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Science Fiction
February 2026 |
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In this Issue:
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Open Minds, Open Worlds “Any time we try to envision a different world--without poverty, prisons, capitalism, war--we are engaging in science fiction. When we can dream those realities together, that's when we can begin to build them right here and now.” – Walidah Imarisha
Welcome to the FCPL Science Fiction Newsletter. This bi-monthly newsletter provides reading suggestions for science fiction books both new and old. All titles will be available in print through the Forsyth County library system, and some are available for immediate download in e-book or audiobook format on your phone or tablet! Download the Libby and Hoopla apps or ask a librarian about our digital library for more information.
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Of Monsters and Mainframes
by Barbara Truelove
Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans. To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team of monsters: a werewolf. An engineer built from the dead. A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. A fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.
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Detour
by Jeff Rake
Ryan Crane wasn't looking for trouble--just a cup of coffee. But when he spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt. As thanks for Ryan's quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn's moon Titan. He crews up and ventures into a new frontier, eventually returning to Earth as a hero. However, when the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different on Earth. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting.
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Notes from a Regicide
by Isaac Fellman
Set some thousand years in the future, this story follows Giffon Keming, whose second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to be trans, paid for his transition, and tried to love him as best they could. But Griffon's new parents had troubles of their own--both were deeply scarred by the lives they lived before Griffon, the struggles they faced to become themselves, and the failed revolution that drove them from their homeland. When they died, they left an unfillable hole in his heart. Griffon's best clue to his parents' lives is in his father's journal, written from a jail cell while he awaited execution. Stained with blood, grief, and tears, these pages struggle to contain the love story of two artists on fire. With the journal in hand, Griffon hopes to pin down his relationship to these wonderful and strange people for whom time always seemed to be running out.
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Flight of the Sparrow: An Intergalactic Adventure
by Fallon Demornay
Nimah may have been born a RIM-rat, a hardscrabble kid from the far reaches of the galaxy, but now that she's a well-respected cadet at the prestigious STARS military academy, she's put her past behind her. That is, until her infamous space pirate grandmother is accused of setting off a bomb at the millennial summit for United Planetary Nation leaders. When the connection between the two women is exposed, Nimah is expelled from STARS. Devastated by the loss of all that she's worked for, she still doesn't quite believe that the woman who has always been the voice of refugees across the galaxy is actually a killer. When a member of her grandmother's old crew tracks Nimah down, Nimah must make a difficult choice.
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Science Fiction by Latino Americans
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Reclaim the Stars: 17 Tales Across Realms & Space
by Zoraida Córdova (editor)
In this collection of stories, follow princesses warring in space, haunting ghost stories in Argentina, mermaids off the coast of the Caribbean, swamps that whisper secrets, and many more realms explored and unexplored; this collection of seventeen short stories breaks borders and realms to prove that stories are truly universal.
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The Shamshine Blind
by Paz Pardo
In an alternate 2009 where “psychopigments”—colorful chemicals that produce almost any human emotion upon contact—are both pharmaceutical cure-alls and popular recreational drugs, Psychopigment Enforcement Agent Kay Curtida works a beat chasing down small time crooks. However, when an old friend shows up with a tantalizing lead on a career-making case, Curtida’s humdrum existence suddenly gets a boost. Little does she know that this case will send her down a tangled path of conspiracy and lead to an overdue reckoning with her family and with the truth of her own emotions.
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Chicano Frankenstein
by Daniel A. Olivas
A modern retelling of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley classic. An unnamed paralegal, brought back to life through a controversial process, maneuvers through a near-future world that both needs and resents him. As the United States president spouts anti-reanimation rhetoric and giant pharmaceutical companies rake in profits, the man falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez. His world expands as he meets her network of family and friends, setting him on a course to discover his first-life history, which the reanimation process erased. With elements of science fiction, horror, political satire and romance, Chicano Frankenstein confronts bigotry and the question of what it truly means to be human.
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Infomocracy: Book One of the Centenal Cycle
by Malka Older
It's been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line. With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?
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Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies. Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released as the city is gripped by an alien terror. The fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades. A reckoning is due at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of brick and wood and steel under the vaults of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape.
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Foreigner by C. J. Cherryh It had been nearly five centuries since the starship Phoenix, lost in space and desperately searching for the nearest G5 star, had encountered the planet of the atevi. On this alien world, law was kept by the use of registered assassination, alliances were defined by individual loyalties, not geographical borders, and war became inevitable once humans and one faction of atevi established a working relationship. It was a war that humans had no chance of winning on this planet so many light-years from home. Now, nearly two hundred years after that conflict, humanity has traded its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no atevi will ever visit. Then the sole human the treaty allows into atevi society is marked for an assassin's bullet. The work of an isolated lunatic? The interests of a particular faction? Or the consequence of one human's fondness for a species which has fourteen words for betrayal and not a single word for love?
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Wool
by Hugh Howey
In a ruined and toxic future, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo's rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside. His fateful decision unleashes a drastic series of events. An unlikely candidate is appointed to replace him: Juliette, a mechanic with no training in law, whose special knack is fixing machines. Now Juliette is about to be entrusted with fixing her silo, and she will soon learn just how badly her world is broken. The silo is about to confront what its history has only hinted about and its inhabitants have never dared to whisper. Uprising.
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Walkaway
by Cory Doctorow
After watching the breakdown of modern society, Hubert Etc. really has no where left to be—except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society and walk away. Now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter—from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system. It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death.
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Your Virtual Library is Open 24/7 |
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Contact us for more great books! |
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Forsyth County Public Library
660 W. Fifth St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101
336-703-2665forsythlibrary.org |
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