Ferran, Mireia and Riffolk are called into the snowy mountains, chasing Mireia’s visions of a darkness at work. When they find a mining village deserted except for a woman in a crow’s cage, they venture into the depths in search of survivors – and find an older evil than they have ever faced before.
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Ilsa’s talent for hacking and Kai’s people skills make them experts at following a cold scent, and they’ve built a successful business on finding things. But when Eleazar Dantes offers them double the usual fee if he can accompany them across the galaxy in their search for his daughter, they find themselves in unknown territory – professionally and personally.
Padma Mehta needs to recruit 33 more people to the Union and claim the signing bonus if she’s to buy the Old Windswept distillery. When an opportunity comes by that would put her over the line, she can’t pass it up, even if it is put her way by smelly loser Vytai Bloombeck. Padma’s forgotten that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The next few days will test what she’s really willing to do to make her numbers – and save her planet.
I’ll be revisiting the Echoes of the Ascended novellae regularly in Bite-sized Books (not least because there’s a new one every month, and I’m still playing catch up). A new perspective on Aedaron, with a new hero and a new tone. Rend the Dark shifts to horror as Ferran hunts the Dark that walks in human skin.
When an assassination attempt goes awry, Regan is left with no memory of who, what or where he is. Club singer Evelyn Calliope – like Regan, more than she seems – takes him under her wing. But they live in a quarantined police state, and Regan is on a Kill List. Welcome to Parole, the doomed city suspended above a river of fire.
Elinor and Con are about to be reminded that corruption is a way of life in the Marches. Already in disgrace, Elinor will have to choose between risking the lives of her engineers or leaving another Reaper’s squad in the hands of a murderous upstart. When honour is for sale, how can she determine what is right?
Manchester, 2025. Real food is scarce. Public services are run by crime syndicates. Drones guard the motorways. And someone is trafficking people across dimensions, stealing their memories, their voices, their names in the pursuit of profit. As dystopian near-futures go, Graft cuts close to the bone in every sense.
Irene is a Librarian with a capital L – a secret agent who recovers books of note for the Library, hopping from one alternate reality to another. Irene settled down in a Victorian steampunk alternate when her apprentice is kidnapped by local Fae. But Kai is actually a dragon prince. If Irene can’t get him back, this will be the opening move in a multiverse-wide war between order and chaos.
If the goal of a short story is to leave you wanting more, A Reaper of Stone is a stunning success.
Elinor is the King’s Reaper, duty-bound to demolish the ancient keeps of the marches to prevent them falling into hostile hands. When the Lady of Timberline dies, Elinor is sucked into the vicious politics of Resa’s grasping nobility. Will she confirm the new Lord who seeks the title, or investigate the Lady’s unexpected death?
Cas Leung trains genetically-engineered monsters to keep the rising seas safe. Kidnapped by a pirate queen to train a stolen monster and turn the tables, Cas must decide what she values most: the code she was raised to follow, or the lives of those she loves.
When my inner child dragged my beloved to see the fourth Indiana Jones film, he didn’t put up much of a fight. When we came out, his piquant review was ‘Thank you, Mr Spielberg, for pissing on my childhood’ (needless to say, he didn’t put himself through all the Star Wars ‘prequels’). This neatly sums up the hazards of revisiting childhood favourites – even when the same creator revisits a work, there’s no guarantee it will be a success (Mr Lucas, I’m looking at you).
I received this as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer title – it’s the latest in a series of collections of speculative / science fiction shorts from around the world. I took it as a great opportunity to broaden my horizons and get to know the works of non-Anglo/American authors, many of whom I hadn’t previously heard of. And generally, the quality here is very good – even the stories that weren’t to my taste were well-written and accomplished.
This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers title, and I’m afraid I persevered to the end only to feel able to write the review. It’s not terrible, but it left me utterly indifferent to plot and characters, and the prose contained enough stylistic issues to really irritate me.
I picked this up in the wake of links highlighting award nominees beyond this year’s poisonous Hugo debate. Winner of this year’s Philip K Dick award, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is a brutal apocalyptic novel set in a nearly-now. The world has been ravaged by a flu-like sickness that has spread like wildfire, killing 98% of infected men – and more women.
onemore.org 