Science Fiction and Fantasy Classics
Here are some books that have withstood the test of time and critical fashions. I pay attention to publishers devoting time and energy to bringing back books or authors in an organized way. For instance, MIT Press is doing such an admirable job with Stanislaw Lem that it inspired a separate page devoted to him. The new Dune films are reviving a sf landmark series. I will add others in time.
Up Against It
Up Against It
A prescient classic of crime, politics, and emergent AI in a future human-settled solar system, Laura J. Mixon's Up Against It is now reissued as a Tor Essential, featuring an introduction by James S.A. Corey, bestselling author of the Expanse series.
Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.
Jane Navio is the resource manager of Phoecea, an asteroid colony poised on the knife-edge of a hard vacuum of unforgiving space. A mishap has dumped megatons of water and methane out the colony's air lock, putting the entire human population at risk.
Jane discovers that the crisis may have been engineered by the Martian crime syndicate, as a means of executing a coup that will turn Phocaea into a client-state. And if that wasn't bad enough, an AI that spawned during the emergency has gone rogue…and there's a giant x-factor in the form of the transhumanist Viridian cult that lives in Phocaea's bowels.
Jane's in the prime of her career—she's only a bit over a century old—but the conflict between politics and life-support is tearing her apart. To save her colony and her career, she's going to have to solve several mysteries at once—a challenge that will put her up against all the difficulties, contradictions, and awkward compromises entailed in the human colonization of outer space.
LAURA J. MIXON, who originally published Up Against It under the pseudonym "M. J. Locke", trained as an engineer and worked for many years in the energy industry. Other novels by her, all published under her real name, include Glass Houses (1991), Proxies (1998), and Burning the Ice (2002). She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her husband, science fiction writer Steven Gould.