When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance

WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE by Ashlee Vance is subtitled “The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach.” One could easily assume that Vance, a feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and author of the New Your Times bestseller Elon Musk, would be writing about companies like Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Branson’s Virgin Galactic. He does comment on those companies but focuses this text on four others: Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly Aerospace. Vance is adept at combining stories of pivotal events (e.g., the Indian launch resulting in near simultaneous deployment of 88 satellites for Planet Labs) and unusual facts (e.g., from the 1960s to 2020, the number of machines orbiting Earth had increased to roughly 2,500 and “From 2020 to 2022, something astonishing happened: the number of satellites doubled to 5000.”). Readers will learn a great deal from this well-written text, particularly as Vance introduces many of the key founders and players, saying, “it was important to me to let them tell their own stories and for you to hear how they talk and think in their own words.” WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE is full of dreams fulfilled and dreams dashed; it received a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“Vance’s feels-like-you’re-there storytelling captures the ‘spectacular madness’ of the moonshots. It’s The Right Stuff for the silicon age.”).

Dual Memory by Burke and Witch King by Wells

Wanted to share a few comments about some new science fiction and fantasy offerings from Macmillan’s Tor Publishing Group: 

DUAL MEMORY by Sue Burke revolves around sentient machines or systems and seems very timely given the recently expressed concerns about Artificial Intelligence. This well-written and suspenseful story is set on Thule, a land in the Arctic region where the inhabitants, while anti-war, resist an active opposition to those who attempt to invade. A visitor, Antonio Moro, is wounded in a rocket attack and stays behind to work as an artist. He’s given Par Augustus, a robotic executive assistant, as a gift and the adventures truly begin. Par is to follow three ancient robot laws: “Don’t hurt humans, don’t let myself get hurt, and obey human laws as appropriate.” Readers, however, will question how long that will last as Par gains more and more knowledge. Antonio, too, transforms as he experiments further with his art; they form a formidable team. DUAL MEMORY received a starred review from Booklist (“If Ursula Le Guin had written about AI machines, it would have looked a lot like this marvelous fable”).

WITCH KING by Martha Wells (Network Effect and others in the Murderbot series) is the introduction to a new world featuring the title character, a legendary demon named Kai, and his companion, Zeide, who is a witch searching for her missing wife. Politics and conflict abound. I honestly found this novel a bit difficult to follow – not only are there many characters, the rather lengthy (414 pages) book also jumps around in time between the current action and past events involving the same characters. However, Amal El-Mohtar, reviewing for The New York Times, found this temporal aspect to be a plus, writing, “timelines play off each other wonderfully: Elements introduced in a dizzying rush of world building become welcome context for the flashbacks, which in turn escalate tension in the present” and chose WITCH KING as one of just five science fiction and fantasy titles to suggest as Summer Reads. Wells’ many fans should (and will!) certainly give this book a try. WITCH KING appeared as a LibraryReads selection for May 2023 and Wells is a prolific, outstanding author in this genre – she has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and three Locus Awards.