One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence; Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili; The Ice House by Tim Clare; Big Cat by Gwyneth Jones; Smoke in the Glass by Chris Humphreys
After publishing a string of fantasy novels, Mark Lawrence rings the changes with One Word Kill (47North, £4.99), a short and punchy science fiction novel set in the mid-1980s featuring quantum physics, role-playing games and meditations on life and death. Nick Hayes is just 15 when he’s told he has an aggressive form of leukaemia – the disease that killed his father – and only a 50% chance of surviving for five years. Lawrence hooks the reader on the first page with the line: “But as it turned out, I would die even before February ... ” The novel shuttles between Nick’s hospital visits, school life and weekly Dungeons & Dragons sessions, which serve as his escape from an overwhelming reality. Things become very strange, however, when events in the role-playing game start to mirror those in the real world, and a mysterious stalker offers Nick the chance to survive – at a cost. With scalpel-sharp prose, surprising plot twists and some acute social observations, Lawrence blends youth culture in the 80s, the immersive camaraderie of RPG culture and exhilarating speculations on the nature of quantum mechanics. One Word Kill is the first novel of the Impossible Times trilogy.
Continue reading...via Science fiction books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2vW6p5z
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