A disjointed but ultimately entertaining spacefaring tale.
Tameem’s SF/fantasy novel takes readers on an outer-space wartime adventure featuring an amnesiac on a mission to protect a very powerful child.
Gen. Daaken is ready to lead the Imperial troops to war against the Elementals, planning to kill their royal family and especially the new heir, who’s just an infant. Just when he’s about to plunge his dagger into the child’s heart, a powerful force emanates from the youngster, causing Daaken to disappear and laying waste to the palace that surrounds them. A woman named Salarin later wakes up in the middle of the palace grounds, surrounded by bodies, but she remembers nothing but her own name—not even what side of the battle she was on. Finding a baby left alone, she does the only thing she can think of: She grabs him and fights her way to a nearby escape pod. After crash-landing on the planet Elventar, Salarin meets a raider named Bosco who agrees to help her find the baby’s parents, and maybe some of Salarin’s memories along the way. After speaking with the high priest on Elventar, they learn that the baby is an Elemental and that he belongs on another planet, but they lack additional details. Now Bosco and Salarin must find their way to the Elemental home world while dodging deadly Imperial troops. Meanwhile, Salarin may have a larger mission than she could have imagined. Tameem presents a fantasy tale that spans the galaxy, but the story, as intriguing as it is, can be very hard to follow due to the narrative’s tendency to jump backward and forward in time. Scenes even appear multiple times but from different perspectives. That said, readers who stick with the jumbled story will be rewarded with characters and interactions that stick with them; Bosco and Salarin’s burgeoning partnership is one of the biggest draws. The epilogue will leave readers eager to find out what happens next.
A disjointed but ultimately entertaining spacefaring tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 3, 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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