Book Reviews

  • Like a Boss

    Like a Boss is the second novel in Adam Rakunas’s Windswept series, published by Angry Robot in June 2016. Set on Santee Anchorage, a sugarcane colony planet at the edge of human-occupied space, it follows Padma Mehta, a former labor organizer who has finally bought the rum distillery she spent the first book dreaming about….

  • Windswept

    What happens when you take a union organizer, drop her on a distant planet smelling of fermented sugarcane, and then tell her she has a matter of hours to find a shuttle full of missing workers before her corporate enemies close the curtain on everything she has built? You get Windswept, the debut novel by…

  • The Ark

    Patrick S. Tomlinson’s The Ark opens with a premise that grabs you by the collar: Earth is gone, swallowed by a rogue black hole, and every human being left alive, roughly 50,000 of them, lives aboard a single generation ship crawling toward Tau Ceti at five percent the speed of light. After more than two…

  • An Accident of Stars

    Saffron Coulter is seventeen, Australian, and running late to class when she sees a woman drag a girl through what looks like a tear in the air. Most teenagers would keep walking. Saffron follows. In a single reckless moment she falls out of her world and into Kena: a land with different moons, a language…

  • The Coward

    The Coward opens with a premise that feels both familiar and quietly subversive. Kell Kressia, now a middle-aged farmer, was the sole survivor of a legendary quest that supposedly saved the world a decade ago. Everyone else on that quest died. Kell came home. He has spent the years since trying to forget everything that…

  • Apex

    When Ramez Naam published Nexus in 2012, the premise was lean and propulsive: a near-future nanodrug allows human minds to link directly with one another, and a graduate student named Kade Lane has just made it dramatically more powerful. Crux, the sequel, widened the canvas considerably, scattering characters across continents and governments. By Apex, the…

  • The Offset

    Calder Szewczak is the pen name of writing duo Natasha C. Calder and Emma Szewczak, who met while studying at Cambridge. Their debut novel, The Offset, arrived from Angry Robot in September 2021 with a premise that hits like a slap: in a near-future world wrecked by environmental collapse, a policy called the Offset mandates…

  • The Circus Infinite

    The Circus Infinite is Khan Wong’s debut novel, published by Angry Robot in March 2022. It follows Jes, a young man of mixed Rijala and human heritage who possesses a rare and coveted ability: he can manipulate probability fields, bending the physical forces around him in ways that look, to untrained eyes, like magic. Born…

  • In the Ravenous Dark

    A.M. Strickland’s In the Ravenous Dark, published in 2021 by Imprint, drops you into Thanopolis, a city steeped in ancient Greek-inspired culture where bloodmages are bound to undead shades who serve as both guardian and jailer. The premise is deceptively simple: a young woman named Rovan has spent twelve years hiding her blood magic after…