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Baxter, Stephen :
The H-Bomb Girl
(UK: Faber and Faber 978-0-571-23279-6, £9.99, 268pp, hardcover, September 2007)
Historical SF/suspense novel set during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, about a 14-year-old girl in Liverpool who is key to a possible US/Soviet confrontation.
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Faber's website has this brief description.
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Farah Mendlesohn reviews it in her blog The Intergalactic-Playground: "Stephen Baxter's The H-Bomb Girl is exactly the kind of competent, well written, complex sf book I expect from an author of this calibre."
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Gary K. Wolfe reviewed the book in the September issue of Locus Magazine, calling the book "a substantial novel drawing on autobiographical elements, Baxter's longstanding fascination with history, and his growing confidence in his ability to drive a novel primarily through character development." Wolfe concluded "The H-Bomb Girl is a pretty exhilarating apocalypse."
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MacLeod, Ken :
The Execution Channel
(UK: Orbit 978-1-84149-348-0, £17.99, 307pp, hardcover, April 2007)
Near-future SF novel about an series of terrorist attacks in Britain triggered by what seems to be a nuclear bombing of a US airbase in Scotland.
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The Orbit edition listed here is the first edition; Tor's June US edition was earlier listed here.
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Gary K. Wolfe's review from the May issue of Locus Magazine is posted here online; Wolfe said the book "is pure SF. It not only draws on traditions of the disaster novel, the alternate-world scenario, and the cyberthriller, but early on begins dropping hints that something more radical may be at stake..."
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McAuley, Paul :
Cowboy Angels
(UK: Gollancz 978-0-575-07934-2, £18.99, 390pp, hardcover, September 2007)
SF technothriller in which Turing gates have opened a variety of alternate Americas to each other beginning in 1963, leading to a series of wars that Jimmy Carter, elected president in 1984, vows to end.
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Gollancz' website has this description.
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McAuley's official site has this extract.
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Locus Magazine ran reviews by Nick Gevers in its August issue, and Gary K. Wolfe in its September issue. Wolfe's review remarks "At times McAuley seems to be aiming for the James Patterson school of thriller writing, with its short chapters with contrived cliffhanger endings, but then, about halfway through the novel, when the characters are fleeing across rural Oklahoma, you realize that he can write landscapes with keen observation and sensitivity, and that he seems to be growing interested in his characters almost despite himself."
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Gevers writes "Cowboy Angels, a magisterial alternate worlds tale, takes the means and modes of the thriller and meshes them so perfectly with ambitious political allegory that for the first time a McAuley SF/thriller succeeds on every level, every technique complementing every other, hardboiled characters and dialogue ably supporting momentous themes and supplying a well-measured turn of humor. The result is one of the best SF novels of the year."
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McAuley, Paul :
Players
(UK: Simon & Schuster UK 978-0-7432-7617-7, £18.99, 390pp, hardcover, February 2007)
SF thriller about murders near Portland, Oregon, that are apparently related to a post-apocalyptic, role-playing computer game.
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Simon & Schuster's has a page for the book, but no description or excerpt.
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McAuley's in print page on his site has the book flap description, and this extract.
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Strange Horizons posted this review by Karen Burnham earlier this year, calling it "an only lightly science-fictional crime thriller". She concludes "In every way, it follows the conventions of the thriller, even to the end, which sees the villains defeated, law and order reassert themselves, and more-or-less-virtuous normality restored. This makes for a perfectly satisfying reading experience, but if readers are expecting something more, it will leave them waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were." And then hopes "that people who pick up this lightly written, enjoyable thriller for a plane ride or an afternoon's summer reading will follow its author back to the realm of seriously extrapolated, thrilling, and interesting science fiction."
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Morgan, Richard :
Black Man
(UK: Gollancz 978-0-575-07513-9, £14.99, 546pp, hardcover, May 2007)
SF thriller about Marsalis, a genetically bred warrior or "thirteen" who's returned from exile on Mars to help track down another thirteen who's escaped and gone on a killing spree.
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The Gollancz edition here was the first edition; listed here earlier was Del Rey's US edition, retitled Thirteen.
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The Gollancz website has this description, with links to an author Q&A and a PDF extract.
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The site also has excerpts from reviews, including Lisa Tuttle's in The Times -- "BLACK MAN is exciting and extremely violent but is driven by passionate moral concerns." -- and Eric Brown's in The Guardian: "Brilliantly plotted and unremittingly violent."
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Reynolds, Alastair :
The Prefect
(UK: Gollancz 978-0-575-07716-4, £17.99, 410pp, hardcover, April 2007, jacket illustration Chris Moore)
SF novel, set in the universe of Revelation Space and its three sequels, about a prefect in the utopian society Glitter Band whose murder investigation uncovers a takeover plot by a posthuman entity called Aurora.
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Gollancz' site has this description.
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The US edition is due in June 2008 from Ace.
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Strange Horizons posted this review by Martin Lewis in June.
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Nick Gevers reviewed the book in Locus Magazine in April, calling it "a long, very absorbing space opera" that is a prequel to the four previous Inhibitor novels, and concluding "This novel assesses hubris, complacency, corruption, and the insidious logic of terrorism with persuasive cogency; it is a fine, provocative portrait of utopia on the brink. The relentless narrative momentum it employs simply underscores the pertinent urgency of that topic."
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Roberts, Adam :
Land of the Headless
(UK: Gollancz 978-0-575-17588-7, £17.99, 275pp, hardcover, June 2007)
Far future SF novel about a society guided by fundamentalist religious dogma, where a high-tech form of beheading is served as punishment for crimes.
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Gollancz' website has this description.
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The author's website has this page for the book, with a description, excerpts from reviews, an extract from the book, and a commentary by the author.
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Nick Gevers reviewed it in the July '07 issue of Locus Magazine, noting that "The SF novels of Adam Roberts invariably center on jaw-dropping concepts extrapolated to wonderful, and satirical, extremes..." Gevers describes the novel's premise and calls it "a brilliant burlesque conceit, and Roberts exploits it in bravura fashion, reflecting soberly on economic marginalization and segregation even as he segues into elaborate farce in the manner of Robert Sheckley. That the literary touchstone of the novel is Marcel Proust adds a further strain of inspired oddness."
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