The Miasmic Mist by Stephen Grenfell

The new science fiction action-adventure novel, “The Miasmic Mist: Volume One: Sisters of Aphrodite”, by Stephen Grenfell tells the tale of several characters and the adventures they share, beginning in 1950s Britain. The novel is the first book in a planned trilogy. 

The novel follows the lives of five people: a brother and sister from the British aristocracy, James and Philippa Marchant, a young man, Daniel Gibson, and young woman, Emily Wilkinson, from less elevated backgrounds, and Kelly Aresti, who is the doppelganger of the female upper class woman in a parallel universe. The novel follows the characters from their school days in the 1950s to growing up and entering the workforce.

The men mainly go into military service in the Royal Marines, while the women have more varied paths. One woman becomes a lawyer while the other is studying to be a doctor. Philippa’s doppelganger Kelly is a practicing physician who is the first to pursue the evil presence that manifests itself.

“Baby boomers will certainly identify with the time frame as will others,” Grenfell explains. “There is much for all including much actual history of the time used as a backdrop to the story.”

read more @ Amazon and @ PR Web

Tin by Padraig Kenny

A science fiction fairy tale, set in a astonishingly realised mechanical world, Tin is a heart-stopping adventure about friendship, courage and finding your identity.

Imagine: the world you know is gone, in its place, a machinarium of Mechanicals, intelligent machines created with the sole purpose of serving mankind. The laws governing their creation are strict and above all the merging of human and mechanical is strictly forbidden.

Christopher is 'Proper': a real boy with a real soul, orphaned in a fire, he can remember nothing of his old life but vague images of his mother and father, cloaked in smoke and ash.

Now he works for an peculiar engineer, a maker of the eccentric, loyal and totally individual mechanicals who are Christopher's best friends; his only friends.

But after a devastating accident, a secret is revealed and Christopher's world is changed for ever...

What follows is a remarkable adventure, as Christopher discovers who he really is, and what it might mean to truly be human.

The fabulous women writers of Indian SF

From FactorDaily:

One does not really need a reason to celebrate the fabulous and fantastic women writers of India who’ve enriched science fiction – taking it in new directions with each tale they tell. Their stories are reason enough. The past few years have truly seen a global renaissance of fresh and original SF, and leading from the front have been the women writers, and the same holds true for India as well. Not surprising, when you consider the fact that it was an Indian lady who, over a century ago, wrote what is amongst the first pieces of feminist science fiction: Begum Rokeya Shakawat Hossain who in 1905 wrote Sultana’s Dream, with its portrayal of the feminist utopia of Ladyland, a full decade before Charlotte Gilman’s Herland.

And just as it was then, so it is now, with Indian women writers pushing the possibilities of the genre with their stories, which – while being rooted in our culture – have transcended borders, winning the hearts and minds of readers across the world with their universal appeal. There are so many writers one could list, not least given the fact that the markers of what constitutes speculative fiction is ever-expanding. So here then, are just some works from Indian women writers whose SF you should definitely be reading – if you haven’t already that is!

read more here @ FactorDaily

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

From The Verge:

In his debut novel, author Tom Sweterlitsch constructed a fascinating mystery with Tomorrow and Tomorrow, set in a virtual version of Pittsburgh after a terrorist attack leveled the city. In The Gone World, he introduces an even more ambitious investigation: one that jumps back and forth in time, and which could decide the fate of humanity. It’s a complicated, dazzling novel that keeps the reader hooked until the last pages.

NCIS agent Shannon Moss hops between 1997 and 2015 a handful of times, encountering wildly different futures as her immediate investigation [into her own brutal murder] progresses. She quickly discovers that there’s more to this murder than meets the eye.

These shifting futures let Sweterlitsch play with some big themes. How do our decisions, given enough time, change the future before us? What lengths will people go through to try to preserve the things that they love?

Review: Christopher Wild by Kathe Koja

..... he lives by his pen, his wit, his nerves, his temper, his ambitions, his appetites, 

his ability to manoeuvre on several fields at once, keeping free of the floods that wash others away .....

Synopsis: Three lives. One man. 

Marlowe lives three different lives in this story, each time awakening in an dark alley, living a new life. I am afraid that for me, the narrative did not work; it was incoherent and disjointed (each paragraph begins with a dash symbol). I could barely follow the dialogue - was it all in his head or was he actually speaking the words aloud (hint: all dialogue is in italics), and thus I struggled at times to work out who was actually narrating the stories.

For me personally, the character portrayal, the editing and punctuation (or lack thereof), writing style and storytelling put the author firmly on the back foot with me. Marlowe was a complex character - poet, spy, heretic - there is so much that you could do with him in a fictional context.

And as much as I love Marlowe, I was not a fan of this, and sadly, I would not recommend it.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Fforde started out in the film industry from age 20, working his way up to cameraman. He is said to have received a total of 76 rejection letters before his debut The Eyre Affair, a literary detective story was published in 2001 when he was 40 years old. 

In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel--unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.

Thanks to Bustle for this tip off as they listed it in their "9 books to read if your drawn to delightfully weird characters" list"

Jasper Fforde writes weird characters almost exclusively (even when he's borrowing from the rest of the literary canon). Thursday Next herself is a literary detective with a pet dodo. Her father is a time traveler. Her friends and enemies range from reanimated neanderthals to talking gorillas to Hamlet. If you're looking for a whole gang of "out there" characters, the Thursday Next series should be high on your list.

Read more here 

@ Jasper Fforde's website

@ the Guardian - interview with Jasper Fforde

@ the Independent
@ wikipedia - Thursday Next