The Reference Library

The Reference Library
by Sean CW Korsgaard

I pen this column in early March, as the first warm winds of spring have come, and with them, some of the best times of the year for writers and readers, as convention season kicks off, publishers start dropping some of their major releases for the year, and hopefully plenty of you have begun to make progress on an ambitious reading list for the year.

By the time you’re reading this column in the fall, I hope you’ve continued to read plenty of great books, but with the end of the year fast approaching, maybe there’s something specific you haven’t quite found yet, or a gap in your schedule you hope to fill. Maybe a favorite subgenre you haven’t yet found the right book to scratch the itch of, or you’re looking for something outside your comfort zone.

I’m here to help, and so are the five books I’ve chosen to showcase this month in the Reference Library:

Books that range in style from pulp to poetry and everything in between; debut novels, new publishers, and new twists from longtime favorites; books that will refresh your spirit or push you to the edge of your seat.

We have three radically different visions of life on Mars, as well as three radically different ways of dealing with planetary invaders.

Each of these books is a standalone work, too, no commitment to a wider series required. If you want that, you’ll have to wait for my next column.

For now, let’s see if we can’t find the perfect book to make its way onto your reading list by the end of the year.

 

Matthew Kressel has a deserved reputation as one of the most inventive authors in the genre, both on and off the page—as you should when you give away trucker hats to promote your most recent book. He should also be no stranger to longtime Analog and Asimov’s readers, his most recent story “Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” appearing in the January/February 2025 issue of our sister magazine. Yet with The Rainseekers, he may have outdone even himself when it comes to surprises.

After much trial and tribulation, humanity made it out from the other side of several wars and climate crisis on Earth, and has begun expanding into the solar system. With what we learned restoring the Earth, Mars is not only being colonized but rapidly terraformed. Some pockets of the red planet now have breathable air, and even snow.

This is all background noise to Sakunja Salazar. She was once a social media influencer who’d risen from poverty in Mexico City to global superstardom, and everything that came with it. Limitless wealth, legions of fans, love and drugs all at the push of a button, at least before that all came crashing down, and in a massive crash out, she left the planet Earth on a binge across the settled solar system before settling into a new life on Mars. There, she has spent the past seven years drinking, indulging in multiple drugs, and barely making ends meet as a photographer.

It’s that career that earned her what could be one of the most unique journalism gigs in the solar system—joining an eccentric group of Martian colonists, numbering just forty-six amateur adventurers, and document their journey as they venture into the untouched alien wilderness where they hope to be the first people to experience rainfall from the Martian skies.

What follows quickly becomes far more than just a gig assignment, as she follows these pilgrims in a trek that reveals as much about Sakunja as it does her companions by the end.

For what is on the surface a remarkably simple premise—storm chasers looking to witness the first rain on a terraformed Mars—Kressel is to be commended to taking it into a much more complex, interesting direction. Sakunja Salazar, acting as a sort of science-fictional gonzo journalist a la Hunter S. Thompson—which in and of itself is a terrific concept for a main character—interviews the various members of the expedition and serves as the link between a series of short vignettes where we learn more about them and what brought them to this moment.

That is another daring narrative choice: largely setting aside any extended explanations regarding the technology or logistics of the expedition to hyperfocus on the human element and human spirit. Most of The Rainseekers’ chapters are structured like interviews being conducted by Sakunja, often complete with some of her own notes. Some are tragic, some are heartwarming or hilarious, and others the end result is one of the most heartfelt science fiction riffs on the Canterbury Tales since Hyperion.

The journey is not without its losses or its perils—Mars is still not an entirely tame world—but it’s one where by the end you’re as invested in the outcome as Sakunja is. It’s a slow burn, intimate and almost spiritually refreshing when the magic moment that our travelers—and by then, you, the reader—have been waiting for finally arrives. Kressel’s prose gives it all the magic and dignity that moment deserves.

By the time you’re reading this column, it would not surprise me to see this novel and Kressel both nominated for several genre awards, and it will have more than earned them. Take The Rainseekers out for a spin, and don’t be surprised if it doesn’t take long for you to pick it up again. To paraphrase one of the more lyrical lines from the novel, before Mars was the God of War, he was the God of Agriculture, and planets as well as people deserve second chances, as do books when they’re this good.

The protagonist of our next book could certainly use one, too.

 

The problem with traveling back in time to try and save the future is there’s a good chance nobody will believe you, or worse, they’ll think you’re mad.

This is exactly what happened to Dorothy Frasier, who awakens delirious on a bus in1950s Virginia, on her way for an extended stay in Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital. She has no memory of who she was before waking up on the bus, and is plagued by repeated violent, psychotic visions. She also has no explanation for how she’s learned a fine-tuned set of reflexive skills ranging from lockpicking to self-defense. Her diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia, and her pattern of disruptive behavior sees Dorothy heavily sedated and undergoing electroshock therapy. At least until Paul, a man claiming to be her husband, intervenes.

Unfortunately, what her doctors and increasingly Dorothy herself are convinced her psychotic visions are actually visions of the future, specifically that of Beatrix “Bix” Parris, a survivor of a viral pandemic that, by 2025, has killed 90 percent of people on Earth. She’s one of several volunteers sent back in time in a last ditch effort to stop the outbreak before it even starts, changing the future and saving billions of lives.

The clock is ticking however—in less than twenty-four hours, she has to make contact with someone at Hanover State who was also sent back in time, someone who will help her stop the outbreak before it begins. She has to be careful through—other people were also sent back, only their goal is to stop her.

What’s more, does the Dorothy part of her even want to sacrifice her future and potentially her life for the vague chance to save Bix’s? She has to figure out who she can trust, if she can even trust herself, and she only has one chance to get this right.

One part 12 Monkeys, one part One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with a heavy dose of woman’s lib mixed in, it’s a classic science fiction formula with a killer genre mashup that makes The Once and Future Me an intriguing thrill ride from start to finish. Time travel stories with a ticking clock are a stable of the genre for good reason, and this one manages to stand out from the pack in a lot of ways, largely for the better.

Of course, the big twist on that science fiction setup is setting much of it in a 1950s psychiatric ward, an era where mental healthcare was the stuff of horror movies, and when the cutting-edge treatment for everyone from traumatized World War II veterans to “hysterical” housewives was the frontal lobotomy. It’s a classic setting in period stories for a reason, with the additional horror of Dorothy/Bix being a woman in one of these mental asylums for added tension. Pace manages to make readers squirm as much as her protagonist every page spent in Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, enough to make even a more jaded reader uncomfortable.

The Once and Future Me is not without its flaws, though small—the exposition is rough and clunky, and it dallies a bit too long with Dorothy wondering if her visions of the future are real or not long after the novel has let the reader know that they are. Still, this is the debut novel for longtime magazine editor Pace, an ambitious freshman effort, and I’ll be interested to see what she writes next.

 

Everyone remembers the exact moment they were reading a book where they fell in love with the science fiction genre for life. For me, that moment came somewhere between Ender Wiggin’s trials in battle school and Arthur Dent turning tohis companion in a panic as reality warps, shouting “Ford . . . you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it!”

Genre fiction and comedy can be a very hard combination to pull off properly, and one that can go wrong very quickly, so it’s no small thing to see just how rapidly Matt Dinniman has earned himself a spot as the medium’s best humorist since Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. His Dungeon Crawler Carl series, in addition to leading the charge in the ongoing LitRPG boom, are themselves some of the most wickedly funny books I’ve read in ages. I came very near to reviewing the first book in the series for the Reference Library—deciding against it only because alien reality television shows aside, it is decidedly a work of fantasy, not science fiction.

The same cannot be said for Dinniman’s latest novel, Operation Bounce House, which I’m pleased to share is purely science fiction while losing none of Dungeon Crawler Carl’s sense of humor.

Farmer Oliver Lewis is not an overly ambitious man, even by the standards of planetary backwater New Sonoma. He spends most of his days trying to keep the drones that run his family ranch from breaking down, his rare free days playing gigs with his band, and is trying to move past a bitter breakup with his girlfriend. This has been the quiet life most colonists have enjoyed since just over a dozen generation ships settled New Sonora nearly a century ago.

That life isn’t so quiet anymore—a year after it was completed and opened, the gate connecting New Sonoma back to Earth finally started spitting something out, in the form of a giant warship filled with mecha. This is Operation Bounce House, an authorized “eviction action” being carried out by Apex Industries, with a legion of remotely controlled mecha each sold to the highest bidder on Earth, each utterly convinced they’re clearing out nests of dangerous radicals and hostile mutants, not gunning down farmers. Not that some of the outright sociopathic remote pilots recruited for this would care even if they did.

With some of Earth’s rich and famous now paying for the privilege of hunting him down, Oliver is going to have to rise to the occasion and fight back alongside his friends, family, and Roger, the ancient AI system that was tasked with running the day-to-day duties of the ranch, and now finally gets to test its limits. They’ll need all the help they can get—especially when it turns out that profit and real estate acquisitions might not be the only thing that put New Sonoma in Apex Industry’s crosshairs, or the true objective of Operation Bounce House.

The initial pitch of Operation Bounce House is twofold: how absurd it would look to have the idle rich and most sociopathic members of your average Internet comment section put in charge of the front lines of an interstellar war, and how terrifying being on the receiving end of that would be, no matter who is calling the shots.

There’s also an undercurrent of thought-fulness behind the jokes and satire. Operation Bounce House is more grounded, while retaining Dinniman’s signature absurdities. It certainly occurred to me while reading this that we’ve watched several real-world conflicts over the past couple of years get any truth about them muddied with terrifying speed as all sides have been lobbing deep fakes and AI videos at each other as fast as bombs and bullets. Toss in the obvious parallels to drone warfare—what is a war for their very existence on New Sonoma measured in thousands of lives is a literal pay-to-play game on Earth, the only cost being rolling out new robots—and this combination is as much a source of horror in the book as it is for laughs.

Oliver and company also make for a wonderful cast, warm and relatable from the start, right before the invasion forces them to do things and go places they’d hoped never to go. There’s also hints of tragedies and secrets of New Sonoma we get to see as events unfold, and speculation on the nature of sentience and what length beings—not just people—will go to survive.

For any readers who are also audiobook listeners, Dinniman’s prose is once more paired with Jeff Hays, hot off the heels of the award-winning Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks, this time bringing Travis Baldree along for the ride, so if you’ve got an Audible credit burning a hole in your pocket, this one is well worth it.

Operation Bounce House is an action-packed and often darkly hilarious book that retains enough wit and edge to give its satire bite. Its heroes are easy to root for, especially given the nature of what they’re facing, and the slow burn mystery that grows and unfolds just as you think the book might run out of gas will keep you guessing until the end.

That said, if you like your tales of resisting the invader a bit more grounded and a lot more bloody . . .

 

In an industry too often dominated by closures and contraction, the launch of a new publisher is one to treat with great interest. Newcomer Ark Press certainly chose an interesting choice for one of their debut efforts with Red State Mars, another in the long tradition of Mars colony stories. This particular one is perhaps very well timed for the United States Semiquincentennial this year, as the Spirit of ’76 comes knocking to the Red Planet.

The string of Martian city-states have for decades been content to develop their own frontier societies, left largely in splendid isolation from their terrestrial American and Chinese progenitors as Earth recovers from a devastating war. The names and dreams of those first settlers still loom large, and the result has been a budding Martian civilization, one that for all the differences between individual city-states, prospers with a mixture of clan-like family loyalty and brisk free trade.

That peaceful isolation comes to a brutal end as the new reactionary government of China seizes control of its wayward colonies, and begins to turn the screws on the former American colonies in a bid for control of the entire Red Planet. Tolls and tribute replace trade, force replaces friendship, and eventually open hostility breaks out between the two sides over the future of Mars.

The remaining city-states of Mars are not at all united in the direction they should take, ranging from seeking intervention from Earth, armed resistance, or even yielding to demands of tribute. Those debates are increasingly drowned out by violence as domes and settlements are shattered and trade ships shot down, and the various clans of free Mars are soon forced to rally together behind an ancient battle cry: Join or Die.

Clearly drawing heavy inspiration from both the American and Texan Wars of Independence, for all the vast stakes of the interplanetary war at its center, Red State Mars is an incredibly family-centric story. All of the events, from the initial trade tensions to open war, are told from the viewpoints of a handful of members of the extended Newcastle, Mackenzie, Atkins, Hylton, and Hollins families. This adds a lot of personality and a personal touch to the debates, and a true cost to the conflict as it grows out of control. Red State Mars reads like John Jakes’ Kent Family Chronicles by way of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.

The structure of the Martian city-states and the clans that dominate them also makes for a unique approach to space colonization we don’t often see more of in science fiction, that of an actual frontier society. I live in Virginia, where one only has to look at street names and local landmarks to see the lingering influence those first few farmers and tradesmen can have on a society even centuries later. The settlements of Red State Mars are very much in the middle of that transition, still small enough that the early families loom large, but big enough that the societies around them are taking shape after them. It adds a lot to the world building and makes some of the tensions between characters make more sense, i.e., the Mackenzie clan is descended from venture capitalists, so it makes sense their city-state is dominated by trade. It makes the Nine Cities of Mars feel like more than just spots on a map, though I do lament we don’t get to see just which version of Robert A. Heinlein the city named for him took inspiration from.

We also get some very brief glimmers of just what kind of horrors the Earth went through during a devastating World War III that happened decades before the events of Red State Mars, with enough biological and nuclear weapons tossed about to entirely change the map. The capitol of the United States is now in Pittsburgh, and part of why the new Chinese government is turning its eyes toward Mars is it has fallen under the sway of a government increasingly guided by eugenics and genetic tailoring. It’s enough to almost leave you curious enough for a prequel, following how Earth went to hell while Mars developed in isolation.

While I shouldn’t be surprised given Travis Concoran is a two-time Prometheus Awardwinner, I have to commend Red State Mars for taking some time to address some of the actual concerns of running a war or governing a domed city on Mars, especially when preserving a sense of personal liberty where even the air you breath is artificial. Concoran also shows a very innovative eye towards his combat scenes, be it the little details—I say “little” as if figuring out how small arms and armor would operate in Martian atmosphere and gravity is an easy feat—or grand set pieces utilizing the Martian landscape, including a climax that will forever change the way you look at Phobos.

Red State Mars is more than just a fun transplanting of the American War of Independence in space, but a deep dive into how a frontier society develops and what pressures and actions force that society to grow and stand on its own feet. This was written to be a standalone work, but I’d very much like to follow the clans of Mars and see just what kind of state they make for themselves moving forward given a chance.

And just in case your preferred flavor of Martian science fiction is a bent more towards the classical . . .

 

It’s rather exciting that as we’ve finally begun to see new works released into the public domain over the past few years, we’ve not only started to see many of these works reprinted and recirculated for a new generation of readers, but we’ve also started to see a new generation of authors start to play around with some of the earliest works of science fiction, often with fantastic results.

This includes one of the first science fiction settings to capture the world’s imagination, that of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom. This isn’t even the first work I’ve covered in the Reference Library to do this—that would be Warlord by Doc Spears—but Guns of Mars could yet be one of the boldest.

Barsoom has long been a dying world, but now it nears its death throes. The canals have long run dry, the Jeddaks are gone, and civilization survives now almost entirely in a few struggling cities near the shrinking ice caps at the poles, while everything in between them has taken a desperate, savage turn.

Two of the most savage are Kal Keddaq, a Thark outlaw with a death sentence on his head placed by a Warhoon chieftain whose daughter he ran out on, and the bronze-skinned human bounty hunter tasked with bringing him back alive so they can carry out the sentence, answering only to John. If one does not manage to kill the other in transit, there’s no shortage of dangers to them both on the journey south, be it the wildlife, raiders, dehydration, or a mysterious, pale-skinned hooded stranger seemingly hunting both of them.

The two form an uneasy partnership when Kal and John stumble upon a wreck of an old airship, one that points towards a treasure that would change not only their fortunes, but those of everyone on Barsoom: a vast reservoir of clean, fresh water. It’s a prize many—including both of them—can and will kill for, guaranteeing encounters with terrifying foes and untrustworthy allies every step of the way. These one-time foes will have to learn to fight together quickly—especially as a presence that threatens every life on this dying planet makes itself known.

This is not the first time we’ve seen a wildly different version of Barsoom—most recently, Dark Tides of Mars and Gauntlets of Mars, both by Chris Adams, are set eons in the past, on a Barsoom still lush with oceans and greenery—but rarely do we see it as bleak as this. Nearly gone is the planetary romance, it’s grittier and more morally ambiguous, each day a desperate struggle to survive. The era of derring-do and heroics of John Carter may be long past, but it’s in desperate need of that spirit once again—and watching our two amoral protagonists rise to that challenge as the story progresses is one of the pleasures of the Guns of Mars.

Chuck Dixon has a long-earned reputation for writing hardscrabble heroes facing long odds, be it his enormous body of work in the comic book industry, or his Levon Cade thriller novels. Still, he handles pulp science fiction prose like an old hand, while bringing a master’s touch to his action and setting a scene. The scrapes facing Kal Keddaq and John are no exceptions, and there is a brutality to the action and grace to the swashbuckling that should leave both fans of Burroughs and Dixon equally satisfied.

There is a similar brutality to this far future Barsoom as well, yet also beauty. The desolate vistas, ruined cities, and dry canals give Guns of Mars an almost western feel, a Martian True Grit that owes as much to Sergio Leone as Edgar Rice Burroughs. The novel should also be commended for avoiding any damsels in distress, and even having a Thark main viewpoint character that feels fully fleshed out, including flaws, but never a stereotype.

The hardcover editions also have some lovely black-and-white artwork, and the cover from illustrator Joe Bennett is delightfully striking, a worthy addition to the proud tradition of Barsoom-inspired science fiction art.

On the whole, Guns of Mars is an action-adventure story that more than brings its own approach to the classic sword-and-planet tales of Barsoom, while still remaining faithful to its style and spirit. For those of you who are looking for a new take on a genre classic, Guns of Mars delivers that and more with a bang.