The Knife and the Serpent
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 11, 2024
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- $6.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From Hugo Award winning author Tim Pratt comes a new, high-concept space opera, exploring technology, family and the price we pay to follow our destiny, perfect for fans of Peter F. Hamilton and Adrian Tchaikovsky.
After her grandmother is murdered in a home invasion, Tamsin Culver leaves her cushy programming job in San Francisco and returns to her Midwestern hometown to settle the estate. What she doesn’t expect is to find out her grandmother’s life-changing secret: She’s not an Earth native, but an exile from another level of the Nigh-Space continuum, an adjacent reality with technology far more advanced than ours. What’s more, her grandmother ruled there as an oligarch, meaning Tamsin is the heir to vast wealth only accessible by someone from her bloodline... but the enemies who tried to exterminate her family won’t be happy to see her return.
Back in the Bay Area, grad student Glenn makes a startling discovery about his girlfriend Vivy. She’s a secret agent for the Interventionists: an interdimensional organisation devoted to protecting the inhabitants of Nigh-Space from those trying to take advantage of less-developed worlds. When she lands in trouble, Glenn finds himself on a sapient starship in a distant level of the continuum, racing to save her. But when Glenn and Vivy’s plans clash with Tamsin’s, and secret connections among them all are revealed, their situation becomes catastrophically complicated.
It’s a princess of Nigh-Space versus a champion of Nigh-Space in a reality-spanning adventure that ranges from alien planets to mysterious space stations to Bay Area bars, with starship battles, cyborg augmentation, abductions, snark, betrayal, and fallout both nuclear and emotional.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hugo Award winner Pratt (Prison of Sleep) puts two extraterrestrial women in a planet-shaking, winner-take-all race for love and conquest in this sci-fi romp. Vivian Sattari pretends to be a UC Berkeley grad student, but she's really an augmented human agent for the Interventionists, a multiverse-spanning group whose mission is to nudge cultures in "good directions." Meanwhile Tamsin Zmija, the granddaughter of a tech innovator, is shocked to discover her grandmother was a deposed ruler of a parallel Earth. When her downfall is traced to a universe-hopping fascist army, Tamsin gets unwanted help from Vivian, along with the welcome presence of Glenn, her ex and now Vivian's boyfriend. Trust, betrayal, jealousy, and kinky sex all mix into scenes of wounded intimacy and cinematic battles between killbots and clone armies. Though the verbal and emotional sparring between the leads can turn a bit catty, frothy humor brightens the tone. Pratt's fans will be well pleased.