An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon --- 349 pages

With her brilliant debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon stakes their claim to the dystopian legacy of Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin and Ann Leckie.

The lost star ship Matilda fled a dying Earth generations ago in search of a new world. But as the long years of its journey proceeded, a brutal  theocracy took control of the ship,  segregating the population into pale skinned elites and dark skinned workers. Workers, such as Aster,  are confined to the lower decks, starved, overworked and brutalized by guards.  The pale skinned elites inhabit the  upper decks, hoarding their comforts and their privileges as god-given prerogatives. Aster fights back any way she can, and uses her skills as a healer to help the suffering. But doing so makes her a target for retribution as a rebel against the Sovereignty that rules Matilda.

A fearsome, fearless book.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from National Public Radio.

Click HERE to read the review from Foreword.

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross --- 349 pages

Doctorow and Stross have created the 21st century successor to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. Millions of posthumans have migrated off-planet to upload their consciousness into the Cloud, abandoning their meatbodies and playing mind games with their meatheaded cousins who stayed behind by spamming Earth's networks with disruptive technologies just for the fun of watching us squirm.

A highminded species would ignore these provocations but whoever said we as a species are all that highminded? No, there's a chump born every minute as they say, and this particular chump, a technophobic Welsh person named Huw, has been assigned the unenviable task of defending all humanity's continued right to exist before the Galactic Federation.