New sci-fi novels feature death theme parks and a killing machine

ECW Press, 312 pages, $24.95

Dr. Cassandra Barlowe thought she’d put her former lover, Dr. Yana Gulsvig, behind her. But when Yana is blown up in a bombing of her research lab at the University of Toronto while Cas is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, working on plastic-digesting fungi that will help dissolve the giant garbage patch that now constitutes a separate continent, their lives are thrown together again.

Yes, it’s complicated. Yana had developed and patented a drug named deleria that allows users to glimpse alternate realities. This is important because it’s thought that news from one of these other timelines will provide clues on how to avoid or at least deal with the environmental collapse brought on by climate change. But when Cas is arrested on charges of domestic terrorism, this kind of mental skimming will have other applications. For one thing, it means Yana may still be alive, at least in one timeline or another.

For all the temporal-cognitive pharmaceutical hijinks, this is very much a character-driven story, and A.D. Sui gives Cas a lot to deal with, from negotiating her grief to saving the world. The personal being political can get messy, and does.

The Mulai

Munir Hachemi; translated by Julia Sanches

Coach House, 176 pages, $24.95

In any deep discussion of science-fiction and fantasy writing, you’re likely to hear something about world building, the amount of detail and internal coherence a make-believe fictional world or universe has. For many readers, it’s important that it be done well.

“The Mulai” takes world building to an extreme. It consists primarily of the field notes of an archeologist living among the Mulai, descendants of humans who colonized a distant planet. His attempts to unpack the workings of the Mulai language are central to his exploration of their culture, and the fact that this novel is translated from the Spanish, with further footnotes from the English translator, only adds to the sense of this book as a nesting puzzle box.

Readers aren’t likely to be drawn to this one for the story. It’s experimental fiction that proceeds in a semi-serious academic fashion to break down the intellectual scaffolding of an alien world, focusing on how that structure is reflected in the operation of language. Not a lot of spaceships and lasers then, but for readers looking to expand from the usual genre fare, this makes for a rich and challenging read.

We Are Underlings

Doretta Lau

House of Anansi, 336 pages, $26.99

In “We Are Underlings” Doretta Lau taps into our morbid fascination with the afterlife by imagining a chain of death-inspired theme parks. Zita Chang is the associate marketing manager at the soon-to-be-opened Nine Circles Hong Kong, a place that makes death accessible to the masses: “You may pay us a visit to discover what happens when you die — without experiencing the messiness of dying.”

Unfortunately, weeks before the grand opening things have hit a snag, as the executive director himself expires. Sort of. He can be reanimated, in a manner of speaking, while Zita and some of her colleagues try to find out how he died in the first place, which may have involved some funny business.

It’s “The Office” meets “Westworld” meets “Weekend at Bernie’s” in a satire that is mainly aimed at the mindless droneship of corporate bureaucracy. Everyone at the Nine Circles head office has a title that defines them, but it seems as if nobody actually does any work. The mechanical underlings are today’s microserfs and they know it. At first a bit off-putting, Lau’s vision feels uncannily authentic and on target for those of us living through our own afterlife of culture.

Scion

James Islington

Saga, 240 pages, $39

“Scion” begins with bone-crunching action, as augmented killing machine Azure, a professional assassin working for the Keres Corporation, infiltrates a target’s fortress-like home.

The brutality sets the tone for much of what follows. James Islington doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining how this vision of the future works, but part of it involves crowdfunding the assassination of very old and very wealthy people who are basically immortal (“lifers”). This is mostly what Azure’s job consists of, but as the story proper kicks off he’s been hired as a bodyguard by a mysterious lifer named Jasa, who has specifically requested him for reasons that the novel will work toward explaining.

In what promises to be the first book in a series, Islington delivers most of what readers will be looking for, with lots of action and plot reveals that aren’t quite unexpected enough to be twists, but are still satisfying when they hit. You can imagine a movie franchise coming soon.