Joan Slonczewski Book order

Brain Plague is the new hard SF novel by Joan Slonczewski, set in the same future universe as her award-winning A Door into Ocean and The Children Star (a New York Times Notable Book). An intelligent microbe race that can live symbiotically in other intelligent beings is colonizing the human race throughout the civilized universe. And each colony of microbes has its own personality, good or bad. In some people, carriers, they are brain enhancers, and in others a fatal brain plague, a living addiction. This is the story of one woman's psychological and moral struggle to adjust to having an ambitious colony of microbes living permanently in her own head. This novel is one of the most powerful and involving SF novels of the year.

A brilliant new SF adventure from the John W. Campbell award winner which marks her return to the universe of A Door Into The Ocean & Daughter of Elysium.

Two decades after a nuclear war, small enclaves survive the destruction of the ozone layer, somewhat protected by walls of air established by the alien floating globes that the radiation-contaminated humans call angelbees. Isabel Garcia-Chase comes of age in Gwynwood in what was formerly Pennsylvania, rebelling against the angelbees, who communicate with humans only through a now-dying Contact and forbid the use of much technology, including radios. The enclaves, the largest of which is in Australia, keep in touch with each other through the angelbee-operated Pylons which provide instantaneous transmission. While Isabel and others believe the angelbees either caused the devastation or at least exacerbated it, the Quakers who mostly populate Gwynwood see them as saviors. After an act of rebellion, Isabel and her new husband, Daniel Scattergood, are taken into the Pylon and they begin to learn more about the aliens. Slonczewski ( Still Forms on Foxfield ) writes a thoughtful and unusual after-the-holocaust novel, strongly infused with the Quaker outlook. Its slow but careful pace rewards the reader with such beautifully developed characters as Peace Hope Scattergood, born without hands and a talented painter, and a hopeful view of humanity and its future.