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Science fiction columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for more than 30 years. Regular contributing reviewer for Common Sense Media.
Leonardo da Vinci. Benjamin Franklin. Albert Einstein. Henry Kissinger. Steve Jobs. Now UC Berkeley's own Jennifer Doudna joins the pantheon of innovators with a full-length biography written by acclaimed journalist Walter Isaacson.
Few novelists in the U.S. write about Franco-American relations with the skill, grace and wit of former Berkeley resident Diane Johnson. The author of Le Divorce, the co-scripter of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and a best-selling memoirist with Flyover Lives, Johnson spent many years splitting time between Paris and San Francisco with her late husband John F.
"In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses." It is a simple yet enticing first line. Perhaps not as memorable as 1984 's "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." But few opening sentences are.
Matt Bell is nothing if not ambitious. In his new novel, (out today from HarperCollins), the author of Shudder and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods alternates between three storylines. The novel addresses climate change, catastrophe, and rebirth from three very different angles, centuries, and technological eras.
Now, Cordell is preparing to celebrate another first - the release of her memoir on Oct. 26. "Her Honor: My Life on the Bench ... What Works, What's Broken and How to Change It" chronicles Cordell's experience as a state trial court judge ruling on cases that had life-changing repercussions on plaintiffs and defendants alike, as well as on her personally.
Photo by Lance Yamamoto For Gene Luen Yang, athletics were always something to be avoided or endured. But when Oakland's Bishop O'Dowd High School computer science teacher started hearing excited talk in the hallways about the upcoming 2014-15 basketball season, he knew he wanted to chronicle the quest in the medium he knew best - comics.
If we can put a man on the moon, why shouldn't we be able to put a self-driving car on the freeway? That's the question former Berkeley resident and Business Insider transportation editor Alex Davies explores in Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car, published this week by Simon & Schuster.
Part-time coastal Maine resident Jonathan Lethem captured the shock of Donald Trump's election in his 2017 novel "The Feral Detective. " With his new book, "The Arrest," Lethem delivers a similarly timely tale, this time in a post-apocalyptic mode. Some day, some academic will sit down and catalog the dystopian science fiction novels published during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Acclaimed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson terraformed the Red Planet in his award-winning Mars trilogy and navigated a sunken Big Apple in New York 2104. With The Ministry for the Future -out today from Orbit Books-he breaks the near future into small pieces and reassembles them into a literary collage that maps human survival through the early 21st century.
When Kerri Arsenault left Maine for college in Wisconsin, she figured that, except for short visits, she would never go back to live in Mexico, her hometown. But the small rural community, centered around a paper mill on the Androscoggin, kept pulling her back.
Life in lockdown at home 24/7 during the pandemic may have made it more difficult for most people to think long term or keep track of time, but this challenging new reality actually can be good for one's brain, according to brain expert David Eagleman who teaches at Stanford University.
For Annalee Newitz, history is all about the small changes. In the journalist and science fiction writer's second novel, "The Future of Another Timeline," Newitz plays with the tropes of time travel, but these temporal secret agents aren't out to assassinate Hitler or save JFK.
Journalist and activist Bill McKibben is back with another book about the crushing realities of climate change. The author of 1989's The End of Nature, often acknowledged as the first book for a general audience about what used to be known as "the greenhouse effect," McKibben has been writing about climate issues for three decades.
Noteworthy Clips
By Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; 366 pages; $26.99) For the follow-up to "All the Birds in the Sky," her highly acclaimed first novel for adults, Nebula Award-winner Charlie Jane Anders heads in a less whimsical, less overtly fantastical direction.
If you haven't kept up with superhero comics for the past 20 years, you might initially not know what to make of Catherynne M. Valente's new collection of linked stories. Stick with the book, though, perhaps after Googling "girls in refrigerators." You should be able to catch on pretty quickly, and the extra effort will have a definite payoff.
Richard Powers speaks for the trees. Five years after the publication of the highly acclaimed Orfeo, the National Book Award-winning novelist returns with a dense, passionate, and suspenseful tale of the connection between humanity and some of the planet's most ancient, massive, and indispensable living organisms. The Overstory, out today from W.W.
Whether they root for the Avengers or the Justice League, comics fan loves a good team-up. Iron Man is enjoyable in his own right, but put Tony Stark together with Thor and the Hulk, and you potentially have a superhero saga that's greater than the sum of its parts.
Perhaps best known for his Mars Trilogy, in which he chronicled the terraforming of the Red Planet, author Kim Stanley Robinson is renowned for the environmental savvy he brings to his science fiction.
story collections such as "Tenth of December," "Pastoralia" and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," George Saunders has repeatedly proved himself one of our most versatile, irreverent and sharp-eyed storytellers.
There's something deliciously apropos in the notion of Margaret Atwood using "The Tempest" as a springboard for a novel about imprisonment, sorcery and second chances. Shakespeare's last completed play is a dark, funny, complicated masterpiece, and it requires a first-rate literary magician to unlock its many mysteries and make something new from them.
The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, "Isaac Newton" and "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood," Gleick is particularly well equipped to explore how the idea of time travel evolved across the past century in science, literature, technology and philosophy.
There are no dueling banjos in Erica Ferencik's new novel, "The River at Night," but the author of this riveting Maine wilderness thriller is canny enough to tip her hat early to the book's likeliest source of inspiration.
Until recently, American readers had little access to - or much interest in - science fiction published in China. Thanks in part to the efforts of Boston-area author, attorney and translator Ken Liu, however, that state of affairs has begun to change.
From sunken Atlantis in the Mediterranean to Hy Brasil off the coast of Ireland, from King Kong's Skull Island to Jules Verne's mysterious Lincoln Island, the notion of an undiscovered land mass lurking just beyond the perception of ordinary humanity has fired the imaginations of storytellers and readers across the centuries.
the 10th time - in DuBois' latest Plenty of mystery writers look to Massachusetts or Maine for inspiration, but fewer choose New Hampshire as a setting for their tales of murder and mayhem.
Among novelists who engage directly with environmental issues, Kim Stanley Robinson has few equals. The Davis, California, science fiction writer is the author of 17 novels that address issues of ecology and space exploration, climate change and alternatives to capitalism.
Asked to identify the first science fiction novel, a reasonable reader might respond by choosing Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Or maybe Thomas More's "Utopia." Or perhaps "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells. But what about "The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz," written by Johann Valentin Andreae? Never heard of it or him?
In the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, Frans de Waal argues that our fellow creatures deserve more credit.In Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, Frans de Waal argues that our fellow creatures deserve more credit.
The history of polar exploration is filled with tales of folly and heroism, in almost equal measure. Such outsized adventures prove to be excellent subjects for comics, as demonstrated by the new graphic novel "How to Survive in the North."
We grow up, and we come to believe we don't need fairy tales anymore. We're wrong, of course. The fictions created or collected by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and nameless storytellers from around the world never leave us.
Popular culture abounds with tales of individuals - or even entire societies - trapped under glass, physically cut off from the rest of the world but still under the scrutiny of ever-present watchers.
The son of a con man, a former low-ranking member of British Intelligence and perhaps the premier novelist of espionage in the past half century, the man born David Cornwell has spent his life trading in obfuscation and make-believe. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality.
This second-edition book, which features a collection of 20 short science fiction and fantasy pieces from both veteran storytellers and promising up-and-comers, walks the line between literary and genre fiction. Among this year's contributors are Adam Johnson, Salman Rushdie and Kelly Link.
Can there be any surprises left in the police interrogation scene? After hundreds of episodes of television crime dramas - from "Law and Order" to "The Closer," from "NYPD Blue" to "Homicide: Life on the Street" - does any viewer not know how a face-to-face exchange between cops and a suspect is supposed to play out?
Sometimes the road not taken intersects with your chosen path decades later. After an uninspiring experience in a college creative writing class, Bruce Robert Coffin put aside his dreams of becoming an author. Instead, he spent more than 27 years in law enforcement, retiring as a detective sergeant with the Portland Police Department.
Last year, Portland writer Chris Holm inaugurated an exciting new thriller series with "The Killing Kind." Now he's back with a second novel featuring Michael Hendricks, the trained assassin who stalks other hit men. The results are similarly explosive. "Red Right Hand" doesn't waste any time getting down to business.
The novel opens in 2016 in Key West, where the coral reefs are dying and the sea levels keep rising. Defoe's claims cause one of the filmmakers to muse about the quality of life nearly six centuries hence: No one would remember how to make asphalt or super glue or sunblock or cortisone cream.
GREAT BARRINGTON - Sometime after completing his first novel in 2013, Aaron Thier looked out his window in Williamstown at frozen trees in 2 feet of snow beneath a low gray sky and imagined the landscape transformed by climate change.
Seattle novelist Nisi Shawl's engrossing "Everfair" uses the genre of steampunk to re-imagine the horrific history of King Leopold II and the Congo Free State, with a more hopeful outcome. Shawl discusses her book Sept. 6, at Seattle's University Book Store.
Chang, who now serves as executive director for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) at Stanford University, said in a telephone interview this week that it took him about eight years to complete his second book examining American culture, "Who We Be: The Colorization of America," published in 2014.
In his new novel, Blake Crouch, the author of the "Wayward Pines" trilogy, borrows concepts from quantum mechanics to address the universal question of "Who would I be if I had made different choices?"
What would you be willing to sacrifice to be the best in your field? What would you give up to achieve artistic success beyond your wildest dreams? Those questions lie at the center of New Hampshire writer Kat Howard's debut fantasy novel, "Roses and Rot."
What would it be like to face doomsday while addicted, homeless, mentally ill and subject to the authority of a totalitarian government? Ninety-year-old Cuthbert believes that they are in imminent danger from a group of cultists who view the comet's arrival as a trigger for a global pandemic of mass suicide and wanton animal slaughter, having found "ways to tip already endangered whole ecosystems toward their bowls of ashes."
With two successful books to her credit and an audience of loyal readers, Oakland writer Melanie Gideon took a gamble with her third book for adults. Her first two were the satirical novel "Wife 22" and the memoir "The Slippery Year." Rather than continue with the irreverent, contemporary voice she had developed, Gideon committed to a different tack.
Writer Lindsay Hatton takes a big gamble with her debut novel, drawing on both history and invention to explore a setting made famous by a Nobel laureate. John Steinbeck begins his short novel "Cannery Row" with a declarative sentence both down-to-earth and loftily metaphorical: "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."
"Monterey Bay," published earlier this month by Penguin Press, focuses on Margot Fiske at two stages in her eventful life: in 1940 as a 15-year-old employee and lover of marine biologist Ed Ricketts, and in 1998, as a founder of the aquarium, musing on mortality even as she oversees the delicate release of a giant sunfish that has outgrown its quarters.
The contours of our current surveillance society and its possible futures have long been the purview of writers of science fiction and espionage thrillers. With "Watchlist," originally published last year in a limited edition from OR Books and now available in trade paperback from Catapult, Bryan Hurt, author of "Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France" and a teacher of creative writing at St.
A new novel by the Berkeley author remixes the work of "pulp-writer, racist, and weirdo" H.P. Lovecraft.
In "Underground Airlines," Ben H. Winters, author of "The Last Policeman," addresses a similar question, but from a unique narrative vantage point. An African American man who has made an uncomfortable bargain with the authorities, he works for the U.S.
Life rarely goes smoothly for Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins. Chaos, racism and tragedy are part of the package of being a fictional African-American private detective in post-war Los Angeles. Acclaimed crime novelist Walter Mosley has chronicled Easy's ups and downs in 14 novels, beginning in 1990 with "Devil in a Blue Dress."
Begun in 2014 with "Mr. Mercedes," Stephen King's Bill Hodges Trilogy has proved to be a welcome change of pace for the best-selling Maine author. This is the first time King has produced three related thrillers in rapid succession, and the exercise has proved to suit the author's storytelling temperament well.
When it comes to writing epic fantasy fiction, East Palo Alto author Matthew Jobin takes the long view. Not only are his first two novels for young readers set in an alternate, magic-filled version of the Middle Ages, the saga is influenced by Jobin's training in anthropology and his study of the genetics and behaviors of prehistoric peoples.
Haven't all the good apocalypses been taken by now? Is there any doomsday scenario left that hasn't been exploited for its entertainment value? Those are the questions facing Exeter, New Hampshire, author Joe Hill as he delivers "The Fireman," his massive account of one young woman's experience of the rapid, fiery fall of civilization.
Richard Russo's "Nobody's Fool," published in 1993, isn't a novel that clamors for a follow-up. A long book about small-town life in upstate New York, it seemed to have accomplished what its author set out to do, capturing with humor and compassion some pivotal moments in the lives of fictional North Bath's working-class residents, chief among them Donald "Sully" Sullivan, unambitious day laborer and town gadfly.
beyond the farthest reaches of our solar system and in a near-future American Southwest ravaged by drought and greed. Nevertheless, award-winning science fiction writers Kim Stanley Robinson and Paolo Bacigalupi share a deep commitment to the here-and-now and the environmental concerns facing humanity this Earth Day and for the foreseeable future.
While researching her new science-fiction novel, Time Zero, Carolyn Cohagan discovered her passion for empowering middle-grade girls. The Austin writer, actor, and former stand-up comedian, who was imagining a near-future Manhattan ruled by religious extremists, learned that in our world today more than 60 million girls worldwide are not in school and an estimated 15 million girls are made child brides annually.
What is it about live music that inspires such fascination, loyalty and obsession? Why are audience members willing to pay so much for bad seats in overcrowded venues, looking for something new in songs they've heard a hundred times before?
Some fantasy novels use maps, glossaries and family trees as filler, extras of no particular import beyond signifying that the author took her or his world building seriously, at least in retrospect. In the case of "The Winged Histories," Sofia Samatar's follow-up to the World Fantasy Award-winning "A Stranger in Olondria," do not make the mistake of ignoring any of the front or back matter.
Historical precedence, public service announcement campaigns and action movies starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson all provide suggestions of how a natural cataclysm might unfold when the Big One finally arrives. The trick is to find a new way of addressing the urgent inevitability of catastrophe, to move the imagined and dreaded event away from disaster fiction cliches and toward a keener understanding of the human heart in turmoil.
On the cover of "Patience," an attractive blond woman stares at the reader straight on, employing a familiar, unblinking gaze. Clowes has long been noted for his versatility, his knack for switching styles in the turn of a page, and this cover implies that he's found another mode in which to drive his literary ambitions.
The ability to write fiction while commuting could be advantageous for any aspiring writer. But Stoughton novelist, short-story writer, and translator Ken Liu has been particularly prolific on his weekday round-trip MBTA train rides between his home in Stoughton and Boston, where he works as an intellectual property litigation consultant.
By 2003, 26-year-old Roy Scranton had already learned how to die. He attributed his physical and emotional survival while serving a tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Iraq to the teaching of an 18th-century samurai manual: "Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily."
Katherine Towler's new memoir is more than an account of her odd friendship with Portsmouth, New Hampshire, poet Robert Dunn. Although she paints a vivid portrait of the eccentric and intensely committed writer, Towler also recollects a New England seaport in transition.
From the start, Catherynne Valente's "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making" announced that it was something new in fantasy. In a dozen words - one of them six syllables - its title promised high drama, an empowered female protagonist and an unusual richness of language.
With her first novel of speculative fiction, she mixes and matches tropes from both science fiction and fantasy, crafting a singular, two-protagonist coming-of-age story that should appeal to readers of either genre. Laurence Armstead is a mad scientist in training, deeply interested in space travel, the inventor of a powerful artificial intelligence and a two-second time machine.
Paul Beatty's latest novel, "The Sellout," is far from an easy read. Its first sentence - "This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything" - puts readers on notice that comfortable assumptions about storytelling are about to be challenged.
When not teaching humanities at the Bay School in San Francisco, Berkeley author Ayize Jama-Everett is hard at work on the final installment of his superhero prose saga. At a time when masked avengers and super-villains dominate the entertainment industry, Jama-Everett has put his own distinctive stamp on the genre in three well-received novels: The Liminal People, The Liminal War and The Entropy of Bones.
What do a mismatched pair of soon-to-be-married lovers, an anti-materialistic Stanford economist, and a charismatic squirrel have in common? The answer lies in Elizabeth McKenzie's new comic novel, "The Portable Veblen." Set in present-day Palo Alto and environs, "The Portable Veblen" focuses on a thirty-ish South Bay couple grappling with the implications of their seemingly hasty engagement.
If you're searching for a representative of the state of science fiction in America, you don't need to look much further than Charlie Jane Anders. She's the editor-in-chief at io9.com, the Gawker site devoted to all things sci and sci-fi, and the founder and emcee of Writers with Drinks, the monthly literary variety show at the Make Out Room that brings together scribblers of all stripes, from Amy Tan to Bucky Sinister to Jonathan Lethem.
increase font size The Maine author taps economic uncertainty and his own deep well of creativity to create 20 unsettling stories. Stephen King taps economic uncertainty and his own deep well of creativity to create 20 unsettling stories. Stephen King is a novelist at heart.
If you plan to weather the zombie apocalypse, San Francisco isn't a bad place to do so, especially if you're handy with power tools. [...] is the predicament of Vasilis "Billy" Kostopolis, would-be writer and experienced drunk, who has come to the West Coast from the Rust Belt to seek his literary fortune without much preparation beyond having sold a single story.
increase font size Eastport author Sarah Graves brings back Boston homicide cop-turned-deputy sheriff Lizzie Snow for a twisty, turny thriller set in northern Maine. If you were able to escape the clutches of a serial kidnapper, would you immediately go to the police and tell them about the crime and the remaining captives?
"The Heart Goes Last" opens with married couple Stan and Charmaine living in their car, trying to get through another day without being ripped off, raped or murdered. All they have to do is spend every second month in prison, and on alternating months they can enjoy four weeks of comfort and security, safe from the ravages of unemployment, homelessness and crime.
Michael Berry | Photo: Courtesy of Tor Books (center) | January 25, 2016 Patricia, a witch who can converse with animals, and Laurence, a genius inventor who's working to save humanity at the potential expense of Planet Earth, have a problem: They're in love in San Francisco-a city on the brink of extinction.
Stand-Alone Reviews
The statistics are sobering: Suicide is now the tenth most common cause of death for men and women. Every thirteen minutes, another American dies from suicide. Yet statistics don't convey the full horror and grief left in the wake of a loved one's self-inflicted death.
increase font size And much of the planning that drives the fast-paced plot takes place in an Old Port bar. Portland author Chris Holm takes a high-concept thriller plot and makes it his own in "The Killing Kind."
Karen Joy Fowler credits her childhood move to Palo Alto as the key to her becoming a writer. The New York Times bestselling author of "The Jane Austen Book Club," Fowler is the first American woman ever to be shortlisted for the highly prestigious Man Booker Prize, in recognition of her latest novel, "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves."
Set in 2010, after the start of the Great Recession and before the Boston Marathon bombings, Stephen King's latest non-supernatural thriller features a mass murderer whose solipsism and misanthropy inspire him to drive a stolen Mercedes-Benz into a crowd of job seekers at a career fair.
By Paolo Bagicalupi Knopf, 2015, 376 pages Paolo Bagicalupi's new near-future thriller arrives at a depressingly appropriate moment. As the Golden State enters its fourth year of drought, with snowpack at an all-time low and unprecedented mandatory rationing being imposed, headlines in the New York Times blare "The End of California?"
New MOOC registers 65,000 students seeking insights into well-being. By Michael Berry | By Michael Berry How can the act of writing a list of things for which you are grateful lead to a healthier immune system and better sleep? Why is spending money on someone else better for your sense of well-being than buying something for yourself?
IN A GLOBAL MARKET where nearly every popular medium - from comics and prose to television and film - is saturated with superheroes, what can a writer do to keep his or her head above the tidal wave of superpowered narrative? When you create a cadre of superbeings who fight toe-to-toe with...
increase font size 'Crimson Shore,' the latest by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, sets Special Agent Pendergast and Constance Greene on the hunt to solve a mystery in small-town New England. Over the course of 15 novels, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created one of the most distinctive - and eccentric - sleuths in the history of crime fiction.
increase font size Connolly displays his aptitude for crafting creepy supernatural tales. As he has proved in his series of thrillers featuring Portland-based private investigator Charlie Parker, John Connolly knows how to unsettle, chill and outright terrify his readers.
In 2007, during the seven years of researching and writing his novel, "The Orphan Master's Son," Adam Johnson spent five days in North Korea, taking in sights unavailable to all but a few Westerners.
Climate fiction is hot right now. Just ask Paolo Bacigalupi, author of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning"The Windup Girl" and the young-adult novels "Ship Breaker" and "The Drowning Cities"; there is plenty of narrative potential in depicting global warming, rising seas, peak oil, extreme weather and other aspects of a changing climate.
The sequence brilliantly caught the paranoid tenor of the times, and its mix of drily funny social commentary and spy thriller mechanics allowed its author to stretch his storytelling craft in fascinating and rewarding new directions. Four years after the publication of the final volume, with a collection of nonfiction published in the interim, Gibson wholeheartedly jumps back into science fiction with "The Peripheral."
It's been 10 years since Ann Beattie, author of "Chilly Scenes of Winter" and "Mrs. Nixon," last delivered a collection of new stories. The arrival of "The State We're In: Maine Stories" finds her ruminating on loss, longing and loneliness in Vacationland and beyond.
Frank Herbert's "Dune" turns 50 this year. Given the growing popularity of mainstream and science fiction concerned with climate change and other ecological issues, maybe it's time the epic space adventure novel received a renewed measure of respect. Oh, "Dune" has received plenty of attention over the past five decades.
Twenty years ago, headlines trumpeted the observation, "Comics aren't just for kids anymore!" In today's superhero-saturated media landscape, however, the more pressing concern might be, "Which of all these comics should kids -- and adults -- be reading?"
increase font size The author's latest novel is full of his signature quirks and characters, along with a few new wrinkles. "Avenue of Mysteries" is unquestionably a John Irving novel. Even if its author's name were redacted from the reading copy, anyone familiar with his books, from "Setting Free the Bears" to "In One Person," would be able to guess its provenance.
Having won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2008 novel-in-stories "Olive Kitteridge," Elizabeth Strout has now delivered another book about motherhood and parenting, secrets kept and revelations deferred. How well can we know our parents? How well can we know ourselves?
Ernest Cline's career as a science fiction novelist is only slightly less unlikely than the tales he spins of alien invasions and virtual reality.
William Gibson, celebrated author of the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer and coiner of the term "cyberspace," seems surprised by the notion that his new novel, The Peripheral, marks a return to science fiction after a 15-year hiatus. "I didn't think of it that way," he says.
Broadcast/Multimedia
By Michael Berry, Photos by Dave Mendelsohn Fifty years ago this September, UFOs came to Exeter. They haven't left. The history of unidentified flying objects in the skies of New Hampshire is long, varied and weird. It includes two hugely celebrated cases that caught the popular imagination and served as harbingers of hundreds of other encounters occurring across the decades and around the globe.
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Essays & Interviews
You know about Night Vale, right? It's that lonely Southwestern desert town inhabited by ghosts, angels, hooded figures, and sinister government agents. It's where fictional character Cecil Palmer reads the news on the Community Radio station and a glowing cloud hovers in the sky and watches over all.
For longtime readers, the book offered amusing callbacks to Mitchell's earlier novels, including "Black Swan Green," "Cloud Atlas" and "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet." Some critics could not abide the metaphysical superheroics of the penultimate section, in which the near-immortal Horologists faced off against the vampiric Anchorites - but few could deny the audacity of the narrative action or the skill with which it was choreographed.
Book Columns
increase font size Catherynne M. Valente's new sci-fi mind-bender touches the far reaches of the solar system. Peaks Island science fiction and fantasy writer Catherynne M. Valente, author of "Deathless" and "Palimpsest," has a taste for the ornate.
Sometime in the near future, after the aquifers have been pumped dry and the farms of the Central Valley have blown away, Los Angeles holdouts Luz Dunn and Ray spend their hot, sweaty days holed up in the Laurel Canyon residence of an unnamed starlet, drinking cola rations, fending off encroaching rodents and stealing gasoline to run the former owner's Karmann Ghia.
increase font size The latest in the Parker series sets the private investigator up for a major showdown. John Connolly has written more than a dozen novels featuring Portland private investigator Charlie Parker, starting with "Every Dead Thing" in 1999.
increase font size Another solid thriller from the ever reliable Maine author. Stephen King still seems to be on a creative roll, producing books at nearly six-month intervals. He delivered "Joyland" and "Doctor Sleep" in 2013, and 2014 saw the publication of "Mr. Mercedes" and "Revival."
In his new novel, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of "2312," "Shaman" and "The Mars Trilogy," examines the fallacy in that kind of "trash one planet, move on the next" thinking. Seven generations of its approximately 2,000 human inhabitants have lived in biomes mimicking the various habitats of their home planet.
New science fiction and fantasy titles Kit Reed, author of "The Story Until Now," "The Baby Merchant" and a host of other strange, unsettling and singular novels and stories, delivers a new metaphysical thriller set on the Outer Carolina Banks. Despite his better judgment, architect David Ribault agrees to a mysterious early-morning meeting with land developer Rawson Steel.
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