Uranus
By Ben Bova
Yes, Ben Bova is back, and even introducing a new trilogy in his already crowded Grand Tour series. This time we’re visiting our solar system’s outer planets, and as the title indicates we’re off to Uranus.
Or, to be more precise, a giant space station orbiting Uranus named Haven, so-called because it’s where Earth’s down and out have come seeking a second chance. The main character is Raven, a former prostitute who turns out, naturally, to have a heart of gold. That heart will be tested though on Haven, as the colony is a religious (albeit fluidly non-denominational) community that’s actually being sustained by an interplanetary drug trade.
The resulting political struggles are further complicated by discoveries being made on Uranus. This is the most interesting part of the book, but things are left unresolved. A simple story in the classic tradition, the table is set for more adventures taking us even further afield.
There’s a lot going on in The Doors of Eden. The story begins with a pair of paranormal investigators, Lee and Mal, being split up when Mal is sucked into another dimension. Years later, the missing Mal will reappear with some disturbing news. It seems there are lot of different dimensions that are starting to crowd together in a collapsing of the multiverse. There may not be time to save our own timeline from a messy extinction event, even as a villainous CEO sees the resulting chaos as an opportunity.
Fans of Susanna Clarke’s 2004 megabestseller Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell have had a long wait for a follow-up. With Piranesi they’re getting something even odder, but more digestible.
Coffee-table books looking to present the history of pretty much anything in 100 objects have become so common it seems an obvious next step to project the genre into the future and the stuff of science fiction.
The idea that the moral community of decent American folk is actually a façade, with all kinds of evil and corruption bubbling beneath, goes back at least as far as Hawthorne. In the twentieth century it would really take off, however, from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt down to present day tales of the suburban “serial killer next door.”
It says something about our anxiety over the way technology is infiltrating, transforming, and controlling our lives that there have been two excellent novels offering up very similar satirical takes on the subject published just recently.
The Polish author Stanislaw Lem was one of the true giants of SF, but his works have often been hard to track down in good English-language versions. It was a signal event then when MIT Press recently acquired the English rights to six Lem titles, which they have now brought out in a series with some fresh translations, great cover art, and new introductions. I hope we’ll soon see more!
The Alfaguara Novel Prize is the world’s highest-profile Spanish-language literary prize, and in 2017 it went to Ray Loriga’s Rendición, now translated into English as Surrender.
In the not-too-distant future, economic inequality has continued apace and society has bifurcated into a class of trillionaires at the top and hardscrabble working poor who are millions of dollars in debt at the bottom. One way out of debt bondage is to sell oneself into slavery, which involves taking a drug called Dociline that, as the name suggests, makes you docile.