I rather fell in love with the blurb for this one – after all, I’m a huge fan of Becky Chambers and Mary Robinette Kowal. And I also liked the cover, although there is a version that I far prefer than this one. But a far-future sci fi adventure on Earth with a wild west vibe? Yippee!
BLURB: Earth, the distant future: climate change has reduced our verdant home into a hard-scrabble wasteland. Saints and sinners, lawmakers and sheriffs, travellers and gunslingers and horse thieves abound. People are as diverse and divided as they’ve ever been – except in their shared suspicions when a stranger comes to town.
One night a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet’s first visitor in three hundred years. She’s armed, she’s scared… and she’s looking for someone.
Love, loss, and gunslinging in this dazzling debut novel by Grace Curtis. For fans of Sam J. Miller, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Becky Chambers, Frontier is a heartfelt queer romance in a high noon standoff with our planet’s uncertain future, full of thrills, a love story, and laser guns.
REVIEW: I think the first issue for me with this one is the very high expectation I had on picking it up. After all, a direct comparison with the likes of Becky Chambers and Mary Robinette Kowal means the standard of story-telling and characterisation has to be extremely high. And frankly, I don’t think the book delivered quite enough magic to be able to stand alongside both authors.
That doesn’t mean it is a bad read, however. Just that it isn’t an outstanding read. But I struggled quite badly with this one for nearly the first half. There is a particularly vile antagonist who keeps popping up and managing to win the day. Initially, I didn’t warm to the main protagonist all that much, even though she is clearly more principled than a number of the folks she encounters. But while it’s clearly flagged she’s looking for someone, we don’t know who. Neither do we really know who she is. And upsettingly (as far as I was concerned) nice people are carelessly gunned down as if they are nothing.
The level of violence also brought me up a bit short – though yes, I know it’s the wild west in a post-apocalyptic world. But Becky Chambers was also mentioned and I was expecting the more uplifting worlds that she depicts… So my progress through it was a bit of a trudge and I was considering DNFing it – until we got to the flashback sequence, when we get to properly meet the protagonist and understand her urgency and who she’s trying to find. And suddenly I was utterly invested the story. And wondering why on Earth this section didn’t appear a whole lot sooner in the book. That still really bugs me – I feel the narrative has been scrambled for some stylistic reason and frankly, that kind of mucking about is what drove me away from literary fiction in the first place.
From then on, the story gathered pace and I was hooked, thoroughly enjoying the denouement and the tender relationship between the protagonist and her lover. However, I’m giving this one three stars – and I haven’t done that with a book I’ve completed for a long time. While I obtained an arc of Frontier from the publishers via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
6/10
BLURB: Being a telepath means your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness.
water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die.
be killed. But what happens when the doppelganger survives?
citizens of one of the great hive cities of twenty-sixth century Earth. Her job is hunting down criminals before they commit their crimes, but this time she must face multiple challenges. While preparing to celebrate the New Year festival of family, Amber’s team have to deal with a case where the stakes grow increasingly personal. The help of Amber’s borderline telepath counsellor, Buzz, becomes crucial.
This edition was produced by Orbit in March 1993. I like the colour tones of the cover, but I’d like that cool, futuristic city to be more visible, rather than lurking in the background. And while I’m aware that it is Banks’ name that is selling the book, the title font is all but invisible in that colour against the background, the minute this cover gets minimised.
This French edition, published in November 2011 by Ailleurs & Demain, far more successfully evokes the feeling of a far future settlement. I love the use of those cool blues… This one would have been my favourite, but for that hideously ugly textbox plonked off-centre as a complete afterthought. What a shame!
Published by Le Livre de Poche in September 2007, this French edition is the reason why I picked this book for this subject. I love this scene with the huge mothership looming above with the nippy fighter craft zipping about and all those cool-looking futuristic weaponry on display. The title and author font has a pleasing synergy with the tone and feel of the cover design. I think this one nails it and is my favourite.
This Hungarian edition, published by Agave Könyvek in 2006, takes a different approach. I get the sense that you wouldn’t want to be sitting in that chair with all those nasty, sharp-looking armaments pointing at you… This cover radiates an effective sense of menace, but the title font is again, very underpowered when set against that punchy artwork.
This German edition, published in April 2015 by Heyne Verlag, is a great spacescape – what’s not to love? While it hasn’t got the cool detail of the French edition, it’s space, baby! And both author and title font also are effectively displayed and complement the design. Which is your favourite?
Once more, this is an ambitious, well-written epic adventure featuring humans, spiders and octopuses all as intelligent, sentient beings. Not only does this book encompass three species and convincingly depict their struggles to communicate with each other and amongst themselves, it sprawls across a brain-achingly long timespan. Furthermore, it does so whilst fracturing the timespan, so that some of it is told out of sequence…
After buying her favourite rum distillery and settling down, she thought she’d heard the last of her arch nemesis, Evanrute Saarien. But Saarien, fresh out of prison for his misdeeds in Windswept, has just fabricated a new religion, positioning himself as its holy leader. He’s telling his congregation to go on strike, to fight the system. And unfortunately, they’re listening to him.
Alaska, 1974. Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed. For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival. Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.
Brainfluff 