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Science Fiction
December 2025 |
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In this Issue:
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Open Minds, Open Worlds “When a population is dependent on a machine, they are hostages of the men who tend the machines.”
– Robert A. Heinlein, "The Roads Must Roll"
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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The Merge
by Grace Walker
How far would you go to never say goodbye? Laurie is sixty-five and living with Alzheimer's. Her daughter Amelia can't bear to see her mother's mind fade. Faced with the reality of losing her forever, Amelia signs them up to take part in the world's first experimental merging process for Alzheimer's patients, in which Laurie's ailing mind will be transferred into Amelia's healthy body and their consciousness will be blended as one. However, as they prepare to move to The Village, a luxurious rehabilitation center for those who have merged, they quickly begin to question whether everything is really as it seems.
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There Is No Antimemetics Division by QntmHumanity is under assault by malevolent antimemes--ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself--in this whip-smart tale of science-fiction horror, an entirely reimagined and expanded version of the beloved online novel.
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When We Were Real
by Daryl Gregory
When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, his best friend Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last adventure: a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last with everyone barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop, Ghost City, where the answer to who is running the simulation may await.
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Simultaneous
by Eric Heisserer
While working a Homeland Security case, Predictive Analytics agent Grant Lukather meets Sarah Newcomb, a therapist who uses past-life hypnosis in her treatment and has recently stumbled upon a phenomenon that seems to defy logic. Grant soon follows this thread to another crime: a copycat killer case in Colorado. With the help of one of Sarah's patients, they embark upon an investigation that spans multiple states, timelines, and consciousnesses. With limited time and only a tenuous grasp of how this phenomenon works, the unlikely trio are in a race for their lives - past, present, and future.
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Classic Hugo Award Winners
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Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret.
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The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
Decades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the hands of poor street urchins Nell and Harv. The Primer in Nell's hands has the potential to upend everything for both parties.
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The Sirens of Titan
by Jr. Vonnegut, Kurt
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.
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Blackout
by Connie Willis
Something's gone wrong in 2060 Oxford, where historians conduct their research via time-travel. Thus, with their access to the 21st century inexplicably barred, scholars Michael, Merope, and Polly find themselves stranded in World War II-era Britain, facing air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs, dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most incorrigible children in all of history -- to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control.
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The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
by Sofia Samatar
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes--literally--when he is yanked 'upstairs' and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship's university alongside the elite. Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as 'the professor,' a weary idealist and descendent of the Chained who has spent her career striving for validation. Together, the boy and the woman will embark on a transformative journey to grasp the design of the chains that fetter them both.
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Liberty's Daughter
by Naomi Kritzer
Beck Garrison lives on a seastead, an archipelago of constructed platforms and old cruise ships, assembled by libertarian separatists a generation ago. She's grown up comfortable and sheltered, but starts doing odd jobs for pocket money. To her surprise, she finds that she's the only detective that a debt slave can afford to hire to track down a woman's missing sister. When she tackles this investigation, she learns things about life on the other side of the waterline - not to mention about herself and her father that she did not expect. And she finds out that some people will stop at nothing to protect their secrets.
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The First Sister
by Linden A. Lewis
First Sister has no name and no voice. As a priestess of the Sisterhood, she travels the stars alongside the soldiers of Earth and Mars—the same ones who own the rights to her body and soul. When her former captain abandons her, First Sister’s hopes for freedom are dashed when she is forced to stay on her ship with no friends, no power, and a new captain—Saito Ren—whom she knows nothing about but has been commanded to spy on.
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Aurora Rising
by Amie Kaufman
The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the Academy would touch. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline-cases and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy..
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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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