Book Review: Superb Hard SF from Katharine Kerr

Haze, by Katharine Kerr (ARC Manor)

Katharine Kerr is one of the most versatile writers of speculative fiction. Although many readers know her best for her long-running “Deverry” fantasy series, she also writes superb urban fantasy and hard science fiction, with such works as Polar City Blues and Freeze Frames. Now she returns to a far future when interstellar civilization depends on travel through hyperspace stargate shunts. Kerr’s universe is richly detailed, enormous in scope of space and history, replete with ancient grudges between sapient races, current politics, and plots-within-plots. And a mystery: the shunts are supposed to be permanent, anchored at each end to nearby planets, but something—or some ONE—has accomplished the impossible and destroyed a shunt. Which vital route will be the next target?

We are drawn into the story through Dan, an immensely talented starship pilot capable of linking with a ship’s AI to navigate the shunts. Like other pilots, he uses the drug Haze to blunt his craving for the transcendent experience of hyperspace when he’s not working. But Haze is highly addictive, and Dan’s use of it has gotten him cashiered out of Fleet, destitute, and turning tricks on Nowhere Street on a backwater planet to feed his habit. When Fleet offers him a way back to his old job, under the care of his former lover, Devit, and enough Haze to keep him functional, Dan doesn’t have a choice. There’s a reason he’s refused treatment for Haze addiction, a secret he guards with his life. Disguised as merchant traders, he and his new crew begin investigating the disappearance of the shunt. And that’s when things start to go seriously wrong.

Kerr’s use of Dan as an initial viewpoint character who introduces us to this world is brilliant. He’s at turns fallible, aggravating, and heart-breakingly attractive. The offspring of a noted film beauty, he’s been genetically modified to be sexually irresistible to both men and women, and to unconsciously respond to their advances. Devit has been the only person in his life to care about him as a person, but at a terrible cost. In this society, both bisexuality and polyamory are widely accepted, but relationships like theirs are fraught with challenges. Anyone who’s ever loved a person with substance abuse issues knows how painful and impossibly difficult it can be. As Devit grows closer to legendary cyberjock Jorja, their problems and the choices both must face become more urgent.

As the mystery unfolds, with a nuanced pacing of plot reversals and surprises, layers of both human and alien cultures emerge. One of the more fascinating of these is the relationship—sometimes symbiotic, often sullenly adversarial—between human pilots or cyberjocks and the AIs that run ships, stations, archives, and more. Scholars find themselves at cross-purposes with the military that is supposed to protect them. Old feuds between species simmer just below the surface. The revelation at the end is highly satisfactory, meticulously plotted, and a fresh surprise.

It's hard to list the strengths of this remarkable novel because there are so many. They include exceptional world-building, social systems and relationships, hardware and AIs, and most of all, the characters. People find themselves trapped with no healthy way forward, like Dan and Devit. They try new strategies and alliances, not always successful. As they confront new situations or old ones come back to haunt them, they struggle to move beyond the past. Wounded, recovering, and scarred, their lives can never be the same. In other words, Kerr’s fully rounded characters change and grow in ways that drive the story forward.

Award-worthy and highly recommended for lovers of space science fiction.

What We Lose, What We Gain

Wright & Teague Delphi Rings

I wrote this post in 2011. Still true, perhaps even more so now.

Some years ago - like maybe a decade - most of my jewelry was stolen. None of it was very valuable, although there were some pearls and jade and a little amber, and a lovely pair of moonstone stud earrings. But, as is the way of things, each piece had a story that was part of my life. That was the real value, and hence the deepest loss. I'd had some of them since my childhood, and some had been gifts from loved ones who've since died. Some of it was my mother's.

I went through the expected rage and frenzy, scouring local flea markets in the forlorn hope that I might spot a piece or two. Of course, I did not. When that stage had run its course, the police report filed (and, doubtless, forgotten), anger turned to grief, and grief to acceptance, and acceptance to looking in a new way at what I'd lost.

I wrote in my journal that the thieves had taken bits of minerals, crystals, shells, fossilized tree sap, but they could not steal:

the stories in my mind
the books I've written
my children
the redwoods
my dreams
my friends
their kindness and generosity to me
my capacity for joy...

Short Book Reviews: A Cozy Battle-Orc Fantasy

 Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree (Tor)

Is there such a thing as a cozy high fantasy with a female battle-orc heroine? Elves, dwarves, enchanted swords, necromancers…and spicy romance novels? Yes to all of this, because Travis Baldree has invented the subgenre!

Bookshops & Bonedust is a delightful prequel to Legends and Lattes, although each works beautifully on its own.

Recuperating from wounds incurred in the hunt for a powerful necromancer, battle-orc soldier-of-fortune Viv finds herself in the sleepy beach town of Murk with nothing to do. In desperation born of overwhelming boredom, she follows the literary suggestions of Fern, the ratkin owner of a dying bookstore. Any fantasy reader worth their salt knows what comes next! Not only is Viv drawn into the enchanted world of novels but she sets about reviving the bookstore, complete with a surprise appearance by the elf author of fabled romance adventures. Along the way, Viv encounters a gnome with a chip on her shoulder, a retired mercenary turned baker extraordinaire, a mysterious traveler in gray, and a talking bag of bones. All is not hunky-dory in Murk, however, for the necromancer responsible for Viv’s injury is still on the loose…

I loved every page of it!

Reprint: Traumatic Bereavement and How to Help

 

When grief involves trauma − a social worker explains how to support survivors of the recent floods and other devastating losses

Rain falls over a makeshift memorial for flood victims along the Guadalupe River on July 13, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas. AP Photo/Eric Gay

Liza Barros-Lane, University of Houston-Downtown

The July 4, 2025, floods in Kerr County, Texas, swept away children and entire families, leaving horror in their wake. Days later, flash floods struck Ruidoso, New Mexico, killing three people, including two young children.

These are not just devastating losses. When death is sudden, violent, or when a body is never recovered, grief gets tangled up with trauma.

In these situations, people don’t only grieve the death. They struggle with the terror of how it happened, the unanswered questions and the shock etched into their bodies.

I’m a social work professor, grief researcher and the founder of The Young Widowhood Project, a research initiative aimed at expanding scholarship and public understanding of premature spousal loss.

I was widowed when I was 36. In July 2020, my husband, Brent, went missing after testing a small, flat-bottomed fishing boat called a Jon boat. His body was recovered two days later, but I never saw his remains.

Both my personal loss and professional work have shown me how trauma changes the grieving process and what kind of support actually helps.

To understand how trauma can complicate grief, it’s important to first understand how people typically respond to loss.

Grief isn’t a set of stages

Many people still think of grief through the lens of psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, popularized in the early 1970s: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

But in fact, this model was originally designed for people facing their own deaths, not for mourners. In the absence of accessible grief research in the 1960s, it became a leading framework for understanding the grieving process – even though it wasn’t meant for that.

Despite this misapplication, the stages model has shaped cultural expectations: namely, that grief ends once people reach the “acceptance” stage. But research doesn’t support this idea. Trying to force grief into this model can cause real harm, leaving mourners feeling they’re grieving “wrong.”

In reality, mourning is often lifelong. Most people go through an acute period of overwhelming pain right after the loss. This is usually followed by integrated grief, where the pain softens but the loss is still part of everyday life, returning in waves.

Although grief is unique to each person and relationship, researchers have found that mourners often strive to a) make sense of the death; b) adjust to a world without their loved one; c) form an ongoing connection with their deceased loved one in new ways; and d) figure out who they are without their loved one.

It’s difficult and at times disorienting work, but most people find ways to carry their grief and keep living.

Northlight has a new cover!

Northlight

She's a Ranger, a wild and savvy knife-fighter, determined to get help in finding her partner who's lost on the treacherous northern border. He's a scholar who sees visions, eager to escape the confines of city life and the shadow of his charismatic mother. With the assassination of a beloved leader and the city in turmoil, the two have only each other to turn to. What begins as a rescue mission turns deadly as together they unravel the secret that lies beneath Laurea's idyllic surface.

 

 

Reviews:

 "A beautifully constructed fantasy with characters who grow and mature before the reader's eyes and who are engagingly human while being fantastically heroic. Her writing flows and the point of view switches are interesting and exciting. This book is a keeper." Rickey Mallory, Affair de Coeur

 "A style and manner reminiscent of McCaffrey's Crystal Singer series." The Bookwatch

 "An unusual saga that starts slowly but builds to a startling climax." Sherry S. Hoy, Kliatt

 "Solid characters and a well-designed world make for good reading." Philadelphia Press

"The plot moves briskly from crisis in Laureal to capture by the Norther barbarians to discovery of the true meaning of the Northlight of the title, with ample foreshadowing from the mysterious spooky something in the air of the frontier. And the culmination quite satisfactorily evokes the sense of wonder." Tom Easton, Analog

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/2czh4mef

Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/3pvx9cp6

Everywhere else: https://books2read.com/u/3L7GXb

Book Review: The Conclusion of the Rook and Rose Trilogy

 

Labyrinth's Heart, by M. A. Carrick (Orbit)

Labyrinth's Heart completes the “Rook and Rose” trilogy by M. A. Carrick (in real life, Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms). The story began in the Venice-like city of Nadežra with the arrival of con-artist Ren, bent on impersonating a long-lost cousin of an aristocratic family and thereby worming her way into rank and riches. An uneasy peace between the nobility and the natives they oppress barely holds in the city. Between the Robin Hood-like Rook (which turns out to be not an individual person but a vocation transmitted through a magical mask), gangs tussling for territory, and the mind-controlling medallions left over from “the Tyrant,” Ren soon finds herself acting several, mutually incompatible roles. One of them, by the way, is a reader of special tarot-like cards, a “patterner.”

At the beginning of Labyrinth's Heart, Ren’s precarious balancing act comes crashing down with the arrival of a scheming social climber who knows her true story and will not stop at pressuring Ren to get what she wants, even at the expense of Ren’s now beloved family. Ancient malice awakens, the oppressed classes rise up against tyranny, and mystery piles upon mystery.

The three volumes weave together old evils, cursed clans, transcendent magic, political corruption, social upheaval, and a love story or two. Together, they form a long, slow simmer of a story that shines with its sympathetic characters and rich cultural setting. The cards used for “patterning” divination are particularly vivid, with a cohesion and archetypal resonance that makes them utterly believable. (The authors designed a deck of these cards that will soon be available.)

I’m a huge fan of the work of the authors and I loved these books. However, since this is a review, I must offer a few caveats. One is that the volumes should be read fairly close together. It had been several years since I read the middle book, and I found myself struggling to recall too many events, characters, place names, and clan relationships.

Two, a corollary, is that Labyrinth's Heart is not a stand-alone. There’s simply too much backstory for a book entire in itself, although the authors make a valiant attempt to supply synopses of previous books, character lists, glossary, etc.

Three is that one challenge of such a long, complex story lies in the sheer number of characters, each with a backstory. The inevitable result is that Ren, who was the front-and-center protagonist at the beginning, fades from time to time into a lesser position when everyone else’s story comes to a climax and resolution. Along with that complexity comes a multiplicity of endings. It’s a bit like the final volume of The Lord of the Rings, where the story does not end with the destruction of the One Ring or even with the hobbits returning home. Indeed, it goes on for chapter after chapter, and so, too, does the “Rook and Rose” saga. This is a good thing for readers who are sad to say good-bye to this marvelous world and its people; not so much for those who want a single, definitive “they lived happily ever after.”

A minor point is that Grey Serrado (Ren’s love interest, among other roles) has grown up thinking he was cursed (what looks like psychological child abuse turns out to have a basis in reality). How that came about and how it’s resolved play out in Labyrinth's Heart. The problem for me is that I never picked up on his being cursed in the first two books, so I was a bit taken aback when it became an important secondary thread. All these are minor quibbles, however, compared to the grand, sweeping scope of the books.

I leave you with one of the many beautiful, poetic lines from “Rook and Rose”:

May you see the face and not the mask.

Reprint: Dogs, Humans, and Stress

Dogs are helping people regulate stress even more than expected, research shows

Studies show that dogs help humans cope with stress. marcoventuriniautieri/E+ via Getty Images

Kevin Morris, University of Denver and Jaci Gandenberger, University of Denver

In a 2022 survey of 3,000 U.S. adults, more than one-third of respondents reported that on most days, they feel “completely overwhelmed” by stress. At the same time, a growing body of research is documenting the negative health consequences of higher stress levels, which include increased rates of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune conditions and even dementia.

Assuming people’s daily lives are unlikely to get less stressful anytime soon, simple and effective ways to mitigate these effects are needed.

This is where dogs can help.

As researchers at the University of Denver’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection, we study the effects animal companions have on their humans.

Dozens of studies over the last 40 years have confirmed that pet dogs help humans feel more relaxed. This would explain the growing phenomenon of people relying on emotional support dogs to assist them in navigating everyday life. Dog owners have also been shown to have a 24% lower risk of death and a four times greater chance of surviving for at least a year after a heart attack.

Now, a new study that we conducted with a team of colleagues suggests that dogs might have a deeper and more biologically complex effect on humans than scientists previously believed. And this complexity may have profound implications for human health.

How stress works

The human response to stress is a finely tuned and coordinated set of various physiological pathways. Previous studies of the effects of dogs on human stress focused on just one pathway at a time. For our study, we zoomed out a bit and measured multiple biological indicators of the body’s state, or biomarkers, from both of the body’s major stress pathways. This allowed us to get a more complete picture of how a dog’s presence affects stress in the human body.

The stress pathways we measured are the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis and the sympathoadrenal medullary, or SAM, axis.

When a person experiences a stressful event, the SAM axis acts quickly, triggering a “fight or flight” response that includes a surge of adrenaline, leading to a burst of energy that helps us meet threats. This response can be measured through an enzyme called alpha-amylase.

At the same time, but a little more slowly, the HPA axis activates the adrenal glands to produce the hormone cortisol. This can help a person meet threats that might last for hours or even days. If everything goes well, when the danger ends, both axes settle down, and the body goes back to its calm state.

While stress can be an uncomfortable feeling, it has been important to human survival. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to respond effectively to acute stress events like an animal attack. In such instances, over-responding could be as ineffective as under-responding. Staying in an optimal stress response zone maximized humans’ chances of survival.

Dogs can be more helpful than human friends in coping with stressful situations. FG Trade/E+ via Getty Images

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