Monday, October 23, 2017

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/21

Welcome back.

Every week, I list whatever new books I've seen, from publicity, purchase or (some word meaning "library" that begins with a p). Sometimes there are many, sometimes none.

This week, there's one: Steal the Stars, a novel by Nat Cassidy based on the dramatic podcast of the same name written by Mac Rogers. (Which descriptor makes me think about whether "drama" or the medium is usually the noun -- see TV drama but also dramatic presentation. Hmm. Dramatic play? Dramatic opera? Dramatic tweetstorm? On balance, I think that's probably the best way to describe the form.)

Steal the Stars is being published by Tor as a trade paperback on November 7th. Regular Tor, I think, not Tor.com or Tor Labs or the other exotic varieties, though the podcast came from Tor Labs and Gideon Media (in, obviously, a different form than a paperback book).

It's described as "noir science fiction," and seems to be one of the many grandchildren of X-Files: there's a crash-landed alien (gray skin, big head, probably a penchant for anal probing -- the whole shebang) held secretly in a US military base, and two of the people guarding it decide they'd have more opportunity to fuck each other and get rich if they stole the alien and ran off. So they do, apparently.

I am typically not your biggest fan of brand extensions into other media, and I am also old and grumpy, so this sounds like another eruption from the woo-woo conspiracy-theory side of SF. So I will not claim I am going to leap right onto this book and clasp it to my bosom. But it has nice quotes from people I respect, like Paul Cornell and Max Gladstone, so that's probably just me. I bet you will love it.

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