Science Fiction for your Kindle to beguile this #Booksgiving Eve

ESCAPING EXODUS
NICKY DRAYDEN (Escaping Exodus #1)
HarperVoyager
$10.99 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

Many thanks to the author and HarperVoyager for my ARC.

I know the author of this book for like fifteen years now. She's got a dry wit, a generous heart, and a deeply subversive soul. This is by way of explaining how I know that, in this twisty and turny story of siblings very much at odds with each other and very deeply enmeshed in each others' psyches, she's explained us to ourselves.

What happens when your intimate enemy, the charismatic and popular one to your quieter, more thorough self, challenges your position? As with all stories of intimate enemies, this is the beginning of the end, and the series of books that will follow depends on hooking you with this cataclysm. Like every blockbuster series in fantasy, Author Drayden sets the stakes high, limns the characters indelibly and economically, and gets you ready for an action-packed ride through a world you'd swear was real.

As book two, Symbiosis (non-affiliate Amazon link), expands the story of how love screws things up for everyone, becomes available on 23 February 2021, it's time to take advantage of this book's sale price to decide if you need to preorder the next. I'm pretty confident a lot of you will need to know how this plays out.

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THE END OF ORDINARY
EDWARD ASHTON
HarperVoyager
$8.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

Human beings hate people who don't look like themselves, don't pray like themselves, and don't eat like themselves. Imagine, then, what an *actual* difference, like a gene-manipulated extra strength or ability, would cause. You don't need to, Author Ashton has done the work for you. In this fast-paced book, I was eager to get to the next set-piece; but then realized that was what I was doing, waiting for the next Scene while being irked at the clueless-Dad-unworldly-Engineer interacting with people more generally capable than he is. Since it's a very good book to read at a moment in history when we need to take stock of how we cope with Otherness, I'd say any SF fan would do a lot worse than picking this up for #Booksgiving reading.

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WHEN GRAVITY FAILS
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER (The Budayeen Cycle #1)
Open Road Media
$8.99 edbook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked awful, but I always look awful in the mirror. I keep myself going with the firm belief that my real face is much better looking.

That is a very trenchant sentence. That is exactly what you're signing up for when you get this book. A rarity now, in the 1980s this book was a unicorn for dealing with Muslim culture in any way, and using near-future SF to highlight the way whites are colonizing the world was still cutting-edge stuff. Digging deeper into themes of identity with transgender characters, refugees from dying Europe, and pharmacological solutions that become terrible problems, the book prefigures the 21st century's obsessions. Readers of transgressive fiction need to rediscover what amazed us in the 1980s because it will amaze and delight you, too.

TEMPER, sophomore effort from Nicky Drayden, builds success on talent topped by native brilliance

TEMPER
NICKY DRAYDEN
Harper Voyager
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Two brothers.
Seven vices.
One demonic possession.
Can this relationship survive?

Auben Mutze has more vices than he can deal with—six to be exact—each branded down his arm for all the world to see. They mark him as a lesser twin in society, as inferior, but there’s no way he’ll let that define him. Intelligent and outgoing, Auben’s spirited antics make him popular among the other students at his underprivileged high school. So what if he’s envious of his twin Kasim, whose single vice brand is a ticket to a better life, one that likely won’t involve Auben.

The twins’ strained relationship threatens to snap when Auben starts hearing voices that speak to his dangerous side—encouraging him to perform evil deeds that go beyond innocent mischief. Lechery, deceit, and vanity run rampant. And then there are the inexplicable blood cravings. . . .

On the southern tip of an African continent that could have been, demons get up to no good during the time of year when temperatures dip and temptations rise. Auben needs to rid himself of these maddening voices before they cause him to lose track of time. To lose his mind. And to lose his . . .

TEMPER

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC OF THIS TITLE, THANK YOU. ALSO, I KNOW THE AUTHOR. NO FURTHER DISCLAIMERS.

My Review: Okay, let's get this out of the way up front. Yes, I knew the author in Austin; we met during NaNoWriMo, we were in a writer's group together, we hung out despite the fact that she's young enough to be my *much* younger sister (and that's quite far enough, thank you). I still have fun chatting with her. She is a delightful person.

And if she'd written a mediocre book, that's all I'd be saying.

But since she didn't write me a gushing acknowledgment in this book *chinwobble* I can actually review it without squicking myself out.

I'm an old white man with a white Gandalf-y beard. Young persons of color snicker at me as I stump along the boardwalk behind my house attired in what can charitably be described as old-guy clothes, floppy hat preventing my unmelaninated skin from turning lobsterish. It isn't visible that I have a radicalized leftist's heart and soul. That's what I wonder about, really, how to make it plain that I'd FAR rather see one of those young people in Congress, City Hall, the Chancellorship of the university system than yet another old guy who looks like me. It's time we move on to the dustheap of history. Go and get it, y'all, it's time to burn the damn thing down and get busy rebuilding it!

So, put together Nicky's age and state of melanination and her well-honed talent-sword and her absence of desire to tell more white patriarchal stories as a woman and person of color, and you'd think from looking at me that I'd be hollering at her to get off my literary lawn.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I *battened* on this meditation on the nature of good and evil, the inextricability of love and hate, the dangers of ideological purity, the dark heart and bright sheen of understanding. Nicky's done a lot of thinking over the years...go to Amazon and get some of her short stories if you want evidence...and it's been deep thought indeed. A theme that she demands her readers think about is fairness. Every word the woman writes is about fairness, almost always in its absence instead of presence. Her mind grapples with the notion of fairness being achievable. It seems to me that she comes down on the side of "not so much" since all of her stories have, well, ambiguous endings. No one ever gets off scot-free and no one ever suffers endlessly. But no one ever faces ennui, either.

So my take on the story here is that, in true Nicky fashion, she's going to take the reader where they need to go and tell them what the characters need the reader to know: It wasn't easy, this life I am leading, it's not a lot easier now than it started off being, but you know what? I'm still here, I'm stronger than I was before I broke this time, and I can't imagine I'd ever want to stop being the me that I've learned how to be. Piss on ya if you don't like it, or me, or the me I'm still learning to be.

Doesn't that sound ever so coming-of-age-ish? Like it's a teenager's dream read? Like hell it is. I attempted suicide for the first time in my life when I was 54. The world broke me. I spent months in a locked ward getting medicated for depression I'd never known I had. After all, when there's no memory of being happy, that's just the world, right? And I share that fault of vision with Auben, and with Kasim, the main characters in this story. They make different choices than I made but they choose between the same things: Accepting the way the world views you and sinking into its molten vats of hate and fear, or finding the updraft from the heat and following it to a less destructive place.

"My people, we have work to do."

So let's get our hands dirty and make the good better and the bad good again.

THE PREY OF GODS, a 5-star gonzo South African supernatural punkopalypse

THE PREY OF GODS
NICKY DRAYDEN
Harper Voyager (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$1.99 Kindle edition, available now through 12 September 22!

The Publisher Says: In South Africa, the future looks promising. Personal robots are making life easier for the working class. The government is harnessing renewable energy to provide infrastructure for the poor. And in the bustling coastal town of Port Elizabeth, the economy is booming thanks to the genetic engineering industry which has found a welcome home there. Yes—the days to come are looking very good for South Africans. That is, if they can survive the present challenges:

A new hallucinogenic drug sweeping the country . . .
An emerging AI uprising . . .
And an ancient demigoddess hellbent on regaining her former status by preying on the blood and sweat (but mostly blood) of every human she encounters.

It’s up to a young Zulu girl powerful enough to destroy her entire township, a queer teen plagued with the ability to control minds, a pop diva with serious daddy issues, and a politician with even more serious mommy issues to band together to ensure there’s a future left to worry about.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FOR REVIEW, THANKS Y'ALL

My Review: I am not going to pretend this is a review. I read this book at least three times in different incarnations before it was accepted by Harper Voyager because Nicky's my bud. I was knocked on my fat spreadin' butt by her warm, deluded thanks addressed to me in the Acknowledgments. But I can tell you the simple, god's-honest truth: If I didn't like this book, I'd send her a nice email thanking her as prettily as possible and let the matter rest.

This book, y'all? This book is THE SH...STUFF. This is what you hope to find when you go shopping, vaguely dissatisfied by everything, critical of every cover, impatient with the puffery that probably isn't much to do with the contents. This is what happens when you're just taking a risk...c'mon, $2.99 on Kindle, you spent more than that on that coffee in your hand, admit it...and stumble upon gold.

A setting that feels as real as your cube-neighbor's garlicky lunch. A premise that feels as right as walking in on your mom snogging your dad, be damned with that gross old bore she's married to. A story that doesn't say hello, just grabs your earlobe and drags you along behind it wherever the hell it damned well pleases.

Nicky's voice is her own, her story is her own, and her love for the craft of writing is just her. You probably won't have a chance in this life to have tea and turkey jerky *retch* with her, you poor, poor bastard, but this book is the next best thing.

Buy it, read it, love it.