Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
Promo copy:
A dazzling debut collection: nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and strangely familiar.
Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, these stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming more savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story–set on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognizable–we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid, signaling the world’s transformation and decline. The remaining stories capture the strange– sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny–circumstances he encounters in the no-longerso- simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man sick with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of “the state”; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips. Yet, in each story, we see that despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity.
Things We Didn’t See Coming is haunting, restrained, beautifully crafted–a stunning debut.
Three Days to Dead by Kelly Meding
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They’ll never see her coming…
When Evangeline Stone wakes up naked and bruised on a cold slab at the morgue—in a stranger’s body, with no memory of who she is and how she got there—her troubles are only just beginning. Before that night she and the two other members of her Triad were the city’s star bounty hunters, mercilessly cleansing the city of the murderous creatures living in the shadows, from vampires to shape-shifters to trolls. Then something terrible happened that not only cost all three of them their lives but also convinced the city’s other Hunters that Evy was a traitor—and she can’t even remember what it was.
Now she’s a fugitive, piecing together her memory, trying to deal some serious justice—and discovering that she has only three days to solve her own murder before the reincarnation spell wears off. Because in three days Evy will die again—but this time there’s no second chance…
Geosynchron (Book Three of the Jump 225 Trilogy) by David Louis Edelman
Promo copy:
The conclusion to the "Landmark Series"! The Defense and Wellness Council is enmeshed in full-scale civil war between Len Borda and the mysterious Magan Kai Lee. Quell has escaped from prison and is stirring up rebellion in the Islands with the aid of a brash young leader named Josiah. Jara and the apprentices of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp still find themselves fighting off legal attacks from their competitors and from Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous heirs – even though MultiReal has completely vanished. The quest for the truth will lead to the edges of civilisation, from the tumultuous society of the Pacific Islands to the lawless orbital colony of 49th Heaven; and through the deeps of time, from the hidden agenda of the Surina family to the real truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago. Meanwhile, Natch has awakened in a windowless prison with nothing but a haze of memory to clue him in as to how he got there. He’s still receiving strange hallucinatory messages from Margaret Surina and the nature of reality is buckling all around him. When the smoke clears, Natch must make the ultimate decision – whether to save a world that has scorned and discarded him, or to save the only person he has ever loved: himself.
More in Part II