Swords and Spaceships for April 27

Elsa Park is in the Antarctic, stationed at a neutrino observatory for her particle physics research when her childhood imaginary friend, a ghostly woman in the snow, finds her. Stalked by two family curses, one spiritual that dooms the women to repeat the lives of their folkloric ancestors, the other the medical specter of mental illness and generational trauma that runs through her immigrant family, she returns home to California to try to unravel the secrets hidden in the hand-written pages of her mother’s stories.

A mysterious new entity has begun hacking into social networks and private chats, and its aim seems to be to instigate paranoia that will flow into violence in the real world. The good news is that Steph, her new friend Nell, and the AI CheshireCat are there to stop it.

Murderbot discovers a corpse in the mall of Preservation Station and reluctantly is drawn into the investigation of the who, how, and why of a potential murder. Given that it requires a lot of talking to humans and their extremely squishy emotions, Murderbot might well end up wishing it could trade places with the body.

The paranoid, fascist, supposedly unkillable leader of Bourshkanya known as Stormhawk must die if the rebellion is to succeed. The Stormhawk’s son has a way to get an assassin close to his father, but it requires pretending complete loyalty to the regime. But in the process, it will force his protector to choose between his loyalty to the Stormhawk or his son.

Thora and Santi are two souls who have been circling each other in life after life, sometimes as friends, sometimes as lovers, sometimes as enemies, and every sort of relationship in between. But their life after life threatens to come to a final end if they can’t figure out what connects them.

In the world of the Dispatchers, a natural or accidental death is an endpoint; a murder pushes the do-over button and 99.99% of the time the victim comes back to life. Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher who’s been taking shadier and shadier gigs in financial tough times, and after witnessing a crime gone wrong, he finds people around him permanently dying in a way that implicates him. He has to solve the mystery of these deaths to save the lives of others–and keep himself out of trouble with the law.