The publication calendar indicates July 29 as the release date of Twilight Galaxy: The Long Gambit. But the good news can be imparted. Sound the trumpets. Alert the town crier. Release the homing pigeons. The book is now available for preorder here. Score bragging rights, be the first on your block to own a copy. Help keep the lights on at Casa Lizzi. Enjoy a good read.
And that’s the hub about which all other considerations revolve–entertainment. In my, admittedly biased opinion, you’re in for a good read. A free trader on the edge of financial ruin risks all on tricky run. Space opera. Strange worlds. Breakdowns. Danger. Treachery. Romance. Pirates. Space pirates, to be precise. But don’t take just my word for the level of entertainment on offer. Take the equally biased word of the publisher, Raconteur Press:
“The Long Gambit is the second book in Ken Lizzi’s Twilight Galaxy — the ongoing saga of the free trader Long Gambit and the crew who keep her flying through a slowly collapsing galaxy.
Captain Pyater Welloons is one missed payment from losing everything. His ship is clamped to the pad for unpaid moorage fees, his accounts are nearly dry, and the only job on the board is a humanitarian rush run: twelve million doses of medicine for a plague-stricken backwater called Owming.
The catch is that Welloons has to source the drug himself — on Ixtpa, a planet where nearly everyone is chemically modified and the automated factories run themselves while the population drifts pleasantly toward oblivion. The one compound he needs has been bought up to the last ampule to treat a cattle plague on another world. So Welloons does the only thing a man in his position can do: he plans a heist.
What follows is a working-crew space adventure with teeth — a midnight break-in through an automated underground, a street ambush, a slow-motion brush with suffocation when a part nobody replaced finally fails, and an ambush by two pirate ships that knew exactly where the Long Gambit would be. The crew’s best hope turns out to be a piece of bargain-bin junk the captain told them to throw out.
And when the ship finally reaches Owming, Welloons discovers that delivering the medicine and getting it to the dying are two very different problems — and that the people who ordered it may be the last ones who want it to arrive.
For readers of working-ship, declining-empire space adventure in the tradition of C.J. Cherryh’s merchanters, Andre Norton’s Solar Queen, and Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper. Dry humor, a crew worth riding with, and a captain who keeps his word even when it costs him. The story is the point.”
Now, before I return to the job search, more marketing. If you’ve read this web log before, you know the drill. Here we go: You don’t need to have read book one of
Twilight Galaxy in order to enjoy book two. But it couldn’t hurt. Get your copy of
Twilight Galaxy: Dekason. Perhaps it won’t add years to your life or make you even more attractive than you already are, but why take the risk?
