A few days ago, I looked at the calendar and said, “But what do you
mean, it’s more than halfway through May?” My sense of time passing remains disconnected from reality, in a faintly comedic way that makes the day of the week a constant startlement.
Truly startling and not at all comedic, though, was the news that Lois McMaster Bujold has published a full-length novel in her “Penric and Desdemona” series.
The Assassins of Thasalon is her first novel in the world of the Five Gods since
The Hallowed Hunt, but it’s not a good entry-point for the Penric and Desdemona stories at all. (Start with
Sleeps With Monsters: Procedural Fantasy and Queering Historical Epic tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Melissa Scott’s career spans, at this point, four decades. Perhaps best known for her Astreiant fantasy novels (initially written with her late partner Lisa A. Barnett, and later alone), she’s also written innovative science fiction, space opera, and tie-in novels for
Stargate and
gen:Lock. Her most recent original novel, the space opera
Finders, came out from small press Candlemark and Gleam: a vivid and lively novel full of character and intrigue.
Now with
Water Horse (Candlemark and Gleam, June 2021) Scott returns to fantasy with a self-contained volume of war, weirdness, and people strained to their breaking point by a generations-long war.
Karen Osborne’s debut science fiction novel,
Architects of Memory, came out in September last year. The pandemic has done a number on my ability to recall detail, so only impressions remain: I enjoyed it, I remember, even if it had a few too many sudden revelations, betrayals, and double-/triple-crosses for me to entirely follow.
Engines of Oblivion is a direct sequel to
Architects of Memory, albeit from a different point of view.
[Spoilers for
Where
Architects of Memory hewed close to the perspective of Ashlan Jackson, dying of an incurable illness that it transpired was turning her into a weapon that many of the corporate polities that rule over the human-occupied galaxy would do nearly anything to possess,