[nesfa-reading-group] 3 candidates for Nov NESFA Reading Group

[Richard Schwartz]

from NY Times best SFF of 2023 By Amal El-Mohtar Dec. 4, 2023 TITANIUM NOIR (Knopf, 236 pp. $28) , by Nick Harkaway, is a funny, voice-y book full of fantastic sentences that remind us of how much detective fiction has in common with poetry. In a near-future world, a highly inaccessible drug, Titanium 7, allows patients to recover from life-threatening damage by turning their body clocks back to prepubescence and running them through adolescent development at speed, leaving them taller and stronger. Known as Titans, these people are secretive and ultrarich. When a man with all the physical traits of a Titan is found shot dead, the police turn to Cal Sounder, an investigator with personal ties to the wonder drug’s inventor. Twisting and turning between excellent fun and melancholy, “Titanium Noir” is an exemplar of the genre --------------------------------------------------------------- INFINITY GATE (Orbit, 535 pp., paperback, $18.99) , by M.R. Carey, is an immense achievement: an impeccably crafted book that makes several science-fictional concepts — the lone scientist trying to save the world, the multiverse, the war between organic life and machines — feel new and tender. The unnamed narrator lays out the circumstances of its creation like a host setting a table. Three people were responsible for its sentience, it tells us: Hadiz Tambuwal, a scientist; Essien Nkanika, a rogue; and Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, a … rabbit? The narrator details their lives, their interactions and the vast reach of the changes they catalyze. While the book technically begins and ends on a university campus in Lagos, Nigeria, its vaulting scope makes you feel as if you’ve taken a few steps up a mountain and ended up in outer space. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vajra Chandrasekera’s THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS (Tordotcom, 356 pp., $27.99) is the best book I’ve read this year. Fetter, the protagonist, is one of several almost-chosen-ones who have shirked or sidestepped their spectacular destinies in favor of haunted and marginal lives in the city of Luriat. The city has many “bright doors” that seem to open onto nothing. Fetter’s fascination with them draws him into a web of Luriati intrigue involving his estranged and godlike father, the Perfect and Kind — whom Fetter has been trained since childhood to kill. Protean, nimble, dazzlingly original, “The Saint of Bright Doors” offers a grammar for comprehending the knots of atrocity we’re living through, without resorting to the blunt simplicity of allegory.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listsmgt.nesfa.org/pipermail/reading-group/attachments/20240707/3a01e178/attachment.html>