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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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There’s not quite as much SPACE! on the docket as there has been in the preceding months, but that doesn’t mean August’s science fiction releases lack excitement. Head out on a clone-staffed generation ship in Marina Lostetter’s Noumenon; catch up with another Spider-Man, Miles Morales, in Jason Reynolds’ new Spider-Man novel; consider a world where you have to pay for every word you speak in Gregory Scott Katsoulis’s All Rights Reserved; and venture forth on a whole host of other adventures.

Keep track of all the new releases here. Note: All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher.

 

WEEK ONE

Omega (Infinity Division #2)—Jus Accardo (August 1, Entangled Teen)
Young adult. Eighteen-year-old Ashlee Sinclair had her life meticulously mapped out until a single moment of careless rebellion stole it all away. With one bad decision, three people were dead, including Noah Anderson, the son of one of the most prominent families in town. His father runs The Infinity Division, a company that has unlocked the technology to travel between parallel Earths. For a price, they will pluck a lost relative from another universe, wipe their mind, and deliver them right to your doorstep. They call them Reincarnates. In retribution for Noah’s death, the Andersons waged war against Ash and her family. With nothing left to lose, Ash makes one last plea, appealing to Corey, Noah’s younger brother. But they’re attacked and Corey is killed. She almost joins him—until a ghost sweeps in and saves the day. Noah. At first she thinks he’s a Reincarnate, but something is wrong with the way he looks at her. She finds herself drawn to the fire she sees in his eyes. When the man who killed Corey frames them both, labeling Noah and his friends Skips—cross dimensional terrorists—they end up on the run. Soon Ash finds that there’s so much more to this than clearing her own name.

The Best of Bova: Volume 3—Ben Bova (August 1, Baen Books)
These stories span the five decades of Bova’s incandescent career. Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama. Here are journeys into the mind-bending landscapes of virtual worlds and alternate realities. Here you’ll also find stories of humanity’s astounding future on Earth, on Mars and in the Solar System beyond—stories that always get the science right. And Bova’s gathering of deeply realized, totally human characters are the heroic, brave, tricky, sometimes dastardly engineers, astronauts, corporate magnates, politicians, and scientists who will make these futures possible—and those who often find that the problems of tomorrow are always linked to human values, and human failings, that are as timeless as the stars.

Blight—Alexandra Duncan (August 1, Greenwillow)
Young adult. Seventeen-year-old Tempest Torres has lived on the AgraStar farm north of Atlanta, Georgia, since she was found outside its gates at the age of five. Now she’s part of the security force guarding the fence and watching for scavengers—people who would rather steal genetically engineered food from the Company than work for it. When a group of such rebels accidentally sets off an explosion in the research compound, it releases into the air a blight that kills every living thing in its path—including humans. With blight-resistant seeds in her pocket, Tempest teams up with a scavenger boy named Alder and runs for help. But when they finally arrive at AgraStar headquarters, they discover that there’s an even bigger plot behind the blight—and it’s up to them to stop it from happening again.

Of Jenny and the Aliens—Ryan Gebhart (August 1, Candlewick)
Young adult. Ten years after Earth sent messages out into deep space, there has been an answer. Music from a distant planet has reached our radios. Are aliens about to invade? No one knows, and almost-eighteen-year-old Derek doesn’t really care, because at a wild end-of-the-world party, Jennifer Novak invites him to play beer pong. And things … progress from there. Derek is in love. Deeply, hopelessly in love. He wants it all—marriage, kids, growing old on a beach in Costa Rica. Jenny is The One. But Jenny has other plans, and they may or may not include Derek. He’ll try anything to win her—even soliciting advice from the alien who shows up in his hometown. This alien might just be the answer to Derek’s problem. But is Derek willing to risk starting an interstellar war just to get the girl? And just how far will he travel to discover the mysteries of the universe—and love?

Noumenon—Marina Lostetter (August 1, Harper Voyager)
In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth’s solar system. But where do we go? Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics, and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon, or something manufactured. The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind’s greatest ambition—to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy— is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie’s mysterious star and explore its origins—and implications. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes—an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.

Miles Morales (A Spider-Man Novel)—Jason Reynolds (August 1, Marvel Press)
Young adult. Miles Morales is just your average teenager. Dinner every Sunday with his parents, chilling out playing old-school video games with his best friend, Ganke, crushing on brainy, beautiful poet Alicia. He’s even got a scholarship spot at the prestigious Brooklyn Visions Academy. Oh, yeah: and he’s Spider-Man. But lately, Miles’s spidey-sense has been on the fritz. When a misunderstanding leads to his suspension from school, Miles begins to question his abilities. After all, his dad and uncle were Brooklyn jack-boys with criminal records. Maybe kids like Miles aren’t meant to be superheroes. Maybe Miles should take his dad’s advice and focus on saving himself. As Miles tries to get his school life back on track, he can’t shake the vivid nightmares that continue to haunt him. Nor can he avoid the relentless buzz of his spidey-sense every day in history class, amidst his teacher’s lectures on the historical benefits of slavery and the importance of the modern-day prison system. But after his scholarship is threatened, Miles uncovers a chilling plot, one that puts his friends, his neighborhood, and himself at risk. It’s time for Miles to suit up.

Children of the Divide (Children of a Dead Earth #3)—Patrick S. Tomlinson (August 1, Angry Robot)
A new generation comes of age eighteen years after humanity arrived on the colony planet Gaia. Now threats from both within and outside their Trident threaten everything they’ve built. The discovery of an alien installation inside Gaia’s moon, terrorist attacks and the kidnap of a man’s daughter stretch the community to breaking point, but only two men stand a chance of solving all three mysteries before the makeshift planetary government shuts everything down.

The Naked World (Jubilee Cycle #2)—Eli K. P. William (August 1, Talos)
In a world stripped bare of digital images and promotainment, unveiled with the audiovisual overlay of the ImmaNet, Amon Kenzaki awakens, lost and alone. He must now travel deep into the District of Dreams in search of Rashana Birla, the one person that might help him unravel the mystery of jubilee. But deprived of the apps and informational tools he’s depended on his entire life, traversing the largest bankdeath camp on Earth is no easy task. Amon soon finds himself face to face with two dangerous groups: a cult called the Opportunity Scientists, who preach bizarre superstitions about economic salvation, and a supposedly humanitarian organization called the Philanthropy Syndicate, whose mandate of serving the poor conceals rapacious motives. Amon takes refuge in Xenocryst, but when political forces threaten the community’s existence and the lives of its members, he is forced to team up with a vending-machine designer, an Olympic runner, a fertility researcher, a corporate tycoon, and many others to expose the heinous secret festering at the heart of the action-transaction market he once served.

The Clockwork Dynasty—Daniel H. Wilson (August 1, Doubleday)
Present day: When a young anthropologist specializing in ancient technology uncovers a terrible secret concealed in the workings of a 300-year-old mechanical doll, she is thrown into a hidden world that lurks just under the surface of our own. With her career and her life at stake, June Stefanov will ally with a remarkable traveler who exposes her to a reality she never imagined, as they embark on an around-the-world adventure and discover breathtaking secrets of the past. Russia, 1725: In the depths of the Kremlin, the tsar’s loyal mechanician brings to life two astonishingly humanlike mechanical beings. Peter and Elena are a brother and sister fallen out of time, possessed with uncanny power, and destined to serve great empires. Struggling to blend into pre-Victorian society, they are pulled into a legendary war that has raged for centuries.

 

WEEK TWO

Binary System—Eric Brown (August 8, Solaris)
After surviving a catastrophic starship blow-out, Delia Kemp finds herself stranded on the inhospitable, ice-bound world of Valinda, populated by the Skelt, a race of hostile aliens who will stop at nothing to obtain Delia’s scientific knowledge. Escaping from the Skelt – assisted by a friendly chimpanzee-like alien and a giant spider-crab – she travels south through a phantasmagorical landscape as the long winter comes to an end and the short, blistering summer approaches. Pursued by the Skelt, she and her companions make a death-defying dash across the planet’s inimical equator to meet up with fellow survivors from the starship, and a final journey to the valley of Mahkanda – where salvation just might be awaiting.

 

WEEK THREE

Ferocious (Vicarious #2)—Paula Stokes (August 15, Tor Teen)
When Winter Kim finds out that her sister is dead and that she has a brother she never knew about, only two things matter—finding what’s left of her family and killing the man who destroyed her life. Her mission leads her from St. Louis to Los Angeles back to South Korea, where she grew up. Things get increasingly dangerous once Winter arrives in Seoul. Aided by her friends Jesse and Sebastian, Winter attempts to infiltrate an international corporation to get close to her target, a nefarious businessman named Kyung. But keeping her last remaining loved ones out of the line of fire proves difficult, and when all seems to be lost, Winter must face one last devastating decision: is revenge worth sacrificing everything for? Or can she find a spark of hope in the darkness that threatens to engulf her?

 

WEEK FOUR

The Massacre of Mankind—Stephen Baxter (August 22, Crown)
It has been 14 years since the Martians invaded England. The world has moved on, always watching the skies but content that we know how to defeat the Martian menace. Machinery looted from the abandoned capsules and war-machines has led to technological leaps forward. The Martians are vulnerable to earth germs. The Army is prepared. So when the signs of launches on Mars are seen, there seems little reason to worry. Unless you listen to one man, Walter Jenkins, the narrator of Wells’ book. He is sure that the Martians have learned, adapted, understood their defeat. He is right. Thrust into the chaos of a new invasion, a journalist—sister-in-law to Walter Jenkins—must survive, escape and report on the war. In this sequel to The War of the Worlds, the Massacre of Mankind has begun.

Starfire: A Red Peace—Spencer Ellsworth (August 22, Tor.com Publishing)
Half-breed human star navigator Jaqi, working the edges of human-settled space on contract to whoever will hire her, stumbles into possession of an artifact that the leader of the Rebellion wants desperately enough to send his personal guard after. An interstellar empire and the fate of the remnant of humanity hang in the balance. Spencer Ellsworth’s space opera has space battles between giant bugs, sun-sized spiders, planets of cyborgs and a heroine with enough grit to bring down the galaxy’s newest warlord.

 

WEEK FIVE

All Rights Reserved (Word$ #1)—Gregory Scott Katsoulis (August 29, Harlequin Teen)
Young adult. Speth Jime is anxious to deliver her Last Day speech and celebrate her transition into adulthood. The moment she turns fifteen, Speth must pay for every word she speaks (“Sorry” is a flat ten dollars and a legal admission of guilt), for every nod ($0.99/sec), for every scream ($0.99/sec) and even every gesture of affection. She’s been raised to know the consequences of falling into debt, and can’t begin to imagine the pain of having her eyes shocked for speaking words that she’s unable to afford. But when Speth’s friend Beecher commits suicide rather than work off his family’s crippling debt, she can’t express her shock and dismay without breaking her Last Day contract and sending her family into Collection. Backed into a corner, Speth finds a loophole: rather than read her speech—rather than say anything at all—she closes her mouth and vows never to speak again. Speth’s unexpected defiance of tradition sparks a media frenzy, inspiring others to follow in her footsteps, and threatens to destroy her, her family and the entire city around them.

The Dazzling Heights (Thousandth Floor #2)—Katharine McGee (August 29, HarperCollins)
Young adult. Leda is haunted by memories of what happened on the worst night of her life. She’ll do anything to make sure the truth stays hidden—even if it means trusting her enemy. Watt just wants to put everything behind him…until Leda forces him to start hacking again. Will he do what it takes to be free of her for good? When Rylin wins a scholarship to an upper-floor school, her life transforms overnight. But being there means seeing the boy whose heart she broke, and who broke hers in return. Avery is tormented by her love for the one person in the world she can never have. She’s desperate to be with him… no matter the cost. And then there’s Callioe, the mysterious, bohemian beauty who arrives in New York, determined to cause a stir. And she knows exactly where to begin. But unbeknownst to them all, someone is watching their every move, someone with revenge in mind. And in a world of such dazzling heights, just one wrong step can mean a devastating fall.

Zero Repeat Forever—G. S. Prendergast (August 29, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Young adult. He has no voice or name, only a rank: Eighth. He doesn’t know the details of the mission, only the directives that hum in his mind. Dart the humans. Leave them where they fall. His job is to protect his Offside. Let her do the shooting. Until a human kills her… Sixteen-year-old Raven is at summer camp when the terrifying armored Nahx invade. Isolated in the wilderness, Raven and her fellow campers can only stay put. Await rescue. Raven doesn’t like feeling helpless, but what choice does she have? Then a Nahx kills her boyfriend. Thrown together in a violent, unfamiliar world, Eighth and Raven should feel only hate and fear. But when Raven is injured, and Eighth deserts his unit, their survival comes to depend on trusting each other.

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