Black Gate

Now here’s an interesting item. A fat, epic YA novel that reimagines Victor Hugo’s classic Les Misérables as a tale of revolution on the French planet of Laterre. Caitlyn Paxson at NPR calls it “kind of brilliant… a massive tome, full of twists and turns and a thousand agonies that propel its characters to their inevitable fates.” It arrived in hardcover from Simon & Schuster in March.

A thief.
An officer.
A guardian.

Three strangers, one shared destiny…

When the Last Days came, the planet of Laterre promised hope. A new life for a wealthy French family and their descendants. But five hundred years later, it’s now a place where an extravagant elite class reigns supreme; where the clouds hide the stars and the poor starve in the streets; where a rebel group, long thought dead, is resurfacing.

Whispers of revolution have begun — a revolution that hinges on three unlikely heroes…

Chatine is a street-savvy thief who will do anything to escape the brutal Regime, including spy on Marcellus, the grandson of the most powerful man on the planet.

Marcellus is an officer — and the son of a renowned traitor. In training to take command of the military, Marcellus begins to doubt the government he’s vowed to serve when his father dies and leaves behind a cryptic message that only one person can read: a girl named Alouette.

Alouette is living in an underground refuge, where she guards and protects the last surviving library on the planet. But a shocking murder will bring Alouette to the surface for the first time in twelve years… and plunge Laterre into chaos.

All three have a role to play in a dangerous game of revolution — and together they will shape the future of a planet.

Power, romance, and destiny collide in this sweeping reimagining of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables.

Sky Without Stars was published by Simon Pulse on March 26, 2019. It is 582 pages, priced at $19.95 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Billelis. Read the complete first chapter here.

You love tales of space pirates, yes? Of course you do. Why did I even ask?

Bennett R. Coles is the author of the Virtues of War trilogy, which we covered here around this time two years ago. His latest, Winds of Marque, is a tale of star-sailing ships, secret identities, dashing commanders and plucky quartermasters, not to mention “interplanetary travel, black powder cannons, and close quarter cutlass duels with members of the brutish Theropods and their mighty tail swords” (Booklist). And pirates! Lots of pirates. Kirkus gives it their stamp of approval.

With solar sails hoisted and war with the Sectoids imminent, Imperial Navy Subcmdr. Liam Blackwood, enigmatic quartermaster Amelia Virtue, and the crew of the HMSS Daring must stop space pirates from disrupting human supply lines in the outer sectors in the first book in a new series.

Unable to catch the pirates outright, they pose as opportunistic space merchants to gather intelligence. Any booty they take from the pirates remains their prize, but sailing the system under a false flag comes with great risk: Fail, and the emperor will disavow all knowledge of the mission. Every member of the crew will be dishonorably discharged and made destitute. When Daring commander Sophia Riverton’s orders jeopardize the mission, that threat becomes all too real, and the crew slips closer and closer toward mutiny. Romantic complications notwithstanding, Liam and Amelia have to uncover the truth about Riverton before the pirates discover their ruse and scuttle the mission, destroying any chance humankind has against the relentless Sectoids… Traditional science fiction lovers may get distracted looking for more space tech, but lovers of classic high-seas adventures and those who enjoy genre-bending SF will find this swashbuckling space adventure a worthy read.

Winds of Marque is the opening volume in a new series, Blackwood & Virtue. It is 354 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Damonza. Read a sizable 30-page excerpt, the complete first two chapters, here, and listen to a 4-minute audio sample here.

Suzanne Palmer has become a familiar face in Asimov’s Science Fiction, with over a dozen stories there in the last decade. Her 2018 Clarkesworld novelette “The Secret Life of Bots” won a Hugo Award, and she’s twice been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Her debut novel Finder features Fergus Ferguson, interstellar repo man and professional finder, in an action-packed sci-fi caper that Maria Haskins at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog calls “a Ridiculously Fun Science Fiction Adventure… a rollicking ride from a hardscrabble space colony at the outer edge of the galaxy to the conflict-ridden settlements of colonized Mars and back again, with stops on the way at an alien spaceship and a holiday planet.” It’s available now in hardcover from DAW.

Fergus Ferguson has been called a lot of names: thief, con artist, repo man. He prefers the term finder.

His latest job should be simple. Find the spacecraft Venetia’s Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. He’ll slip in, decode the ship’s compromised AI security, and get out of town, Sword in hand.

Fergus locates both Gilger and the ship in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a backwater deep space colony called Cernee. But Fergus’ arrival at the colony is anything but simple. A cable car explosion launches Cernee into civil war, and Fergus must ally with Gilger’s enemies to navigate a field of space mines and a small army of hostile mercenaries. What was supposed to be a routine job evolves into negotiating a power struggle between factions. Even worse, Fergus has become increasingly — and inconveniently — invested in the lives of the locals.

It doesn’t help that a dangerous alien species Fergus thought mythical prove unsettlingly real, and their ominous triangle ships keep following him around.

Foolhardy. Eccentric. Reckless. Whatever he’s called, Fergus will need all the help he can get to take back the Sword and maybe save Cernee from destruction in the process.

Finder was published by DAW on April 2, 2019. It is 400 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Kekai Kotaki. Read the first ten pages of Chapter One here, and see all our recent New Treasures here.