VILLAIN (Hench #2) is Author NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS long-awaited and worth the wait sequel

VILLAIN (Hench #2)
NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS
Watch the inimitable Nancy Pearl interview Author Walschots here!
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Boys meets Starter Villain and Assistant to the Villain in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench, in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.

Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.

But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.

It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It took five years, but the sequel I've quietly pined for has arrived. I downloaded the DRC in February, started reading it in late March, and finished a final pre-review skim last night. I treated this read as a reward, an experience to be savored, because Hench was such a completely fresh experience that it made me rethink the messaging of superhero crap, made me consider how subversion can in fact look like participation or even celebration. I liked The Boys because it's taken that idea to its logical end-point; but it came after Hench had prepared me psychologically for its storytelling mode.

The Department of Superheroic Affairs, aka "the Draft," is the organization that's responsible for everything involving superheroes. They do the recruiting, training, and funding...who ever stops to think about the accounting and expenditures that enable superheroes to blow apart entire city blocks? can you even imagine the insurance bills?!...and they create the most compelling backstories for them that they can. It means only certain tropes survive time-testing as superheroes wreak havoc in order to "save" people from supervillains.

Who also have an organizational structure centered around Leviathan, for whom our dear Anna...formerly Electric Eel's hench, now known as the supervillain "The Auditor" (if that yclepture doesn't provoke horripilation you've never filled out an accounting reimbursement justification)...serves as right-hand person. Leviathan, after the end of Hench sees the biggest rival he has (Supercollider) fall to richly deserved intimate betrayal orchestrated by Anna/The Auditor, is too depressed by the newly unchallenging world he lives in to be effective in supervillainy. Anna/The Auditor needs to snap him out of it but, in a truly tropey twist, The Draft hires a new marketing manager. One who is Anna/The Auditor's equal or possibly superior in data analytics and statistical modeling...the secret superpowers that brought Supercollider down. Now Supercollider is permanently damaged, and dies as the Draft's medics are trying to "untangle him from himself," and the Draft's new marketer finds enough dirt to plausibly, if inaccurately, pin responsibility for his death on Leviathan.

Hijinks ensue.

To look into this only-slightly-distorted mirror world is to see 2026 explained without didactic shouting, blaming, and finger-pointing. It's all here, all the guilty parties are lined up for our scorn and contumely to be unloaded on them, and exactly like real life they are everywhere not just on one side. False dichotomies like hero-v-villain aren't allowed to stand; the acts perpetrated are equally awful, are not discernably different in their results. They're not different in their motivations, either; each "side" is only out to do down the other side and then justify the carnage for everyone else later.

It is here that I come fully into my love of Author Natalie's storytelling. The battling sides are not contesting opposing ideas, arguing through competing society-wide organizational plans, they're solely and entirely focused on hurting each other in increasingly horrifying ways. What that means for non-combatants is (yet again) not part of the calculus except insofar as the optics can be used against the other side.

As Leviathan re-awakens to his supervillainous purpose, Anna/The Auditor and her scoobygroup are stretched on practical and emotional levels to achieve Leviathan's purpose and counteract the Draft's new, high-powered team that uses Anna/The Auditor's innovative techniques against them. As in Hench, the emotional costs of violence, loss, betrayal, and fanaticism are personalized while the impersonal systems grind on propelled by the suffering people behind the major players.

I think Author Natalie took her time...I understand she re-wrote this book four times...to very good effect. I got invested again immediately despite the long interval between reads. I was deftly reminded of things necessary to remember instead of infodumped on; I was also shown how time has passed in the storyverse and the changes that has wrought on significant relationships. It's a fine achievement in storytelling craft. The ending is not A Conclusion. There is openness in its action to either another sequel (yes please!) or simply room for you-the-reader to headcanon something you'd like for the characters. It works for soap operas and comic book series, why not for a supervillain's difficult choices and incomplete emotional development?

I recommend the read; it's not utterly necessary to read Hench first, but why wouldn't you want to? It's a series with a lot to say about the world we live in, and what it says I agree with, so I'm recommending it to all y'all, even the superhero/comic book averse.

After all, that described me before this series came my way.

YOUR BEHAVIOR WILL BE MONITORED, as it ever has been...only now it's by machines in place of god

YOUR BEHAVIOR WILL BE MONITORED
JUSTIN FEINSTEIN
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This compulsively readable novel wrestles with vital questions of our time: sentience, purpose, life, death…and how to make a really good commercial. Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat messages, TED Talks, bot trainings, and more, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored presents an all too plausible near future in which emotionally intelligent AI go up against emotionally stunted humans.

Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering self-driving and HR bots, UniView is now barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.

Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.

UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—who is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline. But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate their timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.

Addictively readable and ridiculously entertaining, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a page-turning, hilarious science fictional romp through the promise and perils of an AI-driven future that we probably deserve.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll lead with this line of dialogue from the story: “So, you work on bots with bots, while a bot monitors your behavior and handles all aspects of your life?”

And there it is. Debut Author Feinstein isn't coming at you from behind, or left field. He's using the language of today in the delivery media of right now to interrogate the encroachment of inaptly termed "AI" into every aspect of our lives. "LLM" ≠ "AI" and we're still in the age of the LLM. No, there is not any sign of the "AI" creating something wholly new. For it to be intelligent, truly intelligent, it would need to cross over from quality synthesis-making into insight-having, new-idea-making territory. It's scary enough as it is, as this novel aptly and eptly illustrates in the tradition of The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. Like those novels, Author Feinstein affords us access to the inner world of Noah...and Quinn and even Lex...by delivering it in media screen grabs. I realize for a lot of you I just put a bullet in the base of your interest in reading's brain. I can't change that; I can only encourage you to do your future self a solid and challenge the prejudice, make the effort to see it as the limiting factor it is, not just keep going as though it's immutable truth that all stylistic innovation is inherently bad. May I remind the true heel-diggers among you that Laurence Sterne began these same experiments in 1759 with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman?

Two hundred sixty-six years and countless riffs on the style later, isn't the experiment over? It's maybe not to your taste but it's not fringe weirdness anymore. Do make an effort to meet this trenchant, intelligent, deeply humane story about "AI" and human intelligence meeting, blurring lines, and generally developing the ideas Humanity's been tossing around for millennia into...

...

...uh oh.

This story will, given the opportunity, likely cause you to think, think hard, about what you're being bombarded with fear-mongering noise, stampeded by half-baked shouting into staking an ill-considered stance that runs the risk of becoming immovable despite the situation in reality being fluid and ever-developing. Reading this novel is a deeply corrective attitude check on hardening prejudices. I strongly urge you to take the story in, mull it over, and add it to your tool kit for coping with the world's ever-speedier developments.

DOUBLE SHADOW, second Splinter Effect series time-traveling archaeologist story

DOUBLE SHADOW (Splinter Effect #2)
ANDREW LUDINGTON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this thrilling installment of the Splinter Effect series, time-traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward returns to the past to help save his former adversary and track down a murderous thief in first century Jerusalem.

ROME, 2019. Time-traveling, Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward is back in the present, but not for long. Helen, his former adversary and growing ally, is in trouble with the law after being framed for a murder she didn’t commit. Stuck in hiding and running out of other options, she turns to Rabbit for help. "Help" in this case involves a trip to first century Jerusalem to track down a mysterious man named Einar Eshek.

But Rabbit won't have to do this mission alone; as soon as he arrives in 68 CE, he meets a younger version of Helen, one who has never met him before. Together, they work to track down Eshek, who turns out to be not only a time-traveling thief, but a murderous psychopath.

As they pursue Eshek through time, Rabbit and Helen feel something even bigger pulling them together. Torn between the two versions of the woman he knows, and with the clock ticking down on Helen’s fate in 2019, Rabbit might have no choice but to betray her past self to secure Helen’s safety in the future. Tensions rise as Jerusalem prepares to go to war with Rome, and Rabbit races to capture Eshek, clear Helen’s name, and make it back to 2019 in one piece—a feat that’s proving to be easier said than done—before everything falls apart.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Ludington...are you stark staring mad?! In this absolutely bonkers passage in world history, which no matter how long the editing process on this story took you were writing while the US political landscape's ablaze with AIPAC news, you release a book set in a rebellious Judea! It's a choice....

So, aside from the geopolitical timing seeming to my eyes a bit on the nose, I was verschmeckeled at the twist of Rabbit...I really wish his nickname wasn't evocative of Rabbit bloody Angstrom, that pusillanimous milquetoast...encountering a younger version of his frenemy Helen from the first book. I know a lot of people who find time travel stories not to their taste for this very trope, to the point of not watching Doctor Who despite the glorious beauty of Alex Kingston as River Song, if you can imagine such masochism, because she meets the Doctor at asymmetric moments in each of their lives. "It can't happen! It's never happened!" Maybe...but don't you crave a Jake-and-Sadie moment from 11/22/63? I, clearly, do not share this cavil. In this particular iteration of the trope, I found a real aha! moment for some things in the first book. I really like that in a series story. I want to feel there are webs of interconnection that I sense but don't yet see because that happens in life as well.

So all that to say I found this story as much to my liking as it's ever gonna get when there are straight people centering it. Rabbit and Helen's dynamic in particular feels richly textured with powerful emotions clashing and shifting in each of them every time they meet. In this story, as Helen does not know Rabbit yet, we get the unedited version of her responses to him. If the fact she's trying to kill him says anything, it's something *good* about her character...she is a professional with clear goals. I admit that, as the story began, I was a bit surprised that Helen reached out to Rabbit for this specific kind of help, but it made perfect sense as I was swept along in the tides of developments. Einar Eshek, our villain, was villainous. Rabbit, our hero, was resourceful, determined, and required always to think on his feet; that's a feat any author who's using this character trait gets kudos from me the more successfully they pull it off. I didn't notice Rabbit navigating his altered relationship to Helen as awkward or forced into convenient resolutions to knotty conflicts. That is a rare compliment from someone like me, very experienced in reading series stories.

I found the resolution to the central conundrum...chasing Einar, exonerating *2018-Helen...fit the facts, satisfied the overarching plot, and resolved the immediate story tensions with a very clear intent to publish more of these characters' stories in the future.

Bring it. Soon, please and thank you.

SALVAGIA, super-plausible drowned Florida technothriller

SALVAGIA
TIM CHAWAGA
Diversion Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A near-future, sci-fi mystery reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and inspired by John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, in which a salvage diver discovers the body of the most infamous man in the Florida yoreshore, putting her in the crosshairs of both feds and corporate mafias.

Triss Mackey was flying just under the radar, exploiting a government loophole that let her live quietly on the Floating Ghost—her rented, sentient CabanaBoat. In exchange, she merely had to dive for recycling recovered from the underwater, formerly-coastal cities. If she happened to find some Salvagia—nostalgic salvage, valued artifacts from the beforetime, which is to say our present—well that's just between her and the highest bidder. It's not a glamorous life, but it's not so bad.

That is, until the federal government begins pulling out of the Florida coast and retreating to their OrlanDome. The corporate mafias are poised to seize power, none more so than Mourning in Miami, led by the legendary Edgar Ortiz, owner of the Astro America megahotel. Triss needs one last score, something worth enough to buy the Ghost outright and keep her free from both the feds and the corporations. And she needs it now, before the Ghost is sent to a watery, insurance-scamming grave.

But when she discovers the chained up, drowned corpse of Ortiz on a dive, Triss finds herself stuck between the investigating government agents and the Mourning in Miami elites until Riley, Ortiz’s son, offers her a third if she can help him unravel Mourning in Miami's conspiracy and solve his father’s death, they can track down a valuable piece of Salvagia, a score worth well beyond what Triss needs to save the Ghost and, maybe, find a new, better way of Florida living.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I knew I'd like the read when drowned Florida had something its floating inhabitants call the "yoreshore"...like today's foreshore, it's a liminal place, prone to change with the tides; named after the old, drowned shoreline. Triss is very clearly modeled on hardboiled Travis McGee, and I liked the sentient boat the Floating Ghost in an update of the Busted Flush of yore.

Like Travis on the Busted Flush, Triss wants nothing more than to be let alone to live in peace. Only we all know that ain't gonna happen, she's livin' in the loopholes of the dying society that clings harder than ever to control of its people. Travis was always buttin' heads with by-the-book sorts. Triss's boat life of salvaging the remains of our vanished lifestyle...called salvagia...is much the same: an affront to those who can't tolerate anyone not being like them.

Unless, of course, those people are playing ball and bribing Officialdom to look the other way while things happen that can benefit everyone. Like Edgar Ortiz, the "crime boss" indistinguishable from the officials unless you squint. Someone squinted hard enough to decide Edgar Ortiz didn't need to suck air anymore...and Triss, after locating excellent salvagia while dodging cyborg gators, locates Edgar chained up under the sea sucking water. "Dead" is so prosaic a term, no?

Chaos ensues, of course...not least because Riley, Edgar's son, is now with her...but also because the balance of power is wrecked. There's clearly something breaking in the world, and it's powerfully manifesting in what was once Florida...Church of the Invisible Hand, the Miami Mourners, Interluner Transport Haulers, and others are all carving out insane little fiefdoms and following looney belief systems in them. No wonder the remnant federal power preferred Edgar Ortiz.

Or did they? Triss is certainly in someone powerful's crosshairs and needs to figure out whose before they take a fatal shot at her.

You've all heard of the uncanny valley before. It's been used most often to describe the awfulness that is AI slop images. Here it is in novel form. This is Florida 2045, plausibly, and it feels really weird to think that thought. Triss is a real libertarian Florida gal, in her sentient henchboat the Floating Ghost. She wants nothing to do with the Authorities but has no choice while Edgar Ortiz's discovery is hanging over her. Her acquaintances thereabouts are motivated by Big Causes, things like climate justice and community formation and support...where Triss wants a score big enough to buy the Floating Ghost for her own, not live aboard at an owner's whim. Sure, she'll help out...but commit herself? To anything not her own?

No.

She is, then, our world's great survivor in her selfish focus. She's Travis McGee's great-granddaughter in spirit if not fact. It made her a bit hard for me to warm to; but I found the world she's in, the way she works that world for her own benefit, compelling reading.

Please don't emulate her, just read about her exploits and enjoy the dense worldbuilding. I suspect that, if you make it 10% or more in, you're in to stay. It's a fun place for you, your sci-fi adventure reader giftee, and the young STEM-interested teen in your circle to have a good Sunday's reading.

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, Ed Park's story collection spanning 25 years-plus

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS
ED PARK
Random House
$13.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

In “Machine City,” a college student’s role in a friend’s movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In “Slide to Unlock,” a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,” a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the ’80s that neither seems to remember all that well.

In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning—and transitory nature—of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What I have not highlighted that could make a difference to your pleasure...or not...is something I didn't notice until after I read the whole collection: There seems to be interconnection of settings and/or characters in many of the stories. As these stories have appeared over the course of years, this must reflect Author Park's real interests. It does indeed show. A collection sure to please Park fans and anyone who likes a laugh with their "hmm" sci fi. I mean, who among us does not love "His thoughts were shrouded in rumor, perfumed with adventure and abstruse interlinear controversy" as a quotable quote? One knows one's own.

Comme d'habitude, these sixteen stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method of general remarks followed by brief responses to each one below.


A Note to My Translator is the funniest takedown of the Culture Industry℠'s bizarre effort to translate the work of an author into a local cultural property, thus causing huge misunderstanding and much ill-will:

Page eight, a little lower down: The doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball.
Page nine: Solomon Eveready reappears, smoking cut-grade reefer and imitating a trout. Explain this to me. Explain also the presence of scuba gear that "reeks of melon."

Honestly, I've read translations that felt as though they must've been the subject of a correspondence much like this.

It was hilarious to me, and sets an irreverent, mischievous tone I batten on. 5*

Bring on the Dancing Horses's unnamed narrator hit me with "Penumbra College in Vermont" and made me cackle, then his girlfriend's name "Tabitha Grammaticus"...and that housecoat...! Seriously, I'm still trying to sketch it to understand the topology.

The story itself, well, what a sad little incel this guy is, if I didn't know better I'd say he was fever-dreaming it all. You know what...maybe he is. 3.5*

The Wife on Ambien sketches anomie in cold relief as "the wife on Ambien" does things our Prufrockian putz of a narrator would never dare to do, I half expected her to eat a peach for gods' sake. I wished the refrain wasn't quite so Lucy-Ellmanly.

The wife on Ambien recites the poetry of T. S. Eliot, sings the music of the Jesus and Mary Chain, calculates how much we need to save to retire. Her figures vary. The wife on Ambien also tells me it doesn’t matter, that the sun will swallow the earth exactly eight billion years, or thirteen weeks, or twenty-four hours from now. The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It’s four a.m. Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, and promise each other their children in marriage. The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies. Get a life, you’re a joke. She joins political causes directly opposed to her own. I spend an hour every morning cleaning up the digital trail.

3.5*
Machine City makes that film-student friend into a last gasp of the end-of-adolescence pretentiousness. Bethany Blanket...sounds like a manic pixie girl, right?...puts "Ed" in her student film requiring him to be honest and natural with the girl he just got broken up with by her also-Korean parents objecting to his ancestry. Now, of course, he's a lawyer with a fancy life thinking about les jadis. Not fascinating but oddly...compelling...familiar maybe. 4*

An Accurate Account proves that drama is easy, comedy is *hard*. A stand-up routine that, for me, was a real misfire...like a less-offensive Matt Rife set. 3*

The Air as Air is elegiac in tone, is the air's testator, is clearly about the processing of profound sadness, grief, loneliness: "The jukebox kicked in. Some song I used to hate, but at the moment it made me sad. It pinned me down."

It pinned down the entire mechanism of gaining, painfully and slowly, perspective. The narrator (PTSD and all) and his father, whom he calls "The Big Man" at the man's insistence:

"So you know about Uncle Buck," he said. "The movie?" "What movie? I’m talking about your Uncle Buck. He went on that show where they give you a makeover. It was Lindy’s idea, the whole stupid TV thing. She has connections. You know Buck. He dresses worse than I do. He dresses like he smeared rubber cement on his chest and rolled around in a pile of undershirts. So they show the episode and it went a little too well, if you get my gist."

Sad, funny, unfortunately very relatable...they're not communicating or connecting even a little bit. 4.5*

Seven Women has a therapist elucidating the long and grueling self-confrontation of therapy from her point of view, the way she thinks about the deep-dives into other people's emotions. "Sometimes people tell stories and they leave out the feelings—My job is to show them where the feelings are." 5* for that insight alone...Hannah the patient's a really crappy human being.

The Gift offers me a course I really want to take: "Advanced Aphorism" though not with Dublinski necessarily. The letter to the alumni magazine being written says it was never offered again. I demand a retake on all my school years so I can take this course! Fun wordplay, slight idea. 4*

Watch Your Step is a log-line for a technothriller that feels like it was being fleshed out; as the story progresses, I was trying to think of reasons Author Park left it here, when there's enough, to my story-ear, to support a novella. What gives? 3.5* because it's marooned without coming into port.

Two Laptops does nothing for me because the "man loses family through no fault of his own" trope bugs me. The wife and son he's misplaced live close but...never mind, no point really, as he is reduced to a skype face to the son, I realized he deserved it. 3* for choice of subject matter.

Weird Menace stresses the role memory can't help but play in our relationships to our past, to the people in our lives, and to this weird idea we think is a reality called the self. It's all dialogue, all the time, and all the more fun for that, since I like "Toner Low" as the director's name. DVD commentary was never like this when I was watching horror movies! 4*

Thought and Memory centers transness, but managed to make me wince by leaving in "transgendered" which ain't a good thing. I wish it had not been there like a turd in the punchbowl. Still, a decent and overall surprisingly good effort for someone not trans. 3.5*

Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts didn't really excite me much...Tabby doesn't inspire sympathy as she is presented here...and her career is very amusing indeed, but doesn't make up for the sour note of the narrator's overall dissatisfaction, his dislike and disdain for so many around him. "My girlfriend, Tabby, reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world," sums it up on the tone front; not my fave but very well-written, with some humor that broke through my dissatisfaction. 4*

Eat Pray Click might hit you differently than it did me...my boyfriend is in Chat psychosis so the way the machine comes alive, sort of, and what it does, just did not feel fictional, while feeling mentally disturbing. No rating.

Slide to Unlock might be the most unnerving story in here...almost horror...memory problems scare me leaky. It's a modern problem, trying to keep clear in one's mind the very complicated ways we're required to interface with a world gone digital...in fact, it's not much more complicated than the past, only the medium's changed from speaking to a fallible human to fallibly humanly speaking to a system made by fallible humans. I got the wry humor in here in my bones. 5*

An Oral History of Atlantis isn't so much a story as a proof of concept...every emotional register, every techno-detail, every beat in this collection gets its bones into this stew. What I couldn't find was a through-line to make me invest in it the way MtPR was meant to. 3.25*

A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE concludes the Convergence Saga with book 3

A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE (Convergence Saga #3)
CADWELL TURNBULL
Blackstone Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

One of Ancillary Review of Books' 2025 Notable Books!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling and award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull comes A Ruin, Great and Free, the stunning conclusion to the popular Convergence Saga.

It has been nearly two years since the anti-monster riots. The inhabitants of Moon have been very fortunate in the intervening months. Inside their hidden monster settlement, they’ve found peace, even as the world outside slips into increasing unrest. Monsters are being hunted everywhere, forced back into the shadows they once tried to escape from. Other secret settlements have offered a place to hide, but how long can this half-measure against fear and hatred last?

Over the course of three days, the inhabitants of Moon are tested. The Black Hand continues to search for them and the Cult of the Zsouvox wants to make Moon the last stand in their war against the Order of Asha. This is more than enough to reckon with, but the gods have also placed their sights on Moon—and they bring with them a conflict that may either save or unravel the universe itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nothin' like uppin' the stakes in the last book in a series!

Not that anything was ever low-stakes here; but after becoming multiversal, adding heavy conflict among the gods afflicting the timelines, and starting from the baseline of shapeshifters being a real, oppressed minority, one can be forgiven for feeling...overwhelmed...in the toils of the complexification.

It's all big fun, though, if the previous volumes and their events are all on board one's mind. (My reviews might help you decide on whether this read will suit you.) As the storyverse has expanded, the stakes have multiplied and the worldbuilding has grown more ornamental than structural. It's to be expected; no one should start reading the series here because the world won't make enough sense to get the novice reader involved.

For the invested reader, Author Turnbull provides narrative guidance to put together the strands of this multiversal concluding chapter. It is complicated; it requires thought and rewards reflection; it does not hide its political stances. Since I am sympathetic to them I have no issue with that. This entire series needed to exist, to feed queer people the visibility of others without being Othered, to explore the world queerness as baseline identity, all are things that needed to be done. But the fight scene between the werebear and the dragon is the main reason Cadwell Turnbull *had* to start writing this series.

As much as I like Author Turnbull's politics, I read fantasy novels seldom...not the biggest fan of the genre, me...and when I do I want to have real fun, some thrills, and a background of worldbuilding that involves my brain in more than the ordinary tropey elves and suchlike. This series has delivered on each of those desires from giddy-up to whoa. The monsters are just plain folks, as is almost always the case when one gets to know the Othered; same desires, interests, needs, and the differences are vanishingly small when seen against the backdrop of greater familiarity. That makes their monsterness feel endearing to me. It becomes the urban-fantasy marker that does not turn off this less than eager fantasy reader.

I'm pretty sure anyone who reads my reviews can figure out why I approve of the queer representation herein.

A gory meditation on how much hatred costs, how misguided it is, and how gods, mages, multiversal Powers all have aims that barely touch our own so contact (let alone involvement) should be avoided. Grief and loss are the lot of all sentient beings; so spread kindness and acceptance, please.

It won't be in this series but I look forward to Cadwell Turnbull's next book.

THE IMMEASURABLE HEAVEN, Caspar Geon's literary dose of DMT delivered by Solaris Books

THE IMMEASURABLE HEAVEN
CASPAR GEON
Solaris Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

A finalist for this year's Philip K. Dick Award...the winner will be announced at Norwescon 48 on Friday, 3 April 2026.

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An entirely alien cast race across the multiverse in search of a priceless map of the realities in this thrilling cosmic space opera!

The galaxy of Yokkun's Depth has been settled since time immemorial. There is only one frontier left, and it's a one-way journey: to pierce the skin of existence and delve the countless younger universes beneath.

Running through these universes is the fabled Well, a fissure formed in the distant past into which horrors have been flung for millions of years. Amongst their number was an impossibly ancient sorcerer, cast down into the wastelands of a thousand apocalyptic worlds, never to return.

Until now.

Whirazomar is crossing the stars in the belly of a sentient spore, hoping she can make it to the Well before her masters' rivals realise what she's hunting: somewhere far below them, a hapless explorer has drafted a map of reality. A map that the exile is sure to seek out. A map so valuable that a kaleidoscope of beings will run the gauntlet of every universe to get it, even at the cost of their lives.

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My Review: This. I mean. Story-bomb. Wow.

Okay. Trying to use my words here.

The multiverse is a real, traversable thing. It's hugely ramified levels of lightly interrelated alternate realities are exclusionary. Leave one, voluntarily or not, and it is forever after closed to you, so no return trips.

Of course that means the Big Bad is moving towards what is considered closed to it because stories need stakes. How is The Big Bad doing this impossible thing? Why we know, he was thrown out of his comfy home timeline for being a bastard and wants revenge. But this thing he's doing is impossible. Only it obviously isn't. He's really doing it.

The story, plot-wise, is pretty typical. The great pleasure of the read is the entirely not-human cast, the author's vivid (almost synesthetic) evocation of the many layers of the reality of these characters, and the really entertaining sense that he is actually experiencing this Well that leads down the layers of the multiverse in front of you. He *is* Draebol, who is charged with making the map of all the levels. (I am deliberately not using the in-universe words for these things. Some people are deeply turned off by "odd" names, and easier to woo into a strange story by stealthy temptations.) (I might have a way to go on the stealth skills.)

The first third is an infodump. I say this knowing how many of y'all will switch off now; I really hope you won't. There's so very much intense image-establishment in this infodump that I'd read fifty more pages of it. Just it. I mean, this never happens. It was as if Author Geon opened an animation studio in my head. I love that experience, being so irresistibly insistently precisely immersed in a realty decidedly not my own that there is nothing to do but go with it or get out.

I went with it, and think some of y'all...the ones who batten on Ann Leckie and Tamsyn Muir...will as well. What was not quite so effective to my way of thinking, and is that three-quarter-star's final resting place, is the very human wants and desires of the aliens. In a lot of ways, the needs and wants of the Teixcalaanis in Arkady Martine's books are more alien-feeling to me. I'm not really inclined to ring the tocsin for the read because, well, what an intense experience it was. How much I want more SF that does this...drops the reader into a sea of ideas and concepts and says, "now let's tell a story in here" so I get to feel the sensawunda I sorely lack in most of my reading in every genre.

More, please.

METALLIC REALMS, "elegiac, sweet-talking mourning raga" for a world that dared to disappoint Himself

METALLIC REALMS
LINCOLN MICHEL
Atria Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wildly inventive and entertaining novel about a sci-fi writing group whose fictional universe and personal dramas begin to collide and collapse from the critically acclaimed author of the “timeless and original” (The New York Times) The Body Scout.

Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln’s life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a greater calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written The Star Rot Chronicles. Written collectively by Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit sci-fi writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to interstellar love triangles. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now.

But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest multiverse ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the funhouse reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.

Metallic Realms is a genre-breaking ode to golden-age science fiction, friendship, creativity, and the power and perils of storytelling.

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My Review: Michael Lincoln is NOT Lincoln Michel. He tells you so. Orb 4, to a writer, agrees. It's about all they agree on.

Are you at all involved in geekdom, fandom, nerdery online? Are you vaguely aware of the idea roman à clef? Do you need something to make you laugh before it makes your ego say, "hey! wait a minute!", and rub its thumped nose?

Here's you a book.

Since reading Upright Beasts some years ago, then falling under the sway of what I called "{w}hat would happen if Gattaca and Moneyball had a bastard love-child" aka The Body Scout a while back, I've quite fancied my trips into Author Michel's head. He's facetious, rowdy, and disrespectful. I'd spank him if I met him in person, or maybe not since I think he'd like it, but on the page this is really fun stuff.

I'll assume you've read the synopsis. It's accurate as far as it goes. Lincoln Michel's a caustic and sarcastic soul, so it's not one bit of a surprise that Michael Lincoln is, as well. You think *I* say hurtful things? I'm the Canadian Ambassador to the Court of St. James's by comparison to this guy! No quarter is offered, no opportunity for a well-phrased dig is passed up. Think Dorothy Parker without the waspish edge, replaced by a cruel condescension.

Why, given all that, did I rate this 4.5 stars? Because he's unkind but he's not wrong. The beady eye in the scope is gonna shoot a vital part but he won't miss because he's seen the anatomy too close-up to mistake his aim by so much as a millimeter. And by Grabthar's Hammer, he really is funny.

Will you like it? Are you a Trekkie? A Tolkien/"high fantasy" fan? Then no. Are you exasperated by clever-clever satirical stuff? Avoid like it gots the cooties. A deeply-dyed AO3 lover? This way plagueships lie.

I had moments of stiffened-spine outrage (Ca'Raan? Really? That's where you're expending firepower?), but all's fair etc etc and being a whiny li'l bitch would only make the Big Bad Bully glow with satisfaction. So not gonna make some PC case with less than half my heart. Laugh at yourself, look at how your detractors portray you, because it's how they see you. No one knows they need a comb until they're told. He's telling us.

But get it from the library, no sense handing him your money to get insulted.

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY, what an amazing story collection!

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
KIM FU
Tin House
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.

Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

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My Review: Listen to Author Fu on The Next Chapter for some very interesting insights into her writing.

This collection kicks off May is Short Story Month with a loud, explosive crashing percussive event. This is the best kind of short speculative fiction: Nothing shouts at you, no readily dateable stylistic flourishes that never do what the author imagines they will.

Strap in...we're headin' into the venerable institution of the Bryce Method. Short comments on each story, starting below.

Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867 is the best intro to the author and her hobby horses. A world where there is a simulation technology that enables people to see whomever or whatever they desire, someone wants to see their recently dead mother to take a fantastic opportunity to get it right this time BEFORE she dies. An operator denies the application time after time, saying the truth is it's proven to be too addictive... plus the technology could present Mother in a quantum superposition of both alive and dead. The ideas are way richer than you or I would so much as dare to think about, still less explore as deeply as Author Fu does. Bold, fearless, deeply troubling. 5* and a cheer for this being the story that won the short-fiction 2022 Shirley Jackson Award!

Liddy, First to Fly explores the horrors of puberty via body horror...a girl grows wings on her lower kegs, decides she will use them, her world turns upside down in each possible area of her life. The role of friends comes in for some scary but bracing contextual changes. The adolescence of any girl, turned up to eleven on the scay-meter. 4*

Time Cubes truly gave me nightmares without needing to go to sleep first. Alice lives in our not-that-distant future as a "Depressive Insider." Her one fervent desire is to be no longer alive; all else is pale and vague. One day her existence brings her ro someone whose one amazing invention is an anti-aging machine. It has a reverse gear...4* for ineffable weird and eerieness.

#ClimbingNation rings a...fun? engrossing, anyway...change on the "a stranger calls" story when April, a social-media fangirl, attends an Instagram star mountaineer's wake using an old scraped acquaintance as her entrée. The way to be unobtrusive is to be helpful, and inconspicuous. It leads, in this case, to her learning how one accidental death is about to become two. Very Poe-esque. 4* and a solid shivering bow of respect

Sandman ruined forever my ability to listen to "Mister Sandman", previously a favorite...now it feels prurient, almost pornographic. "Please turn on your magic beam" indeed. Since I seldom have trouble getting to sleep, I have no voluptuous response to it, though it is obvious why this would be the case. Terrifying to know how many have reason to find ecstasy in what I just...do. 5 utterly unnerved stars

Twenty Hours "After I killed my wife, I had twenty hours before her new body finished printing downstairs." A terrible, horrible, no-good way to combat the quotidian sameness of marriage, a toy that makes another person an object...literally, not merely "objectified"...and manages also to indict capitalism as the vicious, sadistic thing it truly is. 4.5*

The Doll is doll horror *convulsive shudder* plus Babbitty snobbery and class judgment seen through a kid's eyes. Effective iteration of a nothing-new plot. 3.5*

In This Fantasy will drive the Punctuation Prioresses potty. Every-damn-thing is a parenthesis. And that's the point. What does a life so deeply, existentially, killingly boring leave is inhabitant but fantasy lived in parentheses? Sad, saddening, filled with the masked hatred of the trapped. 4*

Scissors is...there's no other word, okay phrase then pedants, than "D/s porn". Two women enact a performance-art version of so many subs' fantasy of being used, passed around. As the first explicitly lesbian story, it stands out; as a story for mainstream audiences in a collection, telling it from the sub's close first-person PoV makes it fluoresce and strobe with intense, focused sexual energy. WILL OFFEND SOME. 5 deeply moved, slightly aroused stars

June Bugs traces Martha and Neil's intense, toxic connection from giddy-up to whoa. The abuse escalates from verbal to physical to emotional as their accidental, impulsive couplehood deteriorates, Martha leaves...Neil follows...and those june bugs! 3.5* for big "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?" energy

Bridezilla is the slightly off-putting third-person close PoV narrative of a woman who, in spite of her chosen man's entire expression of passive selfhood, agrees to marry him...then doesn't go through with it, in the most humiliating possible way. There's a sea monster in there, though for the life of me I could not see how or why. My least favorite story. 3*

Do You Remember Candy? is my worst NIGHTMARE! Something...we never learn what...destroys everyone's (around the world, it seems, though we stay focused on Allie and her daughter Jay) ability to taste food. Can you even *imagine* the response in France? Or...holy mother goddesses...ITALY?! So Allie is one of the few who really care about this, keeping her memories of the glories of eating real food alive as Industry pivots to making goos, glops, and pills to keep people nourished. It becomes a fetish, shared among the few, the embarrassed oddballs, to keep those memories alive. Allie becomes the keeper of this secretive sensuous crowd's fantasies made physical. Her daughter, young when...whatever it was, no one looks into it much after a time...happened and is utterly unmoved by the consuming (!) passion of her elders. Awful, scary reminder that no matter how we feel about things as they are, they become normal. And the past...vanishes. 4.5*

Superb speculative fictions that made me think, squirm, and pray for the future to all those useless gods I don't believe in. Not quite even enough in quality for all five stars.

SPLINTER EFFECT, watch out St Mary's! New kid is in town

SPLINTER EFFECT (Splinter Effect #1)
ANDREW LUDINGTON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this action-packed debut, time traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward maneuvers through the past to recover a long-lost, precious menorah hiding out in ancient Rome.

Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward travels through time on sponsored expeditions to the past to secure precious artifacts moments before they are lost to history. Although exceptional at his job, Rabbit is not without faults. In a spectacular failure twenty years ago, he lost both the menorah of the second temple and his hot-headed mentee, Aaron. So, when new evidence reveals the menorah’s reappearance in 6th century Constantinople, Rabbit seizes the chance for redemption.

But from the moment he arrives in the past, things start to go wrong. Rabbit quickly finds out that his prime competition, an unlicensed and annoyingly appealing “stringer” named Helen, is also in Constantinople hunting the menorah. And that’s only the beginning. The oppressed Jewish population of the city is primed for revolution, Constantinople’s leading gang seems to have it out for Rabbit personally, and someone local is interested enough in the menorah to kill for it.

As the past closes in on him and his previous failures compound, will Rabbit be able to recover the menorah before it's once again lost in time?

With new and old dangers alike hiding behind every corner, time might just be up for Rabbit’s redemption—and possibly his life.

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My Review: Jodi Taylor's St Mary's series might need to smarten up their extremely British...let's be honest, English...monomania if Rabbit of the Smithsonian catches on. Much as I love Max, Peterson, and Markham, they need some competition, and here they've got it.

Opening at (one of the several events leading to) the burning of the Library of Alexandria was a genius bait-and-switch. By itself that is an event I would, and have, eagerly read a book about, but here it's only a teaser for Rabbit and his relationship to the Smithsonian. Time travel, inherently threatening to powerful people, is here presented as a tech tightly wrapped in rules. Of course these favor the status quo, and the very, very rich. But I repeat myself...Rabbit's a nepo baby with some time-travel failures behind him including a search for the maguffin in this book, the menorah stolen by Rome from the Jews. It's a real white-whale tale, and not just for Rabbit.

Helen, his antagonist, is also hot for this (solid-gold) candelabra of god's. She's not at all as well-developed as Rabbit is, and frankly I hope they drop her in any future iterations of the book...I didn't like Clive Ronan either (IYKYK). Their reasons aren't explored. I don't think they matter. After all, it's made of gold so greed's more than enough. Here's probably a good place to note that the world as we know it is part of a multiverse. In this splinter (note resemblance to title), there's legal-but-restricted time travel. In others, there's none whether legal or not. You see how immense this storyverse is? Imagine for a moment the things a writer can do in this sandbox!

Earlier versions of this idea have mostly centered around the Time Patrol (Poul Anderson) or The Paratime Police (H. Beam Piper) tasked with preventing anyone from causing time loops or retrocausal gubbins or generally being dickish to our hominin ancestors. (I think it's telling that intertemporal stories about Homo sapiens interacting with any earlier species, or even earlier time in history, all contain some fraud or slavery elements.)

Here the only thing remotely criminal is, arguably, the richest benefiting from Rabbit and his ilk going into the past to retrieve things that're lost to history by idiotic violence, sheer human stupidity, or Earth's natural processes (eg, earthquakes or fires). I'm not squeamish enough about this to give the book a black mark. I *am* squeamish about young, hot Helen being Rabbit's nemesis and Doctor PJ being his girlfriend, because absolutely nothing can be left un-romance-ified and of course that means heterosexual. Ugh. There went a half-star. (Though, to be fair, there are hints that Rabbit himself might be, um, heteroflexible.)

The other half-star disappeared because, though I liked the richly detailed world of 536 Constantinople a lot, I'd've liked more people instead of labels talking. It feels more like infidumping when I have no idea who "the customs official" or any of the other so-yclept faceless ones are. Still, four stars is the absolute minimum a book with this ending could possibly receive. Even moreso because, if this isn't a series-starter, I'll eat my hat for breakfast without ketchup.

I'll be right here waiting for more Rabbit. Without a ketchup bottle.

ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD, good iteration of my delight the "Now what?" post-apocalyptic tale

ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD
EIREN CAFFALL
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

One of Ancillary Review of Books' 2025 Notable Books!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most—love and work, community and knowledge—will survive.

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My Review: I really liked Station Eleven a lot. I'm a sucker for this story: After the Fall, now what? Maybe proof of this enduring fascination is my championing of Earth Abides (now a TV show) and Day of the Triffids. The genre presents a long tail of goodwill, then, as well as wide scope for action set in the present. This story is split between the present crisis...being flooded out of their home on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History...and how things came to be so terrible that this is where their home needs to be.

A really good story idea, one that has a lot of genuine and affecting emotional resonance; then uses up its narrative momentum by structuring the past as flashbacks. Once or twice, okay; more than that it becomes a real drag. Start the story in the past. Trust the reader to invest in the characters, and rip our lungs out by showing us in real time what's happening. It felt to me the author was cushioning the blow by using this method of storytelling.

So no fifth star from me.

Four stars were assured when this happened:

“Hell, it was happening, I saw it happening. But I couldn’t picture it, you know? I couldn’t picture how we’d lose the seasons, how it would be tropical heat in November, but still have blizzards that melted into heat waves. I couldn’t picture the way the storms come and then come back. Not the polar cold fronts in the south. Not the new hurricanes, the hot winters, the king tides, the typhoons going east then west then east again. It should have been easy to see. It was in the data.”

This is exactly and precisely how I've been feeling about others' apparent inability to retain the thread between the past climate events and their all-but-certain genesis. My problem is that I *can* picture it and am cursed with seeing it before my appalled eyes...it's like, in the space of thirty-nine years, I've moved from New York to Maryland. Without moving an inch.

I won't live long enough (I hope) to see this novel's world in the flesh. I expect that, if I'm cursed to do so, it will look a lot like this. It was Author Caffall's gift to me to make me a lot gladder that I'm really old and fairly infirm.

The reason I hope you'll read it, though, is that its sisters Nonie and Bix are the kind of kids we should all strive to raise. They are resilient, they are resourceful, they are respectful of the limited resources they can command and mindful of their good fortune, they are angry enough to work for more and humble enough to know what "enough" means.

They made the issues I had with the structure into cavils. Had I not had them to invest my emotional energy into, I would've enjoyed the story a lot less. As it is, I do recommend it, and hope you'll take this as your nudge to see what a wounded planet will do to heal itself.

EXORDIA, rich, immersive story to block out the world's noise

EXORDIA
SETH DICKINSON
Tor Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Anna, I came to Earth tracking a very old story, a story that goes back to the dawn of time. it’s very unlikely that you’ll die right now. It wouldn’t be narratively complete.”

Anna Sinjari―refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker―has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. While humanity reels from disaster, she must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world.

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My Review: A species (!) of hard sci fi from a writer previously celebrated in the fantasy field for The Traitor Baru Cormorant, here blending queer representation with cosmic horror via military sci-fi in the paranoid Cold-War mode, heavily Cthulhu-ized.

That sounds like something I'd hate. Why didn't I?

Seth Dickinson. He has a deft touch with humor to lighten the darkness, irony to show the urgency of perspective, and unflinching realism to get the reader's investment in the stakes. Which are, I know this will surprise you, existential for Humanity.

On the nose, in our present political and environmental climate? I thought so going in. I think so now. However, there's a reason I recommend this story for your immersion and entertainment anyway. It is about the ways and means used to accomplish political goals while using people's fears and anxieties to motivate them into actions that are genuinely necessary. It takes us into the labyrinth of tech-dominated institutions of force apllication, and shows us the internal conflicts that impact everything done or not done in these institutions. The stakes are often secondary to the purposes of the instituion's inmates.

Yet...in the end, after much troubling back-and-forth...the people are clearly all working for something they see as Right and Good. No matter what outcome eventuates, someone's plans will fail, and someone else's will sorta-kinda work. Will anyone be fully happy? No. The way the book's structured, the changing PoVs are the way to keep this story from devolving into Us-v-Them predictability. Whose ideas and goals you empathize with really isn't the point. It's recognizing the goals and ideas matter TO THEM, and using that knowledge to get what *you* want.

A hard leap to make, as witness the fact that so few ever make it. Author Seth shows the reader the idea of it with startling clarity and not a little dark humor. The results...you'll discover the specifics...are exactly and precisely what the actions of all the characters add up to. There is no deus ex machina here. There is, in the second half, a lot of science to go with your fiction, mostly physics.

I typed that sentence with a sinking heart. I know some significant fraction of my readers just went *click* into the off position. It is, of course, entirely y'all's privilege...but please hear me out. Your prior knowledge of physics would enrich the uses of it. Your entire ignorance of it will not in any way diminish the force of its uses in the story. You read about magic without understanding how it works, this is essentially the same thing. The scientists are casting spells on ushabtis, not writing code to make drones work in concert...it's all a matter of looking at the technology talk in the proper storytelling spirit.

Appeal made. You decide. What you'll miss, if you ignore my recommendation of this read, is a cracking good story about how people, real people with needs and wants and ideals, get together to accomplish goals in the real world. That story will, I wager, appeal to readers of technothrillers, geopolitical spy stories, and SF gulpers as we head into the season where a big, immersive read will keep you from needing to pay attention to Aunt Lurlene's stories about her neighbors you've never met and couldn't care less about, or your nephew's reprehensible politics.

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…

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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…

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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.

ALAN SMALE'S PAGE: The Apollo Rising series, HOT MOON & RADIANT SKY

HOT MOON (Apollo Rising #1)
ALAN SMALE
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Imagine for a second what would have happened if the Soviets had gotten a cosmonaut to the moon first, if Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 had been in a humiliating second place. Everything would have unfolded differently.

America would never have let the Soviets win the space race. That would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, political suicide for any president. We'd have gritted our teeth and doubled down, poured billions into the Apollo program.

HOT MOON is set in 1979 in this alternate world. The US and the Soviets both have permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations, and manned spy satellites supported by frequent rocket launches. Reagan is President and the Cold War is hotter than ever.

The crew of Apollo 32, commanded by Vivian Carter, career astronaut, docks at NASA's Columbia space station on their way to their main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station.

The fight for the Moon has begun!

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My Review: Imagine The Martian set in the storyverse of For All Mankind.

So. You got it. You need more?

The author's a praciticing astronomer. A real, actual scientist writing SF is always a positive, from my PoV, because the details are clearly based in a scientist's understanding of what matters to an expedition to the moon. It's also refreshing when someone takes the constraints of the actual extant tech of a given time seriously. Author Smale does both.

Mixed in with the cool sciency bits are a selection of genre-friendly bits of alternate history, in this case the survival of a Russian scientist whose death caused the end of the Soviet Moon program; a fun twist of gender-equality advancement; and a murder mystery. None of these violated the basic need of the SF reader for a clear path to believable results. It's as accurate to 1960s and 70s science as is possible.

Geopolitics as the source of alt-hist plots are, as you can imagine, the biggest vein in the story-mine ever worked. This one being especially interesting to me, of course I fell for it immediately (despite my absolute conviction that Nixon would never, ever, ever have pulled out of Vietnam...too many defense contractors would've been hurt). I'm one of those who saw "Earthrise" when there was one digit in my age:

...and was never the same again. So a story centered around a time when I was alive but positing a different outcome was meat and drink!

That doesn't stop me from seeing the execution's flaws. I don't see anything in Vivian's sketched-in background that makes her gender relevant, so it feels a bit like tokenism. Mentioning her inclusion for some overarching reason, or integrating some responses that point up the reason, might have helped.

The story's pace is not swift, which I mention for those wanting a real thrill ride. I found it more than swift enough to keep the pages turning. The pace is not representative of the perils. This is space after all, the merest slip of a tool can be lethal...and Vivian seems to be a disaster magnet. She's certainly hair-breadth escape expert par excellence. Permaybehaps a bit too much so.

So I'm not yodeling buy-now-or-else from atop the roof, I *am* saying it's a very enjoyable read for your Kindle as you do your best not to hear little Pookums extorting that second cousin's kid out of the latest game. It'll keep you immersed.

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


RADIANT SKY (Apollo Rising #2)
ALAN SMALE
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Vivan Carter, the electrifying hero from Hot Moon, returns to lead a lunar geological survey team comprised of both Americans and Soviets. Their journey takes them across the harsh and barren lunar surface as they chart the moon and collect samples for this grueling mission. It is dangerous enough, but the stakes become much higher when an ambush threatens the entire mission.

The crew must navigate a treacherous path where survival requires ingenuity, courage, and an uneasy alliance with their Soviet counterparts. As the stakes grow higher, the mission becomes a test of skill, endurance, and trust in an era defined by suspicion and rivalry.

Dive into an electrifying alternate history where space rivalry takes center stage. Radiant Sky is a thrilling continuation of the highly acclaimed hard science fiction novel that will captivate fans of NASA fiction books, near-future adventures, and hard science fiction series. Set in a meticulously crafted world where the Cold War extends far beyond Earth's atmosphere, humanity's reach into space creates a new frontier of tension and exploration.

With breathtaking accuracy from a retired NASA director and an immersive look at the untold stories of space rivalry, Radiant Sky brings hard science fiction alive, capturing the imagination and the thrill of space exploration. Prepare for a pulse-pounding experience that redefines what it means to venture into the unknown.

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My Review: Sequels to alternate-history books are hoeing a hard row indeed. The setting's the star, and the star's done the lifting in the first one. Now, four years later, we know what happened to Vivian, a chunk of why, and how it made her act.

What's left to do? Make her world do a flip: Cooperate with the Soviets who tried multiple ways to kill you only a few years ago. The Moon makes strange bedfellows, after all. And there's weirdness enough that we need all hands on deck to survive.

So the stakes ratcheted up from personal, the character's still a deeply resouceful person, the setting's still the very hostile one of the Moon, and we're treated to more tense moments. This does seem to me to be Author Smale's favorite way of moving the plot: Add a threat and resolve it with averting death. I'm not totally down with that because those stakes really don't change much, just make the status quo continue. So the dopamine hit of fixing the problem wanes a bit every time it happens again.

That said, I don't for a second want you to think this is a sequel where we just do it all again. The worldbuilding is more sophisticated than that. Geopolitics are present in any alternate history. In this iteration, the geopolitics are dependent on events from the last book, so they're less directly mappable still from the 1983 of your and my memories. That is clear from the fact we're on the Moon, of course...but the story is much more than that.

If you're a fan of "what happens when I pull this?" stories, this series will do it for you. Author Smale understands the puzzle-solver's mind, feeds it puzzles to follow as they're solved, and makes points about conflict, its roots, and some of the ways it does, and doesn't, get resolved.

This book came out last month and I snarfed it down in two days. Possibly displacing Farthing as my favorite alternate-history crime book....

2024 NEBULA FINALISTS: SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY, thought-provoking story with a hopeful twist

SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY
YAROSLAV BARSUKOV
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.75* of five

FINALIST for the 2024 Nebula Award! Winner announced at the 2025 Nebula Conference, 5 through 8 June 2025.

The Publisher Says: When lies become truths and two kingdoms head to a bloody war, a man is exiled for his conscience

Refusing the queen’s order to gas a crowd of protesters, Minister Shea Ashcroft is banished to the border to oversee construction of the biggest defensive tower in history. However, the use of advanced technology taken from refugees makes the tower volatile and dangerous, becoming a threat to local interests. Shea has no choice but to fight the local hierarchy to ensure the construction succeeds—and to reclaim his own life.

Surviving an assassination attempt, Shea confronts his inner demons, encounters an ancient legend, and discovers a portal to a dead world—all the while struggling to stay true to his own principles and maintain his sanity. Fighting memories and hallucinations, he starts to question everything...

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory is a thought-provoking meditation on the fragility of the human condition, our beliefs, the manipulation of propaganda for political gains, and our ability to distinguish the real from the unreal and willingness to accept convenient “truths.” The novel is a compelling exploration of memory, its fragile nature, and its profound impact on our perception of identity, relationships, and facts themselves.

A unique blend of science fiction, fantasy and noir, with zeitgeist and prophetic qualities (the original novella anticipated the Russo-Ukrainian War), this is a must for fans of China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series, Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, and Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass.

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My Review: We can use some entertainment. We can use a bit of moral instruction, it seems. Author Barsukov said these things to himself, at least in my reconstruction of the thought process that led to this book, and decided that he'd make a world and a man to resist its slide into darkness.

I found this book very inspiring. I'm inspired to bring it to y'all's attention because of this piece from The Guardian, "'It will renew your faith in humanity': books to bring comfort in dark times":

A surprising number of readers believe a happy ending should mean automatic disqualification from any serious literary award. Good luck to them: I wish them joy in their wallowing. In my turn, I’ve come to believe the opposite. To reach only for novels that reaffirm our darkest fears is merely to make an escape of a different sort, not the escapism of brooding heroes and wedding finales, but the security blanket of an equally foregone conclusion: the safety of imagining the worst. I would argue that to live only in that place is simply cowardice in better camouflage. The truth is that it’s far riskier to remain in uncertainty. Far braver, far more radical to keep hoping.

The truth of this is in Shea's dogged determination to do what's Right; it's in his determination's effect on engineer Brielle, whose expertise is central in what their shared need to do what's Right creates.

There's a lot of the epic fantasy ethos in this urban-fantasy story, sans the usual military glorification; but there is a very welcome leavening of SF in the story that prevents me from the usual somnolent, glazed-eyed scanning to get to the ending. I was alert and involved as Brielle's skills were deployed to create the tower that Shea's tasked with defending, to little avail:

The tower took the length of the world—only it was an alien world, replicating itself over and over as it climbed to a distant, ghostly gap into the clouds. Or did he stare down a well? Shea's head spun again as up and down flip-flopped like axes on a gyroscope.

Does this dimensionally daft structure need defending? Does this technology need help, or resistance to its implications? Can anyone, still less a proven-murderous tyrant, be trusted with a tool/weapon of this magnitude? Are the Others, the aliens, to be trusted, or are they there to treat Shea and his people as the Others...with the usual result?

Ethical questions, existential ones, that resonate clearly with our post-November 6th world. They aren't easy, or easily solved ones; Author Barsukov doesn't pretend his ending is a solution to them all. There aren't any escape routes from the consequences of greed and lust for power provided. There are stern meditations on what we try to use, though:

What makes guilt so grotesque is the fact that it adorns itself with whatever remains of our righteousness.

And so the sadness of life as a moral actor, as a being with agency and puissance outreaching the lessons of their past, is revealed and refined. The story, an expansion of his 2021 novella Tower of Mud and Straw, reminded me more and more of THE DEEP SEA DIVER'S SYNDROME (qv) which French translation also delves into the intersection between dreamlike states and meatspace with equal care. Does anyone really know what the Tower is/can do? Do their...reveries, memories, dreamlike experiences...come without cost yet replete with warning signs?

An ending that addresses these queries of reality yet doesn't wrap them in a tight, constricting little bow gave me both inspiration and information to examine this moment in which I am deeply unhappy, afraid, and emotionally bereft, with a dose of hope. There is a reason Author Barsukov chose this particular stream-of-consciousness style, and this superposed urban-fantasy/SF genre mashup, to tell you this story. Intrinsic to the story, the way everything meshes...and the things that don't...are all made to present a frame for a very intensely resonant meditation.

There is not a lot more valuable for a story to give as its gift than that.

Dungeon Crawler World: DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL & CARL'S DOOMSDAY SCENARIO

DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL (Dungeon Crawler Carl #1)
MATT DINNIMAN
Ace Books
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The apocalypse will be televised! Welcome to the first book in the wildly popular and addictive Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman—now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition.

You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game–like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the Dungeon. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Samuel Beckett's absurdist humor meets The Truman Show by way of Cat Valente's Space Opera, but streamed on Twitch.

If any of that didn't make sense, this might not be the read for you. Wait for the TV show. They'll dumb that down.

Humor is the most difficult thing to review, since you are guaranteed not to think what makes me laugh is funny. Likewise, I'm sure. Princess Donut the cat was a sarcastic, clueless hoot. And I hate cats!

This is a video game, so you know. It didn't originate as one, but it really hit the same cultural nerve.

Boy howdy, did Dinniman hit an artery! A TV deal with Seth MacFarlane's company is the latest...before that the book's self-published editions sold well, his Kickstarter for deluxe hardcovers went past goal. There's something here that spoke to those under forty in stentorian tones.

I think you already know if you'll like this one, and I'm here to assure you you're right.

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



CARL'S DOOMSDAY SCENARIO (Dungeon Crawler Carl #2)
MATT DINNIMAN
Ace Books
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: "The training levels have concluded. Now the games may truly begin."

The ratings and views are off the chart. The fans just can't get enough. The dungeon gets more dangerous each day. But in a grinder designed to chew up and spit out crawlers by the millions, Carl and Princess Donut need to work harder than ever just to survive.

They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered prostitutes rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose.

Carl still has no pants.

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. For Carl and Donut, it's anything but a game.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Reading something I liked, but didn't love, then its sequel, in less than a week was a bad decision. Princess Donut really worked my nerve this time, and not because she's a cat.

I'm not a gaymer. I've never kept my focus long enough to care about these games on screen, but the way they deliver the human addiction to story is pure and uncut. Is this a good exemplar of the text version of it? Since I read them both, and never even finished Ready Player One, I'm goin' with yes. The grace notes in this story are the basic reason I kept my eyes on the Kindle. Small things, deliberately planted, all through both books...this made me want to keep reading past the annoyance of the absurdities Carl and Princess Donut get up to, into, and yak on about.

I said it above: "I think you already know if you'll like this one, and I'm here to assure you you're right."