Incoming Books: Week of July 8, 2023

These "Incoming Books" posts are the ones I do closest to deadline - I'm typing this the morning of July 8, after doing a "review" that will go live on August 23 - and so sometimes I think I can or should give last-minute dispatches from the trenches, if I had any breaking news.

Spoiler alert! There is no such thing as breaking news for a minor-league book-review blog. But I did just get two books from Tachyon this week, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

The Legend of Charlie Fish is the first novel by Josh Rountree, some kind of fantasy Western that comes with quotes from Joe R. Lansdale, A.C. Wise, David Liss, and Brian Keene. From some hints on the back cover, I think the fantasy element is water-related, which is an interesting addition to the usually dusty desert of the standard Western. It also looks pleasingly short, so I might take a run at it soon.

Flight & Anchor is a similarly short novel - I say this admiringly, by the way, since I'm all about short books these days - by Nicole Kornher-Stace, who I am happy to see lives in New Paltz. (Someone has to! Badum-tissh. No, seriously, I actually know where that is and It's always fun to see an creator that lives in a real, smaller place you know something about.)

This is somewhat related to a series Kornher-Stace has running; the cover says it's "A Firebreak story," and she's had five previous books published, most of which I think are in that sequence. I think this is a somewhat near-future SF story, corporate dystopia division - our two main characters are fleeing a rapacious corporation, which seems to have made them both super-soldiers and celebrities. I suspect they are both still quite young; like teenager young, maybe. Anyway, clearly the rapacious corporation will not be happy these two have run away, and hence, I think, the plot of the book.