kirk crossed with 'American Dad' - and
> his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of
> devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through
> 'the infinite vastness of interstellar space'...
>
> The bestselling author of the acclaimed Malazan Book of the Fallen
> sequence has taken his life-long passion for 'Star Trek' and transformed it
> into a smart, inventive and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole
> mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-hi-tech-kit-along-the-way
> type over-blown adventure. The result is this smart. inventive,
> occasionally wildly OTT and often very funny novel that deftly parodies the
> genre while also paying fond homage to it.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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