Date: January 26, 2015-7:00 p.m.
Publisher: Tor Books
Meeting
Location: Barnes & 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.
Title: The Rapture of the Nerds
Author: Cory Doctorow and
Charles Stross
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates LLC
Available
from: Fine booksellers, including Barnes
& Noble
Meeting
Location: Barnes & 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.
