Book Review: A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE by Arkady Martine
Last year, I read a debut author’s space opera that was hyped by many as the Next Big Thing. Comparisons to Dune were explicitly made. The text showed that the author clearly was writing in conversation with Dune, trying to catch that magic about a big broad space opera by focusing on the life and times of a protagonist destined to have an enormous impact on their universe. But for me, that novel fell down on a number of fronts and was an enormous disappointment. This is not that book. This book steps into those shoes, attempting to capture that Dune magic, and walks miles in them. And for me, it succeeds where that other novel failed. This is A Memory Called Empire by debut novelist Arkady Martine. A Memory Called Empire is a dazzling space opera involving a Byzantine plot that immerses the reader in a fully realized world with a cast of interesting characters.
Review: Civilization 6: Gathering Storm
The Aztecs are sorely pressing Sweden, having taken a number of their cities. Greece is exploring, sending caravels across the wide ocean and making contact with the Phoenicians at Ugarit. The Arab-Chinese war is turning hot again. And the Zulu have asked the Phoenicians to join them in a glorious war against the Dutch. The Phoenicians politely have refused. Wait! This is not the latest Alternate History novel from Harry Turtledove. This is my latest game session of Civilization 6 using the latest expansion, Gathering Storm. Civilization 6: Gathering Storm adds new a new gameplay format, civs, and mechanics to provide a Civilization game resonant with our climate change age.
Book Review: Edges (Inverted Frontier, Book 1) by Linda Nagata
Edges capably starts a new sequence of Inverted Frontier novels set in the far future universe that first made the reputation of its author, Linda Nagata. Back in the 1990s, Cyberpunk and nanotech and transhumanism had a boom of novels and idea exploration. The first wave of cyberpunk led by Neuromancer and its ilk was succeeded by novels that pushed the concept further, exploring the consequences of programmable matter, multiple lives across copies, virtual existences, and fantastic landscapes and settings across the Earth and beyond. From Kathleen Ann Goonan to Walter Jon Williams, a number of authors explored this space.
Book(s) Review: Alice Payne Arrives and Alice Payne Rides by Kate Heartfield
Alice Payne Arrives and Alice Payne Rides form a pair of time travel novellas that stand ably alongside the other fresh and new time travel science fiction being written today. The late 21st and early 22nd century are, frankly, a mess. Even after the invention of time travel, the Earth is in a bad way. There are plans to try and move people to the future, when the climate ravages have hopefully settled down, or to the past, before the worst effects are baked in. Trying to change the past to try and fix everything has boiled down to a conflict between two time traveling factions, the Farmers and the Guides. They have very divergent ideas what to do with time travel, enough that they are in a no-win conflict They have achieved a messy stalemate in their temporal cold war. In the meantime, though, a young woman in the late 18th century is using daring, stealth, and her lover’s clockwork automaton creation to gain the funds needed to keep her family’s estate afloat. Her name is Alice Payne, and she is soon swept into the temporal cold war.
Book Review: State Tectonics by Malka Older
State Tectonics concludes Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle trilogy, bringing to a head the tensions and potentials for change that have been laid in Infomocracy and continued through Null States. By the end of the second volume of the Centenal Cycle, Null States, the threats to the 21st century political and social order, the dominance of 100,000 person micro democracies, the centenals, has been laid bare and made clear. Sure, the remaining legacy nations have their problems with the dominant Centenal system and might, like China, seek to subvert it and change it for its own ends. Other more militaristic nations might overwhelm nearby Centenals. But the greatest threat to the Centenal system is a hitherto unknown one—one from inside Information itself.
The Expanse meets Battlestar Galactica in Serial Box’s first space opera: The Vela
Today, on March 6th, Serial Box releases The Vela, a space opera combining the visionary setting and tense politics of SFF and Action and Adventure series like The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica. This series will be brought to you by the juggernaut bestselling author team of Becky Chambers, (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Nominee for the Hugo Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction), Yoon Ha Lee (Ninefox Gambit, Locus Award for Best First Novel), Rivers Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts), and SL Huang (Zero Sum Game, Amazon Bestseller).
