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Head below for the full list of science fiction titles heading your way in November!

Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. You can also find horror titles scheduled for 2020 here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Note: Release dates are subject to change.

 

WEEK ONE (November 3)

Firefly: Generations—Tim Lebbon (Titan)

On an Outer Rim moon, Captain Malcolm Reynolds ends a card game the lucky winner of an old map covered in mysterious symbols. The former owner insists it’s worthless; back on Serenity, River Tam is able to interpret it. The map points the way to one of the Arks: legendary generation ships that brought humans from Earth-That-Was to the ’Verse. As the crew approach the aged floating ship, they find it isn’t quite as dead as it first seemed…

1637: No Peace Beyond the Line (Ring of Fire #21)—Eric Flint, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)

It’s 1637 in the Caribbean. Commander Eddie Cantrell and his ally and friend Admiral Martin Tromp start it off with some nasty surprises for Spain, whose centuries-long exploitation of the New World has run unchecked. Until now. The battle for the New World has not merely begun; it is a fight to the finish.

The Preserve—Ariel S. Winter (Atria)

Decimated by plague, the human population is now a minority. Robots—complex AIs almost indistinguishable from humans—are the ruling majority. Nine months ago, in a controversial move, the robot government opened a series of preserves, designated areas where humans can choose to live without robot interference. Now the preserves face their first challenge: someone has been murdered. Chief of Police Jesse Laughton on the SoCar Preserve is assigned to the case. Soon, it’s clear that the entire preserve system is in danger of collapsing. In order to protect humanity’s new way of life, Laughton must solve this murder before it’s too late.

This Virtual Night (Outworlds #2)—C.S. Friedman (DAW)

When deep-space travel altered the genes of the first interstellar colonists, Earth abandoned them. But some of the colonies survived, and a new civilization of mental and physical “Variants” has been established, centered around clusters of space stations known as the outworlds. Now the unthinkable has happened: a suicide assault has destroyed the life support system of a major waystation. All that is known about the young men responsible is that in their last living moments they were receiving messages from an uninhabited sector of space, and were playing a virtual reality game. Two unlikely allies have joined forces to investigate the incident: Ru Gaya, a mercenary explorer with a taste for high risk ventures, and game designer Micah Bello, who must find the parties responsible for the attack in order to clear his name.

The Alpha Enigma (Team Psi #1)—W. Michael Gear (DAW)

Dr. Timothy Ryan, head of the military psychiatric unit at Grantham Barracks, is meeting a new patient, a woman known as “Prisoner Alpha.” As she is being transferred, they are attacked by assassins, barely escaping with their lives. One shooter vanishes, leaving behind a dead companion unlike anyone Ryan has ever seen. But even more baffling is the puzzle of Alpha herself. She speaks in a strange tongue, and doodles in bars, dots, and little pictures like nothing Ryan has ever seen. Is she some sort of savant, or the most cunning spy he’s ever met?

Meanwhile, in Egypt, archaeologist Reid Farmer uncovers an 18th-Dynasty tomb that shouldn’t exist, filled with Mayan epigraphy, mathematics, and materials that didn’t exist 3,000 years ago. As a result of this discovery, Reid and forensic anthropologist Kilgore France—along with the sarcophagus they have found—are snatched away to a hidden lab to solve the enigma of a man lost in time.

As dark forces gather, Alpha makes an impossible escape from Grantham. Ryan quickly becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance, but with a team of unique allies, sets out to prove his innocence. Together, they must find Alpha and save Ryan before it is too late.

WEEK TWO (November 10)

The Book of Malachi—T. C. Farren (Titan)

Malachi, a mute thirty-year-old man, has just received an extraordinary job offer. In exchange for six months as a warden on a top-secret organ-farming project, Raizier Pharmaceuticals will graft Malachi a new tongue.
So Malachi finds himself on an oilrig among warlords and mass murderers. But are the prisoner-donors as evil as Raizier says? Do they deserve their fate? As doubt starts to grow, the stories of the desperate will not be silenced—not even his own. Covertly Malachi comes to know them, even the ones he fears, and he must make a choice—if he wants to save one, he must save them all. And risk everything, including himself.

The Chimera Code—Wayne Santos (Solaris)

If you need something done, they’re the best: a tough, resourceful mage, a lab-created genderless hacker and a cyborg with a big gun. But when they’re hired by a virtual construct to destroy the other copies of himself, and the down payment is a new magical skill, Cloke knows this job is going to be a league harder than anything they’ve ever done.

The Arrest—Jonathan Lethem (Ecco)

The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working…

Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Post-Arrest,  Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way.

XX—Rian Hughes (Overlook Press)

At Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, a radio telescope has detected a mysterious signal of extraterrestrial origin—a message that may be the first communication from an interstellar civilization. Has humanity made first contact? Is the signal itself a form of alien life? Could it be a threat? If so, how will the people of Earth respond?

Jack Fenwick, artificial intelligence expert, believes that he and his associates at tech startup Intelligencia can interpret the message and find a way to step into the realm the signal encodes. What they find is a complex alien network beyond anything mankind has imagined.

Drawing on Dada, punk, and the modernist movements of the twentieth century, XX is assembled from redacted NASA reports, artwork, magazine articles, secret transcripts, and a novel within a novel. Deconstructing layout and language in order to explore how ideas propagate, acclaimed designer and artist Rian Hughes’s debut novel presents a compelling vision of humanity’s unique place in the universe, and a realistic depiction of what might happen in the wake of the biggest scientific discovery in human history.

Nucleation—Kimberly Unger (Tachyon, November 13th)

Only the most elite Far Reaches deep-space pilots get to run waldos: robots controlled from thousands of lightyears away via neural integration and quantum entanglement. Helen and her navigator were heading the construction of a wormhole gate that would connect Earth to the stars… until a routine system check turned deadly.

As nasty rumors swarm around her, and overeager junior pilots jockey to take her place, Helen makes a startling discovery: microscopic alien life is devouring their corporate equipment. Is the Scale just mindless, extra-terrestrial bacteria? Or is it working—and killing—with a purpose?

While Helen struggles to get back into the pilot’s chair, and to communicate with the Scale, someone—or something—is trying to sabotage the Far Reaches project once and for all. They’ll have to get through Helen first.

 

WEEK THREE (November 17)

Stillicide—Cynan Jones (Catapult)

Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life.

The Saints of Salvation (Salvation #3)—Peter F. Hamilton (Del Rey)

Humanity is struggling to hold out against a hostile takeover by an alien race that claims to be on a religious mission to bring all sentient life to its God at the End of Time. But while billions of cocooned humans fill the holds of the Olyix’s deadly arkships, humankind is playing an even longer game than the aliens may have anticipated. From an ultra-secret spy mission to one of the grandest battles ever seen, no strategy is off the table. Will a plan millennia in the making finally be enough to defeat this seemingly unstoppable enemy? And what secrets are the Olyix truly hiding in their most zealously protected stronghold?

 

WEEK FOUR (November 24)

Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology—S.B. Divya & Mur Lafferty (Eds.) (Titan)

Since 2005, Escape Pod has been at the forefront of a new fiction revolution, bringing the finest short fiction to millions of listeners worldwide. Now editors Mur Laffterty and S.B. Divya bring you fifteen science fiction stories from fan-favourite authors, including Beth Cato, Cory Doctorow, Greg Van Eekhout, John Scalzi, Kameron Hurley, Ken Liu, Mary Robinette Kowal, Maurice Broaddus, Mur Lafferty, NK Jemisin, Sarah Gailey, T. Kingfisher, Tim Pratt, Tina Connolly, and Tobias Buckell.

Ready Player Two—Ernest Cline (Ballantine)

Days after winning OASIS founder James Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything. Hidden within Halliday’s vaults, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the OASIS a thousand times more wondrous—and addictive—than even Wade dreamed possible. With it comes a new riddle, and a new quest and an unexpected, impossibly powerful, and dangerous new rival awaits, one who’ll kill millions to get what he wants. Wade’s life and the future of the OASIS are again at stake, but this time the fate of humanity also hangs in the balance.

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