Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/30

This week I have two books to mention to you, both of which came in the traditional sent-by-publishers-in-hope-of-review way of my people. I hope you'll find one or both of them of interest.

Gate Crashers, by Patrick S. Tomlinson, is a humorous SF novel that I think we can call in the school of John Scalzi. (Everyone at least moderately successful gets a school -- it just means people see what you do and decide they can do that, too. The less polite ones insist they can do it better.) Earth's first starship, Magellan -- which seems to be based on fairly decent physics based on a skim of the first few pages -- runs into an alien artifact in deep space, on its way to its target planet. From the title, my guess is that it's part of some kind of teleportation/wormhole network, and from the cover letter, it's clear that the owners are not happy with humans for messing with it. Some manner of hijinks ensue, possibly wacky ones -- it looks like this novel has humor in it, but it's not aiming to be a Douglas Adams kind of farce. Gate Crashers is a trade paperback from Tor, and officially hit stores last week.

Apocalypse Nyx is a fix-up of five novellas about Kameron Hurley's series character Nyx, whom the back cover describes as "ex-government assassin turned bounty hunter." (Yup: another one of those.) Four of the five stories have only appeared on Hurley's Patreon so far, so this seems to be the first wide publication. There may be earlier Nyx stories -- the back cover refers to "five newest Nyx novellas" -- but I haven't seen them. Actually, I don't think I've read Hurley at all yet, sadly. Nyx's world is pretty crapsack, and seems to be some kind of medium-future science-fantasy, with both guns and magic. This one is a trade paperback from Tachyon, and hits stores on July 17th.