Front Table Newsletter 10/28

On this week’s Front Table, follow a history-making vice president through 107 days on the campaign trail, and face the dangers of artificial intelligence in a stark warning about humanity’s future. Travel from South Africa to Japan in a story of family and forgiveness, and question the power structures that shape our trust in each other. Meet a young woman caught between love and violence, and trace the path of a revolutionary spy across continents and ideologies. Finally, explore our changing planet through a striking look at the world’s disappearing coasts.

107 Days
(Simon & Schuster)
Kamala Harris

Your Secret Service code name is Pioneer.
You are the first woman in history to be elected vice president of the United States.
On July 21, 2024, your running mate, Joe Biden, announces that he will not be seeking reelection.
The presidential election will occur on November 5, 2024.
You have 107 days.
Written with candor, a unique perspective, and the pace of a page-turning novel, 107 Days takes you inside the race for the presidency as no one has ever done before.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
(Little, Brown and Company)
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next. For decades, two signatories of that letter--Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares--have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us--and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence. The world is racing to build something truly new under the sun. And if anyone builds it, everyone dies.

Fathers and Fugitives
(Europa Editions)
S.J. Naudé; Michiel Heyns (Trans.)

Estranged from his elderly, senile father, Daniel nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Shortly after arriving in Cape Town, however, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man's will: he will inherit his share of his father's estate only if he spends time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn't seen since they were boys, and who lives on a sprawling farm in the Free State. With the conditions bearing on Daniel's inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel to Japan to seek out an experimental cure for the son of the woman Theon lives with. The trip will change their lives forever. S.J. Naudé's masterful novel is many things at once: a literary page page-turner full of vivid, unexpected characters and surprising twists; a loving and at times shockingly raw portrayal of its protagonist's complex psyche; and a devastatingly subtle look into South Africa's fraught recent history.

Who Do We Trust?: Power, Solidarity and Anti-Authoritarianism
(Pluto Press)
Dana M. Williams

Distrust is in the air--of politicians, corporations, and the institutions that claim to protect us. Trust is often seen as the foundation of a better society--but better for whom? While some forms of radical trust can foster survival, resistance, and movement-building, others entrench inequality and uphold the domination of elite groups. Who Do We Trust? shatters conventional wisdom, revealing how trust in hierarchical institutions perpetuates inequality and consolidates power among the elite. Drawing on examples from the war on Gaza, the rise of the MAGA movement, police violence, and the global response to refugees, Dana Williams challenges us to question who truly deserves our trust and who doesn't. This bold, timely exploration unearths social relationships, cultures of resistance, and the urgent fight to reclaim trust from those who exploit it.


Nymph: A Novel
(Verso Fiction)
Stephanie Lacava

Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, her mother, and her father made an isolated, strange, and loving -- if very unusual -- family unit. Her lonely childhood games mimicked spycraft and wet-work, while her parents watched and shared their arcane theories about love and death. As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan. This is a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use while pursuing romance in the city. However, steering clear of attachment is as dangerous as anything else she does and means sidestepping a certain alluring figure from her father's past. She is equally intent on dying young, a less difficult proposition given her heritage, the company she keeps -- call girls, conflicted cops, trustfund hoodlums -- and the people pursuing her. Will Bathory escape both fate and family, or does satisfaction and salvation lie only in their embrace?


Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light
(William Morrow Paperbacks)
Neal Stephenson

The first installment in Neal Stephenson's Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB. Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic, and the start of a captivating new series from Neal Stephenson.


The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis
(The New Press)
Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros

Our planet is in peril. Seas are rising, oceans are acidifying, ice is melting, coasts are flooding, species are dying, and communities are faltering. Despite these dire circumstances, most of us don't have a clear sense of how the interconnected crises in our ocean are affecting the climate system, food webs, coastal cities, and biodiversity, and which solutions can help us co-create a better future. The Atlas of Disappearing Places depicts twenty locations across the globe under siege from four different climate impacts. Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, weaving together contemporary stories and speculative "future histories" with beautiful, full-color illustrations. As the effects of climate change continue to become clearer, and the time to reverse it slips further away, The Atlas of Disappearing Places is "a striking and deeply researched work of art and environmental activism" that will inspire readers to take on the greatest fight of our lives.