ROB GREENE'S PAGE: The First Planets series, perfect shut-out-the-world alt-hist space opera

MERUCRY RISING (First Planets #1)
RWW GREENE
Angry Robot Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Alternative history with aliens, an immortal misanthrope and SF tropes aplenty

Even in a technologically-advanced, Kennedy-Didn’t-Die alternate-history, Brooklyn Lamontagne is going nowhere fast. The year is 1975, thirty years after Robert Oppenheimer invented the Oppenheimer Nuclear Engine, twenty-five years after the first human walked on the moon, and eighteen years after Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven sacrificed their lives to stop the alien invaders.

Brooklyn just wants to keep his mother’s rent paid, earn a little scratch of his own, steer clear of the cops, and maybe get laid sometime in the near future. Simple pleasures, right? But a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes is about to make his life real complicated…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: 8-track tapes! How I hated them...annoying clunky things vastly overcomplicated and bad at their job. Cassettes were a boon and a blessing.

Still and all, I'd put up with the sodding things if it meant Moonbases and Mars colonies when I was sixteen.

Thanks, Rob...this world scratches my itch. This is a timeline I'd've loved living in, so this chance to visit it was really welcome.

This was a re-read in advance of reading book two, below. Here is my 2022 full review.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EARTH RETROGRADE (First Planets #2)
RWW GREENE
Angry Robot Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Becoming the planet's most (in)famous human has not changed Brooklyn Lamontagne one bit, but the time has come for him to choose where his allegiances really lie.

The United Nations is working to get everyone off Earth by the deadline—set by the planet’s true owners, the aliens known as the First. It’s a task made somewhat easier by a mysterious virus that rendered at least fifty percent of humanity unable to have children. Meanwhile, the USA and the USSR have set their sights on Mars, claiming half a planet each.

Brooklyn Lamontagne doesn’t remember saving the world eight years ago, but he’s been paying for it ever since. The conquered Earth governments don’t trust him, the Average Joe can’t make up their mind, but they all agree that Brooklyn should stay in space. Now, he’s just about covering his bills with junk-food runs to Venus and transporting horny honeymooners to Tycho aboard his aging spaceship, the Victory.

When a pal asks for a ride to Mars, Brooklyn lands in a solar system’s worth of espionage, backroom alliances, ancient treasures and secret plots while encountering a navigation system that just wants to be loved…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: "The mice will see you now" said Slartibartfast to Dentarthurdent.

The First and their prior claim to the Earth Humanity thinks it owns, and definitely dominates, left me uneasily aware that the religious nuts' worldview of a creator god who is the real owner of the place and the people is a very, very short step from most SF...at least the kind with superpowered aliens. I'm not a believer in either things (aliens or gods), so I was a bit more distanced from this book's essential worldview than the first one.

As soon as we get into alien territory I lose steam. I like the idea here more than it sounds like I do; alert readers will notice a 4.5* rating, which is no one's idea of a dissatisfied reader's opinion. I'm mostly responding to Brooklyn's kindness and unwillingness to leave anyone who needs help unhelped. I'm also deeply satisfied by the story's ending.

But I'll admit, I wanted to know more about the First than I learned; the book needed to be longer, or there needed to be another one. Read together, in quick sequence, the story moves quickly to its satisfying conclusion...which is why I re-read the first one. It's a long afternoon and evening taken at one stretch, but it worked well for me. Think of it aas one read and submerge into Brooklyn's forty-two degrees antisolar worldview.

Make this two-part story your escape-from-togetherness read this Yuletide if you batten on alternate history and/or space operas without pew-pew battles. Think Flash Gordon with sex clubs, or the Star Wars cantina with booze reviewer's notes sound like fun? Welcome, Soul Sibling, to your dream's fulfillment.

MERCURY RISING, alternate space-race history with waaay trippy nukes

MERCURY RISING
R.W.W. GREENE
Angry Robot (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five (the w-bombs! the w-bombs!)

The Publisher Says: Alternative history with aliens, an immortal misanthrope and SF tropes aplenty

Even in a technologically-advanced, Kennedy-Didn’t-Die alternate-history, Brooklyn Lamontagne is going nowhere fast. The year is 1975, thirty years after Robert Oppenheimer invented the Oppenheimer Nuclear Engine, twenty-five years after the first human walked on the moon, and eighteen years after Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven sacrificed their lives to stop the alien invaders.

Brooklyn just wants to keep his mother’s rent paid, earn a little scratch of his own, steer clear of the cops, and maybe get laid sometime in the near future. Simple pleasures, right? But a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes is about to make his life real complicated…

I PRACTICALLY HAD TO BEG THE AUTHOR FOR A DRC. I *THOUGHT* WE WERE FRIENDS. MY FEELINGS ARE STILL HURT.

My Review: No, really. Mortally wounded that this wingèd not my way until I groveled. *sniff* (And seriously NO MORE W-BOMBS. Cut that crap out, dirty-old-man-in-training!) I was calmly enjoying the mental soundtrack, the 1970s jukebox that's permanently cued up in my head, when *wham* another revolting w-bomb.

But about that jukebox...would we, in fact, have the precise same pop-cultural artifacts in a world that didn't slow down its climb to the stars? The 1968 Cougar, well, okay, that was already on course from 1958. The planning window of a car in those days was five years...so the 1958s wouldn't've been much altered from our world, as I understand the timeline, which diverges first in the middle 1940s and so those cars can be explained. Pop culture spins on a nailhead. Elvis electrifying the country is one example, the Beatles knocking off his cool-cat cap is another, but both of those came in response to specific cultural stimuli. Wouldn't the world be more law-and-order oriented when the Oppenheimer Nuclear Drives are dangling before the lust-drenched gaze of every young testosterone factory? Can't get in one of those unless your nose is clean.

Which, of course, our PoV character (Brooklyn Lemontagne) flouts. But the reason he's able to flout that social control mechanism is simple: Invaders from Outer Space! The ultimate Golden Age of SF trope. This time they're Mercurians, the patent absurdity of whose existence gives even the Hero of the piece (who apparently dies early on) some pause. Can't argue with the presence of stonking hostile warships and evaporated cities, can you.

This takes place among Americans! Of course you can! The whole planet pulls together to combat the Enemy from Beyond...and there are ignorant goofballs talking conspiracy theories, there are hemi-hippies rebelling against the controlling hand of the grown-ups. This is the world, and honestly I agree with Author Greene's take on it. I quibble with some details, but I believe he's exactly correct that even an existential threat with ample death and destruction to demonstrate its reality won't create more than a façade of unity among the irredeemable mass of humanity. (Look around, tell me, and him, we're wrong.)

So I buy the premise. So I consent to set aside my niggling nuh-uh generator. I'm in for the ride.

Part One: Mercury Rising is straight out of Astounding's *1956 volume. Brave Americans and honorable Soviets lay down their grievances and get on with the job of killin' them some Mercurians. (Mercurians!) The Ultimate Price? Paid. Now what? When and where are we going next? I'm almost sure my Kindle screen cracked under the thumping of my thumb.

Part Two: Bad Blood shifts gears, gives us the rest of the battle story very effectively, and sends Brooklyn, our new PoV man, into some nasty corners. And not one of 'em anything but his own idiot fault. Some gross and very personal violence perpetrated later in the section...it starts to feel like we're going to be in Peckinpah territory through the book...and, on schedule, the fecal matter impacts the rotary air circulation device at warp speed.

The thing about living your life outside is that you learn to watch simple things like a hawk. It takes Brooklyn about three times as long as it should to come up with his get-out-of-jail-free card. But he decides there's nothing else for it: Go to space, full decade enlistment, and get the whole shootin' match handled...crimes forgiven, mother fed, and future still neatly fucked, same as if he'd gone to jail without solving the problems he most cares about solving. Yay...?

Part Three: Squeeze Box details the adjustments of life in military training. It's not like I wasn't expecting it. But I also wasn't enjoying it much until I suddenly twigged: Brooklyn's assigned buddy, Tommy, is gay. And nothing at all fazes Brooklyn, or anyone else it seems, about it.

It seems that the Mercurians (!) destroying Cleveland and causing climate change as well as serious ashfall issues gave people something more interesting than who's zoomin' who to fret over. As well as feed innumerable conspiracy theories that, oddly prove to be correct but misaimed.

Part Four: Take the Money and Run did very little for me, but brightened up the contrast between Brooklyn's America and my 1976 US.

There's a goodly amount of interpersonal violence in this story, fisticuffs to donnybrooking (to use old-fashioned terms); appropriate for a dead-end life such as Brooklyn was living and (I hope) merely his own process of molting that no-longer-needed carapace. The end of the part was oddly assorted with its beginning if that isn't to be the case; our man Brooklyn gets out of his mind instead of out of his head, and does so in the place I think something like Coachella or Burning Man *should* take place: The mass grave of an entire city's populace.

Part Five: The Rubberband Man pretty much just cemented the crazy-shit-men-do-together trope for all time. It's an adventure story, that was an adventure, but...not quite the thing I'd've chosen to prove "once a scofflaw, always a scofflaw" to ye olde readere.

Part Six: Flight '76 was apparently meant to earworm me in the most appalling possible way, including a w-bomb in the first five seconds of the awful, terrible, well-below-mediocre tune that refuses to get out of my head. I think SOMEone owes me some sort of reparations.

Part Seven: Boogie Nights starts with a much better earworm, thank the Nine Goddesses. But it's more transition time treats, ABBA on the Moon (!), and some interesting-to-me alt-hist entertainment...Vice-President JACKSON...then off into the Wild Black Yonder. It goes by really fast.

We do see a good, solid character whose trajectory is geting more interesting, though it's a glancing blow. I'm mostly intrigued by this *McCartney singing political rock opera....

Part Eight: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood is an earworm I can live with, if without the good memories of Boogie Nights. It's also the best shorthand for the events of this part...there are so many mistakes and screwed-up connections to work out, the metaphor of upgrading the computer is especially apt.

The ship names are giving me little frissons. The (Marie-Madeleine) Fourcade is a woman-captained solo spy ship, the Baron von Steuben old-fashioned, obsolescent, and largely overlooked haven for the queer boys too useful to get rid of but not important enough to keep secure (much to the PTB's cost), each carrying its subtext like a homing beacon and not just one of the darn things. I mean, what did von Steuben do? And where (in Ohio) is Steubenville? And why is Carruthers so shifty?

Part Nine: Runnin' on Empty truly sets new stakes for literally everyone in this, our one wild and precious life. Titanically, existentially reorders whatever priorities you thought you'd formed by utterly altering the ground you plonk your trotters onto every time you think to move.

I do not know of an Odysseus I'd rather see handle this situation than the one who is.

Part Ten: Flash Light wafts its foully malodorously vapid earworm through the four-foot speaker towers in my mental disco.

But that is as nothing to the sudden but inevitable betrayal that This Land endures at the foul, gangrenous typing digits of Author Greene. I am too traumatized to say more.

Part Eleven: Boy from New York City introduces us to the real Jet...short for Jethro...Carson. And now the first part has closure. What we're doing I won't tell you, but I will say that there's a reason you'll want to read this and it's in this part.

Part Twelve: Take a Chance on Me is the first time I haven't wanted to claw my brain out to wash the earworm ichor off it.

There's a lot to cheer for, and a lot left to learn. This is a good solid familiar story arc and it's got lots of good gauds and gew-gaws bejazzling its basic curves. We're going to be offered another trip, right?

Rapture Right!

TWENTY-FIVE TO LIFE, a title with more layers than an onion and just as apt to make you cry

TWENTY-FIVE TO LIFE
R.W.W. GREENE
Angry Robot (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

SUPER ULTRA BARGAIN ALERT You can get the sale-priced Kindle edition here for 99¢!!

The Publisher Says: Life goes on for the billions left behind after the humanity-saving colony mission to Proxima Centauri leaves Earth orbit ... but what's the point?

Julie Riley is two years too young to get out from under her mother's thumb, and what does it matter? She's over-educated, under-employed, and kept mostly numb by her pharma emplant. Her best friend, who she's mostly been interacting with via virtual reality for the past decade, is part of the colony mission to Proxima Centauri. Plus, the world is coming to an end. So, there's that.

When Julie's mother decides it's time to let go of the family home in a failing suburb and move to the city to be closer to work and her new beau, Julie decides to take matters into her own hands. She runs, illegally, hoping to find and hide with the Volksgeist, a loose-knit culture of tramps, hoboes, senior citizens, artists, and never-do-wells who have elected to ride out the end of the world in their campers and converted vans, constantly on the move over the back roads of America.

AUTHOR GREENE SENT ME A DRC OF THIS TITLE AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know that itchy little something that lives in the back of your brain? The one that says "...but...wait...what was...?" in a still, small voice but never quite speaks what it is you've forgotten? That's what happened to me with this book. I knew I wanted it...go look at my review for The Light Years...but forgot it was coming out this month. Completely. Until about a week ago.

Way too late to hit up the publisher, in other words. Fuck!

But given that Rob and I follow each other on Twitter, I used my privileged access (snort!) and DMed him to beg for a DRC in my preferred format. Next thing I knew it was in my inbox and I was off to the races. A week, though, isn't a lot of time to read something for a review. Contrary to the openly expressed opinion of a Famous SF Writer who, on Facebook, called my reviews "mediocre," I do expend a goodly amount of effort to engage with what it is I think the writer is trying to do, and if they've succeeded at it, in my opinion. Are there longueurs of style, are there errors of fact, and how exactly did I end up feeling about the story I was being told?

The news is good, readers. Author Greene does it again. He's made a post-apocalyptic future of Left-Behinders not only readable but fun.

Julie, twenty-three, is on her way into an underage person's rave-type party as we meet her. Mother signed off on her attendance..."just don't let anyone film you!"...and here she is, ready to have all the pharma-fun she can! The state wants people happy, so there are implants that go in as soon as possible; they give out SSRIs like they're nothing because, well, that's what the people Left Behind on Earth can expect: Nothing. The planet's given itself a terrible fever to get rid of the infection of Humanity, and it's working. Hence the Best and Brightest going to the Stars.

Julie, goddesses please bless her, wants...something. It's not going to happen if she stays where she is, so she makes the changes necessary (hello, drug withdrawal aka "brain zaps"!) and joins the Volksgeist. They're the few remaining souls who'd rather experience life instead of simply existing through it. Julie joins their caravan of fools (das NarrenVan?) and begins Life with Ranger, an older woman who takes her in and renames her "Runner." (It really fits.) And the novel goes On the Road!

The way things unfold is partly a commentary on the difficulty of detoxing from the astonishingly complex cocktail of brain-altering stuff we routinely ingest. This means Runner has periodic, what to call them, lapses? lacunae? in her sense of time and in the narrative of the story. Since that means some sorts of things don't get described (a party is simply not dealt with, only its aftermath, for example), it can feel a bit frustrating. I wanted to, like Runner herself, experience it all...but what happens in the telling is that I was given the sense of experiencing it as Runner did herself...a subtle, but bold, decision on Author Greene's part. I think it was successful in reinforcing my sense of Runner's reality, her actual experience, though I might've chosen a different course given the chance.

What do road novels do best? They give you a broad spectrum of experiences...and that's here, as well. The community of the Volksgeist is one amorphous, boundary-permeable entity. The places it rests are both changed by the experience of the group being there and the group is changed by additions and deletions of personal choices to remain or join. It makes the entire novel feel as though the goal is Canterbury, and the Wife of Bath will be here momentarily. While I'm medievalizing, since we've already got the Ship of Fools and the Pilgrim's Tale, let me point out that this is very much a morality play as well. Ranger and Runner, the Odd Couple in a way, are experiencing in unmediated form the consequences of my generation's criminal neglect of the warning signs of catastrophe to come. There's not a single thing that happens to the Volksgeist that isn't perfectly possible to believe is happening now, or to see how it will in the term left to me of my own life.

It doesn't look good. It doesn't make my generation look good. And it makes for one helluva good story.

On sale the 24th, tomorrow from when I'm writing this; preorder it now. You WILL want to have it ASAP.

THE LIGHT YEARS, debut SF novel that feels more heartfelt than any other I've read this year

THE LIGHT YEARS
R.W.W. GREENE
Angry Robot Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Hisako Saski was born with her life already mapped out. In exchange for an education, better housing for her family, and a boost out of poverty, she's been contracted into an arranged marriage to Adem Sadiq, a maintenance engineer and amateur musician who works and lives aboard his family's sub-light freighter, the Hajj.

Hisako is not happy with the deal. The arcane branch of physics it requires her to study broke off a thousand years before, and she is not keen on the idea of giving up everything she knows to marry a stranger and move onto an aging spaceship.

Onboard the Hajj, Hisako soon learns her dilemmas are overshadowed by the discovery of ancient secrets, a derelict warship, and a chance at giving the survivors of Earth a fresh start.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THE BOOK FROM THE AUTHOR. THANKS, ROB!

My Review: I wasn't eager to read this book...I don't like being mean to people, and a first novel about relativistic space travel wasn't likely to excite me in a good way...but Rob asked me to read it in an unrefusable way: "I'll take my chances."

Major respect for that, dude.

So here I am reviewing it and recommending it for #Booksgiving. That's unusual for a first novel. A first novel with a casually bisexual male lead, a culture of selling unborn brides to traders on sub-light freighters that function like planets with clashing cultures. And I'm recommending it?

Yes. It's trenchant. I sat still for a minute after reading the teenaged ruminations of the bride bought for male lead, Adem, on learning the boy she was about to mess around with was her unmet fiancé's fanboy. That needs a bit of unpacking....

Adem messes around in his offtime from being a trader, the son of the captain of the ship, and a bored (sort of) twentysomething horndog by recording and broadcasting ancient Earth songs he's discovered. The City of New Orleans, A Boy Named Sue, that kind of thousand-year-old cultural relic. Hey, we have the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields so this isn't remotely far-fetched. Add to that the fact that there are literally thousands of broadcast hours of Earth music...well, something is going to survive. Maybe even some good stuff, though I wouldn't bet on it. And those lightspeed broadcasts have reached his bride's planet, Gaul, where she is about to take A Big Step with one of her fiancé's fanboys. (Her virginity wasn't required for the marriage contract to be honored.)

That's a moment, a passage from one part of life to another, that is frequently accompanied by music. Not usually that of one of the parties' intended marital partner. And that union set to occur quite a long time (a decade, almost) in her future. About which contract she's been aware since she was twelve...and the groom was twenty-six when it was contracted and will arrive on Gaul about twenty-six still because near-light-speed relativistic travel makes your brain hurt when thinking about its social consequences.

That brain-bending reality the two main caracters live in is really the reason I want you to read this. In the best possible way, this novel resembles a novel of manners set in a society where the people getting married come from two different worlds. What can possibly be better described as speculative fiction than that?

There are numerous caveats and addendums to the basic story, of course, though none of them involve explicit sex or even serious romantic entanglement. Again the echo of the novel of manners...and while the publisher's marketing push might lead one to expect something more on the salacious side, it will only bring disappointment to go into the read expecting this.

Don't think it's not involving, don't imagine it's got no narrative tension! Remember how utterly engrossing and un-put-downable The House of Mirth was? Lily Bart's rise from nothing is a lot like Hisako's...but there is so much fun to be had in following the path Author Greene is marking out for you that I'll avoid spoilering it for you. Developments don't stop with the inner worlds of the characters...in a late-stage capitalist future that accepts prenatal marriage contracts (shades of 1300!), you can bet there is a lot of Evil to be done. Quite a bit of it is done to/by Hisako's poet-father.

A keen eye was cast on the twenty-first century and a report card was issued in this novel's background. It wasn't an F, exactly. The room for improvement noted was pretty sizable.... As I'm in sympathy with this point of view, it was largely invisible to me until I started a second read-through. Many abuses of people, living people in your polity, are no better than the extremes posited here. And they need to be addressed. If this plague year has done nothing else good, it's made that fact clear to more people than were clear about it before.

But Rob...srsly my dude...NO MORE W-BOMBS.

THE FORBIDDEN STARS, third and presumed to be last of the Axiom trilogy...but plenty o' room for more!

THE FORBIDDEN STARS
TIM PRATT (Axiom #3)
Angry Robot Books
$8.99 mass market paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The ancient alien gods are waking up, and there's only one spaceship crew ready to stop them, in this dazzling space opera sequel to The Wrong Stars and The Dreaming Stars.

Aliens known as the Liars gave humanity access to the stars through twenty-nine wormholes. They didn't mention that other aliens, the ancient, tyrannical - but thankfully sleeping - Axiom occupied all the other systems. When the twenty-ninth fell silent, humanity chalked it up to radical separatists and moved on. But now, on board the White Raven, Captain Callie and her crew of Axiom-hunters receive word that the twenty-ninth colony may have met a very different fate. With their bridge generator they skip past the wormhole, and discover another Axiom project, fully awake, and poised to pour through the wormhole gate into all the worlds of humanity...

THIS BOOK WAS BORROWED FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. THANK YOU FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS, LIBRARIANS! ALSO...SPOILERS FOR BOOKS ONE AND TWO (REVIEWS LINKED) ARE PRESENT

My Review: We're not under any illusions about the Axiom anymore, are we? They're the xenocidal monsters of which nightmares were first brewed, they're cruel and thoughtless and smugly superior...no, scratch that, they're oblivious to lesser life's reality and so find nothing or no one convincingly sentient except themselves. They're even working, while in hibernation, on changing the fundamental constants of the Universe! And all so they can prolong their own nasty existences (and those of some slaves to do the scut work, one supposes) in complete disregard of the fact that this fundamental alteration would destroy whatever life there already is in it. In spite of all that, here's Captain Callie Machedo and Ashok the engineer, the White Raven's Scotty, met in the middle of blowing the (apparently awakening, shudder) Axiom's shit up some more!

Some people don't want to live.

Or rather, some people are willing to risk death so that the Universe and its untold trillions of life-forms can, and will, live. An altogether more noble formulation of the same set of behaviors, no? Callie and Ashok are in an Axiom travel hub to destroy it for the Benefactor, and in the process steal something they really, really shouldn't have. The final day of the war is upon us. (That reference will make sense when you read the book.) Do your utmost and be happy with that, not certain of any particular outcome. That's working well for Callie and Elena in their settling-in love affair, for Ashok the 27th century's version of a tattoo addict, for Lantern the double-agent Liar, for Drake-and-Janice the Universe's most unusual conjoined beings.

That makes for a happy and fun read, right? Well...mostly...I'm never going to reconcile myself to the infodumping that the series contains in abundance, but what I realized about that is that the info is entertaining and necessary so...well...so there one is. It's a fact that cannot now be changed. I am still happy with the low-heat romance between Callie and Elena, since I read other subgenres of space opera for the sexytimes I crave on occasion. I was pining for more of Lantern, to be honest, but the story couldn't hold more of "her" without being seriously baggy at the knees. We're introduced to the Benefactor through his servant Kaustikos, "the one who burns," in the form of a floating basketball...I was picturing Sputnik the whole time and quietly chuckling...that delivers excellent intel exactly once and then goes into minor-character mode. The purpose of this itchy lapse becomes apparent. It wasn't a joy, waiting so long for it to eventuate, but it did and I got it. No other way to accomplish that plot thread's resolution.

But most of all, I've been pining for some details about Drake-and-Janice, the mashup person. How did this weirdness occur? How, in practical terms, did two humans get spliced into one (hitherto invisible in-story) entity? That, my friends, is the subject of an extended infodump delivered from page 269 to page 304. It wasn't necessarily deft, but it was *fascinating* and I enjoyed the Drake-and-Janice story as much as I'd hoped to. So much was clearer about how human individuality and individuation seems utterly natural to us but would present a serious puzzle for truly alien beings...rather like we humans find it puzzling to look at fossils and reconstruct the dead being's life from them. Drake and Janice were still within spitting distance of being alive after a nasty space accident; the life they share now was granted them by miracle-working super-healer white Liars who happened to be in the right place at the right time to reconstruct them. Only they got it wrong, and for the first time we're let in on how that felt all around, what that meant to Drake-and-Janice as entities made one but still alive, what identity and practical problems that's presented them.

One big coincidence, no, the passing immortals with a healing jones being there? But that's how Life is sometimes. Stuff, weird random stuff, happens; you're never the same afterwards, but you're well and truly alive and now what? Hence the melded pilots' skills being used by a very live-and-let-live Captain whose essential human decency means they're safe and they're respected for their skills but left alone to live as they like and/or can.

But wait, there's more! Callie and the White Raven are tasked by the Benefactor, whose contact with them is always through different cloak-and-dagger means, with the solution of the silencing of the Vanir system. Planets that the Liars, those "truthteller" cultists secretly still in service of their departed Axiom masters, had sold the humans rights to colonize, which subsequently went out of touch with the rest of humanity. When supply ships, then rescue missions, then military forces all vanished into the silent system, the system was pretty much written off. Human curiosity hates dangling threads...Callie gets the Benefactor's huge pre-payment for expenses...the crew agrees that their unique possession of a wormhole generator not, like the gateways the Liars sold them, fixed to any particular part of spacetime, will make this expedition both satisfying and enriching. What could possibly go wrong? They hold all the surprise-dealing cards!

Nope. Nothing goes easily...for long, anyway...and more Liars, singularly unappealing red specimens yclept "the Exalted," are slavering to get hold of the fresh specimens that Callie and Co. represent in their grand master plan to make the now-ailing as well as hibernating Axiom safe and sound in the newly dangerous Universe they plan to cooperatively destroy together. Excitement ensues, and I won't detail it as this is the whole point of reading space opera.

***FROM HERE ON DOWN THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING. YOU ARE WARNED TO AVOID THEM, PHOBIC READERS.***
---
***
---
***
---
***
---
***
Suffice it to say that it's always darkest before the dawn, and the goodwill of super-healers is a great thing to have in your back pocket. The ending, the point at which the conflicts end, was deeply satisfying, and the main villain's purpose and identity is at the root of Evil's Comeuppance. That's always a recipe for satisfaction in my book.

The series' threads are woven together satisfyingly. Callie will be one busy human lady for, well, ever; Elena her beloved xenobiologist-turned-medical-doctor will be there with her; the crew, from newly repaired though still conjoined Drake-and-Janice to Ashok the body-modder's ultimate modification to Lantern the Liar to Shall the AI, the White Raven and Glauketas, their asteroid home, will act as nucleation points for a whole new world of free and potent humans. It's a pretty satisfying way to say farewell to the world of the Axiom.

Unless, of course, we're treated to more after Author Pratt's had a lie-down....

THE QUEEN OF ALL CROWS, best steampunky fantasy in a line of them by Rod Duncan

THE QUEEN OF ALL CROWS
ROD DUNCAN (The Map of Unknown Things #1)
Angry Robot Books
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Only one woman can stop the world from descending into endless war, in this thrilling return to the world of the Gas-Lit Empire

The year is 2012. The nations of the world are bound together in an alliance of collective security, overseen by the International Patent Office, and its ruthless stranglehold on technology.

When airships start disappearing in the middle of the Atlantic, the Patent Office is desperate to discover what has happened. Forbidden to operate beyond the territorial waters of member nations, they send spies to investigate in secret.

One of those spies is Elizabeth Barnabus. She must overcome her dislike of the controlling Patent Office, disguise herself as a man, and take to the sea in search of the floating nation of pirates who threaten the world order.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is not necessary to read the first trilogy featuring Elizabeth Barnabus to appreciate this novel. It would add incalculably to your pleasure in the read, but it isn't necessary.

The plot picks up where The Custodian of Marvels leaves off. Julia has vanished after embarking for America, there to join her hard-won happiness with husband Richard in his law firm's Patent-law practice there. Julia will make herself a new life by studying Patent law at Columbia University. All of that struggle and fight is now gone for naught with her airship's disappearance. Her bestie and earliest supporter Elizabeth is on the hunt for her at great personal cost. It seems, as of now, that Elizabeth's main supporter and illicit lover, John Farthing, has lost her via her betrayal of his trust as well as her disappearance.

For someone who picked this book up because of its terrific cover art, this should be enough: the friendship between the women is explicitly made the stakes of the story within two chapters. Possibly the most intriguing idea in the series is the existence of the International Patent Office. Those who have read The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire may read the spoiler below:
*
*
*
*
*
Elizabeth's journey from Patent-Office battling terrorist to one of their own is a delightful part of that series's arc, and the basis for this series's stories. In these tales we will follow the intrepid, genderfluid Elizabeth as she resumes her part-time identity as her own brother in service of, not in fleeing from, her former enemy-turned-employer the Patent Office. That by itself would make this an astounding series to follow. But the stakes are far greater than merely serving those that Barnabus once despised. Mr. Barnabus is outed as Miss Barnabus memorably and completely for the duration of this book's search for Julia when we discover the truth of a tall tale of sea monsters eating ships.

The action of the story is set largely among the all-female pirate society, the Sargassans, operating in the North Atlantic Gyre. It's a world constructed around the Unicorn, which name made me snigger as I realized it was chosen to be the center of an all-female society. But I show my juvenile sense of humor. The novella-length time we're aboard the constructed world of the Sargassans is spent politicking and coping with human nature's ickier corners. Women, it turns out, do much as men do when left to rule themselves. I wonder if this is, in fact, true; I don't know how much of the world is based on women being women and how much on women reacting to the male-dominated world they hated enough to run away from. I suspect the truth is the latter by Author Duncan's design.

Now the design itself becomes an issue. This is the first book of a trilogy, whose second book has only recently appeared. The ending of this book's two-fold story is complete only on one strand, and that dangling second strand is going to itch and niggle the entire time we're embarked on a new quest in Elizabeth's emotionally battered and physically exhausted condition. The ending of The Queen of All Crows will not resolve the Barnabus case internal to the International Patent Office. It is clear that echoes of "O brave new world..." in the ending are not accidental. And with it, the opening of vast new vistas and fresh perspectives on the Gas-Lit Empire.

Because the action of this book, airship crashes and pirate republics and long sea voyages, all takes place in 2012.

THE DREAMING STARS, second of a series I like better and better as I read along

THE DREAMING STARS
TIM PRATT (Axiom #2)
Angry Robot Books
$7.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Ancient aliens, the Axiom, will kill us all – when they wake up. In deep space, a swarm of nanoparticles threatens the colonies, transforming everything it meets into computronium – including the colonists. The crew of the White Raven investigate, and discover an Axiom facility filled with aliens hibernating while their minds roam a vast virtual reality. The treacherous Sebastien wakes up, claiming his altered brain architecture can help the crew deactivate the swarm – from inside the Axiom simulation. To protect humanity, beleaguered Captain Callie Machedo must trust him, but if Sebastien still plans to dominate the universe using Axiom tech, they could be in a whole lot of trouble.

CONSIDER EVERYTHING IN THIS REVIEW A SPOILER FOR THE WRONG STARS, REVIEWED HERE.

My Review: While 500-year-old time-tossed refugee Sebastien wasn't a great friend to Humankind in his Axiom-enhanced state, he also wasn't as powerful as an actual Axiom being...and still the crew of the White Raven kept him alive because their adopted crewmember and the other 500-year-old time-tossed refugee Elena asked them to...and now we're about to find out if that was really such a good idea.

Does anyone really know the secret truth of another being? It's an ancient question and it's been answered...no, it's not possible...many times and in many ways. Why, then, do we as a species keep asking it? Because it's endlessly fascinating? Why should smacking your nose into a plate glass window at speed be fascinating?

Dunno, but it is.

So here we are, not long after The Wrong Stars ends, picking up the pieces of life as the White Raven's crew has been living it after the upheavals of discovering a Goldilocks ship, a genocidal alien race's existence and plans, and the real reason the Liars lie. Also the real reason the Free, or religious Liars, both lie and refuse to speak anything but the truth. (It makes sense in the books.) Callie and Elena are rockin' the relationship game. Stephen's his usual lugubrious self and even more so—he's lost his Church of the Ecstatic Divine congregation after all—but he's no slacker, he's busy trying to put Elena's ex-crush object Sebastien's brain back together in the new home base that the White Raven won off the space pirates they were hired by the now-destroyed Meditreme Station "government" to...well...deter, which in practice meant get them killed. It has a souped-up version of virtual reality, and Elena goes with him into Sebastien's head as they endure iteration after iteration of the man's megalomaniacal, unfettered-by-empathy actions to kill the crew that saved him.

After we get a high-concept comedy scene of Callie returning to the Jovian Imperative's coolest, most gentrified-Portland of a moon, in order to crash her funeral, the action commences. Her ex-husband (after recovering from the shock of seeing her in the flesh for the first time since his actions ended their marriage—and at the funeral he's hosting for her no less!) needs White Raven's unique skill set to accomplish something his corporate drones can't. What's causing shipload after shipload of company employees to vanish in the Owain system? The local old-timey bohemian hippie trippers aren't doing it, they've lost some of their own people.

Callie and the crew need money. Callie doesn't hate the ex anymore since Elena busted down the closet door and dragged her out. The ex is part of a family corporation that has more money than God. We'll take the job, says Callie, and thanks for the spiffy funeral.

In the course of setting up the main conflict of the book, we're back into the same group of characters that we had in The Wrong Stars. A similar quest is run, in that we have to deal with the Axiom's universe-domination fetish, not unexpectedly, but with some surprising new stakes added plus a super-dooper uber-cool new playground to duke it out on.

And here we come to my main source of deep satisfaction, my enhanced appreciation for the world Author Pratt's going for. At every turn the Axiom are godlike in their technological achievements, but still their bestial selves; their Achilles heel is their animal nature and it can be exploited even by the "suffering slime," their charming pet name for the technologically inferior beings that clutter up their Lebensraum. The Final Solution that we thought we were appalled by last book? Ha! Small potatoes compared to the revelations in this book.

When an author plays in the much-churned sand of the "xenocidal aliens with humanity in their sights" sandbox, I appreciate some effort being made to titillate me with novelty. Author Pratt gives me the gift of characters working out their deep truths. Callie, the domineering captain, also has an emotional side: Elena is her little lost waif in need of rescue plus the ex who banged up her heart by banging his boyfriend in their bed while she was self-centeredly off flying the spacelanes for adrenaline rushes that she still can't do without. Stephen the XO-cum-doctor, whose world blew up not once but twice, and whose response was to turn back to the comforting arms of Mother Church and lose himself in the designer-drug sacraments that both connect him in loving communion to all the universe while dulling the acute agony of individual loss and grief. These aren't mere cardboard cutouts, these are well-realized characters with important things to offer the reader. Their individuality is their weakness, their brokenness, and in time their greatest and strongest weapon.

The battle between the motley crew and the xenocidal aliens is played out in a virtual reality with enhancements that are as far beyond the VR Callie and company are accustomed to and the VR Elena and Sebastian know from 500 years back. The beings in this VR are self-aware. They experience themselves as we do, they are possessed of inner lives and self-awareness; the Axiom couldn't enjoy torturing and murdering them otherwise. And that's mostly what the Axiom are doing in their space station beyond the asteroid belt of Owain's system. They're playing the equivalent of video games while their meat-bodies slumber in a perfect stasis, awaiting a cosmic-era-long program to run in order to accomplish a truly, amazingly vile thing. The only reason Callie and company know about it is that the game needs an expansion module and the way that this is added involves the death of Planet Owain. Omelettes, eggs....

Sebastien is central to the crew's plans to stop the Axiom because he's been co-opted by them before and therefore has insight into the workings of these cosmic scumbags's minds. Callie trusts him about as far as she can throw him, but he's a useful tool...a thing that Sebastien is now bitterly accustomed to being. How he comes out of the battle is a major source of satisfaction for me as it involves his deepest character traits surfacing, changing the entire future in the process. Callie and Elena can finally agree on Sebastien's future and not have to compromise for the other's feelings.

The crew of the White Raven alters in composition and in character, the threats are neutralized but this is only the beginning of a much larger, more important struggle. The battle and resolution in the Dream, as the VR is called, and in Owain's system, and in the galaxy at large, are not really over. The game is afoot.

I'd like to mention the ending of this book in a most approving way: It gave me chills. I see a pattern developing that I'm not sure I'll like, if it plays out as I think is almost inevitable it will; but the last line of the book gave me horripilation. To my own surprise, I'll trust Author Pratt to deliver the goods.

THE WRONG STARS, first of a series I like better and better as I read along

THE WRONG STARS
TIM PRATT (Axiom #1)
Angry Robot Books
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A ragtag crew of humans and posthumans discover alien technology that could change the fate of humanity... or awaken an ancient evil and destroy all life in the galaxy.

The shady crew of the White Raven run freight and salvage at the fringes of our solar system. They discover the wreck of a centuries-old exploration vessel floating light years away from its intended destination and revive its sole occupant, who wakes with news of First Alien Contact. When the crew break it to her that humanity has alien allies already, she reveals that these are very different extra-terrestrials... and the gifts they bestowed on her could kill all humanity, or take it out to the most distant stars.

THIS BOOK CAME FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY'S DISCOVERY SHELF. THANKS, Y'ALL!

My Review: I enjoyed it. Lesbian sex scene averted, blessedly, so I had no need to flee screaming. I never heard of a "demisexual" before, so my education continues (unexpectedly for someone so old).

One instance of the dreadful pollutant w-verb on p244. I damn near unswallowed on the page. But to be fair to the writer, both characters (sender and recipient) were in imminent danger of death when the heinous abuse of my eyestalks took place, so I don't doubt but what he was under some significant existential stress.

The characters, Captain Callie and Xenobiologist Elena anyway, are all as well made as one could wish. Lantern the Liar, of an alien race called "the Liars", was less three-dimensional but that's not really surprising or remediable for a character whose backstory is related late in the game via infodump. Lantern is positioned now to be a regular in future books, and she and her race and her religious order are fascinating to me, so patience is a must in reading this first volume.

The master aliens are creepy and xenocidal, and their tech is to die for (haw). The slave-alien Liars have been making hay off selling the said tech to humans for a good while. They've sold more than trinkets and trash to humanity, though it's all come on one Bill of Goods. The Liars have told their customers, who despite knowing the species' tendency to prevaricate whenever they feel like it, that the amazing permanent wormholes the Liars let them use to get to twenty-nine different star systems that humanity is allowed to colonize are the only ones and the big dumb schmucks bought it!

The truth is, needless to say, a lot more nuanced. And a lot scarier: The tech the Liars are selling turns out to have been developed by a race that's so evil that the Liars are terrified of them returning one day. After all, the Liars are their genetically engineered slaves.

Okay, yeah, it's all very Flash Gordon versus Ming the Merciless, but it's fun and it's got humor and heart, so I'm in for one more read before I decide its fate at my readerly hands. Far from the worst I've read, not the best either, and the author's willingness to take the slow road out to a higher vantage point is in his favor. Can't *quite* get to another half-star, but it's not because the story is bad but because it's been good for the past hundred years.

THE CUSTODIAN OF MARVELS by Rod Duncan: Excellent. That's all, just excellent.

THE CUSTODIAN OF MARVELS
ROD DUNCAN
Angry Robot
$7.99 mass market, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: You’d have to be mad to steal from the feared International Patent Office. But that’s what Elizabeth Barnabus is about to try. A one-time enemy from the circus has persuaded her to attempt a heist that will be the ultimate conjuring trick.

Hidden in the vaults of the Patent Court in London lie secrets that could shake the very pillars of the Gas-Lit Empire. All that stands in Elizabeth’s way are the agents of the Patent Office, a Duke’s private army and the mysterious Custodian of Marvels.

Rod Duncan returns with the climactic volume of the Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire, the breathtaking alternate history series that began with the Philip K Dick Award-nominated The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter.

THE FALL OF THE GAS-LIT EMPIRE SERIES
THE BULLET-CATCHER'S DAUGHTER—UNSEEMLY SCIENCE

My Review: If I did not already have information to the effect that this volume merely concludes the first series of books about the Gas-Lit Empire, I would even now be stowing away on a container ship bound for the UK with murder in my heart and author Duncan in my sights.

As things stand, I am thrilled by the ending of the book...by the entire last third, in fact...and the justice meted out therein. It's no secret from my earlier reviews that this is a series I've completely given myself over to. I have a suspicion that this is due to the talents of Mr. Duncan in applying his professional knowledge of science and computing to create a plausible explanation for this amazing world and its terrific characters. In previous reviews, I've described the point of departure for the series as unlikely in the extreme. I only now, at the very end of the third book in the trilogy, understand why this particular point of departure from the world we inhabit was chosen. In fact, it couldn't have worked in any other way. I will not spoiler this for anyone else, but keep the origins of the Gas-Lit Empire in your mind throughout the book and you'll be given an even richer reading experience than you'd have any other way.

I've got quibbles, of course, I'm a reader with thousands of books under my belt so it would be improbable for me not to have. I wonder how Miss Elizabeth Barnabus came to the final conclusion she did during the heist at the end of the book in such a hurry. But honestly, any quibble I have is more akin to brushing my husband's coat on his way out the door than to yanking at cards in a house of cards. Specks, mere specks, nothing more.

If it isn't crystal-clear from the foregoing, I am urging with great certainty and compulsion that you go forth on the instant and order whichever of these books you haven't yet read. If you haven't read any, buy the series in bulk. I waited an agonizing year before getting my copy of THE CUSTODIAN OF MARVELS, and I don't want others to suffer as I have done.

UNSEEMLY SCIENCE, second in Rod Duncan's Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire books, is unseemly...in a good way

UNSEEMLY SCIENCE
ROD DUNCAN
Angry Robot Books
$7.99 mass market, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the divided land of England, Elizabeth Barnabus has been living a double life - as both herself and as her brother, the private detective. Witnessing the hanging of Alice Carter, the false duchess, Elizabeth resolves to throw the Bullet Catcher’s Handbook into the fire, and forget her past. If only it were that easy!

There is a new charitable organisation in town, run by some highly respectable women. But something doesn’t feel right to Elizabeth. Perhaps it is time for her fictional brother to come out of retirement for one last case…? Her unstoppable curiosity leads her to a dark world of body-snatching, unseemly experimentation, politics and scandal. Never was it harder for a woman in a man’s world…

THE FALL OF THE GAS-LIT EMPIRE SERIES
THE BULLET-CATCHER'S DAUGHTER—THE CUSTODIAN OF MARVELS

My Review: I really liked the first book in this series, THE BULLET-CATCHER'S DAUGHTER. But you knew that already, right? Since you read my reviews regularly, right?

We're going up a half-star on this second entry in the series because I really, REALLY liked it. There are some odd pleasures to be had in watching Virtue and Propriety subverted from within and with the collusion of the seemingly virtuous. Schadenfreude, anyone? This story takes Schadenfreude to new heights as Elizabeth must, reluctantly, solve a mystery for her bosom friend Julia; protect her nearest and dearest from several groups of malefactors that she doesn't know, as well as elude the vile Duke of Northampton's hired thugs trying to return her to his...service, to euphemize, for the vast sum of 400 guineas. So you know that we're on a rollercoaster as men, women, children of all ages and stations try to get their hooks into Elizabeth, driving her into reckless (though never careless) action.

As soon as Elizabeth believes she has a moment's breathing space, her coterie of enemies and friends set her spinning in yet another direction. One serious enemy, the International Patent Office, plays a smaller role in this book than the first entry; John Farthing the Patent Officer plays a surprising role, considering how they met.

As the story rockets along, shedding layers of illusion and bringing Elizabeth closer and closer to horrible and unpunishable crimes commited in the name of Seemly Science, the urge to sleep was banished and my meals became snack foods until the horrible, chilling denoument. It is Duncan's gift to take this unlikely point of departure and people it with characters whose existence comes to matter a lot to the reader. The world he has created is such an exuberant, lively, richly detailed place, and peopled with such wonderful people, and so much darned fun to enter, how can you resist running directly to the bookery of your choice and buying all three (yes, three!) volumes? Take my word for it, UNSEEMLY SCIENCE is an excellent investment in satisfying your story-hunger.

THE BULLET-CATCHER'S DAUGHTER, Author Rod Duncan's "Gas-Lit Empire" starts its fall

THE BULLET-CATCHER'S DAUGHTER The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire, Book 1
ROD DUNCAN
Angry Robot Books
$7.99 mass market paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Elizabeth Barnabus lives a double life—as herself and as her brother, the private detective. She is trying to solve the mystery of a disappearing aristocrat and a hoard of arcane machines. In her way stand the rogues, freaks and self-proclaimed alchemists of a travelling circus.

But when she comes up against an agent of the all-powerful Patent Office, her life and the course of history will begin to change. And not necessarily for the better…

THE FALL OF THE GAS-LIT EMPIRE SERIES
UNSEEMLY SCIENCE—THE CUSTODIAN OF MARVELS

My Review: Fantasy novel. Four-and-a-half stars. Why are you still staring at this screen? Click over to Amazon or whichever bookery you patronize and order one. It is a Moral Imperative. Seriously.

1/19/16: A few private messages suggested I expand on my exhortation. Okay, here goes: Any writer who can, WITHOUT infodumping, bring me directly into a fantastical and outrageously unlikely alternate steampunk world earned your scarce book-buying dollars. He made me *believe* that, in an illusory world, illusionists could be so important and so vital that the law enforcement agency of the whole world will hunt them down and imprison them. He gave such reality to the conundrum of how to simply exist as a woman in the world he's made that I was wincing, squirming, and blushing for the privilege that being male has always brought.

Please believe me...this is powerful storytelling talent working so smoothly you can't feel the strain. I loved the first book, and am 50pp into the second. This is the shazizzle, as we used to say years ago. Not least for the cross-dressing hero/ine...and surprisingly, to my untrusting soul, the mystery was actually very involving as well. To my surprise, the deus-ex-machina syndrome I was fully prepared to Loftily Ignore wasn't there! Author Duncan played pretty much straight with his readers. I like that a lot.

I'm also duty-bound to reveal that Author Duncan is a social media acquaintance of mine as a result of my fanboying about these books. He takes beautiful photographs as well as writing lovely fiction. Howsomever, I read and reviewed the books before I found all that out.