In this week’s edition of Around the Podosphere, the podcasts have sexy pun festivals, superhero science battles, rants about video game movies, and more. Here’s what we’ve been listening to:
In the Duke’s Sights returns with a belated book-heavy monster post (no, they won’t normally be this big, but I’ve been lazy, so…). From space opera to urban fantasy to epic fantasy to steampunk and beyond! Here’s a chunk of the stuff I’ve received in the last couple weeks that I may just have to read…now. Needless to say, my TBR pile just got exponentially taller… Included below are the descriptions of books from Tor Books, Subterranean Press, Harper Voyager, William Morrow, and Fairwood Press. Anything look interesting to you? Let me know in the comments!
A fallen interstellar empire, a curious, adventurous archaeologist, and a lost pleasure planet whose inhabitants live in the midst of the secrets of that fallen empire are the setting for Artemis Awakening by Jane Lindskold. Lindskold is an author whose work I read early in her career, in her collaborations with and her Zelazny-inspired early work. Griffin is a scholar whose researches on his rebuilding-to-space-travel home planet have led him to take a solo mission to search for and find Artemis. Back in the days when the old Empire reached across this part of the galaxy, Artemis was designed and built as a high-class resort for the creme de la creme of the Empire. A place such as this, Griffin reasons, would be full of wonders and technology of the old Empire. Crash landing his shuttle on Artemis, however, and having to be rescued by Adara, one of the relatively primitive inhabitants, changes his mission entirely. Now Griffin needs to find the technology of the ancients to try to find a way back up to orbit.
Around the Podosphere is back! Here’s what we’ve been enjoying in the last couple weeks:
Quantum searching across timelines with a high powered, sentient computer. A little girl who is being raised by robots, and may be one herself. Danger and adventure on a wondrous construct connecting an icy world and its cold neighbor. Small squad operations against rogue corporations. Long-distance virtual reality riding of a young woman living in Mexico. All this and more are found in Cracking the Sky. Cracking the Sky, from Fairwood Press, represents the first science fiction-only collection of stories from science fiction, fantasy and futurist author Brenda Cooper. The stories range throughout her oevure, selected from the last twelve years of her writing career. While Cooper is better known for her novels (see my review of Edge of Dark, for example), Cooper’s pen does take her into shorter forms. Indeed, some of the stories in this collection are short enough to be almost flash-fiction in length.
Through three novels and a previous collection of stories (Stories of the Raksura Volume One: The Falling World and The Tale of Indigo and Cloud), Martha Wells has built up an ever richer tapestry of tales of the Three Worlds, focusing primarily on her alien, shapeshifting and yet all too human race of the Raksura. Stories of the Raksura Volume Two: The Dead City and The Dark Earth Below continues in that tradition. Within, Martha gives us the two titular novellas as bookends to the book, and three stories in between. Also like the first volume, Wells gives us a variety of time frames in which the stories are set. Having contented herself with setting up the framework of Moon (our primary POV protagonist) in the three Raksura books (The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths), rather than always progressing the narrative forward in time, she has taken the tack of telling backstories, and side stories about the characters and the world. One of the stories, as detailed shortly, does not involve the Raksura at all. The richness of the peoples and creatures of the Three Worlds allows for amazing diversity in potential protagonists within and without of the Raksura themselves. The Raksura are her primary and overwhelming interest, and with good reason. However, there is nothing to prevent her from exploring other corners of her world.
