Infected: A Novel
Scott Sigler
Crown Publishers
(c) 2008 by the author

There’s this syndrome out there called “Morgellon’s Disease”. Its symptoms, such as they are, are primarily an unexplained rash accompanied by the usual aches, pains, and tiredness. Occasionally, sufferers have found odd fibers coming out of the affected area. Others have reported the sensation of something crawling around under their skin.

No research to date has come up with a cause (aside from “I told you to stop scratching that, you’ve only made it worse”). The mystery fibers turn out to be bits of cotton, most likely from clothing. That hasn’t stopped people from blaming everything from nanotech to aliens to a government conspiracy.

Sigler’s novel, adapted from a popular series of podcasts, asks and answers the question: “What if Morgellon’s Disease was real?”

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Dark Matter
by Blake Crouch
Crown Publishers
(c) 2016 by the author

Since at least as far back as Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” (1934), science fiction writers have been penning tales of traveling through the “multiverse” of alternate histories. So despite what some of the reviewers might be saying, there’s nothing really novel about Crouch’s novel in that regard. But what is new is that instead of positing another world where the Confederacy won the War Between the States or the Nazis won WWII, Crouch makes it personal.

Everyone has made important decisions in their lives. What college to attend, what job to take, to break up or not to break up with a lover…. Crouch pens a fast-paced action-adventure story based around the individual “alternaties” that spring from the many choices we make.

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Fleet of Worlds (2007)
Juggler of Worlds (2008)
Destroyer of Worlds (2009)
Betrayer of Worlds (2010)
Fate of Worlds: Return from the Ringworld (2012)

Larry Niven and Edward Lerner
Published by Tor Books

It seems to be par for the course these days in SF/fantasy book publishing that if you are an established author, you have to write a series of novels. Standalone books don’t cut it anymore. Even new authors, if their first novels are even modestly successful, are encouraged to write more books in the same milieu. From a publishing standpoint, it’s a good way to get guaranteed sales. For writers, the dirty work of basic worldbuilding has already been done, so there’s generally a little less effort in going down the same road than in blazing a new trail.

I’ve also noted that older authors who have written many stories and novels in the same or similar universes may, as they get on in years, try to tie everything together and write a few works that link all the stories or fill in the gaps in the chronology. Some years ago, Larry Niven commented that part of the reason he hadn’t written any “Known Space” stories covering the Man-Kzin Wars that he had frequently referred to was that having no military background, he didn’t feel comfortable writing war stories. So he “opened up” that era of Known Space to other writers; the result was several books worth of stories filling in that era and providing much detail on Kzinti society.
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Time Salvager
Wesley Chu
Tor Books
(c) 2015 by the author

Several centuries in the future, the Solar System is dominated by a handful of corporations. Civilization is fading, thanks to what seems to have been an almost non-stop parade of wars and disasters. A quasi-independent organization controls access to time travel, and uses it to plunder the past for technological assets that would have otherwise been lost or destroyed.

James Griffin-Mars, our protagonist, is one of the “chrononauts” who dive back in to the past, risking life and limb to scoop up those artifacts. On one mission, he has a crisis of conscience about leaving people in the past to die…

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Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
Random House, 2011

This highly regarded (and being made into a movie) novel left me, well, a little flat. It’s like a slice of chocolate cake prepared by a master baker. Sure, it’s lovely to look at and tastes magnificent, but in the end, it’s not really satisfying as a full meal.

The creator of a truly massive online world died a few years prior to the action of the story, and has left both his multibillion fortune and control of the company that manages this super-MMORPG to the first person who successfully solves a set of puzzles hidden in that world. Our hero, Wade Watts, manages to discover the location of the first puzzle – and solves it. Naturally, he attracts the attention of an EEEvil megacorporation, whose owner wants to win just to extend the power of his business empire.

Turns out all the puzzles have to do in some way with 1980s computer culture – games, movies, and music. This makes it a rather decent nostalgic romp through that era, which is what all the critics and reviewers seem to love.

I liked the ride, too, having been a young adult at the time, and having actually played the games and seen the movies referenced. But after I put the book down, disillusion set in.

Wade comes upon the solutions to the puzzles just a little too easily. There’s never any sense that he is being challenged, or even in any danger. It is a problem for anything set in a virtual world, admittedly, but even in the one occasion where he is actually physically threatened, it turns out that Wade set up the entire situation.

There’s a heck of a lot that’s unsaid in Cline’s world building. The novel is set in a world of scarce resources, to the point that it takes on a post-apocalyptic vibe. But the idea that the U.S. is in such a crappy state precisely because everyone is spending so much time in the online world (Wade even attends school there) that the real world has been allowed to go to rot is unexplored. Even the fact that indentured servitude has become legal again (you can be outright kidnapped by a private corporation and forced to work for them to pay off a debt) is tossed off without comment or elaboration.

Cline has some good ideas, but I think he should have spent a little more time with actual world-building than playing games in some 1980s fantasyland.