Apocalypse Nyx, like its title character, is swaggering and brash, bristling with guns and spitting quips. In this collection, Kameron Hurley returns to her debut trilogy, the Bel Dame Apocrypha, with five new novellas featuring Nyxnissa so Dasheem, commonly called Nyx. Nyx is a mercenary in Nasheen, which is at war with neighboring Chenja. This isn't Earth – there are two suns in the sky, there are magicians and shapeshifters, and technology is based on the use of insects. Nyx isn't a magician or a shapeshifter, but she does have a preternatural aptitude for survival. She served in the war, became a government assassin, and then went to prison.
A Glimmer of Silver subverts some of the basic tropes of the first contact tradition. Here is a human colony that takes its responsibility as a guest with punctilious seriousness.
However, what I kept wanting from The Loosening Skin was a sure idea of how the inevitability of molting shifted human society and relationships askew from how we know them in our own world.
In Tieryas’s two novels, the state is so monolithic as to be nearly inalterable; this makes for a shockingly nihilistic critique of the sort of individualism that rules so much of liberal leftist thinking about how to bring about social change.
The Breath of the Sun is that rare fantasy novel that reminds us that stakes in this genre don't have to be world-destroying or matters of high politics.
