March roars in like a space lion (just go with it) with the much-hyped novelization of The Last Jedi, which purports to be full of intriguing scenes that we didn’t see in the movie. But that’s not all there is to read: you might continue with Nancy Kress’s Yesterday’s Kin series; pick up the latest from Tahereh Mafi; consider the implications of Nick Clark Windo’s The Feed; check out Victor LaValle’s take on Frankenstein, now become the Destroyer; or go to an ecologically damaged future with Kelly Robson in Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, among plenty of other scientifical options!
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
Zero Limit—Jeremy K. Brown (March 6, 47North)
For war hero Caitlin Taggart, mining work on the Moon is dirty, low pay, and high risk. But no risk seems too extreme if it helps her return to Earth and the daughter she loves more than life itself. Offered a dangerous, long-shot chance to realize that dream, Caitlin will gamble with more than just her life. By leading a ragtag crew of miners on a perilous assignment to harvest an asteroid, Caitlin could earn a small fortune. More importantly, it would give her clearance to return to Earth. But when an unexpected disaster strikes the mission, Caitlin is plunged into a race to save not only herself, but every human being on Earth.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi—Jason Fry (March 6, Del Rey)
From the ashes of the Empire has arisen another threat to the galaxy’s freedom: the ruthless First Order. Fortunately, new heroes have emerged to take up arms—and perhaps lay down their lives—for the cause. Rey, the orphan strong in the Force; Finn, the ex-stormtrooper who stands against his former masters; and Poe Dameron, the fearless X-wing pilot, have been drawn together to fight side-by-side with General Leia Organa and the Resistance. But the First Order’s Supreme Leader Snoke and his merciless enforcer Kylo Ren are adversaries with superior numbers and devastating firepower at their command. Against this enemy, the champions of light may finally be facing their extinction. Their only hope rests with a lost legend: Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. Written with input from director Rian Johnson, this official adaptation of Star Wars: The Last Jedi expands on the film to include scenes from alternate versions of the script and other additional content.
Queen of the Struggle (Memory Thief #2)—Nik Korpon (March 6, Angry Robot)
Overthrowing the tyrannical Tathadann government should have been cause for celebration. But as Eitan City announces its independence, soldiers from the northern province of Vårgmannskjør storm the ceremony and annex the city. The cruelties of the Tathadann soon pale beside their new rulers’ atrocities. Henraek finds himself resettled in the north, in a city where the people seem happy and well… until its labor camps and enslaved spirits come to light. The rebellion must begin anew, in Eitan City and throughout Vårgmannskjør, and now the stakes are higher than ever.
If Tomorrow Comes (Yesterday’s Kin #2)—Nancy Kress (March 6, Tor Books)
Ten years after the Aliens left Earth, humanity succeeds in building a ship, Friendship, to follow them home to Kindred. Aboard are a crew of scientists, diplomats, and a squad of Rangers to protect them. But when the Friendship arrives, they find nothing they expected. No interplanetary culture, no industrial base—and no cure for the spore disease. A timeslip in the apparently instantaneous travel between worlds has occurred and far more than ten years have passed. Once again scientists find themselves in a race against time to save humanity and their kind from a deadly virus while a clock of a different sort runs down on a military solution no less deadly to all. Amid devastation and plague come stories of heroism and sacrifice and of genetic destiny and free choice, with its implicit promise of conscious change.
Destroyer—Victor LaValle & Dietrich Smith (March 6, BOOM! Studios)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein beseeched his creator for love and companionship, but in 2017, the monster has long discarded any notions of peace or inclusion. He has become the Destroyer, his only goal to eliminate the scourge of humanity from the planet. In this goal, he initially finds a willing partner in Dr. Baker, a descendant of the Frankenstein family who has lost her teenage son after an encounter with the police. While two scientists, Percy and Byron, initially believe they’re brought to protect Dr. Baker from the monster, they soon realize they may have to protect the world from the monster and Dr. Baker’s wrath. Written by lauded novelist Victor LaValle (The Devil In Silver, The Ballad of Black Tom), Destroyer is a harrowing tale exploring the legacies of love, loss, and vengeance placed firmly in the tense atmosphere and current events of the modern-day United States.
Restore Me—Tahereh Mafi (March 6, HarperCollins)
Juliette and Warner’s story continues in the electrifying fourth installment of Tahereh Mafi’s New York Times bestselling Shatter Me series. Juliette Ferrars thought she’d won. She took over Sector 45, was named the new Supreme Commander of North America, and now has Warner by her side. But when tragedy strikes, she must confront the darkness that dwells both around and inside her. Who will she become in the face of adversity? Will she be able to control the power she wields, and use it for good?
The Warrior Within—Angus McIntyre (March 6, Tor.com Publishing)
Karsman has a dozen different people living in his head, each the master of a different set of skills and hoping to gain mastery of Karsman’s body. He survives on a backwater planet dominated by the Muljaddy, a mostly ambivalent religious autocracy, where devotion and prayer can be traded in for subsistence wages and enough food to survive. Surrounded by artifacts of a long dead civilization, the population survives off its salvage, with Karsman eking out an uneventful life as the unofficial mayor of his small town. But that life is soon interrupted, when a group of commandos arrive, coming from the wastelands as only off-worlders could. They’ve come to kill a woman, or so they say. At first the commandos merely threaten as they search. Unable to find what they’re looking for, they begin to ratchet up their measures, separating the men from the women, instigating violent encounters, and eventually staging a coup against the Muljaddy and his Temple. Faced with the task of protecting his quiet town and a woman he might love from the commandos who could want to kill her, Karsman must balance between maintaining his personality and harnessing the personas whose skills he desperately needs.
Quietus—Tristan Palmgren (March 6, Angry Robot)
Niccolucio, a young Florentine Carthusian monk, leads a devout life until the Black Death kills all of his brothers, leaving him alone and filled with doubt. Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe racked by plague, is overwhelmed by the suffering. Unable to maintain her observer neutrality, she saves Niccolucio from the brink of death. Habidah discovers that neither her home’s plague nor her assignment on Niccolucio’s world are as she’s been led to believe. Suddenly the pair are drawn into a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.
Pacifica—Kristen Simmons (March 6, Tor Teen)
Young adult. Blue skies. Green grass. Clear ocean water. An island paradise like the ones that existed before the Melt. A lucky five hundred lottery winners will be the first to go, the first to leave their polluted, dilapidated homes behind and start a new life. It sounds perfect. Like a dream. The only problem? Marin Carey spent her childhood on those seas and knows there’s no island paradise out there. She’s corsario royalty, a pirate like her father and his father before him, and she knows a con when she sees one. So where are the First Five Hundred really going?
A Call to Vengeance (Manticore Ascendant #3)—David Weber, Timothy Zahn, Thomas Pope (March 6, Baen Books)
After the disastrous attack on the Manticoran home system by forces unknown, the Royal Manticoran Navy stands on the brink of collapse. A shadowy enemy with the resources to hurl warships across hundreds of light years seeks to conquer the Star Kingdom, while forces from within Manticore’s own government seek to discredit and weaken the Navy for their own political gain. It’s up to officers like Travis Long and Lisa Donnelly to defend the Star Kingdom and the Royal Manticoran Navy from these threats. The situation becomes even more dire when fresh tragedy strikes the Star Kingdom. While the House of Winton faces their enemies at home, Travis, Lisa, and the other officers of the Royal Manticoran Navy must reunite with old friends and join new allies to hunt down and eliminate the forces arrayed against them in a galaxy-spanning conspiracy.
WEEK TWO
Dayfall—Michael David Ares (March 13, Tor Books)
In the near future, patches of the northern hemisphere have been shrouded in years of darkness from a nuclear winter, and the water level has risen in the North Atlantic. The island of Manhattan, now ringed by a large seawall, is dark and isolated, and crime and thrives in the never-ending shadows of the once great city. When the sun finally begins to reappear, everything gets worse. A serial killer cuts a bloody swath across the city during the initial periods of daylight, and the Manhattan police, riddled with corruption and apathy, are at a loss. That’s when the mayor recruits Jon Phillips, a small-town Pennsylvania cop who single-handedly stopped a high-profile serial killer in his own area. When he realizes that he was chosen for reasons other than what he was told, Jon is forced to go on the run in the dark streets—and in the maze of the underground. Can he can save his own life, the woman of his dreams, and maybe even the whole city before the arrival of dayfall?
The Last Beginning—Lauren James (March 13, Sky Pony Press)
Young adult. Sixteen years ago, after a scandal that rocked the world, teenagers Katherine and Matthew vanished without a trace. Now Clove Sutcliffe is determined to find her long lost relatives. But where do you start looking for a couple who seem to have been reincarnated at every key moment in history? Who were Kate and Matt? Why were they born again and again? And who is the mysterious Ella, who keeps appearing at every turn in Clove’s investigation? For Clove, there is a mystery to solve in the past and a love to find in the future, and failure could cost the world everything.
Obsidio (Illuminae Files #3)—Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff (March 13, Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Young adult. Kady, Ezra, Hanna, and Nik narrowly escaped with their lives from the attacks on Heimdall station and now find themselves crammed with 2,000 refugees on the container ship, Mao. With the jump station destroyed and their resources scarce, the only option is to return to Kerenza—but who knows what they’ll find seven months after the invasion? Meanwhile, Kady’s cousin, Asha, survived the initial BeiTech assault and has joined Kerenza’s ragtag underground resistance. When Rhys—an old flame from Asha’s past—reappears on Kerenza, the two find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. With time running out, a final battle will be waged on land and in space, heros will fall, and hearts will be broken.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach—Kelly Robson (March 13, Tor.com Publishing)
Discover a shifting history of adventure as humanity clashes over whether to repair their ruined planet or luxuriate in a less tainted past. In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity’s ancestral habitat. She’s spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.
The Feed—Nick Clark Windo (March 13, Willam Morrow)
The Feed is accessible everywhere, by everyone, at any time. Every interaction, every emotion, every image can be shared through it; it is the essential tool everyone relies on to know and understand the thoughts and feelings of partners, parents, friends, children, colleagues, bosses, employees … in fact, of anyone and everyone else in the world. Tom and Kate use the Feed, but Tom has resisted its addiction, which makes him suspect to his family. After all, his father created it. But that opposition to constant connection serves Tom and Kate well when the Feed collapses after a horrific tragedy. The Feed’s collapse, taking modern society with it, leaves people scavenging to survive. And while the collapse has demolished the trappings of the modern world, it has also eroded trust. Tom and Kate have managed to protect themselves and their family. But then their six-year-old daughter, Bea, goes missing. Who has taken her? How do you begin to look for someone in a world without technology? And what happens when you can no longer even be certain that the people you love are really who they claim to be?
WEEK THREE
No new titles.
WEEK FOUR
Origamy—Rachel Armstrong (March 26, NewCon Press)
High concept science fiction adventure written by maverick scientist Rachel Armstong (currently a professor at Newcastle university), featuring Mobius, a member of an extended family circus troupe that has the ability to travel through spacetime using a technology that can draw fundamental cosmic threads from the ether. They use this ability to keep the universe in balance and the fabric of firmament healthy, but something is awry. A threat which they barely defeated in ages past is threatening to break through into our universe again, and no one knows if they can stop it a second time…
Bash Bash Revolution—Douglas Lain (March 27, Night Shade Books)
Seventeen-year-old Matthew Munson is ranked thirteenth in the state in Bash Bash Revolution, an outdated video game from 2002 that, in 2017, is still getting tournament play. He’s a high school dropout who still lives at home with his mom, doing little but gaming and moping. That is, until Matthew’s dad turns up again. Jeffrey Munson is a computer geek who’d left home eight years earlier to work on a top secret military project. Jeff has been a sporadic presence in Matthew’s life, and much to his son’s displeasure, insists on bonding over video games. The two start entering local tournaments together, where Jeff shows astonishing aptitude for Bash Bash Revolution in particular. Then, as abruptly as he appeared, Matthew’s father disappears again, just as he was beginning to let Jeff back into his life. The betrayal is life-shattering, and Matthew decides to give chase, in the process discovering the true nature of the government-sponsored artificial intelligence program his father has been involved in. Told as a series of conversations between Matthew and his father’s artificial intelligence program, Bash Bash Revolution is a wildly original novel of apocalypse and revolution, as well as a poignant story of broken family.
Flotsam—R.J. Theodore (March 27, Parvus Press)
Captain Talis just wants to keep her airship crew from starving, and maybe scrape up enough cash for some badly needed repairs. When an anonymous client offers a small fortune to root through a pile of atmospheric wreckage, it seems like an easy payday. The job yields an ancient ring, a forbidden secret, and a host of deadly enemies. Now on the run from cultists with powerful allies, Talis needs to unload the ring as quickly as possible. Her desperate search for a buyer and the fallout from her discovery leads to a planetary battle between a secret society, alien forces, and even the gods themselves. Talis and her crew have just one desperate chance to make things right before their potential big score destroys them all.
Void Black Shadow (Voidwitch #2)—Corey J. White (March 27, Tor.com Publishing)
Mars Xi is a living weapon, a genetically-manipulated psychic supersoldier with a body count in the thousands, and all she wanted was to be left alone. People who get involved with her get hurt, whether by MEPHISTO, by her psychic backlash, or by her acid tongue. It’s not smart to get involved with Mars, but that doesn’t stop some people from trying. The last time MEPHISTO came for Mars they took one of her friends with them. That was a mistake. A force hasn’t been invented that can stop a voidwitch on a rampage, and Mars won’t rest until she’s settled her debts.
