October 2020

Edwin Rutledge, owner of the Babylon Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, has shut down his keno lounge because his IT lead Nick Chen has discovered that consumer-grade quantum computers have made the casino's pseudo-random-number generator retroactively crackable; the fix is a quantum random-number generator, which a sales rep named Prashant Singh is in town to install; what Prashant does not know is that his wife Sumi - a polymath who is the actual story of this story - has at home a second quantum unit entangled with the one her husband is installing, has used it to choose her winning keno numbers in advance, and is using a single trip to the Babylon to set up a long con on Las Vegas itself. Andy Weir's contribution to the Amazon Original Stories Forward Collection (2019), narrated in audio by Janina Gavankar.

You wake up in a dark room with no memory of who you are; a disembodied voice over an intercom belonging to a Dr. Anne Kuhn is going to take care of you, rebuild your strength through daily exercises, and gradually walk you back through the memories you do not have; your name, when Dr. Kuhn says it, appears on the page as blank spaces; the world outside the facility has been altered by a pandemic; and what Dr. Kuhn actually wants, who you actually are, and whether any version of you has been in this room before are the questions Paul Tremblay's second-person Bram Stoker-pedigreed novelette is going to walk you toward. An Amazon Original Story in the Forward Collection (2019), edited by Blake Crouch and narrated in audio by Steven Strait.

Sam, a forty-five-year-old man with a wife named Annie and a self-driving car, takes that car to Vitek - a near-future fertility lab that offers parents the option to engineer their child's genome and presents the lives that engineering will produce as three-act plays - and is shown three projected lives for their hypothetical son Daniel: Daniel One a child of constant happiness, Daniel Two a child who marches to the beat of his own drum, Daniel Three a child of effortless success; the Vitek representative also observes, in the same pitch, that Annie is in the second act of her life and Sam has been stuck in his third act for fifteen years; Sam leaves the building, drives to a bar called The Glass Half Full, drinks himself toward an answer, and runs into a stranger named Beezer with his own theory about who Vitek really works for. An Amor Towles short story in the Amazon Original Stories Forward Collection (2019), narrated in audio by David Harbour.

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.

On the night of her twin daughters' fifteenth birthday party in Miami Beach, Emma Ross's life cracks open: a private, humiliating moment of her quieter twin Zoe ends up online, the video goes viral, and the public scandal that follows surfaces a set of Emma's own old secrets that her marriage and her family were not built to hold.

Anna Newell Jones, the creator of the AndThenWeSaved.com blog, wiped out $23,605.10 of personal debt in fifteen months by going on what she calls a Spending Fast - a near-total freeze on non-essential spending - and turned the method into this 2016 personal-finance book aimed not at minimalists or budget-spreadsheet people but at the audience the genre usually scolds: spenders.

Chariton of Aphrodisias's mid-first-century AD Greek romance - the oldest surviving complete prose novel - sends the supernaturally beautiful Callirhoe and her Syracusan husband Chaereas through entombment, pirates, slavery in Miletus, an adultery trial in Babylon before the Persian king Artaxerxes, an Egyptian rebellion, and a naval battle on their two-thousand-year-old way back to each other.

On a Memorial Day weekend Girl Scout campout at Apache Pass, twelve-year-old Jenny Brady and her tentmate Dora Matthews sneak off to smoke a cigarette and stumble onto the body of a murdered Phoenix heiress; when Dora turns up dead two days later, Sheriff Joanna Brady has to figure out who left the body for her own daughter to find before they come back for the second witness.

S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel - written while she was a junior in high school - opens on fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis getting jumped on his way home from a movie in Tulsa, and walks the next several days through a fountain killing, a hideout in an abandoned country church, a fire that saves schoolchildren, a rumble between greasers and Socs, a Robert Frost poem, and one of the more devastating closing arcs in YA literature.

Two weeks after high school sophomore Hannah Baker kills herself, a shoebox arrives at Clay Jensen's house containing seven cassette tapes she recorded before she died - one side per person who contributed to the decision, thirteen reasons in all, with instructions to listen, pass them on, and not break the chain or the second set held by a watchful classmate gets released to the world.