Archives de catégorie : Speculative Fiction

AFTER THE BLINDING de Thomas Mullen

From Thomas Mullen, the internationally acclaimed author of Darktown and The Last Town On Earth, and in the tradition of Blade Runner and Minority Report, AFTER THE BLINDING is a fast-paced speculative thriller about the ways technology has warped how we see the world and the people around us.

AFTER THE BLINDING
by Thomas Mullen
St. Martin’s Press, Fall 2022
(via Writers House)

Years ago, in a still little-understood phenomenon known as The Blinding, all of mankind lost the ability to see. Now, people can “see” again thanks to vidders, devices that transmit radar and other visual information directly to the brain. It feels like slightly enhanced vision, complete with night vision and, alas, pop-up ads. But now someone’s figured out to hack it.
Mark Owens is a burned-out, grieving detective called to investigate a murder in which the killer supposedly blacked himself out of view of every single witness. Owens doesn’t believe the story—until the killer strikes again, and this time Owens himself “sees” not the killer but a black blur, like a human censor bar, the killer somehow redacted from Owens’ vision.
In this police procedural set in a recognizable but fully imagined world, Owens needs to figure out how the killer is redacting himself, and who he is, before he strikes again. His investigation will take him from tech billionaires to anti-modernity cultists, and he’ll be forced to confront his past mistakes and the tragic loss of his wife, a visual artist who was driven to suicide by The Blinding.
Tackling subjects like the pervasive impact of technology, the role of police, government censorship, and a world recovering from collective trauma, AFTER THE BLINDING has the social resonance and immersive world-building of Darktown but with an escapism that whisks the reader someplace new.

Thomas Mullen’s first novel, The Last Town On Earth, was named Best Debut of the Year by USA Today, won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was optioned in a preempt by DreamWorks, and has been a popular choice for colleges’ Freshmen Reads programs (and its treatment of the 1918 flu has proven eerily prescient). Darktown was named an NPR Best Book of the year and was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Indies Choice Award, and several international prizes, and is currently under development for television with MGM. The follow-up, Lightning Men, was named one of the top 10 crime novels of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Five of Mullen’s novels have been optioned for TV and film.

YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS de Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson

A haunting, provocative novel, YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS is a fictional autobiography in an alternate 20th century that chronicles one woman’s unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save.

YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS
by Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson
HarperCollins, November 2021

Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family. Devastated by grief and loneliness, she emotionally exiles herself, avoiding relationships or allegiances, and throws herself into her work—disengagement that serves her when the war finally ends and The New Society arises.
To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to—disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, and endangering her own life. But is her “confession” honest—or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?
A jarring and uncanny tale of loss, trauma, and the power of human connection and deception, YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS is a portrait of a disturbing alternate world eerily within reach, and an examination of the difficult choices we must make to survive in it.

Jeffrey Cranor is a novelist and playwright. He cowrites the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also creates theater and dance pieces with his wife, the choreographer Jillian Sweeney.
Janina Matthewson is the author of the novel Of Things Gone Astray and the novella The Understanding of Women. She co-writes Within the Wires, and has also written for Murmurs, The Cipher, and Passenger List.

THE ELECTRIC KINGDOM de David Arnold

New York Times bestseller David Arnold’s most ambitious novel to date; Station Eleven meets The 5th Wave in a genre-smashing story of survival, hope, and love amid a ravaged earth.

THE ELECTRIC KINGDOM
by David Arnold
Viking, February 2021

Cities are dust, histories lost, and time stands still.
Here, in the ancient gasp of the world, the young are left to their own devices…

When a deadly Fly Flu sweeps the globe, it leaves a shell of the world that once was. Among the survivors are eighteen-year-old Nico and her dog, on a voyage devised by Nico’s father to find a mythical portal; a young artist named Kit, raised in an old abandoned cinema; and the enigmatic Deliverer, who lives Life after Life in an attempt to put the world back together. As swarms of infected Flies roam the earth, these few survivors navigate the woods of post-apocalyptic New England, meeting others along the way, each on their own quest to find life and love in a world gone dark. The Electric Kingdom is a sweeping exploration of art, storytelling, eternal life, and above all, a testament to the notion that even in an exterminated world, one person might find beauty in another.

David Arnold lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his (lovely) wife and (boisterous) son. He is the critically-acclaimed author of Mosquitoland, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. Previous jobs include freelance musician/producer, stay-at-home dad, and preschool teacher. He is a fierce believer in the power of kindness and community. And pesto. He believes fiercely in pesto.

CHILD ZERO de Chris Holm

A fast-moving, page-turning thriller about a world in which antibiotics no longer have the ability to fight off disease.

CHILD ZERO
by Chris Holm
Mulholland/Little Brown, 2022

A quick, straightforward, fast-paced read about Mateo, a boy who not only can fight off disease in a world where antibiotics have lost all of their power, but can heal others. This amazing kid is being hunted by those who want to harness and potentially extinguish his ability. When two detectives find themselves caught in the crossfire of the pursuit, they put their careers and their lives at risk, deciding to deliver Mat to The Resistance—an organization they’ve been trained to view as an enemy to the State but soon start to realize is probably society’s last, best hope.

Chris Holm is a former molecular biologist with a U.S. patent to his name so in this case especially, he knows of what he writes. He is the author of the cross-genre Collector trilogy which recasts the battle between heaven and hell as old-fashioned crime pulp; the Michael Hendricks thrillers which feature a hitman who only kills other hitmen; and thirty-plus short stories that run the gamut from crime to horror to science fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcok’s Mystery Magazine and The Best American Mystery Stories. His Collector trilogy garnered praise from National Public Radio and was nominated for several awards, including a Stoker and an Anthony. His first Hendricks novel, The Killing Kind, was named a Publishers Marketplace Buzz Book, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Boston Globe Best Book of 2015, and Strand Magazine‘s Top Book of 2015. It won the 2016 Anthony Award of Best Novel and was nominated for a Barry, a Lefty and a Macavity. He and his wife live in Portland, Maine.

THE HOLLYWOOD SPIRAL de Paul Neilan

From the author of Apathy and Other Small Victories, a darkly comic novel, set in the near future, about the race to find a missing cyber program with the power to bend reality, all before a fast-approaching comet destroys the earth.

THE HOLLYWOOD SPIRAL
by Paul Neilan
Grand Central, June 2021
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

In the near future, after the internet grinds to a halt amid a wave of cyber-attacks, a company named Zodiac steps in to replace it with an evolved, augmented-reality version called The Grid. Harrigan, a hard-drinking private detective living as off-Grid as possible, is about to be evicted from his apartment when a stranger shows up asking for his help in finding Anna, an escort who he claims he’s desperately in love with. Turns out that through Harrigan’s new client, Anna has come into possession of a program/entity called Mirror, Mirror, which has the capacity to merge The Grid and reality, bending both to the whims of the program’s user. Soon Harrigan finds himself up against the last surviving organized crime gangs in Los Angeles, Zodiac’s mercenaries, and a mysterious group called The First Church Multiverse, all of whom are hot on the trail of Mirror, Mirror – if the comet rapidly approaching Earth doesn’t kill them all first.

Paul Neilan grew up in New Jersey before fleeing the Garden State for its polar opposite: Portland, Oregon. A graduate of Rutgers University, he worked a mind-numbing job in an insurance company where he spent much of his time asleep in the bathroom dodging his boss and his coworkers. It was in the uniquely creative zone of the stall of that men’s room, legs akimbo and drool puddling on the linoleum floor that he began to hatch the idea for his first novel, Apathy and Other Small Victories. He still writes best in the bathroom.