Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel

Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel | 7/7/2021|Rebellion

The mark of a really good book is that you don’t want to put it down and you don’t want to finish it. That’s how I felt about Assassin’s Orbit, which I gather is John Appel’s debut novel. It covers a lot of ground, starting on a space station with a mass murder which includes high-ranked politicians and business types, moving to the planet’s surface as investigators track their suspects, and off into near space as some excellently plotted space war erupts. Continue reading →

Science Fiction to Look for March 2021

Sometimes March roars in like a lion and roars out the same way. It seems everybody wanted to have an early release this month, and the first six books I look at drop at the beginning of the month.  There’s  A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine’s much anticipated sequel to A Memory Called Empire, a solid addition to John Ringo’s Ring of Fire Zombie saga with Charles Gannon’s At the End of the Journey,  and a novel look at time wars in One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky.  Then there’s Dead Space, a gritty murder among the asteroids mystery by Kali Wallace, a sort of Queen’s Gambit meets The Lady Astronaut story in In the Quick: A Novel by Kate Hope Day, and a global cyber/pharma punk novel in S.B. Divya’s gripping Machinehood. 

Later on there’s a very Trek sort of adventure in The Risks of Dead Reckoning by Felicia Watson, and March roars off the page with The Fall of Koli by M. R. Carey, a strong finish to both month and trilogy.

For shorter works, we’ve got a dark novella by Andrew Kelly Stewart We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep that would pair nicely with Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and film (1959), and two anthologies. First Bruce Sterling’s Italian fantascienza stories under the semi-pseudonym Bruni Argento, Robot Artists and Black Swans. and we close out with Alias Space and Other Stories by Kelly Robson.

And much, much, more that I couldn’t fit in, so be sure to check the Other Recommendations at the end.

Reviewed:

Collections and Novellas

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Review: In the Quick: A Novel by Kate Hope Day

In the Quick: A Novel by Kate Hope Day | 02 Mar 2021|Randomhouse

In the Quick is Kate Hope Day’s second novel, after If, Then, a story where folks in a rural town get flashes of alternate realities. In the Quick doesn’t follow If, Then, but it is in a slightly alternate reality.

June, orphaned and living with her brilliant inventor uncle, also has a gift for invention, the ability to look at things and imagine how they might work, or work better. After her uncle dies, and June almost burns down the house fixing a boiler, she’s sent off to the academy where astronautic engineers and astronauts are trained, though she’s only 12, a few years younger than the rest.

When the fuel cells her uncle designed for a deep space mission fail, June wants to help but her age works against her and despite her intuitive understanding of the design, and her exposure to the design process as he and his students were creating it.

It isn’t until she’s graduated and working as an engineer on a station that she realizes there’s still a chance the deep space explorers are still alive, and she gets herself assigned to an outpost where James, one of the students who worked on the cell design, is now stationed. The design failure has been eating away at him, turning him inward and morose. It’s up to June to connect with him and see if they can work together to fix the flaws and see if there is a hope that the crew can be saved.

Day has done an outstanding job of creating a vision of a space program that’s not quite ours, with details like the NAP (National Space Program) and adding a planet (The Pink Planet) to our solar system. She’s clearly done her research and though she could have fit it all in our reality, she’s chose to twist it just enough so that the story stands on its own rather than be swallowed by the real.

The feel is somewhere between The Lady Astronaut and The Queen’s Gambit, and this book should find a broad audience.

Science Fiction to Look for February 2021

Whether you’re still in lockdown, snowed in, or just taking some time for yourself, I’ve got good news. There’s more science fiction coming out this February than you can shake a light saber at, and no matter what your taste, there should be something for you.

Fans of intelligent secret histories will enjoy a look back at the space race in Sylvain Neuvel’s A History of What Comes Next, while Gavin G Smith combines the Cold War with biowarfare in Spec Ops Z. Dan Frey takes a look at the consequences of foreknowledge in The Future Is Yours, and P.N. Shafa looks forwards a few generations to caution us about the one percent’s plans for Mars in Descendants of Power.  Humans cut off from the tribe, whether an abandoned colony or prisoners of war struggle for survival in A Search for Starlight by James Maxwell and Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh respectively, and I actually look at a science fiction romance in Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell, which I think would fit into Bujold’s Vorkosigan universe nicely.

If you want trouble, look no further than Gun Runner by Larry Correia and John D. Brown , or Tyger Bright by T.C. McCarthy. both out from Baen this month. More action with a ragtag crew and overbearing governments can be found in Any Job Will Do John Wilker and Christina Short.

Good ideas gone awry feature both the UK’s attempt to keep secrets save in The Minders by John Marrs, and the mess personal fusion reactors and life extension nanotech make of the world in Glow by Tim Jordan.

As always, I think the best way to get the sense of an author is through their short works, and this month features The Best of Walter Jon Williams with a look at an great author with a wide range of stories to tell. Luna Press, an independent Scottish publisher has just started a series of novellas, with an initial batch of 6, the first two of which, John’s Eyes by Joanna Corrance, and  Just Add Water by John Dodd, are science fiction so I gave them a go. Turns out Scots don’t pull their punches.

Reviewed:

Collections and Novellas

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