New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 new and forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about?

 

de Bodard, Aliette. Seven of Infinities [Subterranean]
Publisher's Description

Vân is a scholar from a poor background, eking out a living in the orbitals of the Scattered Pearls Belt as a tutor to a rich family, while hiding the illegal artificial mem-implant she manufactured as a student.

Sunless Woods is a mindship—and not just any mindship, but a notorious thief and a master of disguise. She’s come to the Belt to retire, but is drawn to Vân’s resolute integrity.

When a mysterious corpse is found in the quarters of Vân’s student, Vân and Sunless Woods find themselves following a trail of greed and murder that will lead them from teahouses and ascetic havens to the wreck of a mindship--and to the devastating secrets they’ve kept from each other.

Why We Want It: de Bodard's Xuya stories are consistently excellent and novella length is a sweet spot and always leaves us wanting more.

Drayden, Nicky. Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis [Harper Voyager]
Publisher's Description

The Compton Crook Award-winning author weaves her trademark blend of science fiction and dark humor in this dazzling story that continues the imaginative saga begun in Escaping Exodus, in which a society lives in the belly of a beast—and an entire civilization's survival depends on a pair of uneasy allies who must come together for one epic battle.

Nearly a thousand years removed from Earth, the remnants of humanity cling to existence inside giant, space faring creatures known as the Zenzee. Abused and exploited by humans for generations, these majestic animals nearly went extinct, but under the command of its newly minted ruler, Doka Kaleigh, life in the Parados I has flourished. Thanks to careful oversight and sacrifice by all of its crew, they are now on the brink of utopia, and yet Doka’s rivals feel threatened by that success.

The Senate allowed Doka to lead their people believing he’d fail spectacularly—a disaster that would cement the legitimacy of their long-standing matriarchy. Despite vocal opposition and blatant attacks on his authority, Doka has continued to handle his position with grace and intelligence; he knows a single misstep means disaster. When a cataclysmic event on another Zenzee world forces Doka and his people to accept thousands of refugees, a culture clash erupts, revealing secrets from the past that could endanger their future. For Doka, the stakes are bigger and more personal than ever before—and could cost him his reign and his heart.

He has fallen for the one woman he is forbidden to love: his wife, Seske. Doka and Seske must work closely together to sway the other Zenzee worlds to stop their cycles of destruction. But when they stumble upon a discovery that can transform their world, they know they must prepare to fight a battle where there can be no winners, only survivors.

Why We Want It: We love Nicky Drayden's novels around these parts. Each one is a wild ride as different from each other as can be. Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis is the first sequel from Drayden, following 2019's Escaping Exodus (Adri's review) and I loved that book at least as much as Adri, if not more.

Martin, George R.R. and Gardner Dozois. Songs of Love and Death [Saga]
Publisher's Description

From epic fantasy, post-apocalyptic America, to faerie-haunted rural fields in 18th-century England, to an intergalactic empire, join star-crossed lovers as they struggle against the forces of magic and fate.

A star-studded cross-genre anthology Songs of Love and Death features all-original tales from seventeen of the most prestigious names in romance, fantasy, and science fiction.

Why We Want It: Is this the last Gardner Dozois anthology? Regardless, even though I haven't read them all, I know that any anthology from GRRM and Gardner Dozois is a top notch anthology.

Robson, Justina (editor). Tales of Catt and Fisher [Solaris]
Publisher's Description

A brand-new collection of stand-alone stories featuring the return of two fan-favourite characters from the world of the critically acclaimed Redemption’s Blade and Salvation’s Fire novels.

Four new tales of Doctors Catt and Fisher…

Scholars, shopkeepers, collectors… aficionados. Obtainers of rare antiquities; relic hunters who can’t resist a lead, even when it takes them into terrible danger. There’s always an opportunity to be found amid the confusion, in the wake of the terrible Kinslayer War. There’s always a deal to be done, a tomb to open, a precious thing to… obtain.

From encounters with the monstrous Vathesk to exploring new worlds; from wielding great power to do great good, to unearthing dark things best left lost. If you need the experts, if you can find your way to their Cherivell shop, maybe you can hire Doctors Catt and Fisher.

Why We Want It: I've read the five volumes of Robson's Quantum Gravity, but I've only dipped my toes in the rest of her catalog. Somehow, up until the time I was putting together this article I was under the assumption that this was a collection of Robson's stories - but as you can see from the description above, it is not. With that said, I've been interested in the After the War world since it was announced so while I may not be dipping my toes into  more of Robson's fiction maybe this is the time to dip into After the War.

Vo, Nghi. When the Tiger Comes Down the Mountain [Tor.com Publishing]
Publisher's Description

"Dangerous, subtle, unexpected and familiar, angry and ferocious and hopeful. . . . The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a remarkable accomplishment of storytelling."—NPR

The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover—a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty—and discover how truth can survive becoming history.

Nghi Vo returns to the empire of Ahn and The Singing Hills Cycle in When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, a mesmerizing, lush standalone follow-up to The Empress of Salt and Fortune.

Why We Want It: One of two books on this spotlight where I haven't read the preceding book, I've been excited to read The Empress of Salt and Fortune since it was first announced. 2020 has been a heck of a year and many of my reading goals and expectations have not quite come through - so my everlasting to-read pile is now one book deeper because the follow up to one of my more anticipated books of the year is naturally also highly anticipated.

Winter, Evan. The Fires of Vengeance [Orbit]
Publisher's Description

In order to reclaim her throne and save her people, an ousted queen must join forces with a young warrior in the second book of this”relentlessly gripping, brilliant” epic fantasy series from a breakout author (James Islington).

Tau and his Queen, desperate to delay the impending attack on the capital by the indigenous people of Xidda, craft a dangerous plan. If Tau succeeds, the Queen will have the time she needs to assemble her forces and launch an all out assault on her own capital city, where her sister is being propped up as the ‘true’ Queen of the Omehi.

If the city can be taken, if Tsiora can reclaim her throne, and if she can reunite her people then the Omehi have a chance to survive the onslaught.

Why We Want It: One of the most buzzed about books from 2019 which I haven't read is Evan Winter's The Rage of Dragons. I own it, I just still need to read the book. Regardless of that, this is shaping up to be an incredible fantasy series and the publication of the second volume should be all the inspiration I need to read the first. It's also the only book I haven't read off of my 2020 Summer Reading List.

POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Microreview [Books]: Redemption's Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Salvation's Fire by Justina Robson

Adrian Tchaikovsky and Justina Robson kick off an inventive, satisfying shared universe with a difficult past.

Oh hey, a shared universe! In books! Perhaps I'm not reading the right things, but this feels like a pretty rare occurrence, and aside from George R. R. Martin's Wildcards series (which I haven't read) and the occasional posthumous series continuation, I'm struggling to think of any intentional collaborations of this kind. Redemption's Blade and Salvation's Fire are a sequential pair which together open the "After the War" series. Redemption's Blade - and, I believe, the concept for the whole world - was written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who is fast on his way to becoming one of my favourite authors; Salvation's Fire continues with Justina Robson, whose work I hadn't read before.

The series is set in a multi-species fantasy world which is dealing with the aftermath of a demigod's warmongering. The Kinslayer was defeated at the battle of Bladno, a battle Celestaine remembers all too well - she was there, dispatching his giant dragon-thing and helping to bring him down. Now the world is full of the kind of horrors that only a demigod on the warpath can inflict, and Celestaine and her pals are driven to try to make things just slightly better, one quest at a time. And it's definitely quest-driven fantasy that's on the menu here: there's no political post-conflict reconstruction going on here, no leaders arising from the ashes or chosen ones returning to their rightful thrones. There's just people doing their best, in the absence of much else to occupy them.

The fantasy world here is probably best described as "Legend of Zelda except society makes sense". Humans share their world not with Tolkien-issue elves and dwarves but with the (formerly) winged Aethani, the water-dwelling Shelliac, forests full of ethereal Draeyads (some of which are now eternally on fire), some spider people (a Tchaikovsky special!), and most prominently, the Yorughans. The Yorughans are After the War's "always chaotic evil" race, subterranean dwellers who were brought out and conscripted into service by the Kinslayer and whose members now have rather a lot to do to rehabilitate their species (not least because, actually, many of them actually quite enjoyed serving in the war, service to evil aside). Celestaine's two closest travelling companions, Heno and Nedham, are both Yorughan, and bring a pair of interesting, sceptical and frequently funny perspectives to her human outlook on the world. Also present are several of the Guardians, ageless beings created by the Gods who are now basically the only divinity left after Kinslayer (himself a Guardian) severed the Gods from the world as part of his campaign. Despite their divine origins, most of the Guardians are pretty human in their motivations and emotions: because of the war, it's only the less heroic of the group that have even survived, meaning that most bring a blend of cowardice and self-preservation to the table (nowhere more obviously than Deffo, "The Undefeated", who maintained his title through the war by hiding as a badger). Taken as a whole, everything feels brilliantly lived-in and the sense of both ancient and recent history really lifts the worldbuilding to another level.

Celestaine is a compelling main character, although she's got more going for her in Redemption's Blade, where the plot is driven by her desire to make amends for one of the war's greatest atrocities, than in Salvation's Fire, where she ends up being more of a passenger on a trip belonging more to other characters. This is a shame, because Salvation's Fire introduces some cracking supporting characters, including the Bride of Kinslayer, who skirts close to being a fantasy manic pixie dream girl but ends up something much more interesting and dangerous, likely due to the influence of youngster Kula; there's also Tricky, a Guardian who appears to represent change and chaos as manifested in a gloriously snarky middle-aged woman, and whose interactions with returning bard Ralas were a constant highlight (and a ship I gave my blessing to). That said, Redemption's Blade gives us the fabulously amoral duo of Dr Catt and Fisher, who also haven't met a scene they couldn't steal. There's a real RPG-esque element to the character interactions in both books, which take as given that the characters will get together and stay together, using their different classes - sorry, character traits - to complete their various missions.

As I guess you'd expect from a shared universe set-up, the plot of each book is self-contained, although character relationships do change and grow between books and we can assume that the set-up for a future Book 3 will continue that trend. As noted above, Celestaine is very much the driving force for Redemption's Blade: she's seeking Kinslayer's magic crown, which she has promised to Amkulyah, prince of the Aethani, in order to return the power of flight to his people. The crown itself is, of course, an effective tool to encourage the characters to travel and showcase some of Tchaikovsky's worldbuilding, as well as setting Celestaine and co. up for deeper questions on survival and reparations - with a world that's been ruined so badly, how can this one thing even begin to make a difference? Naturally, Tchaikovsky doesn't let his characters off easy with an artefact that can simply undo the past, and this nuanced payoff ultimately benefits the journey the characters go on to a far greater extent.

Salvation's Fire, in contrast, takes longer to set up, and when it hits it's more the story of Lysandra, Kinslayer's manufactured bride. After being discovered by Kula (who has some mysteries going on herself), Lysandra provides the impetus for a trip across the ocean to find the ethereal plane the gods have disappeared to. Unfortunately, despite my love for Lysandra herself, this doesn't work as well as Redemption's Blade for the simple reason that Lysandra isn't a character with relateable, well-explained motivations, to us or to the other characters, and it feels like our returning characters end up following her more from lack of better things to do. Luckily, there's enough going on here in terms of the new characters and continued strong worldbuilding to smooth this over, and it all comes together in similarly nuanced fashion. From an RPG player's sense, it also just felt that we were too early in the characters' journey with us for them to be travelling into a parallel dimension to resurrect the Gods, and I don't think this plot brings the weight of the world's history to bear in quite as successful a way as its predecessor.

Ultimately, this is the kind of heroic fantasy one reads for one purpose only: heroic characters doing awesome things. While Redemption's Blade and Salvation's Fire deliver a slightly inconsistent experience in that regard, the strengths of each volume still speak for themselves. Tchaikovsky and Robson both manage to walk a line between capitalising on satisfying heroic fantasy tropes and giving their characters moments of glory we can root for, while still making their post-conflict world dark and complicated and lacking in any easy ways forward. Its as deep as it needs to be, and the change in authors brings a fresh new take which outweighs the continuity niggles especially where some of the character growth is concerned. I'm hopeful that there are more adventures in store with Celestaine, Heno, Nedham and the crew, that I can come back to and scratch that heroic fantasy itch in a brilliantly inventive world.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Worldbuilding that delivers on every level (even the one involving giant spiders and voidcrabs); +1 Bursting with excellent characters across both volumes.

Penalties: -1 Salvation's Fire's plot doesn't quite come together as well as its predecessor

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

References: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Redemption's Blade [Solaris, 2018]

                            Robson, Justina. Salvation's Fire [Solaris, 2018]