Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived at the Geek Compound.
Raising Steam
by Terry Pratchett
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Steam is rising over Discworld, driven by Mister Simnel, the man with a flat cap and a sliding rule. He has produced a great clanging monster of a machine that harnesses the power of all of the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and it’s soon drawing astonished crowds.
To the consternation of Ankh-Morpork’s formidable Patrician, Lord Vetinari, no one is in charge of this new invention. This needs to be rectified, and who better than the man he has already appointed master of the Post Office, the Mint, and the Royal Bank: Moist von Lipwig. Moist is not a man who enjoys hard work—unless it is dependent on words, which are not very heavy and don’t always need greasing. He does enjoy being alive, however, which makes a new job offer from Vetinari hard to refuse.
Moist will have to grapple with gallons of grease, goblins, a fat controller with a history of throwing employees down the stairs, and some very angry dwarfs if he’s going to stop it all from going off the rails . . .
Almost lost my fingers yesterday as Brandy snatched this from me, screaming gleefully, “The NEW Pratchett! Gimme!”
We Are What We Are (2013)
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The Parkers, a seemingly wholesome and benevolent family, keep to themselves, and for good reason. As they struggle to keep their ancestral customs intact, local authorities begin to uncover clues that bring them closer to the secret that they have held closely for so many years.
Bonus Features:
- An Acquired Taste: The Making-of We Are What We Are.
- Interviews with Director Jim Mickle, Bill Sage and Julia Garner, Audio Commentary with Cast & Crew.
Watch for my forthcoming Baker’s Dozen interview with director Jim Mickle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXKogr0O-Zc
Earth Star
by Janet Edwards
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Romance, science fiction, action, and a look at the false assumptions we make about others combine in this light-hearted, fun, and well-conceived science fiction future.
Only She Can Save the World.
Eighteen-year-old Jarra has a lot to prove. After being awarded one of the military’s highest honors for her role in a daring rescue attempt, she finds herself—and her Ape status—in the spotlight. Jarra is one of the unlucky few born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Derided as an “ape”—a “throwback”—by the rest of the universe, she is on a mission to prove that Earth Girls are just as good as anyone else.
Except now the planet she loves is under threat by what could be humanity’s first ever alien contact. Jarra’s bravery—and specialist knowledge—will once again be at the center of the maelstrom, but will the rest of the universe consider Earth worth fighting for?
Ambassador of the Shadows
Valerian and Laureline Vol. 6
by J. C. Mézières and P. Christin
Cover by Mézières
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Who threatens the diplomatic future of Earth? And who are the mysterious Shadows?
Point Central is a multicultural space station that serves as a sort of United Nations to the galaxy. Tasked with protecting the new ambassador from Earth, Valerian is kidnapped alongside his charge in a lightning commando attack. It’s up to Laureline to do all the heavy lifting and slog through the seedy bowels of the station as she tries to locate and rescue them—and figure out who kidnapped them and why.
Operation Shield
A Cassandra Kresnov Novel
by Joel Shepherd
Cover by Stephen Martiniere
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Part military SF, part cyberpunk, part grand-scale space opera, and part techno-psychological thriller, the Cassandra Kresnov novels transcend the recently narrow segmentation of the science fiction genre.
In 23 Years on Fire, Cassandra discovered that the technology that created her has been misused in her former home and now threatens all humanity with catastrophe. Returning home to Callay, she finds that Federation member worlds, exhausted by the previous thirty-year-war against the League, are unwilling to risk the confrontation that a solution may require. Some of these forces will go to any lengths to avoid a new conflict, including taking a sledgehammer to the Federation Constitution and threatening the removal by force of Cassandra’s own branch of the Federal Security Agency.
More frighteningly for Sandy, she has brought back to Callay three young children, whom she met on the mean streets of Droze, discovering maternal feelings she had not known she possessed. Can she reconcile her duty as a soldier, including what she must do as a tactician, with the dangers that those decisions will place upon her family–the one thing that has come to mean more to her than any cause she now believes in?