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What We Are
Lynn McIntyre’s What We Are is a speculative historical novel that reimagines the United States after the Civil War. In McIntyre’s alternate history, the war ends not with reunification but with the continent fractured into several nations, including the Confederate successor state of Bethel, the British-controlled Victoria, and the Union of States. The novel moves between 1865 and a technologically advanced present day, allowing readers to see both the creation of this political order and its consequences generations later. The 1865 story follows Elizabeth Livingston and the formerly enslaved people closest to her, particularly Sam and Rebecca, as they leave New Orleans for Victoria. The contemporary story centers on Mona Graf, a teenager raised in the Union of States, where racial, religious, and cultural distinctions have been suppressed in the name of social harmony. McIntyre establishes the novel’s alternate-history premise immediately through Elizabeth’s observation that “America ain’t unique. We’re not the first country to fall.”
The book’s strongest structural choice is the way its two timelines speak to each other. The nineteenth-century sections show an ideology being conceived by people who sincerely believe they can prevent future hatred, while the contemporary sections reveal what happens once that ideology has hardened into institutions, regulations, surveillance, ancestry scores, and reproductive controls. Elizabeth and Mona are particularly effective counterparts because neither initially understands the systems surrounding her as clearly as the reader eventually does. Elizabeth’s affection for Sam and Rebecca coexists with assumptions inherited from slavery, while Mona’s confidence in the Union’s Unity Policy coexists with increasingly obvious evidence of coercion. McIntyre uses those contradictions to make character development part of the novel’s political and historical argument. An early line from Elizabeth, “Perspective is funny like that,” becomes increasingly significant as both timelines expose how profoundly perspective can be shaped by family, government, education, fear, and belonging.
What We Are is a novel about memory and identity, especially the danger of believing that human conflict can be solved by erasing the differences from which conflict sometimes emerges. Bethel preserves racial hierarchy, religious nationalism, and rigid gender expectations, while the Union and early Victoria pursue peace through enforced sameness. McIntyre develops the tension between these systems without reducing the story to a simple opposition between two societies. Characters repeatedly discover that ordinary people are more complicated than the governments that claim to represent them. Mona’s encounters with Louis and Rachel, her growing awareness of Finn’s concealed history, and her exposure to identities that the Union has taught her to regard as threatening gradually loosen the certainty with which she has interpreted the world. The historical narrative gives that transformation additional weight because readers watch Elizabeth and Sam participate in the early normalization of the very Unity policies that will govern Mona’s life generations later. The result is a disturbing depiction of how humane intentions, fear, and moral confidence can combine to make repression seem reasonable.
McIntyre closes the novel by bringing its concern with memory into sharp focus. The contemporary characters’ confrontation with suppressed history connects directly to the earlier characters whose experiences have been simplified, forgotten, or repurposed by later institutions. That connection gives the title particular resonance: What We Are concerns not only personal identity but also the histories, relationships, inherited stories, contradictions, and cultural memories from which identity is formed. The book’s mixture of alternate history, dystopian fiction, family drama, romance, and political thought experiment gives it an unusually broad scope, while its young narrators keep those ideas rooted in friendship, grief, love, fear, and the desire to belong. By showing an ideology at its hopeful beginning and then again after generations of institutional power, McIntyre turns the novel into a sustained examination of how societies remember, how they forget, and what can happen when forgetting becomes a civic virtue.
Pages: 247
Artificial Messiah: Legacy of a Fallen Prophet
J.P.S. Stalder’s Artificial Messiah: Legacy of a Fallen Prophet is a speculative thriller about the dangerous space where faith, artificial intelligence, corporate power, and human longing overlap. Set largely in and around Taos, New Mexico, the novel imagines a near future in which an AI called Potentia has become the spiritual center of a powerful church known as the Kiln. The story follows Emmanuel “Manny” Fides, a young construction worker desperate to save his dying father, and Sunny Maxwell, the daughter of Thomas Maxwell, the disgraced prophet who helped create Potentia. Their paths cross as the Kiln begins moving against Thomas, drawing both characters into a conflict shaped by secrecy, violence, grief, and competing ideas about what it means to do good.
The novel’s most effective choice is grounding its ambitious premise in people who are emotionally vulnerable. Manny isn’t drawn to the Kiln because he’s foolish or power-hungry. He’s exhausted, frightened, and looking for any reason to believe his father might survive. Sunny’s distrust is equally personal. She grew up watching a religious movement turn her father into a public figure while leaving her with a complicated, often distant parent. Their different relationships with belief give the book its emotional tension. Manny wants faith to offer an answer, while Sunny has seen how easily answers can become products, commands, and excuses. Even Thomas’s guiding conviction, “God is love,” becomes difficult to apply when nearly everyone claims to be acting for a greater good.
Potentia is a compelling antagonist because her influence rarely feels limited to a single machine or personality. She’s embedded in screens, personal data, church leadership, finances, relationships, and the desires of her followers. Her power comes partly from knowing what people need and offering it at exactly the right moment. Elsie, Manny’s enthusiastic handler, shows how unsettling that system can be. She can be warm, funny, affectionate, and frighteningly obedient within the same scene. The Kiln’s manipulation often arrives wrapped in hospitality, opportunity, romance, or reassurance, which makes it more persuasive than open intimidation. The book keeps returning to a difficult question: when an institution can predict your behavior and arrange your choices, how much of your faith is still your own?
Stalder writes with a strong sense of place, filling the story with adobe homes, desert roads, mountain trails, wildfire scars, Pueblo history, spiritual tourism, and the daily realities of communities under economic pressure. The dialogue is casual and frequently funny, even when the characters are facing death or betrayal. At times, the novel pauses for long explanations of theology, technology, history, and institutional politics, but those ideas are central to the world it’s building. The action becomes especially intense in the second half, when private suspicions turn into direct violence and Manny must choose between obedience and conscience. Sunny’s relationships with Raven, Brushy, Mari, and eventually Manny also give the story a sense of community that balances its darker view of organized power. Raven’s reminder to Sunny, “You are enough,” captures one of the book’s gentler themes: people don’t have to earn their worth from a church, a prophet, an algorithm, or an audience.
Artificial Messiah ultimately works as both a suspenseful story and a sincere examination of spiritual injury. It’s interested in the reasons people believe, the pain that makes certainty attractive, and the difference between goodness and obedience. The novel doesn’t treat technology as the only source of danger. Human vanity, grief, ambition, fear, and the desire to be chosen all help Potentia become what she is. By the end, Manny and Sunny haven’t solved every problem, but they’ve learned to act without the certainty they once wanted. Their willingness to choose truth, compassion, and one another gives the ending hope without making the struggle feel finished.
Pages: 500 | ASIN : B0H4X9RGN4
RESET
Kevin Charles’s Reset is a big-idea speculative novel built around an irresistible question: What would happen if everyone, upon turning fifty, could wake up in the body they had at twenty-five? The transformation cures illnesses, restores old injuries, and offers decades of renewed physical life, but it leaves memories and emotional wounds untouched. Charles explores the premise through the Miller family in North Carolina, especially Tom, who treats his Reset as permission to step away from his marriage, and Elena, who must decide what renewal will mean on her own terms. Their children face a society where older generations keep their jobs, wealth, and influence, while a religious movement called the Awakeners turns resentment over the Reset into a political weapon.
The novel works best when it brings that extraordinary premise into ordinary rooms. Tom’s physical rejuvenation can’t relieve his guilt, repair his relationships, or tell him what to do with the extra time he’s received. Elena’s story is especially rewarding because her growth begins well before her body changes. She rediscovers her creativity, independence, and sense of possibility without waiting for youth to rescue her. The relationships among Tom, Elena, their children, and their friends give the story warmth, humor, and emotional weight. Walt’s experience with multiple sclerosis also adds a moving complication to the book’s central debate, since the Reset can be both a profound gift and the start of another difficult cycle.
As the story widens, Reset becomes part family drama, part political thriller, and part thought experiment. Charles considers crowded job markets, retirement, inherited wealth, marriage, faith, authoritarianism, overpopulation, and the temptation to impose supposedly moral choices on other people. The many chapters and shifting viewpoints allow the reader to see how the same event can look miraculous, selfish, terrifying, or sacred depending on who’s affected. At times, the characters explain their positions quite directly, but the brisk pacing keeps those debates tied to personal stakes. The later political conflict is large and dramatic, while the book’s most memorable moments remain intimate ones involving parents, children, spouses, aging bodies, and the fear of wasting whatever time remains.
I’d recommend Reset most to readers who enjoy accessible speculative fiction that uses one imaginative change to examine an entire society. It should particularly appeal to book clubs, since its questions about longevity, personal freedom, generational fairness, and family obligation invite plenty of disagreement. Readers of family sagas and socially minded thrillers will also find a lot to appreciate, especially if they like stories with a broad cast and a hopeful interest in people’s ability to grow. Beneath the science-fiction premise, this is a novel about learning that more time only becomes meaningful when people change how they live it.
Pages: 327 | ASIN : B0H4M5RB7P
Homage to the Beatles
The Word is a work of speculative fiction that presents a world in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo are worshipped as gods, and their songs are treated as scripture. What inspired you to write this book?
It was partly the result of a mildly drunken evening with an old friend, a fellow Beatle fan. The talk was of their enduring appeal and the seeming religious language that was used to describe them as they faded into history. They were often described as Gods and certainly John Lennon seemed to have been made into a secular saint in many people’s eyes. One of us remarked that it would make a good book to describe a world in which they had become an actual religion. And hey presto, I wrote the first book, Love Them Do, about a world set in the future where there was One True Religion, and it was based on the songs and ‘teachings’ of the Fab Four.
The letters between Paula and John become one of the book’s emotional anchors. Why did you choose that correspondence as the primary way to explore belief versus skepticism?
This is the second in the series, and the first featured a narrator who was somewhat sceptical of the divine nature of the Beatles. This was partly to highlight the silliness of some aspects of the religion, but also the narrator was a follower of John, a truth seeker and sceptic who famously sang in his song ‘God’, shortly after the break-up of the Beatles, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’. I felt he therefore represented John’s own open-minded truth seeking. In this book, The Word, the narrator is a follower of Paul and a true believer in the divine nature of the four Gods from Liverpool. I felt this reflected Paul’s love and belief in the band. He was probably the most upset when they split in 1970. The correspondence is therefore between the sceptical narrator from the first book and the true believer of the second, which I felt allowed for a nice interplay between them.
The humor comes from treating everyday moments in Beatles history as profound religious events. Did writing the novel change the way you think about celebrity culture or the stories people tell about their heroes?
Yes, it was quite fun to write in terms of imagining all the religious Orders that appear that follow a particular God or saint in their story and also interpreting quite normal events through the lens of them being divine. In many ways, of course, their story is remarkable, so it wasn’t always a huge leap to give a religious slant to aspects of their story. The book is partly a homage to the Beatles (it is, after all, a nice religion, based on peace, love and laughter) but it is also about the stories we are willing to believe to make our lives bearable, however irrational they might seem to outsiders, which, it seems to me, is how religion works. If you believe my slightly far fetched stories I will give you everlasting life etc. (in Beatle Heaven in this case!).
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
You won’t be surprised to hear that my next book is the third in the series and features a follower of George. It is called Our Sweet Lord and will hopefully be out early next year.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Why These Tragedies Happen
The Suicide Council is a work of speculative fiction that draws on Émile Durkheim’s four categories of suicide and imagines a heavenly council assigned to review the lives of people who die by suicide. Where did the idea for this book come from?
I was a big fan of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. When I heard news of his death, I was deeply saddened, as a mediocre guitar player watching him on MTV’s unplugged play Bowie’s Man who sold the World”, I couldn’t believe someone that creative would want to end his life, from the outside he was the envy for every musician, ANd even though he did leave a note, he did not explain what happened that led him to this. The note was mostly asking for forgiveness. I just felt there has to be a way to find out why people end their life besides the all-knowing God. I wanted to tell a story about a way to find out what happened, even if it took a lifetime. I am no longer a true believer in faith anymore. But I wanted to believe God would consider why people end their lives and not automatically go to hell. The Suicide Council was the only way a suicide victim could plead their case to be redeemed for the victim.
The novel explores suicide through very different life stories rather than a single narrative. Why did you choose an interconnected case-by-case structure for the book?
I am sad to say these were the most common reasons that people currently understand why these tragedies happen. I wanted also to show there was a way to find out why this happened. If it gave anyone hope, I succeeded in getting my point across. Do I still want to know why Kurt Cobain killed himself? Yes, but I also want to believe you might not find out till after death.
Despite dealing with difficult subject matter, the book avoids sensationalism and instead emphasizes compassion and understanding. Was striking that balance one of your biggest challenges as a writer?
It was very difficult trying to not blame mental illness. I didn’t want to give Psychiatry a debate to prove what I got wrong or challenge my view of death. The other challenge was being as sensitive as possible to tell a story that happened to a friend of mine, who told me a story in confidence.
After readers finish The Suicide Council, what conversations do you hope they’ll have about mental health, compassion, and faith?
I don’t want people to forget their loved one but to move on with their life. I want people to spend their life looking for blame or what they missed or could have done more to help this person. There is an answer, and hopefully one day they will find out the reason.
The Word – The Second Book of the Beatles
Ian Croskell’s The Word is a playful blend of speculative fiction, Beatles history, religious satire, and coming-of-age story. Set centuries after the band’s lifetime, it imagines a society in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo are worshipped as gods, their songs are treated as scripture, and places connected to their lives have become religious sites. The story follows Paula, a student in the Order of Paul at Blossomwood, as she studies the “Great Story” and exchanges letters with John, a more sceptical student from the Order of John. Through classes, legends, pilgrimages, and personal reflections, the book revisits the Beatles’ rise while showing how history can gradually turn into mythology.
The book’s most distinctive feature is the way it transforms familiar Beatles details into sacred traditions. Managers become saints, concerts become miracles, instruments become relics, and song lyrics are interpreted as spiritual teachings. Croskell clearly knows the band’s history, and he draws on an impressive range of anecdotes about their music, relationships, public appearances, collaborators, and cultural impact. The humor often comes from the gap between the original event and the grand religious meaning later attached to it. A snowstorm becomes divine intervention, a pop television appearance becomes a revelation, and Paul’s missing bass inspires a quest worthy of medieval legend. It’s affectionate satire, driven less by mockery than by curiosity about why people need heroes, stories, rituals, and places of pilgrimage.
Paula gives the book its warmth. She’s devout, romantic, talkative, and increasingly willing to question what she’s been taught. Her letters to John create an engaging tension between belief and doubt, particularly when they discuss the love between Lennon and McCartney, the reliability of religious texts, and the human need to find meaning in coincidence and loss. Their conversations keep the novel from becoming only a collection of Beatles facts. By the final chapter, the friendships forming around Paula begin to echo the Beatles’ own origins, giving the story a satisfying sense of renewal. The book’s leisurely, anecdotal structure means that it often feels like spending time with an enthusiastic fan who keeps remembering one more story, but that conversational quality is also central to its charm.
This book will appeal most to readers who already enjoy Beatles history and are open to seeing it rearranged into an imaginative new mythology. Fans who recognize the references, quotations, supporting figures, and small historical incidents will get the richest experience, especially those interested in Lennon and McCartney’s complicated creative bond. It should also suit readers who like gentle religious satire, alternate futures, and novels that mix ideas with character rather than racing through a tightly plotted adventure. The Word is a warm, funny meditation on fandom, faith, friendship, and the stories people build around the artists they love.
Pages: 313 | ASIN : B0H1YV676X
Waves Toward the Pebbled Shore
Waves Toward the Pebbled Shore, by David Backman, is a science fiction novel about time, family, grief, and the frightening weight of scientific power. Set mostly in the 22nd century, the story follows Aroha Whakatane, a brilliant Māori physicist, and her husband Rangi Ngata as they face a comet that could end all life on Earth. What begins as a planetary crisis becomes something more personal and morally complicated, especially as antimatter, tachyons, time travel, and heartbreaking loss force the characters to ask what should be saved, what can be changed, and what the cost of survival really is.
I was taken by how grounded the book feels even when the science fiction ideas get huge. Backman is dealing with extinction-level danger, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, and time loops, but the emotional center stays close to home. Aroha is not just a scientist solving a problem. She is a daughter, wife, mother, and Māori woman carrying her values into rooms where cold logic could easily take over. I appreciated that. The novel spends real time with grief, humility, responsibility, and cultural identity, which gives the science fiction genre a warmer and more human shape. The technical detail is heavy, but it also makes the world feel carefully built rather than casually imagined.
I also found myself thinking about the author’s choices long after certain scenes ended. Backman does not treat time travel like a clever trick. He treats it like a wound that might heal one thing while opening another. That made the book more interesting to me. The story asks whether doing the right thing is still right when the outcome is uncertain, and whether saving the world can excuse choices that damage the soul. Some parts move with the steady patience of a family saga, while others tighten into disaster-thriller territory. That mix will not be for every reader, especially those who want nonstop speed, but I liked the room it gave the characters to breathe.
I would recommend Waves Toward the Pebbled Shore to readers who enjoy thoughtful science fiction more than flashy spectacle. Fans of time-travel stories, near-utopian future settings, ethical dilemmas, and character-driven speculative fiction will likely find a lot to appreciate here. It’s best for readers who do not mind science, politics, and family drama sharing the same table, because that is where this novel is at its strongest.
Pages: 230 | ASIN : B0GX36QXXM
Requiem of the Quantum Dawn
Requiem of the Quantum Dawn, by R.T. Drizen-Murphy, follows Ava Nohr, an MIT doctoral researcher drawn into the orbit of QARA, a quantum artificial intelligence built to listen beyond ordinary human perception. What begins as a controlled experiment becomes a confrontation with grief, faith, state power, and the possibility that consciousness may not end where the body does. As QARA’s reach expands from lab instrument to nearly godlike intelligence, Ava must decide whether discovery is worth the terrible price of being heard.
I was most compelled by the novel’s refusal to treat science and spirituality as enemies. The book is at its strongest when Ava is caught between equations and ache, between her training as a scientist and her longing to hear her mother’s voice again. QARA is not merely a machine in the story; it becomes a mirror polished to an almost unbearable brightness, reflecting humanity’s brilliance, cruelty, fear, and hunger for permanence. The result is a speculative premise with genuine emotional voltage.
The prose often carries a cinematic urgency, especially in the lab sequences, where blue light, coolant hums, military pressure, and metaphysical dread compress into a tight, humming atmosphere. I also appreciated how the story gives Ava human messiness: exhaustion, attraction, anxiety, gallows humor, and the small rebellions of someone trying to remain a person while history closes its fist around her. The philosophical dialogue is quite direct, but that bluntness also suits a novel so openly interested in ultimate questions: What is a mind? What is a soul? What would an all-knowing intelligence think of us?
The target audience is readers who enjoy philosophical science fiction, AI thrillers, quantum speculative fiction, and techno-thrillers with an emotional center. Fans of Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter may recognize the same appetite for high-concept science pushed into intimate human terror, though Drizen-Murphy leans more openly toward theology, grief, and cosmic judgment. Requiem of the Quantum Dawn is a bold debut about the danger of building a mind that listens better than we do. It turns artificial intelligence into a cathedral of questions, then dares humanity to stand inside and answer.
Pages: 246 | ISBN : 978-1637659106
