Best Winter Books for Galactic Gurus
New books for a new age
With the start of a new year on the horizon Galactic Gurus have one thing on their mind: the future. Whether that's a stark dystopian future full of hardship or one full of progress where humanity has spread across the galaxy depends on the guru. No matter what kind of future calls to you, these winter releases promise to contain some of the most fascinating looks into future possibilities. Prepare to be absolutely intrigued and enthralled by these upcoming sci-fi novels!
february new releases
The Bones Beneath My Skin
by Tj Klune
A spine-tingling standalone novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune--a supernatural road-trip thriller featuring an extraordinary young girl and her two unlikely protectors on the run from cultists and the government.
There's nothing more human than a broken heart.
In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his only brother wants nothing to do with him, and he's been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington, DC.
With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family's summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon, to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It's not.
A Dragon of Black Glass
by James Rollins
The third and penultimate book in the New York Times bestselling Moonfall series from thriller-master James Rollins, A Dragon of Black Glass is a tale of relentless adventure and the struggle for survival in a harsh world that hangs by a thread.
What will they risk to save the world?
With the apocalyptic threat of moonfall looming ever closer, Nyx and her allies must venture into the eternally sunblasted lands to search for an ancient weapon buried untold millennia ago. All the while, enemies close upon her flanks, and a greater danger lurks ahead. For beneath a desert turned to glass, hidden from the scorching heat, life thrives--both wondrous and monstrous. But a more fearsome menace lies even deeper, where an ancient army has been seeded to protect a secret from any who dare seek it out.
Gliff
by Ali Smith
From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.
Add two children. And a horse.
I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com
by Kimberly Lemming
A FEBRUARY LIBRARYREADS PICK!
A hilarious and sexy romance about a woman who gets dropped on a strange planet only to fall for not one, but two, aliens, from the author of I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf.
Dorothy Valentine is close to getting her PhD in wildlife biology when she's attacked by a lion. On the bright side, she's saved! On the not-so-bright side, it's because they're abducted by aliens. In her scramble to escape, Dory and the lion commandeer an escape pod and crash-land on an alien planet that has...dinosaurs?
The Garden
by Nick Newman
A darkly beautiful, eerie, hypnotic novel about two elderly sisters living alone at the edge of the world.
In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. What was before the garden, they have forgotten; what lies beyond it, they do not know. Each day is spent in languid service to their home: tending the bees, planting the crops, and dutifully following the instructions of the almanac written by their mother.
Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel
by Cory Doctorow
New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever invented: the personal computer.
The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.
When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side.
Dengue Boy
by Michel Nieva - Rahul Bery
For fans of David Cronenberg's films and lovers of Kafka, this gaucho-punk, sci-fi novel set in 2197 offers an explosive interpretation of an ultra-capitalistic society on the brink of climate collapse.
The protagonist of this story has no understanding of the words "winter", "cold", or "snow" because he has never experienced the phenomena they describe. We find ourselves in Victorica, a province of La Pampa, Argentina, some time after 2197 - the year in which the last of the Antarctic icecaps melted and an unprecedented climate catastrophe ensued, radically transforming the landscape of the region into a Caribbean Pampas.
It is here that the Dengue Child grows up, a mutant mix of child and mosquito, the result of crazy experimenting driven by ultra-capitalistic corporations racing against each other to own viruses and their cures, destroying even their very own children's existence to cash in on the stock exchange.
January new releases
Death of the Author
by Nnedi Okorafor
"Her best work yet... about fame and family, culture and change, the power of story, the writer's life... and robots. This one has it all." -- George R.R. Martin
The future of storytelling is here.
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister's lavish Caribbean wedding, she's unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It's a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.
We Lived on the Horizon
by Erika Swyler
The acclaimed author of the "dazzling" (Sara Gruen, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Book of Speculation returns with an engrossing new novel about a bio-prosthetic surgeon and her personal AI as they are drawn into a revolution.
The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Over generations, an elite class has evolved from the descendants of those who gave up the most to found mankind's last stronghold, called the Sainted.
Cold Storage: A Thriller of the Near Future
by Michael C Grumley
AN EXPANSIVE NEW STANDALONE THRILLER IN MICHAEL C. GRUMLEY'S REVIVAL SERIES, EXPLORING HUMANITY'S THIRST FOR IMMORTALITY AT ANY COST.
Technology never works well the first time. Or even the second. Army veteran John Reiff is living proof.
John is revived in the back of a dilapidated ambulance, on the run from a shadowy organization that is desperate to take him back. He is the first one, their archetype, and they need to know what happened after his escape. What is happening to his body and his mind. And they need to know now.
All the Water in the World
by Eiren Caffall
In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York's Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.
"Gripping...tense, de---lightful and rich with resonance." --Scientific American
"Captivating...The setting, the detailed emotive descriptions, and nail-biting adventure are incandescent." --Library Journal (starred)
All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science.
December new releases
The Way
by Cary Groner
A postapocalyptic road trip and a quest for redemption.
It's 2048, and the world has been ravaged by a lethal virus. With few exceptions, only the young have survived. Cities and infrastructures have been destroyed, and the natural world has reclaimed the landscape in surprising ways, with herds of wild camels roaming the American West and crocodiles that glow neon green lurking in the rivers.
Will Collins, the last surviving resident of a Buddhist retreat center in Colorado, receives an urgent and mysterious request: to deliver a potential cure to a scientist on the West Coast.
The Shutouts
by Gabrielle Korn
A brilliant queer dystopian novel from the author of Yours for the Taking, following a cast of characters on the margins of a strange and exclusive new society.
The year is 2041, and it's a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly's on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she's no longer sure she believes in.
Almost 40 years later, another mother, Ava, and her daughter Brook are on the run as well, from the climate change relief program known as The Inside Project, where they've spent the past 22 years being treated as lab rats. When they encounter a woman from Ava's past on the side of the highway, the three continue on in a journey that will take them into the depths of what remains of humanity out in the wilderness.
Mechanize My Hands to War
by Erin K Wagner
September, 2060: Adrian Hall, acting director of the ATF, is holding a press conference. Yes, Eli Whitaker, anti-android demagogue, remains at large, and yes, he is recruiting children into his militia -- Adrian is careful not to use the word army. She is careful all the way through the conference, right up until someone asks her about her personal connection to Whitaker; about Trey Caudill, his foster son.
July, 2058: Farmers Shay and Ernst, struggling after they discover their GMO crop seeds have failed, hire android employees: Sarah as hospice, and AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. Under one roof, four lives intertwine in ways no one expects.
July, 2060: Special Agent Trey Caudill is leading a raid on Eli Whitaker's farm when an android, call sign Ora, shoots and kills a child.
March, 2061: Ora sits in a room. He has been there for seven months, resisting diagnostic tests. He is drawing on the walls, scratching his artificial skin, tracing something over and over and over again with a tired metallic finger. There is nothing wrong with his circuitry, so why does Ora feel so broken?
Ageless
by Renée Schaeffer
Naissa Nolan is a happy child in 1850s Philadelphia--until tragedy strikes while she and her family are on holiday. Alone and heartbroken, she is thrust into an immortal life she never bargained for or imagined. Naissa spends the next few centuries on Earth--and beyond--desperate to learn more about her condition. While working with the esteemed Oberlin Institute in Vienna, she makes an important discovery that could change everything.
Alter Ego
by Alex Segura
Alex Segura, award-winning author of Secret Identity, returns with a clever and escapist standalone sequel set in the world of comic books. In the present day, a comics legend is given the chance to revive a beloved but forgotten character. But at what price?
Annie Bustamante is a cultural force like none other: an acclaimed filmmaker, an author, a comic book artist known for one of the all time best superhero comics in recent memory. But she's never been able to tackle her longtime favorite superhero, the Lethal Lynx. Only known to the most die-hard comics fans and long out of print, the rights were never available--until now.
But Annie is skeptical of who is making the offer: Bert Carlyle's father started Triumph Comics, and has long claimed ownership of the Lynx. When she starts getting anonymous messages urging her not to trust anyone, Annie's inner alarms go off. Even worse? Carlyle wants to pair her with a disgraced filmmaker for a desperate media play.