Superlative characters fuel this swiftly paced futuristic tale.
Mercenaries embark on a series of missions and misadventures while pursuing a heinous alien species in this SF sequel.
Shirakaya was once a captain of the Order, a religious military faction on the planet Pravura. Now, she’s a freelancer for guilds, tackling such missions as investigating unexplained deaths at a nursing home and rescuing a trancepunk rock star from a cult. She slowly forms a team ultimately called Shadow Mercs, starting with the military crew of a spacecraft she once commanded. While the mercenaries complete missions that Shirakaya’s contact continues to assign, they also earn money in other ways. Two Mercs become tag-team champs in an underground arena while Shirakaya’s team tries joining a competition show to win a brand-new interstellar starship. But their most important goal is stopping Ashkaratoth, who leads koth’vurians in terrorist attacks on Pravura. Most don’t believe that these aliens, exiled eons ago, have even returned. Shirakaya further enhances the Mercs with surprising recruits; she hopes to align with a powerful wraith and embraces a soldier who’s gradually mutating from an alien bite. The team may prove a formidable adversary to Ashkaratoth, especially if Shirakaya can get back the magic she’s lost. Centeno’s second installment, like the first, is a collection of subplots. Each chapter focuses on and often resolves an intriguing story; as one character aptly puts it, “One mission at a time, please.” Still, there’s definite cohesion, particularly with the Mercs’ persistent alien enemy, who, like numerous characters, appeared in the preceding novel. The vibrant cast includes Shirakaya; cynical soldier Dojin; and pilot Narja, who pushes the hardest for the starship grand prize. Sadly, not everyone in this appealing bunch makes it to the end. Meanwhile, brisk action ignites the pages with enchanted swords, plasma guns, and tentacled creatures, though it’s apparent that Centeno is setting the stage for more books to follow.
Superlative characters fuel this swiftly paced futuristic tale. (dedication, maps, glossary, author bio)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-227722-8
Page Count: 321
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2021
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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