Rise The complete Newsflesh collection

SINCE THE AGE of 16, the beautiful, half-Sudanese Briton Hope Arden has been literally unmemorable: Within a minute or two out of her presence, other people forget she exists. Every meeting she has with another person is always the first. Her own parents have forgotten that they ever had two daughters, not just one. In a simpler writer's hands, THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF HOPE (Redhook, $27) would bend around explaining Hope's unusual condition and perhaps finding a cure for it. Fortunately, Claire North - also known as the middle-grade and young adult writer Catherine Webb and the satirical urban fantasy writer Kate Griffin - has established a reputation for tense, dense, science fiction/ fantasy-inflected thrillers that defy facile expectations. (Readers may remember the power of her Campbell Award-winning 2014 novel, "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.") North wastes no energy on the why of Hope, only the psychological and physical logistics of survival within a fluid identity. Having grown up to be a master thief, Hope travels from port to exotic port, eternally a woman of mystery, seeking meaning in her various criminal conquests. These provocative character threads are woven into a cyberpunk-esque plot involving the sinister social app Perfection, which seems to transform its users for the better - until it kills them. The resulting tapestry is simultaneously a tense conspiracy caper, a haunting meditation on loneliness and a brutally cynical examination of modern media. With so many layers to juggle, it would be easy for North to fumble her way into a multifaceted mess. Instead, all the layers float, separate yet supporting one another, in a well-paced, brilliant and balanced whole. A COLLECTION OF post-apocalyptic short fiction, DROWNED WORLDS: Tales From the Anthropocene and Beyond (Solaris, paper, $14.99) was inspired by the J.G. Ballard-esque "romantic haze" of "flooded, inundated ruins of a world laid waste by raising oceans," as the editor Jonathan Strahan explains in its introduction. Thus readers are guided into a continuum of stories about the likely world to come, after melted icecaps and rising seas have decimated coastal cities and perhaps set in motion stranger changes on the societal level. The collection begins with Paul McAuley's "Elves of Antarctica," about a helicopter pilot working for a huge industrial project intended to preserve Antarctica's western ice sheet. This is probably the most scientifically plausible story in the set. It's also one of the most didactic, explaining the altered world in a leisurely way that is perhaps meant to evoke the romantic haze Strahan mentions, though instead it just feels heavy-handed. A number of stories in the first half of the collection, like Ken Liu's "Dispatches From the Cradle: The Hermit - Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts," fall into this territory: lovely yet disengaged travelogues of an environment in flux. This starts to change with Christopher Rowe's "Brownsville Station," the slightly surreal tale of a train that travels along the "linear city" edging the coast between Cancún and Key West. Thereafter the collection gets less plausible but more intriguing and immersive, as in Jeffrey Ford's "What Is," an omniscient-narrated tale of stubborn, damaged people fighting a hopeless battle for survival in drought-destroyed Oklahoma. Nalo Hopkinson's "Inselberg" features a mutant tour bus driver - of a living bus - ferrying entitled tourists through a terrifying and wondrous island landscape of sugar swamps and radioactive seas. By Catherynne M. Valente's closing tale, "The Future Is Blue," readers are far off the path of thinly veiled environmentalist lecture and deep into the strangeness of a world utterly transformed. Here, at last, is the romanticism that Strahan seeks - after a journey from science into the unknown that perhaps intentionally replicates the future to come. Altogether it's haunting, heady stuff. MIRA GRANT'S HIT Newsflesh trilogy was an astonishing take on the tired zombie apocalypse subgenre - precisely because it was barely about the zombie apocalypse at all. It wore other hats: epidemiology thriller, genre-savvy black comedy and a fascinating exploration of the future of (not so) new media. Now the follow-up anthology RISE (Orbit, $25) covers the before and after of the novels, with several short stories set during the Rising, when the zombies first appeared, and others exploring the aftermath of "Blackout," the trilogy's conclusion. This is great for established readers, because it brings into sharp focus what is mostly elided in the core series. In "How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea," an indirect sequel to the trilogy, readers are shown a different paradigm for survival in Australia's environment-first response to the crisis. (The zombie kangaroos are a highlight.) "Countdown" introduces the personalities involved in the creation of the Kellis-Amberlee zombie virus, humanizing the researchers, the test cases and even the anti-establishment protesters who disastrously released the viral strains and thus initiated the apocalypse. All of this makes for a rich expansion on a beloved universe. However, roughly half of the collection is set during the Rising itself, and these weaken the whole. Instead of nuanced examinations of the politics of fear, stories like "The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell" and "San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats" are what Newsflesh wasn't: just zombie stories. They're exciting, horrifying. They're written with the same gripping attention to character and pace, and are just as darkly tongue-in-cheek as the novels (as a story about zombies versus San Diego Comic-Con cosplayers must be). Still, they lack the media analysis and complexity that made the trilogy so refreshing. New readers may come away thinking of this series as merely fun. They would do better to head straight for the trilogy, leaving the vast horde of longtime fans to devour "Rise" in the spirit it's meant. THE EASIEST COMPARISON that comes to mind when reading Malka Older's INFOMOCRACY (Tor/Tom Doherty, $24.99) is to its cyberpunk forebears. There's an obvious line of inheritance here from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson to Older's futuristic world of global information networks and cool, noirish operatives vying for power and survival. Yet there's also an inescapable "West Wing" vibe to the book. This probably owes to the fact that Older is herself a global player, with impressive bona fides in the field of international affairs. This lends the story a political authenticity that's unusual in the field of cyberpunk, and very welcome. The time is somewhere in the 2060s, 20 years after the powerful search engine Information (think Google on meth) has helped the world achieve Thomas Jefferson's optimal condition for democracy: a citizenry that is not just well informed but perpetually informed, and more connected than ever thanks to ubiquitous translation software. Today's varied political systems have been replaced with a nearly global microdemocracy, resulting in a world without borders or wars. Sovereign states have dissolved into centenals - aggregations of 100,000 like-minded souls. These centenals vote every 10 years for one of the dozens of political parties to achieve a supermajority, which will then rule the world. The story follows several rising players in this transformed political landscape, each pursuing his or her own agenda - some to abolish microdemocracy, some to maintain the new status quo, some to establish dominance for new powers. And lurking under all of the political jockeying is the danger of a return to the ugliest of the old ways: election sabotage. Popularity trumping the public good. War. The big picture of this story is exciting, intriguing; microdemocracy (probably better known as e-democracy) isn't a new concept, but it hasn't often been tackled so head-on in modern science fiction. The microcosmic questions remain frustratingly unanswered - What's day-to-day life like for people on the local level? How do all these thousands of conflicting centenals get anything done? - but it's clear that the minutiae of the future isn't the point. Futurists and politics geeks will love this unreservedly. N.K. JEMISIN'S new novel, "The Obelisk Gate," will be published in August.

Grant expands her clever and disturbing viral zombie apocalypse Newsflesh universe (Feed, etc.) with this satisfying collection of eight novellas (six previously published in digital or limited print edition form) accompanied by brief authorial introductions. "Everglades" is a sharp, brief, and discomfiting treatise on the cruelty of nature. "Countdown" provides multiple perspectives on the events, both well-intentioned and malicious, that led to the world-changing creation of the Kellis-Amberlee zombie virus. The exceptionally tragic "The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell" is a particularly effective encapsulation of everyday struggles in a postapocalyptic life. New stories "All the Pretty Little Horses" and "Coming to You Live" bookend the collection. "All the Pretty Little Horses" provides insight (if not sympathy) into the evolution of Michael and Stacy Mason, parents of series protagonists Georgia and Shaun. "Coming to You Live" is the work most expressly for fans of the series, addressing Shaun and Georgia's medical and emotional survival needs during their self-inflicted isolation in Canada. This collection is best for established readers, as it contains numerous spoilers for the novels, but any reader can appreciate Grant's skillful writing. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.