by Hafsah Faizal (Sands of Arawiya #2) January 19, 2021; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Nasir and Zafira may have defeated the shadow forest, but victory is not yet guaranteed. Altair has been taken captive. Nasir is busy learning to control the powerful magic flowing through his veins. Soon he will have to use his magic against the Lion of the Night and his own father, who is being puppeted by the Lion. To restore magic to Arawiya, Zafira must return the five hearts of the Sisters of Old to the minarets in each caliphate. Zafira is pulled into the Lion’s orbit and it may cost her everything to break free.
Olivia Chadha’s heartfelt, adroit, brisk and thoughtful debut novel proves that everything old is new again. While its “Clutian Real Year” (i.e., the headspace and zeitgeist that birthed it and which provided its themes) is definitely 2020, its soul and blood and sinews are somewhere back in 1985, with the nascent
Neuromancer. It’s nth-generation cyberpunk, with all of that mode’s glistening surfaces, rotting underbelly, streetlife tech and callous unethical Powers That Be. It’s wonderful and amazing and somewhat delightful how that flavor of SF, now some 35 years old, remains powerful and useful and potent, infinitely adaptable to new realities and able to shine its laser light on old-new inequities and iniquities. Of course, it also remains sexy and captivating on a narrative, SFX level. The pioneers of this subgenre built well.
A streetrat turned revolutionary and the disillusioned hacker son of a politician try to take down a ruthlessly technocratic government that sacrifices its poorest citizens to build its utopia…
We’re excited to share an excerpt from Olivia Chadha’s
Rise of the Red Hand, the first book in The Mechanists series available January 19th from Erewhon.
The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders lead luxurious lives inside a climate-controlled biodome, dependent on technology and gene therapy to keep them healthy and youthful forever. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with discarded black-market robotics, a society of poverty-stricken cyborgs struggling to survive in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs.
A streetrat turned revolutionary and the disillusioned hacker son of a politician try to take down a ruthlessly technocratic government that sacrifices its poorest citizens to build its utopia…
We’re excited to share an excerpt from Olivia Chadha’s
Rise of the Red Hand, the first book in The Mechanists series available January 19th from Erewhon.
The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders lead luxurious lives inside a climate-controlled biodome, dependent on technology and gene therapy to keep them healthy and youthful forever. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with discarded black-market robotics, a society of poverty-stricken cyborgs struggling to survive in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs.