Dare to Know by James Kennedy; Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes; Five Minds by Guy Morpuss; and AI 2041: Ten Visions for our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
The world in James Kennedy’s Dare to Know(Quirk, £9.99) has one disturbing difference from our own: in the 1980s an experimental physicist discovered subatomic particles, named thanatons, with a mysterious link to human deaths. An offshoot of this discovery has led to a booming business in death prediction: for a fee, anyone can learn exactly when they will die. The unnamed narrator, one of the first to master the skill, knows its real price: “gaining proficiency with thanaton theory changed you … the very act of calculation subtly distorted space-time around it”. In a bleak moment, he breaks the rules to find his own date and time of death, and discovers the fatal moment was earlier that same day. How has he survived? Like the narrator, the author has degrees in both physics and philosophy. His first novel for adults connects the two subjects as it explores questions of free will, psychology and human history in a fascinating, compulsively readable thriller.
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