Friday, October 26, 2012

New e-book titles from Aqueduct Press

Aqueduct has released three new titles in e-book formats:

--Gwyneth Jones's Spirit

 A space opera set in Gwyneth Jones's Aleutian universe, Spirit re-visions Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo and further explores the workings and consequences of the series' Buonarotti Transit. Bibi, the sole survivor of her tribe, serves Lady Nef, the wife of General Yu, whose forces exterminated Bibi's tribe. Constantly embroiled in court intrigues and conspiracies, Nef and Yu are sent on a dicey diplomatic mission to Sigurt's World, which culminates in murder and betrayal, resulting in Nef's and Bibi's imprisonment in the ultimate oubliette, from which escape is virtually impossible. As Karen Joy Fowler noted in her review for the Guardian, "Escape is costly; revenge complex." This is, indeed, Dumas for the 21st Century.


--Rebecca Ore's The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid

In 2067, human cloning is a part of everyday life. But it is a bizarre form of cloning: not actually the direct copying of a humans, but rather the construction of custom-made reproductions of humans using animal DNA. The CIA uses these so-called "chimeras" for various undercover operations, and one of their technicians, Simon Boyle, has a sideline making illegal copies: chimeras based on famous criminals, for rent. His Billy the Kid, a creation unable to comprehend or sometimes even recognize the sorts of things that didn't exist before the 1880s and endowed with powerful sex pheromones, is quite popular for a night of historically convincing passion with rich women, particularly the part where Boyle (as sheriff Pat Garrett) guns him down. As the story progresses, Billy the Kid starts remembering things from his previous lives. One of Boyle’s clients sets Billy loose into the mean streets of the 21st century, where he struggles to seize control of the myths in his ROM. Jane, a worker in a shelter for abused chimeras, has her life turned upside down as she's caught up in a struggle for possession of Billy. Sex pheromones or not, not only is Billy's identity as a real person at question, but the notion of masculinity as well.   

Eleanor Arnason's Ordinary People (Conversation Pieces series Vol. 7)
 
Spanning thirty years, this volume collects six stories, one poem, and a WisCon Guest of Honor speech. In the richly ironic "Warlords of Saturn's Moons," first published in 1974, a cigar-puffing woman writes space-opera while the drama of real-life inner-city Detroit goes on around her; "The Grammarian's Five Daughters" offers a playful explication of the uses of the parts of speech; "A Ceremony of Discontent" takes a humorous approach to a modern-day feminist problem; and Arnason's wise, earthy tales of hwarhath serve up new myths explaining the origins of the world and morality (among other things). The work in this collection entertains with its wit, delights with its precision and imagination, and challenges and provokes with its bluntness. Ordinary People offers a small, potent taste of the oeuvre of an important feminist sf author.
 
Like all of Aqueduct's e-books, these can be purchased, DRM-free, through our site in both mobi and epub formats, as well as from Weightless Books, Wizard's Tower, and Amazon.com.

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