Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi

Publisher: Prime Books - Pages: 336 - Buy: Book/eBook
Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel by Jacqueline Koyanagi

Alana Quick is a talented sky surgeon – a fixer and mender of spaceships – but despite her skills, her life is anything but easy. Ever since the Othersiders and their fantastic technology appeared through a rift in space, regular businesses have been taking a succession of hard economic hits, leading to a decline in demand for sky surgeons. Alana also has Mel’s Disease: a degenerative genetic condition that, if left untreated, causes her intense pain that could potentially cause her permanent, even lethal physical damage. But business is bad, and medicine is expensive, forcing Alana to live hand to mouth. Even so, and despite the repeated urgings of her sister, Nova – a wealthy and successful spirit guide – Alana can’t bear to give up working the ships she loves for the sake of a steady paycheck. So when a gorgeous Gartik transport ship, the Tangled Axon, lands at Alana’s shop, she leaps at the opportunity for work, only to find that the captain, one Tev Helix, is looking for Nova instead. Read More »

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Several months ago, N.K. Jemisin, much-loved (and totally awesome and smart) author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (REVIEW) and The Killing Moon (REVIEW), announced that her next novel was going to be, “a postapocalyptic epic fantasy trilogy, set in a world of seismic magic users and enigmatic nonhumans called stone-eaters.”

That novel has been revealed, along with the gorgeous cover, by The Mary Sue, as The Fifth Season. Jemisin describes The Fifth Season:

The Fifth Season is set in a world which has suffered frequent, repeated Extinction Level Events for millions of years, and all life (and magic) in this world has adapted to it. Hundreds of years might pass between these events — easy, plentiful years in which great cities rise, and people have the leisure for art and science and rapid advancement — but then, again and again, the cities fall. The world is littered with the detritus of these times of plenty, and this cover hints at them: past ages of decadence, now decaying; stone that endures beneath flaking gilt.

The Fifth Season is set for release by Orbit Books in August 2014, which, right now, feels like an eternity to wait for what will, if her other books are any indication, be one of 2014’s best fantasies.

Bouyed by seeing the Internet’s recent enthusiasm about John Scalzi’s Redshirts winning the Hugo Award for ‘Best Novel,’ Steven Erikson has announced that his next novel will not be a Malazan novel (though, Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone reveals that Fall of Light, the second novel in the Kharkanas Trilogy, is still in the works, merely delayed), but Willfull Child, a satirical riff on Star Trek.

Willfull Child is described as a ‘smart, inventive and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-hi-tech-kit-along-the-way type over-blown adventure.’

An excerpt of Willfull Child last year on on Tor.com.

More details are available via the Amazon.co.uk page for the novel:

These are the voyages of the starship, A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life life-forms, to boldly blow the…

And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback – a kind of James T Kirk crossed with ‘American Dad’ – and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through ‘the infinite vastness of interstellar space’…

Erikson is a delightful and sharply funny person, and I’ve always felt that this sense of humour was one of the highlights of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, so I’m glad to see him momentarily shifting away from the dark, sprawling world of the Malazan/Kharkanas novels into something entirely different. Mind you, it sounds alarmingly like Scalzi’s Redshirts, but Erikson and Scalzi are such stylistically different writers that I think the outward similarities only make me more curious to read Willfull Child.