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All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in September! tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Two years ago, Walter Jon Williams returned to the setting and subgenre of his ingeniously unconventional Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy with the first of a set of sequels, The Accidental War (now branded A Novel of the Praxis). Though perhaps I should call the series “multi-conventional,” since, while the packaging and promotional language correctly signal “space opera” and “military SF,” the books also include strong elements of romance (if not romantic comedy), novel-of-manners, and even crime/intrigue-thriller. The comparisons I settled on for the first three were to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin wooden-ship naval adventures and Jane Austen’s distinctly non-military novels of manners, money, and marriage. Those comparisons still apply, but in the new novel, ....