Adrienne Martini

The Daughters’ War, Christopher Buehlman (Tor 978-1-25088-767-2, $28.99, 416pp, hc) June 2024.

Christopher Buehlman’s The Daughters’ War is the rare prequel that makes you want to pick up the first book – The Blacktongue Thief, in this case – again so that you can read it with all that you now know about this world and one of its characters. It helps, too, that both books are damn ...Read More

The Knife and the Serpent, Tim Pratt (Angry Robot 978-1-91520-280-2, $18.99, 400pp, tp) June 2024.

Tim Pratt’s latest novel, The Knife and the Serpent, has all of the hallmarks of a Tim Pratt story: The underlying voice is smart and engaging even when a character (or two) is neither; the plot is brisk but not so brisk that it is rushed; and the stakes are high, but not ...Read More

The Hermit Next Door, Kevin Hearne (Subter­ranean Press 978-1-64524-195-9, $40.00, 96pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Dominic Harmon.

The Hermit Next Door, a novella by Kevin Hearne, is a lighthearted romp about grief. Really. Winnie Mae is newly widowed and decides to move from Tennessee to ex-urban Oregon. She finds a house that meets her needs: The neighborhood is quiet enough so that she can continue teaching her ...Read More

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Waste­lands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron Books 978-1-250-87861-8, $28.99, 336pp, hc) July 2024.

Trains make great narrative devices. You can get all of your characters in the same place and keep them there while they move through space and time. Pick up the well-known Agatha Christie train mystery, if you like a good murder on the rails. Or, if you bend more toward science fiction, ...Read More

Lyorn: A Vlad Taltos Novel, Steven Brust (Tor 978-0-76538-286-3, $27.99, 288pp, hc) April 2024.

Before you read further know this: Lyorn, the 17th novel in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, is not the place to begin. So much has happened to Vlad since Jhereg was published in 1983 that there is really no way to jump directly into this part of the ocean. Even for those who’ve kept ...Read More

Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson (Del Rey 978-0-5934-9750-0, $28.99, 384pp, hc) March 2024.

Micaiah Johnson’s Those Beyond the Wall isn’t so much a sequel to 2020’s The Space Between Worlds as it is one that tracks parallel to it. The timeline has advanced slightly, but her created world looks different from this location. Rather than focus on the power dynamics in wealthy, walled Wi­ley City, we’re in Ashtown, ...Read More

Bookshops & Bonedust, Travis Baldree (Tor 978-1-250-88610-1, $17.99, 288 pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Carson Lowmiller.

Don’t get me wrong; I love a book that chal­lenges my idea of what a story is or how language can work or both. But the last few years have given me a new appreciation for a story where the biggest hurdle is which character can be the most humane, even if ...Read More

Paladin’s Faith, T. Kingfisher (Argyll Productions 978-1614506096, $6.99, 422pp, eb) December 2023.

T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon) ventures back into her Saint of Steel universe with Paladin’s Faith. Each book in the planned seven-book series is nominally about one of the paladins whose spirits were broken when their animating saint died. But Kingfisher expands what we know about these paladins, their god, and his demise with each volume. ...Read More

The Art of Destiny, Wesley Chu (Del Rey 978-0-59323-766-3, $29.99, 651pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Tran Nguyen.

The second book in a trilogy is always a rough go. You can’t pay off any of the larger story arcs you set up in the first book, but you still have to close out book two with a sense something has changed within your characters – but that they haven’t ...Read More

The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei (Flatiron Books 978-1-250-88553-1, $29.99, 416pp, hc) July 2023.

In Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky, a billionaire offers humanity hope after an overwhelming number of environmental calamities have come home to roost. She’ll provide starter funding for a one-way mission to Planet X. Each govern­ment that provides additional cash will get to place its citizens on board in proportion to the donation. That scheme ...Read More

Dual Memory, Sue Burke (Tor 978-125080-913-1, $29.99, 352pp, hc) May 2023.

In Sue Burke’s Dual Memory, AI runs the world. Most of the machines are not fully capable of rising above their programming and making independent decisions. However, at least one, Par Augustus, has crossed over from a simulacrum of human-like thought to full autonomy – and is able to network with all of the other machines to ...Read More

The Warden, Daniel M. Ford (Tor 978-125081-565-1, $27.99, 320pp, hc) April 2023.

Does Daniel M. Ford’s The Warden break new ground and expand what we think a fantasy adventure can be? It does not. But does it produce everything a reader would expect in a fantasy adventure and some fresh takes in just the right proportions to make it feel both familiar and new? Yes, it most definitely does. ...Read More

Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher (Tor 978-1250244093, $19.99, 128pp, hc) August 2023.

Thornhedge, a short novel by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon), concerns a princess in a tower. The princess isn’t the main character; rather, the story is about Toadling, the human-ish person who is destined to stop the princess from mur­dering everyone she sees. As you’d expect from Vernon, this is a fairy tale told slantwise.

Toadling didn’t start ...Read More

The Road to Roswell, Connie Willis (Del Rey 978-0-593-49985-6, $28, 416pp, hc) June 2023.

In short, The Road to Roswell is a romp in multi-award-winning author Connie Willis’s signature style. If what you need is the science fiction novel equivalent of a screwball movie with aliens, look no further. It is right here.

Things aren’t always what they seem in Ro­swell, New Mexico. Our hero Francie is fresh off ...Read More

Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit 978-0-31628-971-9, $29, 432 pg, hc) June 2023.

With Translation State, Ann Leckie returns to the Radchaai universe she built in the Ancil­lary trilogy. This time, the focus shifts from the powerful and ritual-bound Radch to the rest of the humans who are just trying to live their lives without interference from system-wide events. That goes about as well as you’d think.

In the ...Read More

Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom 978-1-25082–6794, $28.99, 432 pg, hc) May 2023. Cover by Tommy Arnold.

‘‘I’m just trying to learn how everything works,’’ one of the secondary characters says in Martha Wells’s Witch King. Same, secondary character. Same.

For the last few years, Wells’s Murderbot stories have been collecting readers and awards across the genre. All of the praise is well-earned. These science fiction stories about a ...Read More

A House with Good Bones, T. Kingfisher (Tor 978-1-250-82979-5, $26.99, 256 pg, hc) March 2023. Cover by Karolis Strautniekas.

In A House with Good Bones, T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon) travels back into the horror section like she did with What Moves the Dead. This time, the subject is roses rather than fungi, but rest assured, there are still the dead.

Sam, a 30-something archaeoentomologist, returns to ...Read More

Tsalmoth, Steven Brust (Tor 978-0-76538-284-9, $27.99, 288pp, hc) April 2023.

Steven Brust’s Tsalmoth is the 16th book in his (allegedly) 19-book series. Each book focuses on one house on the great wheel of power in Dragaera, but each story within the series concerns Vlad Taltos, an assassin whose backstory is more complicated than it first appears.

Taltos is an Easterner in a world full of dragons, who aren’t really ...Read More

Dead Country, Max Gladstone (Tordotcom 978-0-7653-9591-7, $17.99, 256 pp, tp) March 2023. Cover by Goni Montes.

Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence created a world in which slivers of soul are used as currency and lawyers are as close to clerics as you can get. All six books in the sequence can be read independently of each other, mostly, but reading them all in any order tells a more complete story ...Read More

Illuminations, T. Kingfisher (Red Wombat Studio, $4.99, 248pp, eb) November 2022.

Illuminations, the latest middle-grade book by T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon), opens on a very, very bored Rosa Mandolini. Fortu­nately, the Studio Mandolini, her family’s art/magic business, is full of storage rooms, stuffed to the brim with boxes of interesting, ancient wonders. One such box resists being found and opened. And thus begins Rosa’s adventure.

As you’d ...Read More

The Origin of Storms, Elizabeth Bear (Tor 978-0-76538-017-3, $28.99, 384pp, hc) June 2022.

If I were a TV producer who wanted to take on an epic fantasy story à la Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time, I would look no further than Elizabeth Bear’s Lotus Kingdom books. To be honest, I’d much rather see an interpretation of Bear’s work over yet another Euro-based, medieval-esque retread of dudes ...Read More

The Golden Enclaves, Naomi Novik (Del Rey 978-0-59315-835-7, $28.00, 416 pp, hc) Sep­tember 2022.

Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves wraps up her Scholomance trilogy. If you’ve not read A Deadly Education or The Last Graduate, I’d suggest skipping this review in order to read the first book fresh. This is definitely a series better enjoyed if you begin at the beginning, where you’ll meet El and what become ...Read More

The Art of Prophecy, Wesley Chu (Del Rey 978-0-593237-63-2, $28.99, 544 pp, hc) August 2022.

New York Times bestselling author Wesley Chu’s The Art of Prophecy, which kicks off his War Arts Saga trilogy, is the anti-Dune. Rather than chart the development of a random kid who fulfills a prophecy despite all of the obstacles in his way, Chu focuses on a kid who knows he’s ...Read More

August Kitko and the Mechas from Space, Alex White (Orbit 978-0-7564-1483-2, $17.99, 464 pp, tp) July 2022.

August Kitko and the Mechas from Space is the first book in Alex White’s Starmetal Symphony series. It does pretty much what it says on the tin: jazz musician August Kitko finds himself thrown into a battle against mechas from space. The fate of humankind hangs in the balance. It’s excellent fodder ...Read More

Amongst Our Weapons, Ben Aaronovitch (DAW 978-0-7564-1483-2, $27.00, 302 pp, hc) April 2022. Cover by Stephen Walter & Patrick Knowles.

Amongst Our Weapons is not the book to start with if you want to read some Ben Aaronovitch. Instead, pick up series opener Midnight Riot (Rivers of London in the UK) to be fully in­troduced to the world of Detective Constable Peter Grant and the magical demimonde that ...Read More

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager 978-0-06302-142-6, $27.99, 560pp, hc) August 2022.

With Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Transla­tors’ Revolution, the multi-award nominated R.F. Kuang travels to 1830s Oxford University to build a tale about a tower built on languages whose fate is all but guaranteed. Her story about ...Read More

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers (Tordotcom 978-1-25023-623-4, $21.99, 160pp, hc) July 2022. Cover art by Feifei Ryan.

Becky Chambers’s A Prayer for the Crown-Shy picks up where A Psalm for the Wild-Built ends: Sibling Dex (a monk) and Mosscap (a robot) have begun their journey from the wilds back out into the built world. The robot has questions about happiness (which lead to conversations about more than ...Read More

The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor 978-1-25082-915-3, $30.99, 368pp, hc) October 2022.

My reading habits have shifted after the last two-plus years. Anything gritty or tense has got to be followed by at least one lighter title or maybe two, otherwise I cannot regulate my re¬sponse to anything happening to the characters. It seems like the last two-plus years have done the same to many SFF writers. The ...Read More

Rosebud, Paul Cornell (Tordotcom 978-1-25076-539-0, $14.99, 110pp, tp). April 2022.

Just to get it out of the way, the Rosebud in Paul Cornell’s Rosebud is a survey ship, not a sled. Said Rosebud has happened upon a mysterious black sphere out in space, and its digital inhabitants “a balloon, a goth, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects” decide to investigate ...Read More

Last Exit, Max Gladstone (Tor 978-0-76533-573-9, $18.99, 400pp, tp). March 2022.

Max Gladstone’s voice is one that defies easy description. It’s both succinct and verbose, dour and silly, dark but also light. Last Exit, his homage to the great American road story, is peak Gladstone, the voice he has de­veloped through his Hugo-nominated Craft series and his award-winning This is How You Lose the Time War. Yes, ...Read More

Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher (Tor 978-1-25024-404-8, 256pp, $25.99, hc) April 2022.

I am already a fan of T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon). The three books (so far) in the Paladin series are full of light romance (with occasional corpses) and have kept me going through the last 18 months. Her young-adult stories like the Lodestar Award-winning The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking are fun for adults as well ...Read More

The Paradox Hotel, Rob Hart (Ballantine 978-1-98482-064-8, 324pp, $28, hc) February 2022.

Rob Hart’s The Paradox Hotel sums its own energy up with one line of dialog: ‘‘We’re at DEFCON Level Holy Shit.’’ Hart not only starts in media res, he puts us on the rollercoaster that is the Paradox Hotel just as it is tipping down the first big hill. The pace never really lets up until the ...Read More