Skip to main content

Featured

October Daye / Inheritance - Essay Series Part Five: Long Series and How to Read Them

Hello Patrons and general audience members! Welcome to another Books That Burn essay by Robin. Thank you to Case Aiken, who receives a monthly Patron shoutout. [Full Audio Available Here] This is the fifth and final entry in a five-part essay series discussing two long-running book series by queer authors: October Daye by Seanan McGuire, and Inheritance by A.K. Faulkner. I chose these series because I love them both, they were intended from the start to be long series, neither of them are finished yet, and the authors have different structural approaches to developing each series across so many volumes. Purely coincidentally, they are both long-running contemporary fantasy series mainly set in California in or near the 2010's, with major characters named Quentin, and whose fast-healing protagonists have a tendency to quasi-adopt a gaggle of magical teenagers. After a brief moment in the 1990's, October Daye begins in earnest in 2009 and has reached 2015 as of the eighteenth boo...

Frontier by Grace Curtis

In the distant future most of the human race has fled a ravaged Earth to find new life on other planets. For those who stayed a lawless society remains. Technology has been renounced, and saints and sinners, lawmakers and sheriffs, travelers and gunslingers, abound.

What passes for justice is presided over by the High Sheriff, and carried out by his cruel and ruthless Deputy.

Then a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet’s first visitor in three hundred years. This Stranger is a crewmember on the first ship in centuries to attempt a return to Earth and save what’s left. But her escape pod crashes hundreds of miles away from the rest of the wreckage.

The Stranger finds herself adrift in a ravaged, unwelcoming landscape, full of people who hate and fear her space-born existence. Scared, alone, and armed, she embarks on a journey across the wasteland to return to her ship, her mission, and the woman she loves.

Fusing the fire and brimstone of the American Old West with sprawling post-apocalyptic science fiction, FRONTIER is a heartfelt queer romance in a high noon standoff set against the backdrop of our planet’s uncertain future.

PUBLISHER: Solaris
YEAR: 2023
LENGTH: 287 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Romance, Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Main Character(s), Gay/Achillean Secondary Character(s), Ace/Aro Main Character(s).

FRONTIER is a post-apocalyptic story with Wild West vibes, religious bigotry, petty tyrants, and former space soldier trying to find the person she lost.

I love the opening chapter, it sets up the book's tone in a way that is followed through very well. As the traveler moves around, trying to find something with a signal strong enough to reach space, there are a series of vignette. These snippets build a sense of people's lives in different communities and settlements and the roads in between. So many facets of their lives imply this more complicated whole, without it ever trying to be about any one of them, nor pulling attention from the traveler from space. 

The language and word choice is inseparable from the worldbuilding. There seems to be one main religion, a handful of agnostics, and as many ways to interpret the basic tenets as there are characters. The current human inhabitants of Earth are the descendants of a particular religious sect that believed some combination of the Earth being god with climate change as her punishment. These people stayed behind when humanity went to the stars. Now, heir descendants distrust anything that comes from space or is too technologically sophisticated, but what is "like space" or "too much technology" varies wildly from community to community, sheriff to sheriff, religious leader to agnostic nomad. 

I loved every page and I want there to be more. This is perfectly paced in its current length but I wish it weren't over.

Graphic/Explicit CW for xenophobia.

Moderate CW for cursing, ableism, bullying, blood, violence, gun violence, murder, death.

Minor CW for fire, drug use, medical content, vomit, war, colonization.

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link

Add this on TheStoryGraph

A silhouette of someone in a long coat and cowboy hat, in a barren field in front of a full moon which fills the sky


Comments

Popular Posts