January 17, 2015

Sf & F Literati Meets January 26, 2015

Date: January 26, 2015-7:00 p.m.
AuthorJohn C. Wright
Publisher: Tor Books
Available fromFine booksellers, including Barnes& Noble
Meeting LocationBarnes & Noble #2352, 2nd Floor
11323 W 95th Street, Overland Park, KS 66214

Overview from Barnes & Noble:
John C. Wright burst upon the SF scene a decade ago with the Golden Age trilogy, an innovative space opera. He went on to write fantasy novels, including the popular Orphans of Chaos trilogy. And now he returns to space opera in Count to a Trillion.


“After the collapse of the world economy, a young boy grows up in what used to be Texas as a tough duelist for hire, the future equivalent of a hired gun. But even after the collapse, there is space travel, and he leaves Earth to have adventures in the really wide open spaces. But he is quickly catapulted into the more distant future, while humanity, and Artificial Intelligence, grows and changes and becomes a kind of superman.” 

It's also time to begin preparing for next month:

Come with ideas for the next group of four selections!

Date: February 23, 2015-7:00 p.m.
TitleThe Rapture of the Nerds
Author: Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates LLC
Available fromFine booksellers, including Barnes & Noble
Meeting LocationBarnes & Noble #2352, 2nd Floor
11323 W 95th Street, Overland Park, KS 66214

Overview from Barnes & Noble:
Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

"Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. 

"The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth’s networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden apple.

"So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth’s anthill, there’s Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.

"Rapture of the Nerds is a brilliant collaboration by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two of the defining personalities of post-cyberpunk science fiction."

IMAGE CREDITS: the cover image for Count to a Trillion is from the Bewildering Stories review blog. The cover image for The Rapture of the Nerds is from Amazon

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