New releases in fiction, non-fiction and comics that catch our eye.
Putnam Pub Group
An agoraphobic engineer named Henry spends his days building strange robots that look like wizards and ride around on tiny bicycles in his ultra-smart home. His wife, Lily, is the only person he really sees, but things have become strained between them – made worse by the fact that he’s usually alone in the attic working on a secret project. One day, Lily invites some former co-workers to encourage Henry to socialize, and Henry finally seizes the opportunity to show off his greatest creation: William, an advanced AI system housed in a crude robot body. Horror happens.
Mason Coile’s William (stylized W1LL1AM) takes the well-worn trope of a naïve creator faced with their out-of-control creation and adds a haunted smart-house twist with a twist ending. Of course, comparisons are made Frankenstein and even sparkling, but I’d dare say it’s a clue Demon Seed there too. This is another short read at under 250 pages and just the right thing to get you in the spooky season mood. It happens, appropriately, on Halloween.
Penguin Press
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his subsequent transformation into X have dominated headlines for months, as we already know, so you can’t be blamed for feeling like you’ve heard everything there is to know about the whole saga. But for those who want to dig deeper into how it all happened, journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac collected a lot of previously unreported information in their book. Character limitit draws from interviews with insiders and internal notes from the rooms where it all went down to give us the full story of the Twitter takeover. And it’s messy.
Image comics
I can’t think of another new series in recent memory that has left me so hungry for the next installment Tin Can Society #1. Before I get into that, I should point out that this first issue opens with some cautionary content about violence and racism and discussions of racism. It’s intense without skipping a beat. Tin Can Society begins with a crime scene: tech tycoon-turned-superhero Johnny Moore is murdered.
Moore, who was born with spina bifida, earned a reputation as a genius creator of advanced exoskeleton-style mobility devices, and he donned a full-body armored version of one of these suits while performing as the vigilante hero Caliburn. When he was found dead, the suit was gone. Tin Can Society It follows childhood friends who reunite years later to get to the bottom of Moore’s murder. The first issue has a lot of heart as it bounces back and forth between her present circumstances and her past, creating a backstory to Moore’s early life and the tight-knit group of friends she once had. I’m excited to see where this goes. Tin Can Society will be a nine-part mini-series with the next issue coming out at the end of October.
