Discover the Best Deals on Top Products – ShopEver24, Your Ultimate Destination for Quality and Savings

Cosmic horror sci-fi, and the quest to understand how life began

New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

The book cover for the novel The Night Guest. It has a bubblegum pink background, and a wine glass is pictured in the foreground, with a small amount of a red liquid dripping into it

Anyone who lives with a difficult-to-diagnose chronic illness and has endured the demoralizing process of trying to get proper treatment can tell you it is, at times, a living nightmare. Advocating for yourself, fighting to be taken seriously; it’s something I’ve dealt with most of my life as a person with autoimmune diseases. So when I read the description of Hildur Knútsdóttir’s psychological horror novel, The Night Guest, it resonated with me immediately:

Iðunn is in yet another doctor’s office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something’s not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven’t revealed any cause. When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same ― have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps. Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . . What is happening when she’s asleep?

The Night Guest is a short, compelling read that puts an unsettling spin on an issue that a lot of people — especially women — can relate to. I pretty much inhaled it.

The cover for Is Earth Exceptional? Spherical green structures are pictured arranged like dense planets against a backdrop of starsThe cover for Is Earth Exceptional? Spherical green structures are pictured arranged like dense planets against a backdrop of stars

The origin of life and the question of whether it exists elsewhere is a topic I find to be endlessly interesting (as evidenced by how regularly books about it land among these recommendations). In their new book Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life, astrophysicist Mario Livio and Nobel Prize winning biologist Jack Szostak examine what we know about the things that make life possible — the building blocks of life — and explore how they could have emerged on Earth and, hypothetically, elsewhere. At the heart of the mystery is the as yet unanswered question of whether or not life came to be as the result of a freak accident.

As the authors write in their introduction, “Even with the enormous scientific progress we have witnessed in the past few decades, we still don’t know whether life is an extremely rare chemical accident, in which case we may be alone in our galaxy, or a chemical inevitability, which would potentially make us part of a huge galactic ensemble.”

An illustration of a huge, grotesque gray head with red tube-like sludge pouring out of its eyes and mouth onto a path, where a person is standingAn illustration of a huge, grotesque gray head with red tube-like sludge pouring out of its eyes and mouth onto a path, where a person is standing

In 2034 as imagined by Into the Unbeing, Earth is well past the tipping point of climate change. The planet has been devastated by natural disasters and species have died off in the masses. Looking for anything that can help improve the world’s situation, a team of climate scientists with the Scientific Institute for Nascent Ecology and Worlds (SINEW) ventures out to explore what appears to be an entirely new environment that has popped up out of nowhere near their camp in the Australian outback. But they’re not prepared for what they find.

Into the Unbeing is a new gripping science-fiction series that weaves in cosmic horror. The first issue came out at the beginning of the summer, and Part One just wrapped up this week with issue number four. If you were into Scavengers Reign or The Southern Reach Trilogy, you’ll probably enjoy Into the Unbeing. The art alone will suck you right in.

This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.

Trending Products

0
Add to compare
- 20%
Sceptre Curved 24-inch Gaming Monitor 1080p R1500 98% sRGB HDMI x2 VGA Construct-in Audio system, VESA Wall Mount Machine Black (C248W-1920RN Sequence)

Sceptre Curved 24-inch Gaming Monitor 1080p R1500 98% sRGB HDMI x2 VGA Construct-in Audio system, VESA Wall Mount Machine Black (C248W-1920RN Sequence)

Original price was: $99.97.Current price is: $79.97.
0
Add to compare
- 20%
SAMSUNG 27″ T35F Sequence FHD 1080p Laptop Monitor, 75Hz, IPS Panel, HDMI, VGA (D-Sub), 3-Sided Border-Much less, FreeSync, LF27T350FHNXZA

SAMSUNG 27″ T35F Sequence FHD 1080p Laptop Monitor, 75Hz, IPS Panel, HDMI, VGA (D-Sub), 3-Sided Border-Much less, FreeSync, LF27T350FHNXZA

Original price was: $149.99.Current price is: $119.99.
.

We will be happy to hear your thoughts

Leave a reply

ShopEver24
Logo
Compare items
  • Total (0)
Compare
0
Shopping cart