Daniel Abraham, Blade of Dream: This middle book of a planned trilogy is unusual for a fantasy because there are no real fantasy elements until three-fourths of the way through. Instead, the bulk of the book is Elaine a Sal, the new prince of Kithamar’s heir, dealing with the change in her status including her tryst with a random citizen. The tryst throws both their lives off track—the citizen leaves his merchant family and joins the city guard, while Elaine starts to consider what parts of her life she actually wants, while investigating what is making her father so upset and closed-off from her. (That’s connected to the magic of the first book, as is what happens when, late in the book, the Thread of Kithamar tries to regain its control of the city’s rulers.) I’m interested to see what happens next.
M.R. Carey, Infinity Gate: Across the multiverse, a Pandominion rules hundreds of earths with an iron fist; when it discovers a set of worlds run by machine intelligence, it reacts badly. Meanwhile, a scientist from a world only slightly more deteriorated than our own discovers how to shift universes. They’ll all collide, with a denouement that is pretty exciting and also sets up the sequel.
C.S. Friedman, Nightborn: Coldfire Rising: A “how it happened” narrative creating the background for earlier novels. Human colonists land on Erna and discover that there’s something that can apparently read their minds and manifest dreams and fears, which they label “fae.” The last quarter of the book jumps far ahead in time, to characters we’ve met before, tenuously linked to the first three-fourths. It didn’t seem necessary to enjoy the earlier novels, but I guess there’s a market for this kind of filling out the narrative.
Kate Elliott, Furious Heaven: Space opera on a grand scale, with an Alexander-like hero in Sun, who is still fighting palace politics to ensure her place as heir while preparing for a war against the Phene Empire. Elliott has thought of an interesting way to use physical limitations to get the commander on the front lines, which is otherwise a really dumb thing for a mechanized army that doesn’t work by hand signals. No one is particularly good, and luck plays an important role, but it is still epic.
Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir: Cal is a noir detective specializing in Titan problems. Titans are rich people who’ve gotten access to an expensive life-enhancing treatment that rolls back age but also makes people grow bigger—seven, eight, nine feet. They get stronger and harder to hurt, too, but somehow their hearts don’t give out—look, it’s a metaphor about wealth, ok? Anyway once you handwave the Titans, this is sf noir without much internet; after the beginning murder of a Titan, Cal pounds the street and looks at hard copy records, with the occasional file encoded into a [spoiler]. I liked it.
Mary Robinette Kowal, The Spare Man: Newlywed Tesla Crane wants to have a nice honeymoon cruise to Mars with her new spouse—a retired former detective—and her service dog. But someone keeps killing people and trying to blame it on her husband. Punctuated by cocktail recipes, this is an attempt at a classic Nick and Nora style mystery in spaaaace. I found it a bit too convoluted, but that is indeed classic, and it was interesting to have a main character with chronic pain issues (partially postponable with a deep brain implant, but only at a cost).
K.D. Edwards, The Eidolon: Apparently Edwards is planning a spinoff series focused on the kids, which seems completely reasonable though I also want to know what is happening to Rune. This book is set during the events of the previous book but focused on Max, Quinn, and Anna—the intro says it was actually begun when production limits forced the excision of a lot of material from that book. Anyway, it provides new information about what happened and what it’s like to be Quinn, who sees so many futures that he can have trouble dealing with the present.
Genevieve Cogman, Scarlet: The Scarlet Pimpernel, retold in a world with vampire aristocrats—sanguinocrats!—and maybe some leftover sorcery. Eleanor is a servant in an English vampire’s household when she’s recruited for a dangerous mission in France to rescue (she’s told) unjustly accused aristocrats. But she can’t help noticing that the Scarlet Pimpernel has a lot of assumptions about servants and nobility that don’t match her experience. And are vampires really as benevolent as she’s been raised to believe? I liked the Invisible Library series better, but this certainly has adventure and magic too.
David Gerrold, Hella: The main character is an autistic boy with a chip in his head that helps him navigate the world—which is a giant planet on which everything grows bigger than it does on Earth, though that doesn’t turn out to be as significant to the plot as you might have thought because the colonists are trying not to interact too much with the ecology for fear of disrupting it. But some colonists want to start colonizing and capitalizing, driving the conflict of the book, which also includes the protagonist starting to date and considering whether to transition back to being a girl. It felt like a bunch of interesting ideas both about humanity and about what “colonizing” really means were being squished under the YA format.
Ruthanna Emrys, Imperfect Commentaries: Short stories, including some details from her Cthulhu-derived universe, where she explains that one reason The Shadow over Innsmouth inspired her was that it starts with a government raid, meant to read as reassurance that the authorities were paying attention, but if you start talking raids and camps, “I’m going to have some default assumptions about who the bad guys are.”
Sara Beaman, Arlene Blakely, CS Cheely, K.D. Edwards, & Daniel Wood, Doom Days: After a pandemic wipes out most people, the survivors find ways to get by, mostly by scavenging or living in small farming communities. I have questions about the worldbuilding, but if you like “we have to escape the fascist enclaves and protect our small scale lives” then this is fine.
Steven Brust, Tsalmoth: Back in time, to the run-up to Vlad and Cawti’s wedding. Some of the events are surprising, because Vlad forgot them. He gets involved in a Tsalmoth conspiracy or two, runs up against a faction or two of the Left Hand, and experiences some surprising sorcerous attacks. It seemed like there were some boxes to check before the series finale, and mostly Vlad’s relative youth was shown by having him learn new words, but I still want to see how the last one goes.
Sharon Shinn and Molly Knox Ostertag, Shattered Warrior: Graphic novel about a young woman on a planet being exploited for its resources; although the loss of her family and position has left her wounded, finding her young niece as well as connections to rebels leads her to choose connection and dangerous sabotage attempts against the (larger, human-related) overlords. It’s fine but I mostly wanted new Ostertag.
Martha Wells, Witch King: Wells returns to fantasy with this story of a demon prince (aka witch king) that unfolds across two timelines: during a rebellion against the genocidal Heirarchs and long after, when some things have gone well and others haven’t. There was a lot to process—humans, witches, demons, Immortal Blessed, their constructs, and the Heirarchs were the key players, with lots of palace intrigue as well as fighting. I know it’s reasonable to fear descending into caricature when the market really likes one of your projects, but I confess I want more Murderbot instead.
Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard War: Final volume of the trilogy that deals with magic that destroys the ecology and also allows its practitioners to control other people with engraved bone shards. Actually tries to deal with the fact that "the most powerful magician should rule" is not a great principle, though the emperor arrives at this conclusion in a fairly abrupt manner.
Audrey Schulman, Theory of Bastards: In an increasingly fragile world, a researcher arrives at one of the last sanctuaries for apes and starts studying bonobos in order to further her theories about female sexual selection. She’s also recovering from surgery from endometriosis, the pain and medical neglect of which is described in detail. And she is navigating her own recovering body and her sexuality, including her relationship with the initially offputting but increasingly attractive researcher assigned to support her work. After a dust storm cuts them off from the rest of the world, things get pretty scary; the ending is ambiguous at best but it’s sf of feminist ideas in terms of the questions it considers important (especially: what does choice mean when we have these bodies evolved in specific ways?) and I found it engaging despite the terrible romance-novel cover it has on Scribd, which was staring at me every time I opened it.
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