REISSUES
Last year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel went to Sarah Pinsker’s A SONG FOR A NEW DAY ( , 4 March, Head of Zeu but our reviewer wasn’t quite so impressed. It’s set in a near-future US after a wave of terrorist attacks and a viral pandemic, when about all that’s left of the music industry is VR gigs accessed via “Hoods”. We said: “It’s refreshing to see a novel focus on the problems facing musicians in the 21st century… But it’s fond of rock & roll clichés, and the intensely earnest tone leads to passages of purple prose.” A bestseller in his native Germany, Marc-Uwe Kling’s QUALITYLAND ( , out now, Orion) satirises the way online profiling is creating malleable, credulous mass consumers.