Science Fiction & Fantasy Archives | Page 41 of 66 | BookPage

by Alice Gunther

Early on in W. Michael Gear’s Abandoned, a newcomer to the planet Donovan marvels at the beauty of its alien forest: “He could have imagined nothing like it short of a VR holo fantasy come to life. The stuff of dreams and exotic special effects.” Unfortunately, Donovan—named for the first of many humans to die on its surface—bears less resemblance to James Cameron’s Pandora than to its mythological eponym, the holder of a box of unlimited horrors. Flesh-burrowing slugs, tentacled tree-dwelling “nightmares” and snakelike “sidewinders” are all constant threats to the lives of Donovan’s luckless colonizers.

This second installment of Gear’s Donovan series picks up where its predecessor Outpost left off, as Donovan’s settlers adjust to the presence of a group of stranded terrestrial officials who arrived to enforce order and found their means of return less reliable than expected. Talina Perez, the unofficial leader of the settlers, continues to grapple with the mental presence of “her quetzal,” a raptor-like creature whose psychic ghost has haunted her ever since she killed it. Kalico Aguila, the once-unflappable supervisor of the newcomers, longs for her former rank in the totalitarian Earth she left behind, even as she finds herself growing strangely comfortable in her new surroundings. Unbeknownst to either of them, Mark Talbot, a marine lost in Donovan’s lethal wilderness, finds a small community of Donovanians living far from the epicenter, who may have found a way to work with their deadly environment rather than against it.

Gear alternates between these and other threads with flipbook swiftness, successfully maintaining the atmosphere of casual horror that characterized Outpost. (The settlers’ vocabulary for the threats that surround them recalls the Southern U.S. with its slangy deadpan: “gotcha vines” are scarier than they sound.) At the same time, he introduces a new wrinkle to the situation by asking whether the creatures of Donovan are thinkers as well as devourers. Starved summer-action movie enthusiasts would do well to start at the beginning, but established fans of Outpost will find a satisfying expansion of Gear’s perilous universe.

Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Historical Fantasy Fantasy

Creatures of Want and Ruin

Review by Chris Pickens

by Chris Pickens

In many fantasy stories, making a deal with a demon starts out as a good idea. Maybe you end up with superhuman strength, riches beyond your wildest dreams or the admiration of those around you. But what do you have to give to receive these gifts? In the case of Molly Tanzer’s fun and atmospheric Creatures of Want and Ruin, two women from very different walks of life have to figure out what the demon wants before Long Island is swallowed by an evil they don’t understand.

The first character you meet is Ellie. It’s the height of Prohibition, and she smuggles liquor by boat to paying customers all over Long Island. When she discovers a wrecked ship stocked with bottles of a mysterious liquid, she naturally takes them for herself. Meanwhile, Fin, a socialite visiting the island to escape the city, feels disconnected from her husband and the rest of her friends from high society. She’s coaxed into hosting a party and enlists Ellie’s help to supply the all-important booze. Fin ends up taking a sip from one of Ellie’s unmarked bottles, and sees a vision: a man bowed before a monstrous thing, submitting to a dark will that she is unable to understand. Bound together by shared experience, Ellie and Fin must work together to find the source of the unholy presence gripping the island.

The vision Tanzer paints of Long Island during Prohibition is nostalgic, tactile and just a little bit creepy. One can almost hear the creak of Ellie’s boat or the tinkle of Fin’s expensive champagne flutes as we float into and out of each character’s perspectives. That being said, the setting never overtakes the interplay between the characters. Both Ellie and Fin maintain complex, multidimensional relationships that ebb and flow as real relationships do. And, thankfully, not even Ellie and Fin are blameless in how they treat others. No one is perfect in this vision of the past.

The back-and-forth between the two heroines is worth celebrating. Ellie, the hard-nosed, what’s-it-to-you liquor smuggler balances perfectly with thoughtful, lonely, demure yet determined society maven Fin. The way they gain each other’s trust and play off one another’s strengths feels natural and unforced, a testament to Tanzer’s gifts with dialogue and pacing. Indeed, the book does a wonderful job of knowing when to lean into an action sequence (the climax gets a large chunk of time at the end of the story) and when to step back and let the characters inhabit the world.

Creatures of Want and Ruin is the second of a trilogy of books revolving around the impact of a demonic presence in a small community. How these communities are split by fear and hatred is telling and relevant in today’s divided public forum. It’ll be a sad day for readers when Tanzer’s trilogy is complete, but at least we didn’t have to sell our souls for such a fantastic journey.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Molly Tanzer.

Science Fiction, YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA Science Fiction

Rabbit & Robot

Review by Jon Little

by Jon Little

Printz Honor-winning author Andrew Smith returns with Rabbit & Robot, another audaciously bizarre and bewilderingly funny YA novel.

At first glance, Cager Messer is not your normal teenager. He has a manservant. He’s also hopelessly addicted to Woz, a futuristic drug. But in this disquieting future world, where the U.S. has just entered into its 30th simultaneous war, pretty much everyone’s addicted to Woz. That and “Rabbit & Robot,” a television program that keeps children merrily distracted while teaching them all about coding and firearms. But like most teenagers, Cager feels neither normal nor adequate. Luckily, he has two people looking out for him—Rowan, his manservant, and Billy, his one and only true friend. To break his Woz addiction, Rowan and Billy trick Cager into boarding the Tennessee, an interstellar cruise ship staffed by robots so advanced they’re coded with human emotions.

Unfortunately, the robots are only so advanced. They tend to have one overriding emotion that informs their character. There’s the perennially enraged Captain Myron; Milo, the despondent yet dutiful maitre d’, who constantly bemoans the sad absurdity of life; and Maurice, a French bisexual giraffe who’s just, well, weird. To make things stranger still, a blue worm has crawled aboard the Tennessee and is disrupting the robots’ codes, turning them into robot cannibals.

Part satire, part dystopia and as wholly unique as all of Smith’s previous novels, Rabbit & Robot is one of the strangest and funniest books in recent memory.

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Printz Honor-winning author Andrew Smith returns with Rabbit & Robot, another audaciously bizarre and bewilderingly funny YA novel.

Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Historical Fantasy Fantasy

Breach

Review by Laura Hubbard

by Laura Hubbard

Anyone who has read books about Soviet era espionage recognizes a certain kind of scene: intelligence agents meeting to exchange information—and occasionally prisoners—in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Breach, the first book in W.L. Goodwater’s Cold War Magic series, uses this well-worn trope and amplifies it with the threat of magical annihilation, bringing a new edge to the traditional spy story.

In the waning hours of World War II, Soviet magicians conjured a wall of pure magic, dividing Berlin in two and protecting their hold on East Germany. While the world was aghast, there was little the West could do. The wall was impenetrable except at specific, predetermined crossing points like Checkpoint Charlie. Until now. The wall is failing, and to avoid World War III, the US needs to find out why—and try to reverse the process. The CIA calls on Karen, a young researcher from the American Office of Magical Research and Deployment. As she searches for a way to repair the wall, Karen quickly realizes that the truth is never straightforward in Berlin, especially when it comes to the story behind the Wall itself.

The characters of Breach shine as much as the plot and world do. Like the book itself, the characters are well-trodden archetypes that are given new life. There’s the young magician burnout-turned spy and his partner, the not-quite-recovering alcoholic chief, and the young spitfire determined to make her place in the world. If those sound familiar and even overdone, it’s because they are. But Goodwater takes those cardboard cutouts of what we would expect from a 1980s spy novel and turns them into three-dimensional characters that readers can actually root for. Far from being mere types, Karen and her compatriots are vibrant characters with complex inner lives. They go off-script from typical spy novels, making a world that could have been a parody of itself into one that readers will be eager to get back to.

Goodwater’s debut novel is tightly wound in the way that only good suspense stories can be. At any moment it seems that the fragile peace built between the West and East could fall apart with disastrous consequences, which is a testament to Breach’s overall success with dramatic timing. By the same token, however, if it’s possible to make a complaint about Breach, the only complaint to make is that at a few points the story felt rushed, with too many events being crushed into not enough space. While this fits with the frenetic pace of the scenes in question, it also made action sequences difficult to follow because so much was happening at once. However, the pleasure of the book as a whole more than made up for these slight pacing issues.

Breach combines the magical world building of The City & the City with the suspense of Cold War thrillers like Bridge of Spies, resulting in a cinematic suspense story that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page.

Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction

Restless Lightning

Review by Ralph Harris

by Ralph Harris

Vanilla ice cream gets a bad reputation. Most would consider it secondary—a side dish to better, richer flavors. But on the contrary, vanilla ice cream does one thing better than anything else: simplify an experience down to its best attributes. Vanilla ice cream is sweet, smooth and, most importantly, tastes exactly as expected, every time.

Richard Baker’s Restless Lightning is a wonderful, delectable bucket of vanilla ice cream, set in an idealistic vision of a future age of space exploration. Baker is not afraid to flood the reader with alien and military lingo, flexing twenty-five years of experience designing tabletop role playing games for industry titan Wizards of the Coast. The dearth of unexplained vocabulary avoids obstructing the flow of the story, instead creating a pseudo-realistic atmosphere a la “Star Trek.”

As the book opens, our hero, Lieutenant Commander Sikander North, finds himself assigned to a backwater station, set up as a diplomatic agent to a race of fishlike beings called Tzoru. The Tzoru are a civilization that has traveled the stars since before humans built pyramids. Tradition and peace have made them a bastion of stability, but the Tzoru way of life is changing faster than they can adapt. Unrest follows, tossing North and his intelligent romantic interest, Dr. Lara Dunstan, into the center of the action.

Combat breaks up the rising political strife, and Baker depicts space combat into a more naval, less Star Wars-style dogfight, experience. Ships line up in formation, forty thousand kilometers away from each other, firing broadside mounted “K-Cannons” at extremely calculated angles. Baker has a knack for writing each encounter in an interesting, dynamic way, without succumbing to bombastic explosive indulgence or boring mechanical descriptions.

Restless Lightning is not going to shake the foundation of science fiction. Instead, amidst a slew of gritty genre offerings like “Game of Thrones” or “Altered Carbon,” this book takes a rose-colored detour to a universe where every character has the best intentions. The most evil character, on a scale from one (least evil) to ten (most evil), ranks at a solid “high school bully” level of malicious intent. Even the main character’s relatively bumbling attitude is endearing; while clearly not suited to be an intelligence officer, North’s struggle to prove his worth is certainly worth cheering for.

In fact, the only weak aspects of this novel are some poorly timed flashback sequences, where Sikander North faces demons of his past. These sequences try to bring depth to North as a protagonist, but unfortunately end up hurting the story’s otherwise smooth plot. These sections are thankfully few and far between.

Four hundred pages later, Baker’s space romp concludes with a space battle, foot chase and an explosion, as it should. Wrapped up in a pretty pink bow, Restless Lightning is a fun fireside read, perfect to break up the stresses of everyday life.

Richard Baker’s Restless Lightning is a wonderful, delectable bucket of vanilla ice cream, set in an idealistic vision of a future age of space exploration.

Science Fiction & Fantasy, Thriller

Science Fiction & Fantasy Thriller

Someone Like Me

Review by Alice Gunther

by Alice Gunther

Best known for zombie-apocalypse thriller The Girl With All the Gifts, M.R. Carey explores a subtler infestation in Someone Like Me, juxtaposing two troubled women whose coping mechanisms have taken on lives of their own. When Liz Kendall is assaulted by her abusive ex-husband, her body retaliates violently without her input, her hand operating “like a glove on someone else’s hand.” “She hadn’t willed this; she had only watched it, her nervous system dragged along in the wake of decisions made (instantly, enthusiastically) elsewhere.” Liz’s therapist speculates that, finding her life in danger, she created an alter ego to handle a task too repellant for the conscious Liz to touch. But once evoked, this restless new iteration of Liz—who appears to have arrived with an agenda of her own—is not so easily dispelled.

Meanwhile, 16-year-old Fran Watts suffers from hallucinatory episodes in the wake of a childhood trauma and draws comfort from the protective presence of “Lady Jinx,” a sword-wielding cartoon character from her favorite TV show. (Fran is conscious of Jinx’s unreality but regards her as a “cherished symptom.” “Maybe you’re my symptom,” the vision counters airily.) Part of the fun of both storylines is the question of whether these psychological visitations represent a real supernatural manifestation, and Carey is careful not to tip either hand too early in the game. (In a Stephen King-esque touch, he also cannily inserts smaller, odder questions to maintain our investment: why, Fran wonders, does her imagined companion have a speech impediment that the televised Jinx does not?)

At its bloodiest and most baleful, Someone Like Me can’t quite work up the Gone Girl level of feminist shock it aims for—the bent of its storyline forces goodhearted single mother Liz to remain frustratingly disassociated from her vengeful double “Beth”—but its human-focused horror should be a draw for the “Stranger Things” crowd. The unfolding friendship between Liz’s teenaged son Zac and the outcast Fran invites a similar sympathy for the freaks and loners of the world, and it’s not hard to imagine the hag-ridden Liz played by Winona Ryder. Before you start casting the Netflix adaptation, however, appreciate the features baked into the literary format, such as the changing icons in the chapter headings that hint at whose perspective is coming next. Just as The Girl With All the Gifts reengineered the zombie pandemic, Someone Like Me plumbs familiar horror premises to find a few new ingredients for the old Hyde formula.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with M.R. Carey.

Best known for zombie-apocalypse thriller The Girl with All the Gifts, M.R. Carey explores a subtler infestation in Someone Like Me, juxtaposing two troubled women whose coping mechanisms have taken on lives of their own.

Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

The Phoenix Empress

Review by McKenzie Tozan

by McKenzie Tozan

The sequel to K. Arsenault Rivera’s acclaimed fantasy debut, The Phoenix Empress is a superlative example of what fantasy is capable of.

The restrained, visually evocative world building of The Tiger’s Daughter is continued here. Many of the animals witnessed in this series are unique combinations of the animals we see in our own landscapes, enriching Rivera’s fictional world and keeping the reader grounded. But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the book is Rivera’s prose, and her willingness to question the reliability of one of her narrators. Shefali has been seeing ghosts since the first book, and not only does this give the reader the opportunity to enjoy Rivera’s grisly renderings of the afterlife, but it also complicates the marriage at the heart of the series.

Readers left Shizuka and Shefali essentially walking in opposite directions at the end of the previous book—Shizuka as newly-crowned empress, and her warrior lover Shefali facing physical and psychological trials typically only seen in science fiction and horror. Much of The Phoenix Empress explores the struggles of their growing relationship under the specter of PTSD and the stressors of their unique positions. Shizuka and Shefali’s transformed marriage is a fascinating through line, and Rivera is to be commended for building a relationship that needs work, instead of one that was perfected as soon as vows were exchanged. Separated for several years, Shizuka and Shefali must relearn their partnership and deal with the outside expectations of a very public marriage.

The Phoenix Empress is a tremendous achievement, and highly recommended.

The sequel to K. Arsenault Rivera’s acclaimed fantasy debut, The Phoenix Empress is a superlative example of what fantasy is capable of.

Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

Vita Nostra

Review by Thane Tierney

by Thane Tierney

There’s really no way to approach Vita Nostra but elliptically, so strap in. By way of orientation, imagine that Hogwarts has opened a satellite campus inside Harry Haller’s Magic Theater from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and assigned Kafka, Dostoevsky and Rod Serling to oversee the curriculum. This circumstance is likely to incite one of three reactions from readers: befuddlement, terror or magnetic attraction. When you crack the spine of the latest novel from acclaimed Ukrainian authors Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, you’ll get a full measure of all three, and just as with the famed five stages of grief, you may experience any or all of them out of order, and more than once.

Vita Nostra starts out simply enough, with teenager Sasha Samokhina colliding with a strange man who exudes an unexplainable influence over her. Drawing her under his spell, the girl’s unbidden mentor persuades her to enroll in the Institute of Special Technologies, much to her confusion and her mother’s consternation. Once there, the lesson plan is—to put it mildly—fairly opaque, and academic failure is met with unpleasant consequences for the students’ families.

The novel belongs to an expanding Ukrainian genre known as fantastyka, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror and folkloric traditions. Much of this genre has not yet been translated into English. This particular exemplar could claim both Piers Anthony’s Macroscope (1969) and Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) as antecedents from the sci-fi realm, but also Jose Luis Borges’ Ficciones (1944) and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Instantanés (1962) from the lit-fic sphere. Kudos are due to translator Julia Meitov Hersey, whose task cannot have been a simple one, given Vita Nostra’s complexity and sophistication.

I realize that this is a bit of a tease, but if you are at all intrigued by the phrase, “Time is a grammatical concept,” you will find yourself swept into this book’s estimable vortex from page one.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Historical Fantasy Fantasy

An Easy Death

Review by Noah Fram

by Noah Fram

Lizbeth Rose is a “gunnie,” a crack shot with her bolt-action Winchester rifle and her pair of Colt handguns, who makes a living guarding people on their helter-skelter treks between towns in the Texoma desert. With the United States government in tatters after the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt and the continent subsequently swallowed up by Canada, Mexico, England and Imperial Russia, there is no such thing as an easy life. So when her crew is killed on a run, Lizbeth is forced to take whatever job comes along, even if it means following a dour pair of Russian wizards on their hunt for the last descendants of Rasputin. As their search takes them south, Lizbeth is drawn ever closer to a part of her past she would rather forget. At least she won’t be unarmed when she finds it.

In An Easy Death, Charlaine Harris’s fictionalized mid-century North America is enticingly familiar. Although she will win no prizes for eloquence, her blunt prose serves the first-person narration, as it matches Lizbeth’s personality and language. Seen through the gunnie’s eyes, what used to be the American Southwest is brutal and remorseless, but draped in a kind of honesty the reader is forced to respect. Lizbeth’s descriptions of the wizards, or “grigoris” as she derisively calls them, are studiously, sometimes hilariously devoid of flowery language. She is content to describe their methods of combat as “creative,” leaving it up to the reader’s own creativity to fill in the gaps.

The plot is predictable, sure, but it’s honestly refreshing to read an alternate history that doesn’t try to score any philosophical points and focuses on telling a complete story. Similarly, Lizbeth’s quest is to maintain the status quo, both in aiding her charges on their journey and in returning to the life she left to take this job. For her, it would be a triumph if nothing much changed. In a genre dominated by rags-to-riches stories of world dominance and great evils vanquished and old magics mastered, there’s more than enough room for a good story of normal people, just trying to stay alive.

Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

Priest of Bones

Review by Gerry Paige Smith

by Gerry Paige Smith

Disillusioned by their service to the Crown in a brutal war marked by siege, starvation and unimaginable violence, a rootless assemblage of former soldiers elect to follow their battlefield priest and confessor, Tomas Piety, home from the killing fields. But Piety’s return to Ellinburg won’t offer a hero’s welcome. As the city’s former crime boss, his businesses and underworld networks have been usurped and claimed by outsiders in his absence. His homecoming, with dangerous associates at his back, sets the scene for a entirely new and equally deadly conflict.

As he crafts plans to seize back control of his criminal enterprises, Tomas must also assemble his former brothers-in-arms into a new kind of fighting force, transforming soldiers into Pious Men who will help him reclaim his illicit rule of Ellinburg. And while the soldiers bid goodbye and good riddance to the machinations of the Crown when they left the battlefield, the Crown isn’t finished with Tomas and his men. Between pitched battles in the streets and bloody raids to reclaim Pious Men territory, the Crown inserts its own deadly agent to complicate Tomas’ political maneuvers from the shadows.

Trust among his battle-shocked crew of veterans runs thin and Tomas balances on a knife’s edge as he tests their loyalties and his authority is threatened by a rivalry between his explosively violent brother and Tomas’ equally deadly second, Sergeant Bloody Anne. Like a weapon that could turn in his hand, the Pious men are all killers, one of them with emerging magical powers that are dangerous to friend and foe alike. Violent and visceral, the expletive-laden action weaves through bawdy houses, back rooms and bars as the stakes and the body counts escalate. Peter McLean’s rendering of battle fatigue as well as the traumas of physical and emotional abuse fosters an emotional investment for readers that elevates this title above other “run and gun” adventures.

Set in a Tudor-esque alternate world, Priest of Bones paints its literary landscape in broad, masculine strokes. But as the real power players emerge, McLean’s female characters conquer the foreground as Tomas’ strongest assets—and his deadliest counterparts. With its charismatic merging of backstreet magic, gangland conflict and political power struggles in a city teetering on the edge of destruction, Priest of Bones launches a breathtaking opening salvo as in the War for the Rose Throne series.

Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Historical Fantasy Fantasy

The Sisters of the Winter Wood

Review by Chris Pickens

by Chris Pickens

At first glance, the town of Dubossary might appear to be a simple Jewish town at the edge of the woods. Pious and cheerful villagers bustle about in the snow, going to market and celebrating shabbas together. But for sisters Liba and Laya, who live in the forest outside of town, things aren’t quite as idyllic as they seem. Odd noises and rumors of wandering strangers suddenly make life in the woods a little less welcoming. Maybe the folk tales are true after all?

When Liba and Laya’s parents leave to visit a dying relative several towns away, they tell the girls two massive secrets. Both of their parents are shape-shifters—and so are they. Liba inherited her father’s bearlike shape and dark features; Laya has her mother’s swanlike beauty and light hair. These changes start to manifest as each sister’s feelings for each other, boys, tradition and temptation collide. When Laya is tempted by a group of young outsiders, Liba knows it’s up to her to protect her sister and, if necessary, call on the swan people to defend her and her sister from whatever lurks in the woods.

One very distinct stylistic choice separates Rena Rossner’s The Sisters of the Winter Wood from all of the other history-meets-legend tales out there. Liba’s perspective is written in prose and Laya’s in poetry. Throughout the book, the differences between Liba’s stalwart, rule-abiding nature and Laya’s strong-willed, rebellious character play out beautifully as the two styles Rossner employs perfectly reflect each sister’s emotions. I was particularly drawn to Laya’s airy yet intense chapters, which seem to fly by in an instant.

Equally intriguing is how Rossner evokes the sensation of breaking the strict rules that govern the sisters’ existence. Dubossary’s identity is based on a very strict interpretation of Orthodox Judaism, which forbids men and women to physically touch before they are a couple. When Liba finds herself just thinking the natural thoughts of an 18-year-old woman, the reader feels the push-and-pull through Rossner’s prose. Amplifying this conflicting feeling is the uncontrollable shape-shifting transformations each sister starts to undergo, a touching and painful representation of what it feels like to grow up.

Rossner’s family came to America as a way to escape the pogroms and hatred visited upon Jews in Eastern Europe. She mentions in the (highly recommended) author’s note that she heard her grandmother’s voice in her head as she wrote The Sisters of the Winter Wood. There’s a lived-in, folklore feeling to this story, a mystical and ominous glow you can’t shake. However, at its heart, this is a novel about two sisters loving and understanding each other during a difficult time in life. And luckily, we get to take that wonderful, strange journey with them. Rossner’s The Sisters of the Winter Wood is a dreamlike ode to sisterhood, mythology and family that you won’t be able to put down.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Rena Rossner.

Fantasy, Fiction, Historical Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fiction Historical Fantasy Fantasy

Time’s Convert

Review by Stephenie Harrison

by Stephenie Harrison

It was a bittersweet moment in 2014 when history professor and bestselling novelist Deborah Harkness published The Book of Life, bringing her All Souls Trilogy, which chronicled the adventures and romantic escapades between a powerful witch and a centuries-old vampire, to a close. At the time, Harkness reflected to BookPage that although she had always envisioned Diana and Matthew’s story as a trilogy, she found it unexpectedly frustrating to stick to three volumes, because it meant she couldn’t fully explore the interesting characters and side plots that cropped up.

Now it seems that Harkness has found an ingenious workaround to her dilemma in a move that will undoubtedly thrill her fans: Her latest novel, Time’s Convert, marks the launch of the All Souls Universe, a series that expands upon the original trilogy and whose only limits are those set by Harkness’ imagination and busy schedule.

Set in the same world as Harkness’ previous novels, Time’s Convert is not simply a continuation of The Book of Life. Although Matthew and Diana do appear, it is Matthew’s son, Marcus, and his fiancée, Phoebe, who take center stage. With this couple, Harkness is allowed to do what she does best, weaving a rich and mesmerizing love story that jumps between past, present and future, as she delves into Marcus’ origin story and juxtaposes it with Phoebe’s own struggles as a fledgling vampire.

Harkness’ depictions of Revolution-era America and France are vivid and detailed, while her examination of the various ways one can form a family and all its inherent complications are thoughtful and moving. However, much of the interpersonal drama and revelations in Time’s Convert assume one has a pre-existing familiarity with the characters and world, so newcomers should start at the beginning. For those who have already read Harkness’ previous books, Time’s Convert is a welcome reunion with old friends.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy

A rip-roaring sci-fi adventure

Review by Laura Hubbard

by Laura Hubbard

The universe was once overrun by an intergalactic war, fought with star system-destroying technologies. Then a mysterious energy called the pulse pushed technology’s progress back, including humanity’s ability to destroy one another. In some cases, planets lost a few conveniences or even space flight. In others, they lost the ability to generate electricity at all. Enter Jane Kamali, a member of the Justified, the group responsible for the pulse. Jane’s job is simple: she must find children with special powers and get them back to the Sanctum—the Justified’s base—before other sects can find them and abuse their powers. When a mission to rescue a gifted girl named Esa goes south, Jane is pulled into a struggle against the Pax, a bloodthirsty, militaristic sect that values strength and domination above all else. In the battle to survive, Jane, Esa and the Sanctum itself must fight tooth and nail if they hope to stand up to the Pax.

The Stars Now Unclaimed takes what should be a predictable space opera—fight scenes with a bit of plot sprinkled in like glue—and creates something truly fun. Kamali and her compatriots’ sarcasm prevent the book from taking itself too seriously, breaking up the tension created by the near endless fight and chase scenes (there is barely a page in the book that is not at least affected by one or the other). The fight and chase scenes themselves are magnificent and compelling, careening the reader from tense pre-ambush jitters to the adrenaline of an attack and back again in just a few sentences. Williams’ combination of fantastic fight scenes and skillful character writing makes The Stars Now Unclaimed a compulsively readable treat for readers in search of a kinetic space opera.

But it is not a good choice for anyone who is less than enthusiastic about fight scenes, as well as for readers who are squeamish about a little bit of (non-graphic) gore. And while Williams writes a great story, it is an action story rather than a deep, contemplative look at the nature of the universe. That doesn’t mean that Williams shies away from some difficult questions. But it does mean that The Stars Now Unclaimed doesn’t get bogged down in the philosophical details. It moves quickly, hurtling its readers towards its exciting (and lengthy) climax.

The Stars Now Unclaimed is a perfect pick for any reader who loved “Firefly”’s Mal or Star Wars’ Han, or for anyone who just wants a good romp through the galaxy with a thousand fighters on their tail.