Square3

Dust jacket illustration by Julie Dillon.

Seanan McGuire returns with a long new novella, Square^3,, written under her popular pseudonym, Mira Grant.  

About the Book:

We think we understand the laws of physics.  We think reality is an immutable monolith, consistent from one end of the universe to the next.  We think the square/cube law has actual relevance.

We think a lot of things.  It was perhaps inevitable that some of them would turn out to be wrong. 

When the great incursion occurred, no one was prepared.  How could they have been?  Of all the things physicists had predicted, “the fabric of reality might rip open and giant monsters could come pouring through” had not made the list.  But somehow, on a fine morning in May, that was precisely what happened.

For sisters Susan and Katharine Black, the day of the incursion was the day they lost everything.  Their home, their parents, their sense of normalcy…and each other, because when the rift opened, Susan was on one side and Katharine was on the other, and each sister was stranded in a separate form of reality.  For Susan, it was science and study and the struggle to solve the mystery of the altered physics inside the zones transformed by the incursion.  For Katharine, it was monsters and mayhem and the fight to stay alive in a world unlike the world of her birth.

The world has changed.  The laws of physics have changed.  The girls have changed.  And the one universal truth of all states of changed matter is that nothing can be completely restored to what it was originally, no matter how much you might wish it could be.

Nothing goes back. 

Limited: 1250 signed numbered hardcover copies

From Publishers Weekly:

“The latest from bestseller Grant (after Kingdom of Needle and Bone) reads as a labor of love—or a bit of a lark, really. Grant (a pen name for Seanan McGuire) experiments in the vein of Alan Moore’s Watchmen by drawing on mid-century comics and pulps, updating the tropes, and making no bones about politics… As in any pulp escapade, pace and spectacle matter significantly more here than logic or nuance, but readers who go in with expectations properly adjusted will find a satisfying, light adventure.”

From Library Journal:

“Popular sci-fi horror author Grant (Into the Drowning Deep) presents an intense page-turner that features two sisters in Evanson, IL, as they are swept up in the next earth-shaking disaster after a pandemic. Huge Godzilla-like monsters step out of them… this is a fast-paced and entertaining novella that’s perfect for fans of cosmic horror.”

Incursion
(excerpt) 

When the first holes ripped in the fabric of reality and the first interlopers appeared, looming out of the sudden unseasonable fog like mountains or wayward aircraft, no one knew what to expect. The world was not braced. There had been no warning—

(or if there had been warning, it had been too diffuse to help. In the months and years to come, people would point to a dozen possible causes for the disaster, each as likely and reasonable as any of the others. A record-breaking particle accelerator had been turned on in Siberia; a long-range space mission had returned to Earth; several solar storms had caused massive electromagnetic disruptions; a mathematician working in hyperspatial mathematics intended to map the movement of parallel dimensions had logged multiple breakthroughs within the weeks leading directly up the event. None of these incidents were conclusive, and none of them could ever be proven connected)

—and no way to predict the event. One moment, nature had laws and generally followed them, unenforced and unpoliced. One moment, everything was normal. The next, physics and mathematics were negotiable things, and the supposed laws that had always governed biology were shattered beyond all repair.