Up Against It

Although billed as a virginal production by M. J. Locke, this "debut" novel really represents the stealth relaunch of a fine writer, Laura Mixon-Gould. A state-of-the-art solar system space opera finds the heroine struggling against an assortment of engineering troubles that bedevil the asteroid colony of Phoecea. A page-turning parable, one might say, for the crumbling infrastructure of our own era.

May 22: The video game Pac-Man, featuring "the most iconic character from the golden age of arcade video games," was released on this day in 1980. Over the next decade, gamers spent over $2.5 billion in quarters…

Ethan Rutherford and Matt Burgess (Dogfight: A Love Story) on the writing of Rutherford's surreal and fiercely funny story collection The Peripatetic Coffin

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