Month: July 2019

Summer Reading List 2019: Midpoint madness

We’re around the halfway point of summer, and considerably farther through the unofficial season of the Summer Reading List Challenge. This year, thanks to what we’ll call “fortunate events”,1 I haven’t finished all three of the books, but I do have one, so here we go.

Fiction

Title: Sins of Empire
Author: Brian McClellan
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2017

I’ll go ahead and say this up front: Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage series quickly became one of my all-time favorite fantasy trilogies. It occupies a small but growing niche variously referred to as flintlock fantasy or riflepunk, which counters the oft-held belief that fantasy ends with the invention of gunpowder. I love that sort of genre-bending, and those three novels hit a sweet spot for me.

Well, Sins of Empire continues the story. It’s the first of a new series, Gods of Blood and Powder, but it carries over many of the characters. Set about ten years in the future, on a new continent, it has a kind of “summer blockbuster” feel: full of action, with a few nonsensical twists and an epic finale. The prose is, at times, not the greatest, something I’ve begun to notice with increasing regularity. But this book makes up for it in worldbuilding, in pacing, and in the sheer fun of the ride.

I’ve had this one sitting in my to-do pile since last Christmas, and I’m glad I chose it for this year’s challenge. It’s not a filling meal. No, it’s more of a dessert, something for a reader’s sweet tooth. Which isn’t all that bad, as long as you don’t over do it.

Coming up

I still have two more books to finish in the next month or so. I’m more than halfway through one, but I haven’t started the other. It looks like this might be a summer of procrastination, but that’s okay. It’s what I did in school, right?

  1. One of those fortunate events doesn’t like my completely logical punctuation style, but she’s not reading this. ↩

Release: Falling Into Place (Return to the Otherworld 5)

Now it’s time for the fallout. Here begins the second half of Return to the Otherworld, and we start with Part 5, Falling Into Place.

Disaster averted.

The other world, or this part of it, has seen much better days, but all agree that the worst has passed. Now, the members of the second expedition, along with those who have made their homes here, can return to the bigger business of science, learning, exploring.

But all is not well. The stress of the past weeks has taken its toll. The uncertainty of the future leaves some shaken. And further danger lurks beyond the borders of this fair land. As time runs out on their stay, the students, the teacher, and all those closest to them search for the perfect ending to the tale of spring.

Just because the flood’s over, that doesn’t mean our team is out of the woods. Oh, no. That would be too easy. Now, the scope of their effects on the Otherworld are growing. People are noticing. And decisions must soon be made.

You can get Falling Into Place, along with all my other Otherworld works (now that’s a tongue-twister!) over at my Patreon. It only costs $3/month, and there’s so much more left in store. Like Whence We Came, which is only six weeks away. I’ll see you then.