Thursday, June 25, 2020

Ten top books about remaking the future

"My latest series, The Salvation Sequence, is set in the far future after a catastrophe has scattered the human race across the stars, and sees us hunted," writes Peter F Hamilton in the Guardian. "The story follows a single goal that everyone shares, to defeat our enemy – which will finally allow us to reunite and live the life we once had. This quest for an ordinary existence is regarded as a destiny that’s worth fighting for."

Hamilton tagged ten top "stories of remaking the future that contain hope – or at least stability," including:
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

A multi-award-winning book, another far-future story where stability is achieved by empire and enforced by AIs. Planets live in harmony once they have been subjugated, but at huge cost. Leckie follows the story of one such warship of the empire that was destroyed, its AI mind now occupying a human body without understanding what being human really is.
Read about the other entries on Hamilton's list at the Guardian.

Ancillary Justice is among Gareth L. Powell's ten top spaceships in fiction, Stacey Berg's five speculative fiction books that obliterate the Bechdel Test, Andrew Liptak's six notable novels featuring Artificial Intelligence, and Jeff Somers's top five sci-fi novels that explore gender in unexpected and challenging ways.

--Marshal Zeringue