8 new fantasy and science fiction books to read in February 2023
By Daniel Roman
USERS by Colin Winnette (February 21)
A standalone novel that delves into the realm of tech start-ups, Users follows a VR designer who creates a new program that slowly derails his life. Called “The Ghost Lover,” it creates a VR experience where players are haunted by the ghost of an ex-partner, which sounds pretty awful. Which I guess makes it perfect for big tech, really.
Miles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its “original experiences,” has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. The “game” is simple: a user’s simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they’re haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover. Responding to and manipulating the user’s mind and body in perfect, dystopian harmony, The Ghost Lover becomes wildly popular—and wildly controversial—in the VR world.
When Miles receives a series of anonymous death threats—typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address—paranoid panic begins blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.
The once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company. The consequences for Miles seal him inside the walls of his life as what was once anxiety explodes into devastating absoluteness.
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ARCH-CONSPIRATOR by Veronica Roth (February 21)
Veronica Roth is best known for her Divergent series of YA sci-fi novels, but come this February she’ll be releasing Arch-Conspirator, an adult science fiction novel that reimagines the Greek myth of Antigone in a dystopian future where humanity is on its last legs and the future rests on the genes of the fallen.
Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end.
Antigone’s parents – Oedipus and Jocasta – are dead. Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but with her militant uncle Kreon rising to claim her father’s vacant throne, all Antigone feels is rage.
When he welcomes her and her siblings into his mansion, Antigone sees it for what it really is: a gilded cage, where she is a captive as well as a guest.
But her uncle will soon learn that no cage is unbreakable. And neither is he.
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THE ADVENTURES OF AMINA AL-SIRAFI by Shannon Chakraborty (February 28)
February is an exciting month for fans of S.A. Chakraborty, the author of the highly-acclaimed Daevabad trilogy. While Daevabad may have come to an end for now, Chakraborty is starting a brand new series this month with the release of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. It’s a high seas pirate adventure, and it sounds like a total blast.
Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.
But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. The chance to have one last adventure with her crew, do right by an old friend, and win a fortune that will secure her family’s future forever? It seems like such an obvious choice that it must be God’s will.
Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there’s more to this job, and the girl’s disappearance, than she was led to believe. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savor just a bit more power…and the price might be your very soul.