SF&F Literati Meet August 25, 2014

Alien Artifact
TITLE: Existence
AUTHOR: David Brin
WHERE:  
Barnes & Noble #2352 at Oak Park Mall
11393 W. 95th St., Overland Park, KS 66214
On 2nd floor by the windows.
WHEN:  
Monday, August 25, 2014, 7:00 p.m.
AVAILABLE FROM: Barnes & Nobles and other fine booksellers. 

Overview from Barnes & Noble:

Bestselling, award-winning futurist David Brin returns to globe-spanning, high concept SF with Existence.

Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’ something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”

Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity. 

Don't miss next month:
TITLE: Graceling
AUTHOR: Kristin Cashore
WHERE:  
Barnes & Noble #2352 at Oak Park Mall
11393 W. 95th St., Overland Park, KS 66214
On 2nd floor by the windows.
WHEN:  
Monday, September 22, 2014, 7:00 p.m.
AVAILABLE FROM: Barnes & Nobles and other fine booksellers. 

Overview from Barnes & Noble:

Kristin Cashore’s best-selling, award-winning fantasy Graceling tells the story of the vulnerable yet strong Katsa, a smart, beautiful teenager who lives in a world where selected people are given a Grace, a special talent that can be anything from dancing to swimming. Katsa’s is killing. As the king’s niece, she is forced to use her extreme skills as his thug. Along the way, Katsa must learn to decipher the true nature of her Grace . . . and how to put it to good use. A thrilling, action-packed fantasy adventure (and steamy romance!) that will resonate deeply with adolescents trying to find their way in the world.

Awards: Winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature, winner of the SIBA Book Award/YA, Indies Choice Book Award Honor Book, ALA Best Book for Young Adults, 2008 Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, 2008 School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2008, 2008 Booklist Editors’ Choice, Booklist’s 2008 Top Ten First Novels for Youth, 2009 Amelia Bloomer List, BCCB 2009 Blue Ribbon List

Don’t miss the sequel Fire, also a New York Times bestseller and ALA Best Book for Young Adults, winner of the 2010 Cybil for YA Fantasy/Sci Fi and the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award.

IMAGE CREDITS: The cover image for Existence came from MacMillan, the book's publisher. The image for Graceling came from GoodReads.

SF&F Literati Meet Monday, July 28, 2014

Poet Danger
TITLE: Lexicon 
AUTHOR: Max Barry
WHERE:  
Barnes & Noble #2352 at Oak Park Mall
11393 W. 95th St., Overland Park, KS 66214
On 2nd floor by the windows.
WHEN:  
Monday, July 28, 2014, 7:00 p.m.
AVAILABLE FROM: Barnes & Nobles and other fine booksellers.
 

Overview from Barnes & Noble:

At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics—they are taught to persuade. Students learn to use language to manipulate minds, wielding words as weapons. The very best graduate as “poets,” and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose.

Whip-smart runaway Emily Ruff is making a living from three-card Monte on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization’s recruiters. Drawn in to their strange world, which is populated by people named Brontë and Eliot, she learns their key rule: That every person can be classified by personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately unlocked by the skillful application of words. For this reason, she must never allow another person to truly know her, lest she herself be coerced. Adapting quickly, Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy, until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.

Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Parke is brutally ambushed by two men in an airport bathroom. They claim he is the key to a secret war he knows nothing about, that he is an “outlier,” immune to segmentation. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the organization and its mind-bending poets, Wil and his captors seek salvation in the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, which, if ancient stories are true, sits above an ancient glyph of frightening power.

A brilliant thriller that traverses very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data-collection, connecting them to centuries-old ideas about the power of language and coercion, Lexicon is Max Barry’s most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet.

Get ready for August!
TITLE: Existence
AUTHOR: David Brin
Monday, August 25, 2014, 7:00 p.m.AVAILABLE FROM: Barnes & Nobles and other fine booksellers. 

Overview from Barnes & Noble:

Bestselling, award-winning futurist David Brin returns to globe-spanning, high concept SF with Existence.

Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’ something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”

Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.

IMAGE CREDITS: The cover image for Lexicon is courtesy of Micro-Sites in the UK. The cover for Existence is from MacMillan, the book's publisher.