More cool new books

Last week there was a vignette prompt at Sarah Hoyt's blog, but no book promo. This week it seems the vignette prompt has gone astray, but there are two new books you might want to look into, as well as a humorous tale of obstacles overcome.

 Also, I just wanted to remind everyone about Joseph T Major's new novel. I'm hoping to start reading it shortly.

 

 The Motherland Knows by Joseph T Major They thought he could help. The First Man in Space was under pressure. He had to regain his flight status. A friend had died for him. And from all over the Soviet Union, workers and other proletarians wrote him begging for help. Sometimes he could help And now, he was beginning to think, the Soviet Union was going the wrong way, a very wrong way. They might decide to solve some matters. A dead hero can't disagree with the authorities. So he reached out, to someone he had met, someone who was known, someone he thought he could trust. Then, on a cold and clear Christmas night, he took the most daring step -- and the world changed. In a tale of space flight, spying, and politics, people who thought they would never get into that sort of thing now found themselves propelled into it. A turbulent and tumultuous world is shaken into a different path, as leaders react to embarrassment with a desire for prestige, where the wish of a pilot is brought closer to coming through, and famous men are brought together, to find that enemies are more like them than they had imagined.

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Crossposted at my LiveJournal, The Starship Cat

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New Books for the New Year

It's a brand-new year, and there are some brand-new books, some long-awaited and some surprises.




 Survive by Vera Nazarian The End is Here, in a Fiery Cosmic Apocalypse! Gwen Lark knows how to Qualify, Compete, and Win... The time has come to Survive. The Games of the Atlantis Grail have come to a ground-shaking halt and Gwen Lark, nerd, geek, and awkward smart girl, survived the remarkable ordeal, for the time being. But the worst is yet to come! Now, both the colony planet Atlantis and Earth are under a threat of annihilation, and everything is up in the air, including dire and stunning wonders in the Atlantean skies. Will there be a Wedding? Will there be a future for Gwen Lark, her beloved, and all their families, friends, and loved ones? Is Gwen’s rare and powerful talent, the Logos voice of creation, enough to resolve the greatest mystery of the Kassiopei Imperial Dynasty and its role in the events of deepest antiquity since the dawn of time? The fate of the entire human species is at stake, and now there can be no respite, not a moment to lose. The final battle is here, and Gwen, and everyone she knows and loves, are in for the greatest fight of their lives. It is time to survive. SURVIVE is the fourth and final book in The Atlantis Grail series, now an international cross-genre phenomenon, optioned for film.

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 The Motherland Knows by Joseph T. Major They thought he could help. The First Man in Space was under pressure. He had to regain his flight status. A friend had died for him. And from all over the Soviet Union, workers and other proletarians wrote him begging for help. Sometimes he could help And now, he was beginning to think, the Soviet Union was going the wrong way, a very wrong way. They might decide to solve some matters. A dead hero can't disagree with the authorities. So he reached out, to someone he had met, someone who was known, someone he thought he could trust. Then, on a cold and clear Christmas night, he took the most daring step -- and the world changed. In a tale of space flight, spying, and politics, people who thought they would never get into that sort of thing now found themselves propelled into it. A turbulent and tumultuous world is shaken into a different path, as leaders react to embarrassment with a desire for prestige, where the wish of a pilot is brought closer to coming through, and famous men are brought together, to find that enemies are more like them than they had imagined.

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Time of Daughters I by Sherwood Smith In a time of change and danger, peace sparks to war, and sons become daughters... It’s nearly a century after the death of Inda, the unbeatable Marlovan commander. Danet and Arrow, content in their arranged marriage, just want to live in peaceful obscurity and raise their family. But when a treaty sends them to the royal city to meet the heir to the throne, they discover that peace is fragile, old enemies have long memories, and what you want isn't always what you get. By the time they learn that you can’t go back again, events ignite a conflagration that no one could have foreseen—except for the ghosts who walk the walls in the royal city. This is the first half of an epic story of politics, war, family and magic in the beloved world of Sartorias-deles.

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Time of Daughters 2 by Sherwood Smith In a time of rising danger, women go to war, and ghosts walk the walls... A few years have passed since the Night of Four Kings, when the least expected candidates for rulership found themselves in charge of a disintegrating kingdom. These years of tenuous peace see their children reach adulthood. Threats from the border become raids, led by an idle noble with an eye to kingship. The two princes, Noddy and Connar, newly emerged from the military academy, are dispatched to patrol the troubled area until they find themselves under attack. Their loyalty to one another is strong, but what happens when one brother discovers a taste for war and the other a loathing for it? Matters of marriage and love tangle up with the menace of war. But the greatest threat of all comes when the world’s strongest army faces enemies from within. This is the concluding half of an epic story of politics, war, family and magic in the beloved world of Sartorias-deles.

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Also Sherwood Smith has been signal-boosting for Australian writers affected by the massive fires in that country. After seeing so many images of shocking destruction, a lot of us are asking how we can help. Right now, the best way we can help is to buy their books so that they will have some income to return home to and start over. There are several names of both authors and publishers who have lost everything, and who could really use some solid income streams right now, when everything is at its lowest.

A Cautionary Tale Applicable to Our Present World

The Year of Jublio! by Joseph T Major
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's long been theorized that John Wilkes Booth and his convicted accomplices were in fact part of a much larger conspiracy aimed at wiping out as much of the Union government as possible. This novel of alternate history is based upon the idea that, not only was this true, but it succeeded almost completely.

However, the author does not immediately present us with this scenario. Instead he begins the novel some years later, when our protagonist is a youngster growing up in a United States that superficially looks like the Gilded Age US we know from history books. Except weird little things keep popping up, such as the references to Lincoln as "Father Abraham," and being spoken of as though he were still President, yet also being referred to as having been martyred. Only slowly do we learn how Lincoln's assassination was part of a decapitation strike that wiped out the entire Line of Succession, leaving the surviving senior Union government officials in a position where they had to somehow maintain the function of the Executive Branch, but none of them had any formal standing to assume the Presidency.

Much like Aleck in the author's Alternate World War II series, the protagonist of this novel is American-born but with strong ties to the UK aristocracy, being heir to a baronetcy. As he goes to England to receive an appropriate education and subsequently becomes an officer in the British Army in the Boer War and then their equivalent of World War I, he watches the land of his birth go deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of obsession with seccesionism and slaveocracy.

I do not believe that the author intended this novel to be allegorical of any Primary World government (although certain actions are strongly reminiscent of the former USSR, particularly under Stalin, albeit with the Cult of Personality focused on a martyred President rather than a living Leader), but it is certainly a very applicable warning against the dangers of becoming obsessed with an enemy long after the defeat of the nation it represents. And most of all, the danger of erasing or rewriting history, as the alternate America does in reducing every leader from the Revolution to the 1860 election to nameless ciphers, as if Lincoln personally masterminded and led every success the US ever enjoyed.

Review copy provided by the author.

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Zilbrant the Traitor by Catherine Mintz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I originally started reading this novel as the family was coming back home from Christmas Eve service at church, and intended to read it piecemeal over the next several days. However, when I got back to reading it the next day, I ended up spending pretty much all day on Christmas reading it, even when I'd intended to do some other projects. I just couldn't keep myself from reading "just a little bit more."

I originally met Zilbrant in Ms. Mintz's short story "Earth Ashes Dust" in the anthology Past Future Present 2011. When I read it, I initially assumed that the author was unthinkingly using the trope of the Medieval peasant village recreated In Space, since such things are not uncommon in space opera. But as I read further in the story and learned about the history of the Varr, of the initial hostility of many humans to their creation and the consequent wars with atrocities on both sides, I reinterpreted the crushing poverty of Zilbrant's family's village and the religion that seemed deliberately designed to keep them down as a case of vengeance being more valuable than economy.

When I found out that there was a novel about Zilbrant, I was immediately interested. The title intrigued me, since she didn't seem to be the sort of person who would willfully and maliciously betray anyone, but she was certainly in a situation in which conflicting loyalties could create one or more double-binds that would lead her to be condemned by one or another party (or maybe several) as a traitor. A situation sort of like "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

The beginning does not simply copy the original short story, instead weaving in first person narrative threads by two apparently artificial entities, one a spaceship in orbit over Zilbrant's homeworld, which finally has a name and a place in a larger galactic setting that Zilbrant's brutally limited education gave her no way to know. There are also two other human characters' stories, both told in third-person limited POV, one a rebel against the Varr and the other one of their trusted servitors. All these POV's can be a little difficult to follow at times, but it gives us a far broader and more nuanced view of the situation. The Varr are not entirely vicious oppressive tyrants, although their rule is certainly not democratic even on the worlds where the elite has not become corrupt. It turns out that, while the Skalmar religion was indeed artificially created, it was not as a tool of oppression, but as a way of keeping the early settlers of newly terraformed worlds from self-sabotage when the scientific rationales for restrictions on their activities couldn't be culturally transmitted. The Skalmar faith was supposed to be something that their descendants outgrew when the world's ecology became sufficiently established to allow for luxuries, for interstellar travel, not a crab bucket ideology dragging everyone back down.

Perhaps it was too much to hope for our protagonist to break free of her conditioning and move beyond the stifling poverty of her upbringing to go out into the bright and unbounded universe. But it's quite possible that she was right in believing that this transformation, however delayed, still needed a number of generations before their people could view the Skalmar revelations as mere superstition (albeit supported by the judicious, if creepy, use of tech) and roll their eyes at what their ancestors once believed.

Even so, I do want to read more stories set in this fascinating universe, even if Zilbrant has no more stories, just an ordinary life as an ordinary peasant woman.

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Short, but Has a Punch

The Chooser: A Tale of Modern Valkyrie by David L. Burkhead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't know whether this novella inspired the meme going around about the child who died fighting off his abuser showing up in Valhalla, or if the novella is a response to the meme, but it certainly digs into the idea, trying to understand what it would mean -- and what it would take for a child to grow into the reward for that moment of adrenaline-fueled courage.

I really like how the author dropped just enough details for us to figure out the ethnic background of young Kamil and his father, but never explicitly stated that they were immigrants (probably refugees) from the Middle East living in one of the Scandanavian countries. By doing this, he's able to keep the focus on the individuals and their choices, and avoids having a whole bunch of political stuff dragged into what is fundamentally a story about a person breaking free of a dysfunctional, abusive family situation and winning his freedom.

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The First Novel in a New Trilogy in a Beloved World

A Sword Named Truth by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wanted to read this one slowly, because there's so much to savor, so much detail, so many things that link to other books in the same 'verse. But I'd borrowed it from the library, and there were two more people waiting to read it, so I had to hurry through it so it could go back for the next person in the hold queue.

I'm in an unusual position reading this, because I've read some parts of the overarching storyline in various stages from the earliest rough drafts through various rewrites over the years, including material that has yet to see print and may never. So I know some characters by other (nick)names than the ones used in this novel, and some backstory to certain characters and magical objects that I'm not sure I want to mention, lest I snerk something important in an upcoming book.

The book itself starts with a sudden and dramatic political shakeup, the removal of a rotten dark-magic king to the mysterious place outside of time known as Norsunder, a sort of artificial Hell created as a base and bolthole by the aggressors in a long-ago war known as the Fall of Old Sartor. Suddenly there's a power void in Chwahirsland, but nobody wants to move lest Wan-Edhe (literally, The King, reminiscent of several 20th-century dictators whose titles translated into The Leader) should return and be displeased. Jilo, formerly the heir-apparent to the bad king's brother Prince Kwenz, steps into the breach, trying to maintain some sort of forward motion in a land that has lain far too long under dark-magic spells.

Chwahirsland was not a well-liked country back in Banner of the Damned (events of which are referred to several times in this book), but now it has become a dark-magic horror. The comparison to North Korea is rather apt, although magic enables some horrors that even the worst Primary World police state can't manage (paralleling something I contemplated a couple of years ago when I was writing a story based on a bit of backstory and realized that my villain could hardly be distinguished from any of several Rotten Dictators of History, and I needed to think about just what a tyrant could do in a world with Functional Magic). Things like the energy-sucking spell and time-bindings cast over the palace, or the book that traces the movements of people whose names are written in it.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world of Sartorias-deles, other leaders are responding to the sudden change in the balance of power as a result of Norsunder's decapitation strike on Chwahirsland. It's becoming obvious that, after millennia of waiting and occasionally playing cat-and-mouse games with various countries, Norsunder is on the move, sending its minions wholesale rather than retail. While the older rulers struggle with the concept that the status quo is being upended, a group of youngsters who came to thrones extraordinarily young are forming their own network to defend against these new threats.

And then Norsunder moves, and it's horrifying how fast carefully-laid light-magic defenses are swept away. It's a fight that leaps all over the world of Sartorais-deles, and even to its sister-world of Geth-deles (the two planets are in each other's L3 position relative to their primary, known as Erhal but generally just called "the sun"), where the Norsundrians are trying to steal a different type of transfer-magic after having their old methods forcibly blocked.

And this doesn't even get into the fascinating discussions of morals and ethics, and particularly the ethics of the use of power, or the hint that the original foundation of Norsunder was some kind of eldritch entity of pure hunger for life-energy that came from Outside, and that may have been why the Fall didn't get humanity kicked off Sartorias-deles by its mysterious indigenous inhabitants, who had been ready to do that for far less in the first centuries after humans first settled.

I'm hoping to get it back out once there's no longer a hold queue and read it more slowly and carefully, then write a longer and more analytical review on my book reviewing site.

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A Story of Magic and Peril

Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel forms a bridge between the Inda tetralogy and the era of Crown Duel and the CJ Notebooks. In Crown Duel, there was a reference to the ties between Remalna and Marloven Hess, going back to when a Marloven princess married into the old royal family. There have also been references in the later books to Indevan's ride into Norsunder with his First Lancers. This is the story of those events.

In the Inda books we saw the Marlovens through their own eyes, but in this, we see them through the eyes of the Colendi, a cultured people reminiscent of Heian Japan or the court of the Sun King at Versailles, but with magic. And by this point magic has become far more common than it was in Inda's era, although not to the near-ubiquity of CJ's notebooks.

It is also the story of a woman on trial: Emras the Scribe, who became royal scribe to Princess Lasva, and who accompanied her to Marloven Hesea (as the country was known at the time) when she weds Prince Ivandred, who rescued her from the Chwair king. Officially, Emras went as a scribe, but the Queen gave her a secret mission: protect Princess Lasva from dark magic, which both the Chwair and the Marlovens had a reputation for using.

A very open-ended mission, with almost no instruction on how to go about it. So Emras does so as best she knows how, trying to learn how magic works. And her very diligence and determination lead her down a path she might not have, had she been given better instruction and been less easily led astray.

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