Brisk, entertaining supernatural romp.
A 13-year-old boy becomes a superpowered defender of planets throughout the universe in Royer’s debut novel, which launches an SF/adventure series.
When a new family moves to his North Carolina neighborhood, Aben Egole meets Nastera Roshen, a girl his age. She wastes no time in showcasing her supernatural abilities by teleporting Aben to planet Zonda. Nastera is there to recruit Aben to the Astroknights, a group that protects planets from foreign invaders. She furthermore activates his dormant powers, which stem from his mother, Marlya, who’s been MIA for nine years. Aben learns that not only is his mother an alien, but that she’s alive and well, safely residing on her home planet. Aben subsequently develops and hones such abilities as telepathy and flight. Soon joined by his father, Col. Ivory Egole, the teenager and his fellow Astroknights embark on missions to help others, confronting winged creatures and more. These missions play a part in creating the universe’s first alliance, the Fortress of Planets. An alliance, however, may not be possible as long as tyrannical Imperial Gen. Warnod and his warships remain a perpetual menace. Consequently, a battle between the Astroknights and Warnod may be unavoidable. Royer begins this novel full-tilt as Nastera introduces herself and then teleports Aben by the very next page. The novel covers a wide range of characters, planets, and subplots, including Astroknights’ training or undergoing specific missions. As such, action scenes are sometimes over too quickly. Nevertheless, myriad abilities are on display, like shape-shifting and invisibility. And while Aben harnesses incredible skills (e.g., creating a vortex), he’s a mostly relatable teen protagonist. He, for example, is not invulnerable, as he doesn’t win every confrontation, and Aben can be impetuous, putting himself at unnecessary risk by going off on his own.
Brisk, entertaining supernatural romp. (dedication, author bio)Pub Date: April 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5447-6218-0
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A skillfully rendered, thoughtful offshoot of the original story.
An isolated, sunless planet faces challenges in another adjunct to the Imperial Radch trilogy.
Readers of those books will remember that the battle among various factions of Radchaai ruler Anaander Mianaai destroyed several gates that made it possible to travel across vast distances in space. This novel explores the ramifications of that action on the remote and frozen planet of Aaa, which still chafes under the Radchaai occupiers who annexed it 30 years ago. Aaa’s precarious food supply chain is disrupted when information and ships stop showing up. Key imports cease to be available and local food sources begin to run out in an atmosphere of religious and social unrest heightened by a wealthy man’s desire to become a saint. Many people consider Serque Tais unworthy of this ascension, which involves several weeks of fasting and drug-induced contemplation and ends with a fatal poison that permanently preserves the body as a sacred relic—and as a focus for fresh offerings to the temple. Tais’ decision to leave his property and business to his grandchild Elerit makes his feckless son rather unhappy. Meanwhile, Speaking Savant Keemat, the popular cleric whose vision endorsed Tais’ sainthood, clashes with the social-climbing hierarch of their order and begins to wonder if the vision was actually intended for Keemat themselves. Plus, a young man unwillingly sold into servitude on a distant planet instead finds himself pressed into service at home, attending the physically and emotionally injured cousin of the Radchaai governor. A nearly omniscient narrator from several centuries in the future explains how these storylines converge, but never explains the injured cousin’s backstory, which seems like it’s going to be important but never pans out. What the narrator does do is examine the complex, volatile enmeshment of religious and secular matters (something with obvious contemporary relevance), obligations between parents and children, whether a person can make their own destiny despite societal pressures, the impact of small choices in a wider world, and the ripples of larger choices in an even wider galaxy.
A skillfully rendered, thoughtful offshoot of the original story.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780316290357
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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