Black Gate

Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues (St. Martin’s Press, February 15, 2022 and March 14, 2023). Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Truth to tell, I missed Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 last year, despite all the breathless praise heaped on it (NPR listed it as one of the Best Books of 2022, calling it “A wildly entertaining mix of action and big ideas peppered with humor and a bizarre love story”). It was our very own Brandon Crilly who tuned me in to the coolness of Mickey7 with his mid-2022 Roundup, in which he wrote:

Gods this was a fun read. Ashton begins with protagonist Mickey stuck at the bottom of a pit and certain he’s going to die, since he’s the Expendable and his colony will just regenerate him. Except things take various turns from there, due to the threat of alien attack, the idiosyncrasies of the colonists, or the bizarre experience of being the seventh iteration of yourself. If you’ve ever spent nights thinking Okay, but the transporter really kills folks and then duplicates them, right, this is most definitely a book for you.

And now the sequel Antimatter Blues, which arrived this week from St. Martin’s Press, is being called “A nonstop SF adventure from beginning to end” (Library Journal).

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Cinder, Volume One of The Lunar Chronicles (Square Fish, February 2020). Cover by Tomer Hanuka

I don’t usually hang out in the young adult section at Barnes & Noble. OK, that’s a blatant lie. I gawk at the colorful table displays like a starving zombie at a Springsteen concert. Let me start over.

I love the young adult section at Barnes & Noble, but I don’t usually buy a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I don’t often come across book descriptions like this one.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move…. Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction.

A Cinderella retelling dressed up as cyberpunk noir, described as “a cross between Cinderella, Terminator, and Star Wars” by Entertainment Weekly? That’s worth twelve bucks. I totally missed Marissa Meyer’s Cinder when it was released in hardcover a decade ago, but I was delighted to bring the new paperback edition home with me, and you know what? I’m glad I did.

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The Rooks and Ruin trilogy: The Obsidian Tower, The Quicksilver Court, and The Ivory Tomb
(Orbit, 2020, 2021, and 2022). Covers by Peter Bollinger, Mike Heath, and Peter Bollinger

On Saturday I was wandering through the well-stocked Dealer’s Room at Capricon 43 in Chicago with Rich Horton, looking for new books of all kinds. (And if there’s a guy you want at your side as you struggle to find quality books, believe me, it’s Rich Horton. He has great taste and a well informed opinion on everything — and I do mean everything.) I stumbled on the newly-released The Ivory Tomb, the concluding novel in Melissa Caruso’s Rooks and Ruin, and read the first paragraph of the back cover.

The Dark Days have returned. The Demon of Carnage mercilessly cuts through villagers and armies. The Demon of Corruption rots the land. The Serene Empire and the Witch Lords race towards war. And in the middle of it all stands Rxyander, the Warden of Gloamingard.

That’s a lot of demons. Do I really want to read a trilogy about Dark Days, demons, Witch Lords, and a gloom-shrouded castle called ‘Gloamingard’??

Ha! You know me so well. Of course I do. I bought that book so fast Rich didn’t even know what happened.

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Dance of Thieves and Vow of Thieves (Square Fish, 2019 and 2022). Covers by Rich Deas and Mike Burroughs

I don’t pay as much attention to Young Adult fantasy as I should. It’s not experiencing the explosion of bestsellers and media attention it was just a few years ago, but it’s still one of the bright spots in genre publishing, and where a lot of talented writers are doing some excellent work.

Fortunately Barnes & Noble makes it easy for me to stumble on some of the most exciting titles, and that’s exactly what happened on Sunday when I stopped in front of their YA display tables. There in the center was Dance of Thieves, the first of a two-volume series featuring an outlaw family, a legendary street thief, a dark secret, the young women of the Queen’s guard, a son thrust suddenly into power, and a life-and-death cat and mouse game between them all. It shares a setting with the author’s bestselling Remnant Chronicles, which helped pique my interest, and that (and the enticing description) was enough to convince me to take it home.

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Ancestral Night and Machine (Saga Press, March 2019 and October 2020). Covers by Getty Images and Jae Song

Elizabeth Bear is chiefly known as a fantasy writer these days. She won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and she’s had a hand in more than eight acclaimed series in the years since, including The Edda of Burdens trilogy, the Eternal Sky trilogy, and The Lotus Kingdoms trilogy, all from Tor. When I wrote about her new space opera novel Ancestral Night back in 2019, I quoted the Publishers Weekly review that first got my attention.

Outstanding… Bear’s welcome return to hard SF after several years of writing well-received steampunk and epic fantasy. As an engineer on a scrappy space salvage tug, narrator Haimey Dz has a comfortable, relatively low-stress existence, chumming with pilot Connla Kuruscz and AI shipmind Singer. Then, while aboard a booby-trapped derelict ship, she is infected with a not-quite-parasitic alien device that gives her insights into the universe’s structure. This makes her valuable not only to the apparently benevolent interstellar government, the Synarche, but also to the vicious association of space pirates… Amid a space opera resurgence, Bear’s novel sets the bar high.

While shipping for some Christmas break reading at B&N last week, I laid eyes on the sequel for the first time. The trade edition of Machine was released in July of 2021, and now looks very handsome on my bookshelf next to the first one.

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