Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/15

There's a decent stack this week, so let me get right to it:

A World Too Near is the new novel by Kay Kenyon, and second in her series "The Entire and the Rose." I haven't read the first book in this series, Bright of the Sky; in fact, I've only read one Kay Kenyon novel at all. That was her 2000 novel Tropic of Creation, an intense, Cherryhesque story of cultural conflict and personal transformation on an arid third-rate world with secrets. So I know she can do some good stuff -- though, in my old life, I was mostly unsuccessful in getting people to try Tropic of Creation. I hope Pyr has more luck with this series; they published World on March 11th.

Next is In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, the second book in S.M. Stirling's current old-fashioned solar system series. We learned in the first book, The Sky People, that aliens had terraformed Mars and Venus hundreds of millions of years ago and populated them with Earth-derived life -- and then, in the mid-20th century, the Cold War and Space Race exploded onto two more worlds. Sky People (which I read, liked, and bought for my former job) was set on Venus; Crimson Kings brings us to Mars and what I think is a number of years later. Tor publishes it on Tuesday; it's probably in stock everywhere as I type this. And, for those who care about such things, Crimson Kings opens at the 1962 WorldCon...

I may have mentioned Dark Wraith of Shannara before, but I've now seen a finished copy -- it's a new graphic novel in the bestselling series by Terry Brooks, and credited as "written by Terry Brooks, with illustrations by Edwin David, adapted by Robert Place Napton." (From which I infer -- rightly or wrongly -- that Brooks wrote it as a prose piece, Napton broke it down into pages and panels, and David drew it.) It's an interesting cross-pollination of fantasy and comics, and I'm intrigued to see how well it works. Del Rey publishes it on March 25th.

Flight Explorer, Volume One is something else entirely; a collection of short all-ages comics stories from the creators of the Flight series of anthologies. It's being published by Villard on March 25th.

One of the favorite writers of my youth was Robert Asprin -- I loved the "Thieves' World" series, which he co-conceived and edited, and re-read his novel The Bug Wars more times than I could say. (My younger brother was a huge fan of Asprin's "Myth Adventures" series, which I enjoyed but wasn't as obsessed with.) He dropped off the map for a while, and has been coming back gradually over the past few years. Now Ace is launching a whole new Asprin series with Dragons Wild, the story of a professional gambler who learns that he's a dragon. This is the first book on which Asprin is the sole credited author since about 1993, which may mean that his troubles have ended. (And I can't be too much more definite than "troubles" -- I've heard explanations involving either writer's block or the IRS, and some mixing both with other elements -- since I don't know why he's hasn't written anything solo for ten years or more.) Whatever it was, it's good to see Asprin back again. Dragons Wild is an Ace trade paperback, publishing April 1st.

Adam Stemple's second solo novel is Steward of Song, which I'm somewhat sorry to see is a sequel to his first solo novel, Singer of Souls. Singer was a closely-observed novel about a young junkie musician who had contact with Faerie. It also had a strong, striking, untypical ending that I fear any sequel would unpick -- it's hard to see how any sequel could continue the path Singer followed at the end. I may have to read this one just to see what Stemple did with it. Steward of Song was published March 4th in hardcover by the inescapable Tor.

The trade paperback edition of Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 is being published by Villard on March 25th. (The original hardcover was from Archaia Studios, who also published the individual issues; I read it in the hardcover.) When "small-press" comics companies can sell paperback rights to their projects to Random House imprints and get national bookstore distribution along the way, the stranglehold of the Diamond/comic shop/superhero/Big Two nexus on the neck of the comics medium may finally be loosening. And thank god for that.

The oddest thing I've seen recently is Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim. It was written by Tom Corwin and illustrated by Craig Frazier, and will be published by Flying Dolphin Press (an obscure-to-me imprint of Doubleday) on June 24th as a small gift-size hardcover. Corwin is a musician, and his hero Fooster is "your average fellow...he takes us into a rich and vivid world unlike any we've seen before." (And that means quite a bit to me, since I've seen a lot of quite different worlds in books before.) I'm not sure what it all means, but this is short, so I'm pretty sure I'll read it and report back.

And last for this week is the new novel from Allen Steele, Galaxy Blues. It's set in the same universe as most of his recent work (Spindrift and the various "Coyote" stories), but focuses on a new character in his journeys deeper and deeper into the galaxy. It's a hardcover from Ace, coming the first of April.