Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/5

This week's crop of mail -- that's a horribly mixed metaphor, but let it go -- brought two books for me to tell you about. And I'll get to that, but, first, I feel the need to explain this thing I do for every Monday morning.

The way Publicity works is this: people who have an audience, in whatever media, get free stuff and/or access to help build awareness and interest for upcoming products of interest to the folks in their audience. In my case, that's you folks, and primarily books. (I do get some music as well, but am much less organized about it.) Thus I get free books in the mail, mostly unexpectedly because I'm semi-deliberately bad at this, and I write about them here every week.

First is The Castle in Cassiopeia, third in the Dead Enders series by Mike Resnick. This is somewhere in the nexus of Military SF and space opera, with a small group of tough military folks who do the impossible jobs -- in fact, this time, they're re-doing a job from the first book, since their fix didn't work out as well as they hoped. It's set somewhere in the middle of Resnick's Birthright timeline, which has been the background for most of his fiction for around forty years -- there are a couple of appendices here with a detailed timeline and notes about the universe. (And I don't need to tell you folks how much I love lists and timelines and background notes!) Cassiopeia is a trade paperback from Pyr, hitting stores on August 22.

Then there's Victor Milan's The Dinosaur Princess, third in his medieval fantasy series with every possible variety of dinosaur substituting for the more usual dragons. (Those who whine about the lack of scientific accuracy in fantasy may be interested in this series -- I'm not clear if there's anything supernatural in it at all; it looks like humans were dumped on a world with dinosaurs through super-science long ago, and now we get fighting and scheming.) This one is a Tor hardcover, and will be in stores on August 15.