Publisher: Titan Books February 20, 2018
Publisher’s Blurb: From BSFA Award winning author Gareth L. Powell comes the first in a new epic sci-fi trilogy exploring the legacies of war. The sentient warship Trouble Dog was built for violence, yet following a brutal war, she is disgusted by her role in a genocide. Stripped of her weaponry and seeking to atone, she joins the House of Reclamation, an organization dedicated to rescuing ships in distress. When a civilian ship goes missing in a disputed system, Trouble Dog and her new crew of loners, captained by Sal Konstanz, are sent on a rescue mission. Meanwhile, light years away, intelligence officer Ashton Childe is tasked with locating the poet, Ona Sudak, who was aboard the missing spaceship. What Childe doesn’t know is that Sudak is not the person she appears to be. A straightforward rescue turns into something far more dangerous, as Trouble Dog, Konstanz and Childe find themselves at the center of a conflict that could engulf the entire galaxy. If she is to save her crew, Trouble Dog is going to have to remember how to fight… (Source: Titan Books) Continue reading →

Callie Machedo is the scruffy, emotionally damaged captain of the cargo/gunship White Raven, and when she discovers a derelict human spaceship in trans Neptunian space she doesn’t know if it’s a box that will hold gold or spiders, but she’s not the sort that doesn’t want to find out. The ship shouldn’t be there at all, considering that it left 500 years before to seed a new colony, but its navigation logs show that it reached its destination and jumped back using a drive that nobody has ever seen before, or at least, no human. The alien race that showed up a few centuries after the ship left, bringing wormhole access and other advanced tech may be all too familiar with the technology that allowed the ship to make a point to point jump, and it scares them to the center of their starfish shaped beings. Continue reading →

SFRevu: How did Semiosis come about? Did it spring from a short story? Did it come before or after your Clarion experience, and what did you think of that?

Sue Burke: It started with real life. A couple of my houseplants got into fights with other houseplants. A pothos wrapped around another plant and killed it, and a philodendron tried to sink its roots into a neighbor. That seemed suspicious, so I did some research and discovered that all plants in a given place are, as one botanist put it, “in a state of war with regard to each other.” (War on my windowsills!) That seemed like a good source of conflict for a story, but how?

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