Roundup: 4 new science fiction books to transport you to another world

Cold People

By Tom Rob Smith

(Scribner, 368 pages, $37.00)

Alien invasions can take strange turns. In “Cold People,” a fleet of bossy visitors arrive and immediately give humankind an ultimatum: relocate to Antarctica in 30 days or be destroyed. After a month of madly rushing south, a new society is formed on the icy continent, and with that new society a new sort of human as well.

Life in Antarctica isn’t easy, though the diet and exercise regimens are actually quite healthy. The scientists, however, think they can do even better and have developed a plan to rapidly evolve a breed of Homo antarcticus specially equipped to survive under the most extreme conditions. After twenty years, their experiments start to bear strange fruit. But in the struggle for survival, our parahuman descendants may not all be on our side.

Any explanation of what the aliens are up to will have to wait for the sequel, but the cold people are interesting creations and the action makes good use of their weird abilities. The best part of the book, though, is the way Antarctica is presented as an alien environment, no less fatal for being here on earth.

The Terraformers

By Annalee Newitz

(Tor, 338 pages, $38.99)

Terraforming a planet takes a long time and costs a lot of money, so it’s no surprise that the Verdance Corporation has a keen eye on its bottom line in refashioning Sask-E for human settlement, which means selling Oceanside lots to people looking for authentic Pleistocene real estate.

“The Terraformers” is a book that takes a long view of this process, being made up of three main narrative sections with breaks of 700-900 years between them. The plot feels a bit like one of those build-a-civilization-from-scratch videogames, but Newitz uses it to address various interesting questions relating to environmental stewardship, responsible capitalism and the definition of personhood. This latter being an important point where one of the main characters is a talking moose.

Why Don’t You Love Me?

By Paul B. Rainey

(Drawn & Quarterly, 214 pages, $29.95)

Most of “Why Don’t You Love Me?” a serial graphic novel, is about as far from science fiction as you could imagine. A man and woman share a loveless train wreck of a marriage. Claire is a stay-at-home alcoholic and can’t even take care of herself much less the two kids. Mark works for a company that does web development, but he doesn’t understand anything about the job. In fact, he seems to think he’s really a barber …

They’re a dysfunctional family, but it’s weirder than that. Then, at the exact halfway point in the story, there’s a global event that sets a restart button. Or causes a wrinkle in the fabric of the multiverse. And Mark slowly breaks out of a bed that’s shaped like a cocoon into a brand new life.

It’s hard to say much more about the story than this, in part to avoid spoilers but also because it’s hardly clear even to Claire and Mark what’s going on. Suffice it to say that Paul B. Rainey’s cramped and cluttered visual style is the perfect complement to a strange domestic tale of social order breaking down into isolation and chaos. Then a quick reread is necessary to put it back together again.

Arch-Conspirator

By Veronica Roth

(Tor, 112 pages, $26.99)

Sophocles’ play “Antigone” has been adapted countless times over the past two-and-a-half millennia, being the archetypal tale of individual conscience versus public conformity to the law.

Veronica Roth, author of the popular Divergent series, has reimagined the old story once again, this time set in a future city that has narrowly survived some kind of global apocalypse. In order to maintain genetic stability the frightened new world strictly controls the process of reproduction by disallowing natural procreation and forcing new children to take the form of resurrected clones made from the archived “ichor” (DNA) of deceased citizens.

The names as well as the outline of the plot have stayed the same. Antigone (“Tig”) is the wilful daughter intent on salvaging the ichor of her brother Polyneikes, who has died in an attempted coup against their uncle Kreon’s authoritarian government. Kreon has forbid “extraction” of Polyneikes’ ichor, but Antigone has her own ideas. Or, as she puts it: “F- Kreon’s decree.”

Roth finds a number of interesting connections between ancient Greek debates and issues in our own time. Of course the patriarchy is still in business, but also operative is the intertwining of notions of inheritance and genetic doom with classical ideas of fate. And finally the ending is something that’s really new, even offering a sliver of hope, if not on earth than in the heavens.

SHARE: