A tale of a once-and-futuristic king that combines juvenile adventure elements and more mature intrigue.
In Hickman’s latest SF series entry, an Earth teenager who’s also the king of the Milky Way galaxy prepares to defend his massive realm against an ancient enemy dragon.
“So many things have changed since I've left home, and it's only been about ten months,” understates young Richard Plantagenet in this continuation of a saga begun with Richard: Distant Son(2022). Until recently, he was Richard Drumm, a small-town Ohio teenager; then he found out that he’s the hereditary heir to the throne of a galactic kingdom. This spacefaring destiny has been brewing for 1,000 years, ever since his royal grandfather and immediate family members died due to a conspiracy by a jealous usurper. The revelation that a boy from Earth—a despised planet—carries the crucial Plantagenet DNA has led to much plotting and scheming; although many planets of the realm celebrate the return of the monarchy, the power-hungry Senator Spartacus and his conniving family want to take control themselves. In this installment, they launch a conspiracy to abduct and murder the teen, but are unaware that the boy’s steadfast guardian—an artificial alien lifeform, or AAL—has created an emergency duplicate of Richard, dubbed Henry, for just such occasions. Richard and Henry are switched, but the price of escape turns out to be a steep one. The Spartacus household sends an assassin among the foxlike citizens of the planet Beowulf to kill Richard’s pregnant queen, Amber. However, the essential function of the Plantagenet king is to enact a once-a-millennium defense of the galaxy, partnering with satyrs and flying horses against a banished species of long-lived, teleporting dragons. The barrier between the dragon’s prison dimension and the capital world of Krel is thinning, and Richard must do his duty.
Blending SF, mythic fantasy, not-very-hard science, and references to Hollywood SF properties (even the TV series Sliders gets a shoutout), the epic narrative offers readers a mixture of the sophisticated and the jejeune. The latter aspect is sometimes abetted by close encounters of the bathroom-humor kind; one such moment elicits this reaction: “Richard almost lost his breakfast. ‘You have got to be kidding me!’ ” There are still some unanswered questions, carried over from the series’ inception, about mighty beings who transcend time and space and oversee everything with godlike authority; they include AAL’s mentor, Olaf, an ordinary-looking old man in a battered hat who’s invisible to most. There are deeper themes at work amid the action and menagerie of unusual creatures: Human beings are portrayed as having run the Milky Way government for centuries, mainly for their own benefit, and marginalizing a vast number of other intelligent species along the way (including rabbit folk, multi-limbed extraterrestrials, merpeople, and centaurs, among others). Fair-minded Richard not only launches his progressive reign with inclusivity in government and society, but also mates with foxlike alien Amber, which many consider taboo. As such, readers should be prepared for references to interspecies sexual couplings and sperm-related procedures, as well as profanity.
A tale of a once-and-futuristic king that combines juvenile adventure elements and more mature intrigue.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985477788
Page Count: 378
Publisher: RedFoxOnHigh
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2023
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
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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