Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/9

Here comes another week, I'm afraid -- but, before it really gets started (at least in my time zone), here's a short listing of books that arrived in my mailbox last week, with my hopes that one or more of them will be so appealing to you that it will automatically brighten your outlook and get you whistling a happy tune.

(Results not typical, or guaranteed. Consult your physician if whistling a happy tune persists for more that four hours.)

David Brin is back with his first new novel in a decade (Kiln People was way back in 2002), Existence. It's a big near-future novel with many viewpoint characters and what may be an Enigmatic Alien Artifact -- so my guess is that this is Brin back in Earth-mode, concerned with the future of mankind, privacy, life in the universe, and similar weighty topics. It's coming as a Tor hardcover on the 19th.

I also have July's paperbacks from DAW books, and there's a momentous change: there's only two of them. There's the usual reprint from a 2011 hardcover, and a brand-new novel, but, for the first time in I-don't-want-to-bother-to-look-up-how-long, there's no anthology from the Tekno Books mills of Green Bay. Time will only tell if this is a momentary hiccup in the pipeline, or the beginning of the end. (Well, asking someone at DAW would probably also provide some sort of answer, but I'm just a guy blogging his mail, not a reporter!)

Anyway, the two DAW mass-markets for next month include Diana Rowland's Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues, the second in the contemporary fantasy series that began with My Life as A White Trash Zombie. And, yes, they're about a young female zombie -- who still has most of her own brains, despite her desire for eating brains -- who is not overly refined. (That's her, presumably, on the cover.)

And the other DAW paperback this month is Citadels of the Lost by Tracy Hickman, the second in the epic "Annals of Drakis" series. (The first book was Song of the Dragon.) It's an epic fantasy series, of course, with a cruel elf empire, plucky human slaves battling long odds, and, most definitely, dragons.