Science Fiction for your Kindle to beguile this #Booksgiving Eve

ESCAPING EXODUS
NICKY DRAYDEN (Escaping Exodus #1)
HarperVoyager
$10.99 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

Many thanks to the author and HarperVoyager for my ARC.

I know the author of this book for like fifteen years now. She's got a dry wit, a generous heart, and a deeply subversive soul. This is by way of explaining how I know that, in this twisty and turny story of siblings very much at odds with each other and very deeply enmeshed in each others' psyches, she's explained us to ourselves.

What happens when your intimate enemy, the charismatic and popular one to your quieter, more thorough self, challenges your position? As with all stories of intimate enemies, this is the beginning of the end, and the series of books that will follow depends on hooking you with this cataclysm. Like every blockbuster series in fantasy, Author Drayden sets the stakes high, limns the characters indelibly and economically, and gets you ready for an action-packed ride through a world you'd swear was real.

As book two, Symbiosis, expands the story of how love screws things up for everyone, becomes available on 23 February 2021, it's time to take advantage of this book's sale price to decide if you need to preorder the next. I'm pretty confident a lot of you will need to know how this plays out.

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THE END OF ORDINARY
EDWARD ASHTON
HarperVoyager
$8.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

Human beings hate people who don't look like themselves, don't pray like themselves, and don't eat like themselves. Imagine, then, what an *actual* difference, like a gene-manipulated extra strength or ability, would cause. You don't need to, Author Ashton has done the work for you. In this fast-paced book, I was eager to get to the next set-piece; but then realized that was what I was doing, waiting for the next Scene while being irked at the clueless-Dad-unworldly-Engineer interacting with people more generally capable than he is. Since it's a very good book to read at a moment in history when we need to take stock of how we cope with Otherness, I'd say any SF fan would do a lot worse than picking this up for #Booksgiving reading.

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WHEN GRAVITY FAILS
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER (The Budayeen Cycle #1)
Open Road Media
$8.99 edbook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked awful, but I always look awful in the mirror. I keep myself going with the firm belief that my real face is much better looking.

That is a very trenchant sentence. That is exactly what you're signing up for when you get this book. A rarity now, in the 1980s this book was a unicorn for dealing with Muslim culture in any way, and using near-future SF to highlight the way whites are colonizing the world was still cutting-edge stuff. Digging deeper into themes of identity with transgender characters, refugees from dying Europe, and pharmacological solutions that become terrible problems, the book prefigures the 21st century's obsessions. Readers of transgressive fiction need to rediscover what amazed us in the 1980s because it will amaze and delight you, too.