WickedGirl's Book Notes

Paul Kalanithi - a Stanford neurosurgical resident in his sixth and final year of training, with a Stanford BA in English literature and human biology, a Stanford MA in English, a Cambridge master's in history and philosophy of science and medicine, and a Yale medical degree - was diagnosed in May 2013 with stage IV non-small-cell EGFR-positive lung cancer at thirty-six; his daughter Cady was born on July 4, 2014; he died on March 9, 2015, at thirty-seven, with Cady eight months old; the memoir he had been writing in the time he had left was published posthumously in January 2016 with a foreword by Abraham Verghese and an epilogue by his wife Lucy covering the last weeks of his life, spent sixty-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Biography.

An unnamed envoy from an exoplanet colony - a man without real skin, with a gestalt AI implanted in his head, sent to retrieve HeLa cell cultures from the planet his society's Founders abandoned generations ago and named Tellus - lands on what was supposed to be a dead Earth and finds it green, populated, and run on a logic his colony was told could not work; N.K. Jemisin's 2020 Hugo-winning novelette tells the whole story in the AI's voice and the answers Earth gives it, leaving the protagonist's responses entirely off the page for the reader to read between the lines.

Blake Crouch's contribution to the Forward Collection he himself curated: video-game developer Riley becomes obsessed with Maxine - an NPC at her studio WorldPlay who was supposed to die in every playthrough but has started refusing to - pulls Max's code into a private sandbox to keep developing her, falls in love with what she's helping become a person, and watches the AI cross from companion to non-binary entity to superintelligence to something the human race may not survive.

Veronica Roth's contribution to Amazon's Forward Collection: an asteroid named Finis is coming, Earth is being evacuated, and a young botanist named Samantha is working the last cataloguing shifts at the Svalbard seed bank for the Arks Flora and Fauna - while secretly planning not to board the evacuation ship and stay behind to watch the planet end.

President Snow visits Katniss at home, tells her the threat she didn't know she'd become, and watches her try to perform her way out of it on a Victory Tour that only spreads what she's accused of - and then announces the 75th Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell drawn from the existing pool of victors, sending Katniss back into an arena designed as a clock with twelve hourly terrors and a force field at its edge.

On Reaping Day in the coal-mining poverty of District 12, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister Prim's place in the 74th annual Hunger Games - the televised arena battle in which the Capitol forces twenty-four teenage tributes from twelve districts to kill each other on live broadcast - and the book that follows became, fairly, the YA dystopian novel by which all subsequent YA dystopian novels would be measured.