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The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel

In a world were you can get limbs and organs replaced as easily as car parts, Kobo is addicted to his own transformation. Or he was, until his funds dried up. Now this one-time baseball star spends his days scouting talent, and avoiding a pair of inanely vindictive, but motivated, debt collectors. 

In a cyber punk New York, sports teams represent corporations, not cities, and Kobo’s adopted brother, JJ, is the star of the Monsato Mets, a bioengineering conglomerate. The brothers have drifted apart, but Kobo still watches all the Mets matches, and so sees the day a vacant-eyed JJ drops dead on the home plate.

Intent on finding out the truth behind his brother’s death, Kobo’s investigation takes him into unlikely company, and uncovers some uncomfortable truths about his idolised big brother, and the dark machinations of the companies they both work for.

“Venom was quick, capitalism killed you nice and slow. Then sent you a bill.” The Body Scout

Picked for Esquire’s Top 50 Sci-Fi Books of All Time, and winner of the New York Times Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novel of 2021, this is solid tech noir. The sci-fi elements are fun—neanderthal bodyguards, dinosaur hamburgers, living organ artworks—and the story slaloms along in satisfying hardboiled fashion. I found myself occasionally slowed down by the amount of background, but in general the pacing is good and it definitely kept me entertained to the very end. 

If you’re a fan of baseball, detective fiction and/or sci-fi, you’ll probably get a huge kick out of The Body Scout, and if you’re in the market for a genre-bending page turner, this is an excellent choice.

WANT A FREE BOOK? Drop me a comment below, and I’ll be in touch to send you your free paperback copy of this month’s book: The Body Scout, by Michel Lincoln.

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Paperback from Abe Books £11.16

Follow the author on twitter @TheLincoln

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The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin

A homeless kid becomes the human embodiment of New York City, when a terrifying alien force arrives to destroy it (and possibly the universe). 

N.K.Jemisin is undeniably a grand dame of speculative fiction and having gotten two highly-acclaimed, sci-fi trilogies under her belt (Broken Earth and Inheritance), here she tries her hand at something new. 

Set in our world, in our time, we find ourselves in a reality where cities are extra-dimensional organisms that are born and can die. In order to birth themselves, cities must chose a human avatar from among their residents, who they imbue with special powers, drawn from the essence of the city and the people who live there. It’s an entertaining premise, and one with plenty of scope for exciting world-building.

“Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.” The City We Became

The book is immediately immersive; giant cosmic battles, spunky characters and the plot is always moving. There is some space given over to considering the beauty and the violence of the all-too-human (all-too-inhuman) entities that are cities, and some commentary on the divisions we carve around ourselves, even while living on top of each other. The heart of the book however, is undoubtedly the author’s love affair with New York and its boroughs.

Perhaps that is why—as a Londoner—I felt it sometimes fell short; lapsed into all too easy moralising, while taking aim at obvious crowd-pleasing targets (‘Karens’, whiny hipster boys). It seemed to want to say something about gentrification, but it couldn’t quite decide what. 

I was undone by The Broken Earth Trilogy, but The City We Became simply doesn’t have its depths. However, when complaining that a book is not someone’s best work we must remember who we’re talking about. This book won the BSFA Award for Best Novel this year, and was nominated for the Nebula, and Hugo Best Novel Awards. It will also be part of a trilogy, so I will certainly be tuning in to see what the next one has to say.

Have you read it? Let me know what you thought in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £4.99 

Paperback from Hachette £8.99

Follow the author on twitter @nkjemisin

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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

This is a sophisticated book, long and meandering, which makes sense as it follows a character destined to live, die and be born again with his memory in tact, ad infinitum; a strange sort of immortality.

After his entirely ordinary first life (and death), it takes Harry August a couple more (believing himself mad, possessed or cursed), before he is found by others of his kind and initiated into The Cronus Club. This shadowy organisation exists to support and shelter its members (the Ouroboran), and defend the secret of its own existence. Other than rescuing Ouroboran children from their linear parents to save them from the boredom of endlessly repeating their childhoods, the club is mostly social in nature, though it does have one strict rule: No interfering with linear time. 

It is on his eleventh death bed, that Harry receives a message. A small girl bearing a warning passed back in time through future generations of Ouroboran that something is wrong. The end of the world is getting faster.

Already a little tired of immortality, Harry begins an investigation into the cause of this acceleration, a search which gets him entangled with a formidable nemesis, and leads to a ferocious battle of wits played out across multiple lives, while the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

“Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine.”

The premise is intriguing, and underneath the skilful world-building and juicy vignettes about life as a Ouroboran, the text is full of big questions about what it means to live well. On its release, it received widespread praise in the media and had since reached Bestseller status, extremely impressive for a book of this length and complexity. If you have the patience for it, it’s well-written, expertly crafted and rich which space for contemplation.

Already read it? Let me know what you thought in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

 

Buy on kindle £4.99 

Paperback from World of Books £4.19

Follow the author on Twitter @ClaireNorth42

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The Water Cure, by Sophie Mackintosh

Three sisters live an antiquated, disconnected existence on a remote island. Their lives are ruled over by their autocratic parents, who mete out medieval punishments and force them to compete in bizarre rituals of sufferance.

The girls are introduced to us one by one, their narratives unfolding, sad and lonely as their large, dilapidated home; all empty rooms and creaking floorboards. It is unclear why the family has secluded itself on this remote spot and what exactly they have to fear from the ‘toxic’ mainland and its men, but unease lurks like sea mist in the mind of the reader as the sisters piece their parents’ hints and their own memories together in an attempt to understand what is true.

Then three male castaways wash up on their lonely shore and the spell their parents have worked so hard to craft, begins to unravel.

“It will always be a woman who saves us, we know that now. The protections of men are only ever flimsy and self-serving.” The Water Cure

The story is heavy with female longing, with the desperation for salvation through love and the giving over of oneself to something bigger. It is a quiet, potent story, one of those incisive pieces of speculative fiction that speaks of something too painfully real, too true, for realism.

Let me know what you thought of The Water Cure in the comments, and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £3.99

Buy from Waterstones £8.99

Follow the author at @fairfairisles

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 This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

One of my favourite books from the last few years. It won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction, the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019, and the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella. If you’re only going to read one book this year, read this one.

The story follows two time travelling beings, Red and Blue, acting as agents of cosmic forces which are locked in a fierce battle for the timeline. These opposing empires, The Garden and The Agency, fight to influence events throughout history in a mission to lay the seeds for their preferred outcomes in the future. Pursuing each other up and down the timeline, Red and Blue’s initial antagonism melts into curious, adversarial jesting, before blossoming into friendship, and then love.

“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.” This Is How You Lose the Time War

The story takes the form of messages the two central characters leave for each other at the scenes of their triumphs and defeats. Letters written in the wind, in the heat signature of water, in the entrails of sea creatures, in the heart rings of a tree. Hiding these letters from the ever watchful superpowers they serve, the lonely warriors tease, flirt and slowly come to reveal themselves to each other, unaware that something is on their trail. 

A mesmerising story of love and resistance in which the oppressive powers that be, fight the long game, and still cannot win. It blew me away. The prose is delicious, the love story seductive, and the sci-fi vivacious with fresh ideas and immaculate plotting. I doubt you’ve read anything like it before and you should absolutely read it now. 

Don’t forget to tell me what you think in the comments, and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.


Buy on kindle £4.99

Buy paperback from Bookcase London £4.99


Follow the authors @tithenai and @maxgladstone

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Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, Bewilderment  is an important and beautiful book about empathy and the sadness and beauty which define living in our troubled world.

The book follows a father, Theo, and his son, Robin, as they struggle to fill the spaces the world has cut out for them. Set in the near future, or perhaps an adjacent timeline, the book moves seamlessly between realism and the speculative. Theo’s job searching for signs of life in the galaxy brings us to visit a variety of different worlds, and Robin, a sensitive boy who is quick to anger, begins an avant-garde treatment for his unspecific neuro-atypicality. The therapy teaches him to mimic brainwaves patterns in an effort to teach him how to regulate his emotions, and has some unexpected repercussions.

“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp…”

Always teasing a delicate line between despair and hope, shrinking and expanding between the relationship of father and son, and the nature of being in the universe, the book is rich with love and life and the implausible abundance of the natural world. It is the best kind of speculative fiction: Wild and exciting and new, while full of old wisdom.

If you like personal stories with heart that invite you to think about how you live in the world, you should definitely add it to your reading list. 

If you enjoyed it, let me know why in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £9.99 

Hardback from Waterstones £9.49

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The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells

The six book series has won various awards, including Nebula Award Winner for Best Novella and Hugo Award Winner for Best Novella. I fully expect to see a Netflix series or movie franchise one of these days.

The main character is a dry-toned cyborg with a penchant for trashy TV dramas who is afraid of nothing, except the possibility of close interpersonal relationships with humans. Built by a nefarious company to act as security detail for planetary exploration, a malfunction causes our protagonist to murder the team they are protecting. The self-titled ‘Murderbot’ then hacks their governor module to ensure they are no longer under external control, but with apparently nothing better to do, continues to perform their duties, all the while giving us the benefit of their eye-rolling narration. This is until the group of humans they are protecting get themselves into some serious trouble, and our ‘Murderbot’ is forced to confront their freedom, and make some choices about who they are and what it is they want out of life.

“…in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.” All Systems Red

As the series continues, we are taken around the galaxy solving crimes and gathering evidence against the corporate giants that treat human, and other forms of life, so cheaply. I’m only three books in and I’m utterly sold. The world is great, the plots compelling, and the protagonist unfailingly charming. I flew through the first three books and have had to restrain myself from jumping straight into the next. If you like your sci-fi low on the sci, and heavy on the action (with a good dose of dry witticism), this series is for you. 

Have you read any of the Murderbot series? If so, let me know what you thought in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy Book One: All Systems Red on kindle £2.09

Paperback six book series from Blackwells £36.44

 

Follow the author at @marthawells1

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If I had your face, by Frances Cha

An impressive debut novel about four young women battling to hold their own in the ultramodern, image-obsessed city of modern day Seoul.

Frances Cha, a former journalist, has lived and worked across the US, Hong Kong and South Korea, giving her a unique perspective on the plight of women at a time of shifting cultural norms and extreme wealth disparity.

“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.” If I had your face

The Seoul of the novel is a fascinating, inhuman place, where plastic surgery is ubiquitous, bosses are abusive, men cheat and the future is best not thought about at all. Somehow though, despite this bleak backdrop, the book is never dreary, as in the face of their hardships the vitality of the main characters keeps the narrative buoyant, demanding you read on. The street-eye-view of South Korean culture is intriguing – and I’d recommend the book just for that – but the heart of the story is the relationships between the four women and their growing intimacy and solidarity. 

The three hundred pages fly by, and the book leaves us with enough reason to be hopeful for these characters we’ve come to care so much about.

All in all, if you like a smart book with captivating characters and an enthralling insight into another culture, this will be a great bet. Let me know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £4.99 

Paperback from Betterworld Books £7.56

  

Follow the author at @FRANCES_H_CHA

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The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas

I  loved this book. The original novel was written in nynorsk and is a classic of Norwegian literature, but I can’t believe it loses much in translation. The short, ninety-six page novella is quite positively overflowing with poetry.

For anyone put off by that, don’t be — I read the whole thing in a few hours and couldn’t put it down.

The story starts with a young girl in a small rural community whose world is rocked by the arrival of a new girl to her village. The girls’ tentatively burgeoning friendship is electric with the magic of youth and possibility and uncertainty, and in its messy, non-sensical intensity, provides a painfully honest rendition of young attachment.

After this, things only get weirder, but if you’re concerned about getting lost, don’t be. The story is unendingly compelling, the magic realism (for want of a better term) an effortless texture to the strangeness of the setting. The Ice Palace itself, when it finally consumes us, is a masterpiece of alien intelligence and cosmic beauty which puts any Lovercraftian monster to shame.

“The pine needles stretch their tongues and sing an unfamiliar nocturnal song. Each tongue is so small that it cannot be heard; together the sound is so deep and powerful that it could level the hills if it wished.” The Ice Palace

A vast, majestic book squeezed into an impossibly small story that will suck you, along with its young protagonist, deep into the incomprehensible vastness at the heart of all things. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.

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Buy on kindle £4.99

Buy hardback from Blackwells £6.49

Like reading speculative fiction? Want more book recommendations? Follow me on twitter @SLangridgeUK for updates on my latest posts.

Like poetry? Check me out on TikTok @theyrhymesometimes