Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 4, 2022

The date in the title of this post was my birthday, and, as is traditional, I got a few books as presents. (Most of them because I bought them, and handed them over to The Wife to wrap.)

So these are the new books in my life, which were officially gifts:

Inside Man is a novella by K.J. Parker, and I gather it's at least something of a sequel to Prosper's Demon. Now, I loved Prosper's Demon, and I keep thinking Parker (originally better known as Tom Holt) is the kind of writer I should read more of...but he writes fat books fairly quickly, often in series, so I'm very far behind. But this is short and in the first person, so I expect to get to it right away.

Escape from Yokai Land is another novella-as-book, this time by Charles Stross. It's in his Laundry Files series, which I've been reading since I was at the SFBC. This one is about Bob Howard, the original main character of the series, and seems to be a prequel to The Delirium Brief.

Next is an actual full-length novel, James Alan Gardner's They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded. It's the sequel to All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault, and I'd have thought there would have been at least one more novel by now - Gun is from 2018, and the superteam it's about has four members, and one narrated Explosions and another (I gather) narrates Gun. But, as far as I can tell, there's been these two, and nothing else. Gardner is another writer I'm quite fond of - those are the people we gravitate to when we're buying books for ourselves as gifts, it's true - so I expect I'll read this one relatively quickly as well. (As quickly as one can read a book from 2018.)

And last is the graphic novel Celestia, from the Italian creator Manuele Fior. I've read his previous two books - at least, the two that were translated into English and published here - 5,000 km per second and Blackbird Days, and thought both of those were great. So I'm back again. This is some kind of SF, with telepaths and an island enclave separate from the rest of the world after some group fled there during the "Great Invasion."