> SCIENCE FICTION:
The Rosewater Insurrection By Tade Thompson Orbit, $20.99, 406 pages
The Rosewater Insurrection is the second part of Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy. The first book in the series, Rosewater, introduced us to a strange structure that had arisen in Nigeria as part of a plan to download alien minds into human hosts. The main character in the series, Kaaro, is a member of a secret police unit with a special medium-like ability to navigate the fantastic alien “xenosphere,” which is one of the ways these mysterious visitors communicate with us.
In this book, the story opens up a lot more. The mayor of Rosewater declares independence, triggering a Nigerian civil war. Meanwhile, the alien is under attack by a plant-like creature with its own mysterious agenda. Politics makes for strange bedfellows and soon the large cast of characters, with Kaaro and his partner Aminat at the centre, are having to take sides, sometimes quite reluctantly.
Rosewater was a terrific start to the trilogy and The Rosewater Insurrection only raises the bar, introducing a number of fascinating new elements into an already intriguing storyline. If you haven’t got started on it already this is a series you’ll want to get on board with now.
Radicalized By Cory Doctorow Tor, $34.99, 304 pages
As an author and activist, Cory Doctorow’s fiction often takes up the same political subject matter as his advocacy and opinion pieces. In recent years, the two have been drawing ever closer together, to the point where the four novellas in his latest collection, Radical
ized, might almost be thought of as dramatic essays.
The stories are drawn from hot-button issues in today’s headlines and then given an SF spin: cybersurveillance runs amok in smart homes, racism and law enforcement get challenged in an age of superheroes, the rationing of health care gives rise to dark web terrorism, and social inequality implodes at the end of the world.
Informing all of this is Doctorow’s libertarian but socially progressive optimism, with heroic hackers and freedom fighters looking to create a more just society. And while he can be preachy, he is also capable of dealing with timely issues that affect us all.
Permafrost By Alastair Reynolds Tor, $19.50, 173 pages
Time travel is a venerable science fiction trope, so much so that various subgenres of time travel story can be iden
tified. Permafrost may remind us of 12 Monkeys in its basic premise: In the year 2080 the world as we know it has gone to hell, the result of a total environmental collapse known as the Scouring. A group of scientists in Russia, however, have come up with a way to inject the consciousness of selected “pilots” into the minds of people living 50 years earlier by way of MRI machines. In this way, they hope to avert catastrophe.
To try to explain more would risk getting caught in the “python-coils of paradox” that bedevil all such journeys into the past and which the pilots themselves are keen to avoid. Suffice it to say that this is a short book that has many such coils, some of them twisting in unanticipated directions. The hero of the piece, for example, is an elderly woman and not an action hero, while the villains remain a mysterious whiteout. Reynolds, however, is one of the top writers in the genre today and he’s capable of both going his own way and taking us with him.
The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction Ed. by Gardner Dozois St. Martin’s, $31.50, 686 pages
For 35 years, super-editor Gardner Dozois, who died last year, helmed the prestigious Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. The Very Best of the Best offers up some highlights from his tenure, but the subtitle is flat-out wrong as the book only includes stories that go back to 2002. There were two previous Best
of the Best volumes that included stories published from 1983 to 2002, making this book the third such selection.
With that important caveat out of the way, one can recommend The Very Best
of the Best wholeheartedly. As you would expect, the lineup of names is like a who’s who of contemporary science fiction and, as always with Dozois, the selection is expertly assembled, offering up a wide range of traditional tropes and themes being spun in all kinds of imaginative new ways.
Not all of it will be to everyone’s liking, but for everyone there is a lot to like. You really can’t go wrong adding such a volume to your collection.