Reviews roundup: 4 best new books for science fiction lovers

Galaxias

By Stephen Baxter

Gollancz, 529 pages, $34.99

By the year 2057 the Earth has already been through a lot. The effects of climate change have even forced the relocation of the British Parliament to Newcastle and the American government to Alaska. But then the Blink occurs — a name given to the sudden disappearance of the Sun. This truly does seem like the end of things. But then, just as quickly as the Sun left, it comes back.

Obviously some very powerful forces are at work, which the global brain trusts take to calling Galaxias. It seems the removal of the Sun is a message that’s been sent to us, though the meaning of that message is obscure and the nature of Earth’s response much debated by the scientific bureaucracies in China and the West.

This makes Stephen Baxter’s new novel a bit talky in places, but the focus on a trio of friends and the backdrop of speculative “hard” SF on a grand scale combine to make “Galaxias” an engaging enough cosmic mystery story, with an ending that opens up in a big way.

Lost in Time

By A.G. Riddle

Head of Zeus, 416 pages, $33.95

Even for veteran SF readers used to creative new ways of dealing with crime — like convicts having their memories wiped, or transported to penal colonies on other planets — the idea of criminals being sent back in time hundreds of millions of years so that they can fight it out with dinosaurs in an alternative Earth timeline may seem a bit of a stretch.

Nevertheless, that’s the premise here as Sam Anderson, one of the scientists who developed the patented Absolom time-travel technology, is convicted of the murder of a colleague he’d been dating and then jettisoned to dinosaur-land. As he struggles to survive Triassic Park, his daughter Adeline tries to figure out who framed him back here on Earth Prime, while also working with the other Absolom scientists to develop a machine that can bring her dad back.

“Lost in Time” is obviously high-concept Hollywood fluff, but if you’re looking for a bubble-gum page-turner with lots of silly action, cliff-hangers, and plot twists it’s hard to beat a time-travel murder mystery with dinosaurs.

Station Eternity

By Mur Lafferty

Ace, 464 pages, $23.00

Mallory Viridian isn’t the kind of person you want to get too close to. She’s the carrier of a weird kind of “murder virus,” which means that wherever she goes someone nearby ends up being killed.

Such a fatal penumbra leads Mallory to become a mystery writer. She’s also the perfect host for a new series by Mur Lafferty (“The Midsolar Murders”), of which “Station Eternity” is the first volume.

Aware of her dangerous condition, Mallory takes a lonely, and lowly, job at the sentient space station Eternity, where she is one of only a few humans on board. She figures this should keep the death rate manageable, but her plans for self-quarantine go out the window when a shuttle of visitors arrives at Eternity, with many of its passengers already dead. It seems murder has followed Mallory into space. Now, as the bodies start to pile up, she’s in charge of finding out what’s going on.

It’s a good mystery, presented in a lighthearted way, but the real treats here are the fascinating aliens, including a swarm of wasp-like creatures called the Sundry and a race of rock creatures known as Gneiss. Luckily for Mallory they seem to like her, as she’ll need all the help she can get.

Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene

Ed. by Jonathan Strahan

MIT Press, 215 pages, $25.95

In recent years, perhaps feeling that established literary genres aren’t already vague enough, some people have adopted the term “speculative fiction” as an alternative to “science fiction.” Whatever the new label’s merits, it’s fair to say that some SF is more geared toward an imaginative sort of forecasting of what the future might actually have in store, which is the direction taken by the stories collected in the series of anthologies put out by MIT Press that started out as Twelve Tomorrows and of which Tomorrow’s Parties is the latest instalment.

Despite the subtitle here, Tomorrow’s Parties isn’t just what’s come to be called CliFi (climate-change SF). The effects of climate disaster are included, and an introductory interview with CliFi master Kim Stanley Robinson addresses the real challenge of the Anthropocene, but otherwise what we get is just a great lineup of stories that survey the wide range of concerns that today’s SF writers have about the future. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but Dylan Gregory’s “Once Upon a Future in the West” is certainly one of the highlights. A possibly cannibal Tom Hanks giving a lift to a refugee from a California forest fire is a truly magical vision of the end of the world.

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