Tim Pratt’s Axiom trilogy (
The Wrong Stars,
The Dreaming Stars, and
The Forbidden Stars) is a trio of excellent, modern, space-opera pulp adventures, with a compelling cast and a satisfying amount of solving problems by blowing them up. I’m gutted that there don’t seem to be any plans for more novel-length works in this setting – and at the same time delighted by the novellas collected in
The Alien Stars and Other Novellas, which form a coda of sorts to the trilogy.
The Alien Stars collects three stories: “The Augmented Stars”, “The Artificial Stars”, and the titular “The Alien Stars”. Each involves or focuses on a different character from the original trilogy, and each is told with a slightly different style – though with equal amounts of panache.
I was on not one but
two award juries in 2020. I told myself it was reasonable because there was a lot of overlap in the potential nominee pools, so it wouldn’t be
that much extra reading. I didn’t count on 2020 being a year of unusual strain and psychic deterioration, which increased the difficulty of reading, thinking, making critical judgments, and really doing anything that required executive function. Still, I got through my mountains of books, and even found some comfort (or, at least, distraction) there. I’ll highlight ten of my favorites.
The best book of the year for me was
Tim Pratt’s last trilogy from Angry Robot, the Axiom (
The Wrong Stars,
The Dreaming Stars, and
The Forbidden Stars), was precisely the kind of space opera romp guaranteed to delight me. Fast paced, and with a rag-tag crew of heroes and a selection of batshit weird dangers, it drove an appealing course through a galaxy not so very far away.
With
Doors of Sleep, Pratt opens a new series, and although it’s far from space opera, its rollicking pace and fiercely inventive worldbuilding makes it every bit as appealing.
Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree is very far from home. Every time he falls asleep, he wakes up in another universe, and has done so for approximately the last three years. He’s fallen into over a thousand worlds, and then fallen out of them just as quickly. Along the way, he’s had a handful of companions – for he can take people with him, if he falls asleep touching them – but all of them have left him, or been left behind. One of them, a man known a
Last year, Tim Pratt launched a Kickstarter for a new book, one set in the same world as his Axiom (
The Wrong Stars, The Dreaming Stars, and
The Forbidden Stars) trilogy:
The project was ultimately successful, and according to The Bookseller, it was enough to attract the attention of Angry Robot’s Commissioning Editor, Eleanor Teasdale, who picked up the book for a release later this year.
Pratt’s space opera trilogy (also published by Angry Robot) is set in the distant future, in which the crew of a salvage starship called
White Raven come across a derelict ship with a lone survivor, who tells them that she came into contact with aliens. Those aliens are from an ancient civilization and now that they’ve been awoken, they’re bent on exterminating humanity.