New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
Putnam Pub Group
An agoraphobic engineer named Henry spends his days locked away in his extremely smart home building freaky little robots, including one that looks like a magician and rides around on a tiny bike. His wife, Lily, is the only person he really ever sees, but things have grown tense between them — a situation only worsened by the fact that he’s usually holed up alone in the attic working on a secret project. One day, Lily invites some former coworkers over to encourage Henry to socialize, and Henry takes the opportunity to finally show off his greatest creation: William, an advanced AI system housed in a crude robot body. Horror ensues.
Mason Coile’s William (stylized W1LL1AM) takes the well-worn trope of a naive creator faced with their out-of-control creation and adds haunted smart-house creepiness, with a twist ending. Naturally, it’s drawn comparisons to Frankenstein and even The Shining, but I’d dare to say there’s a hint of Demon Seed in there, too. This is another short read, coming in at under 250 pages, and it’s just the right thing to get you into the spooky season mood. It takes place, appropriately, on Halloween.
Penguin Press
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and its subsequent transformation into X as we now know it dominated headlines for months, so you couldn’t be blamed for feeling like you’ve heard all there is to know about the whole saga. But for those who do want a deeper look into how it all transpired, journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac have dredged up a ton of previously unreported information in their book Character Limit, which pulls from interviews with insiders and internal recordings from the rooms where it all went down to give us the full story of Twitter’s takeover. And it is a messy one.
Image Comics
I can’t think of another new series in recent memory that’s left me so hungry for the next issue as The Tin Can Society #1. Before I get into it, though, I should note that this first issue opens with a content warning about violence and discussions of ableism and racism. It is intense from the jump. The Tin Can Society begins with a crime scene: tech mogul turned superhero Johnny Moore has been murdered.
Moore, born with spina bifida, rose to fame as the genius creator of advanced exoskeleton-style mobility aids, and he wore a full-body armored version of one of these suits while operating as the vigilante hero, Caliburn. When he’s found dead, the suit is gone. The Tin Can Society follows Moore’s childhood friends, who come together after years apart to get to the bottom of his murder. There’s a lot of heart in the first issue as it bounces between their present-day setting and the past, building out the backstory of Moore’s early life and the tight-knit friend group that once was. I’m excited to see where this one goes. The Tin Can Society will be a nine-part mini series, and the next issue drops in late October.
