By Abigail Nussbaum
Publication Date: 2025-12-30 20:00:00
The salt oracleLorraine Wilson (Solaris 978-1-837865-741, £18.99, 400 per person, hc), November 2025.
Bellwether College is a floating structure somewhere in the Baltic Sea. In the future that followed the crash, most technology is lost or dangerous, and the “ghosts” of electronic information wander in search of their lost sources, fatally infecting and transforming anyone lucky enough to come into contact with them. Environmental degradation has made weather conditions and ocean currents even more unpredictable than they were before satellites and computers. Generating new climate and navigation models, Bellwether is the rare place in this devastated, dangerous future where science and learning still occurs.
What makes the college’s existence possible is the Oracle, a young woman born with the ability to safely contact and channel the spirits. At the careful suggestion and study of Bellwether’s researchers, the Oracle produces fragments that the scientists…
