Incoming Books: Week of June 17, 2023

This is something of a cheat. As I said last week, I got a big box of remainders recently, and this is the middle third of them: the books that are SFF or something similar.

(I'm doing this in three batches because of two competing urges: I want to list all of my new books, but I also don't want to sit doing twenty-some books in a row. So I do a Caesar-in-Gaul act instead.)

And so here are:

Longer, a Michael Blumlein novel from 2019 that I think was his last work. This looks to be less...disturbing than most of his books, since it seems to be more-or-less straightforward serious SF about life-extension and such. (Blumlein was a doctor, and his work often came at SF from a horror slant - or maybe vice versa - with novels like The Movement of Mountains and X, Y and his great disturbing collection The Brains of Rats.)

Carmen Dog is a short novel by Carol Emshwiller, who I've read very little of. This one is about women who turn into animals and vice versa; I don't think it's officially a fable but it probably aims towards that territory.

I Am Providence is a novel by Nick Mamatas, a murder mystery set at a Lovecraftian convention. So maybe this generations Bimbos of the Death Sun, perhaps? Mamatas is suitably cruel and willing to burn bridges, so I have reasonably high hopes.

The Menace from Farside is a novella by Ian McDonald, apparently loosely related to a recent trilogy set on the moon. I haven't read the trilogy, and haven't read any McDonald for at least a decade, but I liked all his earlier books that I did read, so why not? I also like novellas these days, since my reading time is shorter and more fragmented.

By Force Alone is a big Arthurian novel - I think in the "grim & gritty" camp - by Lavie Tidhar, who I've generally seen working the SF side of the street. From my chair, it looks like it was supposed to be his big breakout book, but I don't think that succeeded - maybe it was too different from what he'd done before, or maybe the starts just weren't right.

Lent was Jo Walton's new novel for 2019, and some kind of historical fantasy in which Savonarola (maybe the historical figure, maybe some other guy; I'm not an expert on the period) can see and cast out demons. I'm a few books behind on Walton, but she always does distinctive and thoughtful books, and this one stands alone, so I might be able to find time for it.

And last is The Accidental War, another book in the "Praxis" series by Walter Jon Williams. I may be slightly confused, since there are some novellas in that series, and not all of them are available in printed form, but I think this series is mostly two trilogies, and this book is the beginning of the second one. I was a big Williams fan back in the day, but he's someone whose work I somewhat lost track of when I left the SFBC and was no longer reading SFF in bulk and having it delivered every day to my office.