New releases of fiction, non-fiction, and comics have caught our attention.
Hildur Knutsdottir’s “Night Guests”
Anyone who has lived with a chronic illness that’s hard to diagnose and endured the devastating process of trying to get proper treatment will tell you that it’s a living nightmare at times. Advocating for yourself and fighting to be taken seriously is something I’ve wrestled with for most of my life as someone with an autoimmune disease. So when I read this description of Hildur Knutsdottir’s psychological horror novel, The Night Guest, I immediately resonated with her.
Idun is seeing yet another doctor. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something is wrong, but doctors ignore her symptoms and blood tests don’t reveal the cause. When she tells friends and family about it, she hears the same thing over and over again: “Have you tried eating better? Exercising more? Creating a nighttime routine?” She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a pedometer watch. Nothing helped. One night, Idun fell asleep with her watch on and woke up to realize she’d walked more than 40,000 steps overnight. What happens while we’re asleep?
The Night Guest is a short, engaging read that takes an unsettling look at an issue that many can relate to. I was hooked.
Is Earth Special? The Search for Life in Space by Mario Livio and Jack Szostak
The question of the origin of life and whether life exists elsewhere is a topic that is endlessly fascinating to me (as evidenced by the frequency with which books on the subject appear in these recommendations). In their new book, Is Earth an Exception? The Search for Life in the Universe, astrophysicist Mario Livio and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak examine what we know about the things that make life possible (the building blocks of life) and how they might have emerged on Earth and, hypothetically, elsewhere. At the heart of the mystery is the unanswered question of whether life arose as a result of a freak accident.
“Despite the enormous scientific advances we have witnessed in the past few decades, we still do not know whether life is the result of an extremely rare chemical accident, in which case we might be unique in our galaxy, or whether it is the result of a chemical inevitability, in which case we might be part of a vast galactic cluster,” the authors write in their introduction.
Into the Unbeing by Zach Thompson and Hayden Sherman
Into the Unbeing’s 2034 setting sees Earth far past a climate tipping point. The planet has been devastated by natural disasters, and many species have been wiped out. Searching for something that could improve the state of the world, a team of climate scientists from the Institute for Emerging Ecology and Science in the World (SINEW) embark on an exploration of what seems to be an entirely new environment that suddenly appears near their camp in the Australian outback. But they are completely unprepared for what they find there.
Into the Unbeing is a fascinating new sci-fi series laced with cosmic horror. Issue #1 was released at the beginning of the summer, and part one concluded this week with issue #4. If you enjoyed Scavengers Reign or The Southern Reach Trilogy, you’ll enjoy Into the Unbeing. The art alone will have you hooked in no time.
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