twenty-one days until book
Or, The End (of The First Planets duology) is Nigh!!
I woke up this morning and counted the days. Oof … only twenty and a wakeup until the release of Earth Retrograde, the second and final installment of The First Planets duology.
Early reviews are coming in, and I’m feeling pretty good about them:
“You will struggle to find a better literary Sci-Fi embodiment of the space girl lofi hiphop videos on YouTube than Mercury Rising and Earth Retrograde. There is no drawback to this duology. No downside. Greene nailed it.”
In the first book, Mercury Rising, we met Brooklyn Lamontagne, a petty criminal working to pay his (and his mom’s) rent in 1976 New York — but not the one you know. See, in Brooklyn’s world, Oppenheimer put his talents into something constructive and came up with an engine that put us on the moon in the early 1950s. Everything was going swell until the aliens showed up in 1961 and started wrecking things. Brooklyn — through no plan of his own, of course — ends up joining the Earth Orbital Forces and shipping out to fight the extraterrestrial menace.
Publishers Weekly called Mercury Rising a “genre-bending romp,” and who am I to argue?
The new book fast-forwards to 1999, and things are … different. I don’t want to say too much more than that. One Goodreads reviewer wrote, “The odds are against him but Greene’s belief in humanity (however alien the form it comes in) shines through and Brooklyn is a character that will stay with me for his efforts alone.” I won’t debate that, either.
If you missed out on Mercury Rising, it’s still available in the shops and, as I write this, on discount ($2.99) as an e-book via Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Earth Retrograde comes out Oct. 24 (two days before my birthday!), and it’s available for preorder everywhere you might shop for books. If you like physical copies, I’d prefer you bought it from your local independent bookstore or Bookshop.org. You can also get Mercury Rising as an audio book, and I hear the Earth Retrograde audio is in the works.
If you’re planning to attend World Fantasy Con in Kansas City, I’ll be there to sign books, talk speculative fiction, and otherwise be charming and interesting. Folks in the Cambridge/Boston area can find me at a ticketed event Nov. 2, courtesy of the fine folks at Pandemonium Books & Games, where I will read from the new book and, again, do my best to be charming and interesting. Later in the month, I’ll be at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH for a similar thing, but that date is not yet set in stone nor electrons. I’ll announce any additional events and sightings through the usual methods.
Whew! I’m grateful to Angry Robot Books for letting me get the entire story out, grateful to the folks who took time to review and otherwise promote the thing, and beholden to the many fine people who reached for their wallets and bought the books. Publishing is a strange business, but it all comes down to the story. I hope you like this one. -Rob