Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/30

The end of September saw a cold snap in my neck of the woods, as if Nature said "well, right, that's Summer thoroughly done for now." There's currently a chill breeze coming in through the small window in my blogger's basement, making me think seriously about actually closing that window. But it's supposed to warm up a bit again this week -- Nature is deeply fickle -- so I think I can stand it until then.

Things change every week, with new ideas and sights -- and among the most pleasant changes are new books being published. This week, I've got two new hardcovers from Tor to lay out before your amazed eyes.

I'll start with Children of the Fleet, a new "Ender" novel by Orson Scott Card, hitting stores on October 10th. I'm not as plugged-in to this series as some other people, but I believe this is set in the gap between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, and is about yet another super-smart kid who wants to go to the super-awesome Fleet School to learn to massacre evil alien Buggers. (No, wait. The Buggers are all dead at this point, right? So who are all the Earth kids learning to massacre at this point?) This kid is Dabeet Ochoa, and he has an unknown father, which I'm sure will never become a plot point. The title page has the subtitle "Fleet School," which I have a lurking suspicion means this may become a series -- either with more books about Dabeet, or a number of books about different students at the school. Time will tell.

The other book is War and Craft by Tom Doyle, the third in the American Craftsman series. It's modern military fantasy secret history, about the super-classified magical Spec Ops types who keep the world safe for democracy by killing a lot of bad guys in entertaining ways and doing the rest of that MilSF stuff. This one seems to be the climax of the series, and is mostly set in India, because what good are American special forces types if they're not wreaking havoc in foreign countries? War and Craft hit stores on September 26; you should be able to find it everywhere now. If the idea sounds interesting, though, you probably want to start with the first book, American Craftsmen.