MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By Martha Wells

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.

But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

NY. Tom Foherty Assoc. 2017. 154p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By C. S. Forester

From chapter 1: “A DEFEATED ARMY was falling back through the mountains from Espinosa. Such was its condition that an ignorant observer would find it easier to guess that it had, been defeated than that it had been an army. The twenty thousand men of whom it was composed were strung out along twenty miles of road; its sick and its dead littered the edges of the road for a hundred miles to the rear. At the head came such of the cavalry as were fortunate enough still to have horses to ride; they felt safer there than in their proper place covering the retreat. Next came the infantry, in groups, in herds, or in ones and twos.”

London. MICHAEL JOSEPH. ND. 207p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By Michael Crichton

A brutal struggle in the cutthroat computer industry; a shattering game of cat and mouse; an accusation of sexual harassment that threatens to derail a brilliant career ... this is the electrifying core of Michael Chrichton's new novel, his first since Rising Sun. At the center: Tom Sanders, an up-and-coming executive with DigiCom in Seattle, a man whose corporate future is certain. Until: after a closed-door meeting with his new boss - a woman who was his lover ten years before, a woman who has been promoted to the position he expected to have - he is accused of sexually harassing her. Now, as he scrambles to defend himself (enlisting the help of a sagacious woman lawyer whose career has been built on the successful prosecution of men charged with sexual misconduct), he finds himself trapped between what he knows to be true and what he knows others will assume to be the truth. And, as he uncovers an electronic trail into the company's secrets, he begins to grasp just how cynical and manipulative an abuse of truth has actually occurred ... Tackling one of the most divisive issues of our time, Disclosure compels us to see beyond our traditional responses. It is Michael Chrichton at his galvanizing best.

A.A. Knopf, 1994, 397 pages