A story of time travel, murder, and unlikely allies separated by centuries, battling for a world in which anyone can change the future.

1992: Beth, a teenage riot grrl, witnesses a murder and realizes something is deeply wrong with her life--maybe it's her best friend, maybe it's her dad, or maybe it's the strange woman who keeps trying to warn her about what's coming.

2022: Tess, a time-traveling geologist, journeys to different eras for her research, while secretly hoping to correct a mistake from her past that haunts her still.

Their lives become mysteriously intertwined as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel, leaving only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future.

Well! This is a treat!

I thought this might just be an extended riff on Desmond Warzel's Wikihistory - a decade-old piece of micro-fiction about time travelling Wikipedia editors. But this is so much more than that!

Much like "This Is How You Lose the Time War" - this is an impossibly good slice of chronojumping sci-fi. And it also uses a similar device of alternating chapters between our protagonists.

It's a joyous book of gal-pals teaming through time, putting right what once went wrong, and getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Has good "hard" sci-fi roots - dealing with paradoxes via merge-conflicts - and examines the social implications of generally available time travel. It presents (as the title suggests) a terrifying vision of what our future could have been. There's also a lovely section about what pronouns to use when you meet yourself.

Well worth picking up and diving in.

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?

Having read Newitz's brilliant sci-fi novel "Autonomous", I thought I'd try her pop-sci book from a few years ago.

The central thesis is that animals survive when they "scatter" (find new habitats) and "adapt" (via evolution or some other means). Humans are (almost) unique in that we can remember, and pass down knowledge.

It's an entertaining and provocative look through history. It convincingly makes the case that we need to do something in order to survive as a species, and sets out some possible ideas.

A great book, but two things annoyed me.

Lack of footnotes. I'll admit, I'm one of those people who taps on every footnote to see where the author got their information from. Sure, sometimes it disturbs the flow of the book, and a I rarely look up the primary source, but it is comforting to know they're there. While the book carefully references its illustrations, there are no links to where an interested reader can find out more.

Well, that's what I thought... After getting to the end of the book, all the footnotes were there! With links back to the main text. I'm not sure if it's a flaw in the book, but this is how the HTML inside it looks:

Secondly, it never quite delves into the technology which could be used to help us remember. There's some great stuff about geo-engineering, and genetic editing, but I wanted to learn more about the process of future learning.

Overall, a good book to help you understand our place on this planet - and beyond.

Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner.

Oh, but this is a cracking read! Biohackers on the run from the law, killer robots, and - best of all - patent law!

If you told me this was a new Cory Doctorow novel, I'd believe it in a heartbeat.

The book is full of lovely little riffs on modern Internet culture - and presents a plausible view of how the world may develop given a rapid rise in biotech.

At times monstrously dark, and by turns blisteringly funny, this is perfect pulp-fiction.

You can read a free excerpt at Boing Boing.