An offbeat and enchanting space adventure.
A princess and her long-suffering assistant explore the galaxy in this SF novel.
Elaine Durowich is a handmaiden to Princess Anastasia, the pampered, only daughter of the Greater Galactic Emperor and Empress. When Anastasia gets her heart set on seeing what’s outside the palace, Elaine has little choice but to tag along with her. The timing is hardly ideal, as the newly divorced Emperor and Empress are waging war against each other, and antiroyalist rumblings among the populace are getting louder every day. Nevertheless, after Anastasia falsely claims that her dad approved of the trip, she and Elaine set off on a journey to alien planets, including glitzy Paartay, which is effectively one giant rave, and Dump, a colony of rebellious teens who stage ridiculous, gladiator-style fights. The royals’ unpopularity puts a target on Anastasia’s back, so she and Elaine try to keep low profiles via aliases and disguises with varying success. After meeting a dashing revolutionary, Anastasia and Elaine stow away with a crew of geeky space pirates and even meet an intergalactic mob boss on planet Vegas. Things get more complicated when the Emperor and Empress disappear, leading the Empire’s top general to label the princess’s trip a kidnapping. By now, Elaine and Anastasia are also being tracked by alien assassin Mirret and her bloodthirsty “teddy bear”accomplice. Gimba, the author of Not So Heartwarming Stories(2019),has written a refreshingly zany work that has the potential to become a cult classic. The witty, third-person narration takes aim at everything from fandom culture to materialism and inequality, but it never takes a tone that feels preachy. Instead, Gimba delivers refreshingly funny dialogue and fresh worldbuilding. The leads are genuinely likable and don’t feel focus-grouped: Princess Anastasia is hilariously flighty and spoiled but ultimately kindhearted, and Elaine, the older and more levelheaded of the two, is as blunt as her bob haircut, but softhearted enough to pursue a possible love interest.
An offbeat and enchanting space adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79424-159-6
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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