New Book of the Week: Double Vision

Our New Book of the Week comes from one of science fiction’s most extraordinary and original voices – winner of the 1999 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dreaming in Smoke, Tricia Sullivan.

In 2004, Tricia rewrote the rulebook with Maul – a dual-narrative mesh of near-future timelines we can only describe as genderpunk and consumerterrorism – which went on to be shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA and James Tiptree, Jr Awards. Then, having bent our minds as far as they could go, with Maul, she snapped them with Double Vision . . .

When shy, psychic bookworm ‘Cookie’ Orbach watches television, she sees things. But not the things that you or I would see. Cookie sees The Grid – a strange, shifting landscape where human forces battle against an enemy they dare not kill.

Her employer, the mysterious Dataplex Corporation, pays her well to watch this war, and asks only that she report her observations but take no direct action, which suits her passive demeanour just fine.

But Cookie’s quiet life is about to be shattered. Her two very different worlds are threatening to merge in a way that shouldn’t really be possible. Everything is about to change. And we do mean everything . . .

You can find more of Tricia Sullivan’s work via her Author page on the SF Gateway website and read about her in her entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.