Donald Maass Literary Agency

Booklist: Drayden’s latest (after Temper, 2018) is a sweeping, smart, stunning story that dazzles brighter than a star system. Seske Kaleigh is the young heir to the command of a starship that is comprised of the insides of a whale-like space beast. Adalla is her best friend and lover of a lower caste. The young girls are among the descendants of Africa, who resettled among the stars and rely on whale-like space beasts to keep them alive. They carve out cities within the interior body cavern of the beasts and make a home there until the beast begins to die. Then, they move on, catching and carving up the next beast in order to ensure their continued survival. When their clan’s newest excavated beast is assailed with violent tremors, the girls embark on a journey to unearth the cause and save their people’s new home. The premise of Escaping Exodus is a biology lover’s dream, with an animal’s bones being used for building material and its circulatory system for mass transit. Yet, Drayden excels in writing the tech in a way that will reach out and ensnares every reader—not just biology geeks. She has created a whimsical, complex, rich setting whose world is the literal anatomy of a beast. Interwoven with the body horror, environmentalism, and classism that Drayden artfully explores is a love story between two Black girls from different castes, making Escaping Exodus a true gem to be treasured.

Locus: One of the most irreverent characters I’ve encountered in a long time, Gideon Nav wants only to escape the House of the Ninth, a dark place populated by the dead and the few living necromancers that control them. Gideon, no necromancer but an enthusiastic swordswoman, keeps trying to escape and join the military Cohort, but her plans are continually foiled. Then she’s offered something new—if she accompanies the Lady of the Ninth House, the much-loathed necromancer Harrowhark, on a mission. The Emperor, the King Undying, has called for each house to send their first (Harrowhark) and their cavalier to be tested as potential Lyctors. The problem is the Ninth’s cavalier is unwilling, so Harrowhark drafts Gideon, and the two are off to another world where they end up in an incomprehensible contest against the other eight houses in a decaying, mazelike complex. Foul-mouthed Gideon is a joy to watch as she attempts to pass as a cavalier, falls for one of the competition, and basically spends a hell of a lot of time trying to figure out what’s going on—gradually learning to work with Harrowhark, and maybe even coming to appreciate her…Muir’s impressive first novel offers a heady and macabre mix of science, necromancy, constant danger, and a healthy dollop of Gormenghast-like weirdness like no other.

Kirkus: From the award-winning author of The Red-Stained Wings (2019, etc.), a collection of 27 tales published between 2005 and 2019, spanning most of Bear’s career. Readers familiar with Bear’s novels soon learn to expect the unexpected, with characters, worlds, and ideas eyed from drastically skewed perspectives. Who else would dream up a lactating vampire to whom the sun is no enemy, as Bear did in “Needles”? Or imagine a mortal Loki, banished from the Norse pantheon, as a god of rock music, as in “Hobnoblin Blues”? Mark Twain makes a guest appearance in a chewy murder mystery, “The Body of the Nation,” set in the author’s remarkable New Amsterdam universe and featuring the splendid Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett. We’re offered an early yet highly effective glimpse of the universe that will evolve into the stunning Steles of the Sky series, “Love Among the Talus,” while “Okay, Glory” shows us a reclusive, solipsistic genius forced to reinvent himself and the AI that’s imprisoning him. Elsewhere, “The Bone War,” Bear’s wry commentary on the real-world Bone Wars between 19th-century paleontologists O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope, evokes a wide grin. Two tales would wring tears from a stone: “Tideline,” about a dying battle machine whose last purpose is to memorialize her dead crew members, and “Orm the Beautiful,” an exquisitely fashioned fable of the last dragon—that’s also, possibly, a genuflection to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea tales…While Bear doesn’t preach or hector, there’s a message implicit in much of the work here: As individuals and as a species, we adapt, or we die. Eclectic and insightful, mostly, and well worth dipping into.