Buy These Books

Recommendations from a burst of new releases

Within the span of about a week I became aware of four new books from people who are friends, former collaborators, or both. These are very different books from very different people, but I’m spreading the word here in case some of them appeal to readers of this Substack.

The first three authors, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, and Ellis Amdur, all have independent careers of their own writing solo books, but I have had the pleasure of working with them on collaborative projects. The fourth, George Dyson, is an old friend who along with me and a few others was one of the first people involved with Blue Origin circa 2000.

Prince of Clay by Joseph Brassey

I first met Joe through HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) but soon stumbled upon some fiction he’d posted somewhere. From this it was obvious that he was a gifted writer. One thing led to another and we ended up working together, along with several others, on a historical fiction project called The Mongoliad which after many colorful twists and turns ended up being published by Amazon’s fledgling fiction imprint and spawning a number of sequels and graphic novels. Later Joe co-authored one of those sequels, Katabasis, but by that point his solo career was launched and he was writing novels set in an original fantasy universe called The Drifting Lands. Prince of Clay is the third book in that series, of which I’ve been a fan since the beginning. If you would like to dive into a highly original fantasy trilogy, now’s the moment to pick up Prince of Clay and its predecessor volumes Skyfarer and Dragon Road.

Boy by Nicole Galland

I met Nicole Galland a long time ago through our mutual agent, Liz Darhansoff. The quality of her historical fiction, beginning with The Fool’s Tale, was so evident that when we launched the Mongoliad project it was obvious to me that we had to invite her along. She ended up becoming a treasured collaborator and, like Joe, later wrote a sequel set in that world. Subsequently, Nicki and I had a great deal of fun co-writing The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. She then solo-wrote a sequel called Master of the Revels. Now, with Boy, she’s back in her favorite fictional stomping ground of Shakespeare’s London. I’m still reading it but was drawn into the story from the first page—as usual for a book by Nicki.

Little Bird & the Tiger by Ellis Amdur

Ellis Amdur has lived a dual life as a martial artist and as an expert on crisis intervention and hostage negotiation. In both fields he has published several influential books. Many in the martial arts world—both Western and Eastern—have the utmost respect for his books Old School and Dueling with O-sensei. In more recent years he has begun to write fiction. Along with Charles Mann and Mark Teppo, he and I co-wrote a graphic novel called Cimarronin, which is set in the same fictional universe as the Mongoliad series. Now he has published Little Bird & the Tiger which is a tale of martial artists, male and female, in Japan during the latter half of the nineteenth century—an era when the martial arts traditions we all know from samurai movies are still extant, but undergoing rapid mutation as Japan opens to the West and begins to lay the groundwork for imperialist expansion into China and Manchuria. These are fictionalized accounts of real people who lived lives so incredible that many readers would not believe in these tales if they were pure inventions of the author.

Project Orion (new expanded edition) by George Dyson

George Dyson and I worked together at Blue Operations LLC, the entity that later turned into Blue Origin, during its very early days starting around 1999. The original version of his book Project Orion came out during that era and was a sensation for all of us who were interested in thinking about alternatives to chemical rockets as a way of getting things into orbit. To be clear, no one at Blue ever wanted to use atomic bombs to propel spaceships—that being the basic idea behind Orion—but we were all inspired by the ambition and scope of the Orion project. Now, 23 years later, George has just released an expanded edition of the book. As he told me in an email, “it will set the record straight, and remain available. All sources are now referenced and I went back through the raw material and gave precise dates for every quotation in the text. So it’s sort of the director’s cut." This edition has 98 illustrations, up from 39 in the original, and all of them are utterly fascinating. If you never saw the 2002 edition, you missed an incredible story, and if you did read it, I suspect you’ll find the expanded edition worth having just because of the new material.