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What does September have in store for you? A new Neal Stephenson novel! Not one, but two new releases from Cherie Priest! Plus faeries, vampires, digital revolutionaries, and a college in outer space. Here are all the new releases your bookshelf needs this month. More »
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Ken MacLeod's latest near-future thriller The Restoration Game takes us deep inside a CIA plot to overthrow the government of Krassnia, an imaginary former Soviet republic — using an MMO designed to stir up nationalist sentiment among Krassnia's youth. Out this month in the U.S. from PYR Books, the novel traces a set of strange connections uniting a small Scottish videogame startup, two ethnographers who met in Soviet-era Krassnia, benevolent human smugglers, and a multinational conspiracy straight out of The X-Files. If you are fascinated by the political history of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, The Restoration Game will light your brain on fire. But you don't need to be a history buff; this is a novel for anybody who likes a damn good spy story with wisps of the singularity lurking at its edges. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5837311&view=rss&microfeed=true Great news for stateside fans of Ken MacLeod. His latest novel, The Restoration Game (Orbit UK), will be available from smartypants publisher Pyr Books in the United States in fall 2011 - and Pyr publisher Lou Anders says the cover will be designed by award-winner Stephen Martinere. The Restoration Game is a videogame espionage novel where MacLeod deftly mixes Eastern European intrigue with underground gamer culture to create a terrific political thriller. More »
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Ken MacLeod, author of The Execution Channel, has a new book coming out in the UK next month: The Restoration Game. I interviewed him for Bloggingheads, and he told me about his future projects - including one with galactic princesses. More »
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A truly great infodump is a work of art. The best science fiction authors can brief you on everything you need to know about their worlds, without making you feel lectured. Here are 20 great examples of the smooth infodump. More »
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If you wish science fiction would have a bit more actual science (and focus on the near future instead of the year 5 billion), you'll be thrilled that When It Changed, an anthology pairing scientists and SF authors, is out. More »
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Hot enough for ya? Our crazy fossil-fuel orgy is driving the planet's temperatures through the roof. Good thing science fiction books and movies have come up with 10 can't-fail solutions (well, maybe they'd work) for stopping global warming. More »
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Ken MacLeod's writing taught me to love science fiction again. I had pushed the genre out of my reading life for many years, but I could not ignore his novel Newton's Wake. More »
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If you didn't already worship visionary writer Charles Stross, a new virtual seminar on his works by a group of luminaries and amazing writers will convert you. Among the highlights: Paul Krugman on transdimensional economics. More »
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Ken MacLeod's latest novel, The Night Sessions, is about a near-future Earth that's ruled by atheists who have driven Christians into the closet. The "Faith Wars" have purged governments in the East and West of their religious leaders, and left in their wake a fairly peaceful world order. Still, the population is filled with people and sentient robots haunted by memories of the violent "God Squads" who led the anti-religious purges. In this novel, released last month in the UK, MacLeod has stuck to the near-present time frame of his last novel The Execution Channel, while also bringing in the kinds of far-future concerns about posthuman selfhood that made his Engines of Light trilogy so brilliant. An intricate murder mystery about Protestant terrorist factions of the future, The Night Sessions is also a strangely moving tale of the emotional bonds between humans and robots. MacLeod has given us a crisp novel of speculation made achingly realistic by his characters' believable, messy lives. More »
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A terrifically interesting new anthology called Seeds of Change hits bookstores this summer, featuring original stories from nine scifi authors dealing with near-future scenarios where the world completely changes. Essentially, it's a political take on the idea of the singularity and it features two of my favorite smartypants authors, Tobias Buckell and Ken MacLeod. Edited by F&SF editor John Joseph Adams, Seeds of Change deals with everything from voting to U.S. oil companies in Africa. Contributor Blake Carlton describes the anthology as dealing with how "fiction can be a mode of social change." More »
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William Gibson says reality has become science fictional, and therefore all his science fiction is now set in the present day. Authors like Charles Stross and Margaret Atwood have followed suit, writing books set in the near-future. What is this obsession with near-future SF? We asked io9's muse, science fiction author Ken MacLeod, whose latest book The Execution Channel is set in a not-too-distant future, and marks a strong departure from MacLeod's far-future space opera phase that included books like Learning the World, Newton's Wake, and the Engines of Light trilogy. MacLeod says he turned to the near-future out of fury with the present. Read our interview with him to find out more. More »
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