A disillusioned major, a highwaywoman, and a war raging across time…
The story of a time traveling thief turned reluctant hero, Kate Heartfield’s science fiction adventure Alice Payne Arrives is one of our favorite books of 2018—and now it’s nominated for a Nebula Award! We’re encoring the first two chapters below, in which you’ll meet notorious highway robber Alice Payne, her trusty automaton, and Major Prudence Zuniga—a time traveler on her seventy-somethingth attempt to save history.
I was about a third of the way through Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside when I realized I was reading a fantasy novel about the future.
Not in any literal sense, so far as I know; this is a secondary-world fantasy, set in a vaguely Renaissance-ish city-state. But the magic system in Foundryside is technological. I don’t mean that in a reversal-of-Clarke’s law sort of way; magic in Foundryside can be ineffable and slippery. What I mean is that it interacts with its society in many of the same ways information technology interacts with our own.
In February 1989, audiences saw, for the first time, a young Keanu Reeves lean close to a young Alex Winter and declare, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.”
It was a critical moment, not only in the plot of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but in pop culture. As the movie posters had it, history was about to be rewritten by two guys who couldn’t spell. It was a goofy movie, and most of the critics didn’t get it. Teenagers did, though. For those of us who were young in 1989, Bill and Ted gave us exactly the time travel movie we needed.
Now they might be able to do it again.
Jo Walton once wrote, fairly, that each of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels is about half as good as the one before it. By my math, that makes God Emperor of Dune (#4) about 12.5% of a classic, but it’s still worth reading.
It presents an argument that I think is fundamentally misguided, but it’s worth reading.
It’s about the ruminations of a man who turns into a worm, but it’s worth reading.
I know it’s worth reading because I’m still thinking about it three decades after the first time I read it.
There were science fiction and fantasy books with lesbian and bi women in them, back in the 1980s, when was a kid. But I didn’t know about them. They existed, but not in the stacks of paperbacks I borrowed from my local public library.
So lately I’ve been making up for one of the failures of the time and place in which I was born. I’ve been on a reading jag, focusing on SFF books with F/F relationships. And there are many! (Although never enough.) What makes me happiest is the sheer diversity of the love stories I’ve found. I don’t mean only demographically, although that too. There are mature and complicated relationships and there are quick, passionate affairs. There are slow magical sagas and fast techno thrillers.
A disillusioned major, a highwaywoman, and a war raging across time.
It’s 1788 and Alice Payne is the notorious highway robber, the Holy Ghost. Aided by her trusty automaton, Laverna, the Holy Ghost is feared by all who own a heavy purse.
It’s 1889 and Major Prudence Zuniga is once again attempting to change history—to save history—but seventy attempts later she’s still no closer to her goal.
It’s 2016 and… well, the less said about 2016 the better!
But in 2020 the Farmers and the Guides are locked in battle; time is their battleground, and the world is their prize. Only something new can change the course of the war. Or someone new.
Little did they know, but they’ve all been waiting until Alice Payne arrives.
Kate Heartfield’s science fiction adventure Alice Payne Arrives is available November 6th from Tor.com Publishing.
In February 1989, audiences saw, for the first time, a young Keanu Reeves lean close to a young Alex Winter and declare, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.”
It was a critical moment, not only in the plot of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but in pop culture. As the movie posters had it, history was about to be rewritten by two guys who couldn’t spell. It was a goofy movie, and most of the critics didn’t get it. Teenagers did, though. For those of us who were young in 1989, Bill and Ted gave us exactly the time travel movie we needed.
Now they might be able to do it again.
