Donald Maass Literary Agency

Library Journal: The underqualified misfits undertaking this intergalactic art heist have no idea what mission they’ve actually signed up for. They think they’re going to steal back the art treasures that Earth gave up in return for a quick fix to their onrushing apocalypse. Now that Earth is repaired, it wants its stuff back, even if they have to steal it. The crew thinks the mission is sanctioned, their leader believes that everyone will forgive his deceptions, and the art historian is in this to get her lover back. Meanwhile, their friendly alien pilot with the handy spaceship plans to use them as a convenient scapegoat for nefarious plans of their own. It will be a miracle if any of them get out of this one alive. Tanzer’s (Creatures of Charm and Hunger) sci-fi heist caper surprises everyone, including readers, every parsec of the way.

VERDICT Inside this combination of Beth Revis’s Full Speed to a Crash Landing with Becky Chambers’s To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a story about alien con artists, self-deceptive historians, self-aware clones, and self-centered cyborgs, along with a surprising look at what it means to be real in both art and relationships.

Publishers Weekly: An exercise in elaborate worldbuilding, this ambitious outing from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Walton (Or What You Will) transports readers to the fantastical city of the Serenissima, “built on nothing but layers of magical mist and memories and dreams.” The Serenissima’s geography shifts with the fog that drifts through it, “opening a new square here, closing up an old canal there, like a face caught in the fleeting act of changing expression.” Its waterways, maintained by shared belief in their existence, connect eight disparate worlds, including Earth. The Venetians believed the Serenissima into being first, and through it soon found neighbors: beings who look much like the Venetians, but with the faces of cats, dogs, or domino masks garlanded with flowers and feathers, and who connect to the magic of the Serenissima in their own ways. Against this inventive backdrop, a fisherman wakes from a dream that the city will elect its first doge. A local mystic confirms that she can see this coming to pass—and also sees a cure for the plague that blights the fisherman and his lover—after which the city itself pulls everyone around him into the rush to fulfill the prophecy. Told through the eyes of nine different characters, each with a perspective and backstory rich enough for its own novel, the relatively low-stakes plot still manages to feel personal and affecting. This fascinates. (June)

Publishers Weekly: A far-future gang attempts an interstellar museum heist in this crafty sci-fi novella from Tanzer (Creatures of Charm and Hunger). Led by Tarquin Lennox, a wealthy human man affiliated with Earth’s last corporation, the crew also includes Arakachi Misora, “a set of sextuplets folded into a single body” acting as the team’s muscle; Jack Kirby, a powerful machine intelligence there to interface with the computer systems; Tchick-tchick, the insect-like alien hive mind captaining their space craft; and Fennel Tycho, Jack’s former attaché and the tale’s first-person narrator. Their mission: to liberate six masterpieces of Earth art from a distant Celerian museum and replace them with exact copies. In the 21st century, humanity allowed the Celerians to temporarily safeguard these pieces in exchange for technological solutions to Earth’s “multifarious” problems, but the aliens subsequently refused to return them. The mission gets off to a rocky start when the team learns they no longer have corporate support—Tarquin has gone rogue. As they forge ahead, Fennel recounts the wacky sequence of events that brought her and humanity to this point, complicating the otherwise straightforward adventure with poignant observations about the significance of original art and art history. This bite-size romp is a wild and thought-provoking ride. (May)