Rob, who thought he was training to be a forest ranger, is on his first away mission as a forensic auditor. It turns out that his survivalist skills come in handy on a planet with disputed mining claims.
The story is competently plotted, but the prose is not impressive. Here, for example, is a bit of description charitably described as filler:

That side was closed off with a tough transparent material. Apparently not the glass or transparent metal that it would have been most places in the Empire, but what Astrid had told him was the traditionally used quartz.
“Healthier that way, too,” she said. Lets in the UV you need to make Vitamin D. Not much sunlight down in the mines.”

The Shadow of the Leviathan series, which seems to have been retitled more prosaically as Ana and Din Mysteries, features complex plots with investigators reminiscent of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. The stories are set in an Empire whose aristocracy and minor functionaries have been given biotech modifications that produce drug-triggered paranormal abilities. Ana wears a blindfold, takes drugs, and performs rituals that give her Holmesian insight. Her partner, Din, does the legwork and reports to her with detailed memories associated with specific aromas.

In A Drop of Corruption, Ana and Din travel to Yarrowdale, a canton on the border of the empire. Its economy is based on producing valuable psychoactive drugs from the “shroud” of dead leviathans. If you are thinking ambergris from the head of Moby Dick, you are not far from the mark. A treasury official has been murdered. But, of course, that is just the start.

Din is thinking about leaving police work to join the regular army, but Ana predicts he will change his mind. I won’t do plot spoilers, but in the end, Ana is like Terry Pratchett’s Commander Vimes in that she sees her job as keeping her blindfolded eyes on those who think kings are a good idea.

Bennett has already won a big handful of awards, and this one will likely win some more.

The Murderbot Diaries is a series that continues to entertain. In Platform Decay, Murderbot is on a mission to rescue some of Dr. Mensah’s relatives from a shambolic toroidal habitat, whose governing structure and travel options change or disappear every few kilometers. Along the way, he picks up some other humans, including children. Is Murderbot getting soft? Well, maybe. He now has an app that has him frequently check his emotional state. When he thinks about killing people, he often refrains because he doesn’t want to offend his clients, which leads to much internal snark.
I liked this one more than I did System Collapse. The plot is more straightforward, and the clients are entertaining.

Twelve-year-old Jericho spent his time in an orphanage studying the economics of interstellar trade. When he gets a job as a cabin boy on a family-run trading ship, he amazes everyone with his ability to turn a profit. It shows the influence of Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper novels. Lowell is a much better writer.

Col. Butler has a hard time staying retired. He can’t turn down a friend who asks him to investigate the apparent kidnapping of his teenage daughter. It is not long before he finds himself running an off-planet military op with his friends Mac and Ganos. Well-drawn characters and a clever plot that mashes up noir mystery and military action make Blindside a page-turner, but I did find the corporate villain hard to buy. I especially liked the realistic detail of Butler worrying about how long his retirement nest egg will last if he has to finance a large-scale covert op.

A generation starship in mid-flight suffers a power failure that requires its first-generation crew to be brought out of hibernation. Who done it, and why?

This one gets a mixed review. On the plus side, we have a complex, multicultural crew with some original, well-rounded characters. The population of the ship is as diverse as a Cairo phonebook, if there still is such a thing, and there are no doubt allusions to recent Egyptian history that I am missing. An author’s note explains that the protests in Tahrir Square inspired one scene. However, the ship also has a complex backstory that is never adequately explained. Right now, the book is a standalone debut novel, but I would not be surprised to hear that a prequel or sequel is on the way.

Jack Campbell is best known for his military science fiction novels, but Ad Astra shows that he can write non-military Analog stories when the occasion demands. Some of the stories in this collection spin current news events into a space opera setting. Others make fun of NASA PR-speak and its well-known penchant for nannying astronauts. In one of the best of the collection, he gives a spacecraft’s AI something akin to an autoimmune disease.

Marko Kloos, a German who now lives in New Hampshire, writes entertaining straight-ahead military science fiction. In this sequel to Scorpio, Alex, a girl who survived for years on a colony planet infested with huge intelligent saurians with bad attitudes, is now an infantry private sent into battle again. Kloos, as always, provides believable weaponry, intriguing tactics, and characters who are easy to root for. I miss the dog from Scorpio. I think he Kloos is planning to bring it back in Cygnus, which is now on my to-read list. 3.5 (no dog)

After the war between California and the United States, machines with emerging intelligence are given civil rights. A group of them reopens an abandoned noodle shop in San Francisco. There is Stay Behind, a repurposed military bot; Hands, who makes the noodles; Cayenne, who has a sense of taste; and Sweetie, a humanoid bot who lets her metal shine through. Can they overcome anti-robot reviews and avoid being recycled?
There is some sharp satire aimed at red-state America, but the tone is ever-so-cozy.

Set in an early era of the Skolian Empire, Undercity is a hardboiled detective story. Major Bhaajan was a tough kid who grew up in an impoverished community beneath the city. After her time in the military, she works as a PI investigating the kidnapping of an aristocrat. Her lover is a gambler whose moral compass does not always point the same way hers does, but she is more at home with the “dust rats” of the aqueducts than with the cultured folks who hire her. In the end, she discovers that the dust rats have unexpected qualities the upper city needs.

Oz is a Navy ensign assigned to command a squad of Marines on a first-contact mission. He was an enlisted man who rose through the ranks. He has leadership skills, but he needs a crash course in Marine tactics. Eventually, his squad and the snooty scientists they must protect are glad to have him. It is a tense Hornblower-in-space adventure that kept me up late.

Radiant Star is Ann Leckie’s new standalone set on a planet that has escaped its star system. The population lives underground and worships the star that isn’t there. They have a shrine, called the Temporal Location, that features sainted mummies said to be revivable if and when a star shows up. I think Leckie gives a tip of the hat to Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series.

The new imperial governor and the tired old warship, Justice of Albis, find themselves out of contact with Imperial leadership and face daunting problems introducing Radch culture. They learn, for example, what a bad idea it is to fool with a carefully balanced ecosystem. There is a hilarious chapter (“Hymn”) that describes the fragile relationship between sea rot, the city water supply, and the onion crop.

A book witch is charged with corralling characters who have escaped from their texts. You don’t want pages to go missing from Pride and Prejudice just because Lizzie wants to take a gander at the Pacific. And, a book witch should not fall for a fictional character, so of course, that happens here. Meg Shaffer has fun playing with the tropes of several literary genres, which does not prevent The Book Witch from being a readable cozy mystery romance.

Caveat: Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series does something similar with more complexity and wit.

Neal Stephenson is best known as a science fiction writer associated with cyberpunk. But Polostan is not science fiction; it is a historical novel that reads like science fiction. Niels Bohr makes an appearance. Characters discuss nuclear physics, including cosmic rays and the health effects of ionizing radiation. Our heroine even dates a lad named Proton, who is a pilot in a high-altitude balloon experiment.

Our heroine, named Dawn (or something else if the occasion requires), bounces back and forth between Montana and Soviet Russia with a stop at the 1933-1934 Chicago World’s Fair’s City of the Future. Along the way, she has an unfortunate pregnancy, gets tortured by the NKVD, learns to assemble and aim a Tommy gun, and plays polo with the cavalry in both countries.

A studio should buy it up, because every tall actress in Hollywood would be panting to play Dawn.

A special ops team fights multidimensional robots. Angela Brown is back. Bob, the battle operations bot, is back. But it doesn’t help. It is just one combat scene after another with not much story in between. That is a shame. Solitude, the first book in the Dimension Space series, was quite original and readable.

Cachalot is a water world inhabited by evolved cetaceans with telepathic abilities. Suddenly, they begin destroying human habitats. Human visitors have with them a new multisensory musical instrument that plays a role in the plot. This 1980 Del Rey novel got a boost from cover art by Darrell Sweet, picturing a whale surfacing near a small futuristic ship.

The story is entertaining enough, but it does not rise to the level established by Zelazny’s “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth” (1965).
David Brin’s Startide Rising would outdo it again in 1983, and Asher’s 2002 Skinner also does a better job with a similar premise.

Earth is fighting an interstellar war, and 16-year-olds are being recruited as starfighter pilots. The fighters still use hydrazine as fuel. Mmm. The plot intersperses combat scenes with PG-13 sex. After a while, the plot becomes a mashup of Maverick and Enemy Mine.
It is all routine, but not terrible, so why only one-star reviews? The book was originally published by Whiskey Creek Press in 2012. Whiskey Creek was purchased by Start Publishing in 2014. Bara seems to have decided to publish a Kindle Unlimited edition in 2023, but for reasons unknown, the last half of the book has not been posted, leaving only “insert text here” placeholders. So no one could read the new edition.
I read the Whiskey Creek e-book, so at least a few stars from me.

Collum is a country kid who has had to learn to fight dirty. His dream is to become a knight and serve King Arthur, but when he gets to Camelot, he discovers Arthur is dead and the Round Table ain’t what it used to be. What will become of England now in this grim post-heroic world?

Grossman gives us a long, episodic tale focused on the secondary characters of the Arthurian legend. It’s Camelot with a twenty-first-century sensibility. It goes without saying that Thomas Malory's language has been freshened up. My favorite word in Malory is “smote”: It occurs 298 times. Here’s a sample from Chapter 14 in Le Morte D’Arthur: “Then King Lot saw King Nentres on foot, he ran unto Melot de la Roche, and smote him down, horse and man, and gave King Nentres the horse, and horsed him again. Also the King of the Hundred Knights saw King Idres on foot; then he ran unto Gwiniart de Bloi, and smote him down, horse and man, and gave King Idres the horse, and horsed him again; and King Lot smote down Clariance de la Forest Savage, and gave the horse unto Duke Eustace.”

Grossman, bless his heart, uses the word only twice. Here’s his first homage to Malory: “The boy knight smote the first one so hard that not only he but his horse went down, struggled to rise, then lay still again in the dust of the road.”

Peng Shepherd based The Cartographers on a factoid—early highway mapmakers would hide small fictional places on maps to protect their copyrights. Turn one of these places into a magical realm that can be reached only if you are looking at a copy of the map that shows it.

On that hook, Shepherd attaches a two-generational murder mystery plot. Young Nel is an engaging character, but the older librarians are not just pegs for plot details.

I also wish the plot had provided more information about the history and practice of cartography. I will confess that some respectable reviewers liked the book more than I did, so maybe I am missing something. 3.5

At its heart, Cyber Way is a police procedural with an X-Files vibe. A Tampa art dealer and his housekeeper are murdered in the attempted theft of a sand painting. The painting is destroyed in the process. The trail leads a veteran cop out west, where he teams up with an officer in the Navajo police. So far, it is a story that Tony Hillerman could have written better.

But then they discover that images from the painting connect to an ancient AI that really messes with their green-screen computers. Oooo-eeee-ooo.

It’s a theme at least as old as Kipling: what do you do with dangerous soldiers when the war is over? The soldiers in question are physically enhanced and genetically modified to feel pleasure when they go into a rage. They are designed to go rogue. Mod soldier Ander Rade is pulled out of prison by a task force to hunt down a former teammate who is committing terrorism on behalf of corrupt politicians. It’s hard-boiled action drama.
Richard K Morgan does it better in his Black Man series, especially Thirteen (a.k.a. Black Man and Th1rte3n).

I would not be surprised to learn that Mackey Chandler’s April is a 14-year-old incarnation of Heinlein’s Lazarus Long. Certainly, he would approve of her shooting the toes off some bothersome paparazzi on her visit to Earth. It is a popcorn read.

Of the nineteen stories in this anthology, eleven are by authors I always read with relish. Six more are by writers I will read again when the chance arises. Only a couple were not to my taste.
Bottom line: For me, this was an excellent anthology of short stories.

A clan of free miners in the Kuiper Belt spots an incoming alien starship. They are beset by corporate claim jumpers and are unprepared for an alien encounter. Will Earth get the news in time?
A prequel to Ender’s Game is unnecessary a quarter of a century after the original. The novel has a good near-future asteroid mining story that is rendered almost incoherent by all the scene-switching to characters the novel gives us no reason to care about.
Most of the space technology is plausible, but Card could do a better job of explaining how our hero Victor maneuvers and navigates his spacecraft from the Kuiper Belt to the Moon. How does he power and provision a ship that must maintain an average cruising speed of over 300 Kilometers per second for seven months?

A man working on a VR system ominously called Pinocchio wakes up in a body that is a dozen years younger than the one he had yesterday. You guessed it: he’s a sim, but where is his meat body?

Hogan had the computer chops to write a state-of-the-art virtual reality tale, but Realtime Interrupt never tells us enough about the tech to make us suspend our disbelief. I wish Neal Stephenson or William Gibson had written it.

Kiela is a committed librarian at the Empire’s Great Library. When revolutionaries break in with torches, she escapes with a few books of magic and sails to her home island. What follows is a cozy fantasy romance in which Kiela struggles to keep her illegal magic books a secret while trying to use them to improve life on the island. A couple of sapient plants are amusing.

Rapport is a thirty-four-page short story marketed like a novel. You can do that these days with interstitial stories in a popular series. There is no plot to speak of. Its function is to introduce us to Peri/ART’s crew. It tucks in somewhere between Artificial Condition and Network Effect. Is it always the case that Wells gives her shortest pieces the longest titles?

I have not been a gamer since I plugged in my last floppy drive to play lo-rez D&D. So I am not the intended audience for litRPG. The stats and repeated battles put me to sleep. I will acknowledge that there is some wit and original stage business in Dungeon Crawler Carl. And I needed a good nap.

Edna is a Muggle woman living in a nursing home that does not have enough magic to enchant a bedpan. So she is surprised when a wizard pops in (literally) to tell her she has been named the Chosen One to recover the Sword of Destiny and take down a bandit who is using dragons to attack knights. It is a post that usually goes to teenagers. I was amused that a nurse sent the wizard out again to get a visitor’s pass.

Once the plot starts, the prose loses some of its luster. We have epic fantasy, young adult fantasy, and urban fantasy, so why not geezer fantasy? I just wish it didn’t read so much like YA fantasy. Edna should have stuck me with her knitting needles to keep me awake.

It is hard to know what to make of this fictionalized biography of Philip K. Dick. The New York Times said it gives us a “bubble gum” treatment of Dick’s fiction, and that’s about right, but it reads a bit like a Dick story, and suggests that Scanner Darkly may be about as autobiographical as anything Dick ever wrote. There are no notes and no sources, so who knows what you can believe. Which seems to have been Dick’s attitude about reality, so there you go. 3.5.