Name: A Shadow in Summer
ISBN: 9780765313409

Daniel Abraham

A business manager, her apprentice, and a pair of outskirters become the only protectors of a financially powerful, technologically advanced city that is being threatened by the conquering armies of Galt, which are plotting against the city's top citizen, the poet-sorcerer Heshai. 50,000 first printing.

A Shadow in Summer

Janice Hopper

It occurred to me that I'd read the first book in this series, but hadn't read the rest. Scribd has them available, so I thought it was time to remedy that lack.

I think this was Abraham's first solo novel. It's really interesting, especially in a lot of the small details. There's a communication system where you can amplify and add nuance to what you're saying by gestures and postures. I think a lot about what something like that would actually look like. It's pretty interesting to think about actually.

There are "poets" who come up through a very harsh educational system. This system, however, enables them to harness and control abstract ideas. These manifested ideas are called andat, and (at least in this book) manifest in human-appearing shapes. But they are NOT human. The andat we meet in this book is called Seedless. He's a key part of the cotton-producing economy of the city, because one of his powers is to easily separate cotton seeds from cotton fiber. If you've ever had to gin cotton, or ever tried separating cotton from seed by hand, you'll understand what a time-saver this would be.

But Seedless isn't happy. And its attempts to escape what it sees as slavery have dire consequences.

That's the basic structure that the plot hangs on. This description omits the people. The old poet, Heshai; the new poet, Maati; the girl Liat and her lover Itani/Otah, who isn't quite who he first appears to be; and Amat, an overseer looking to remedy a wrong. Amat is that rare thing, a middle-aged woman in fantasy. I think Abraham does these characters well. He also seems to like to build fantasies around untraditional professions in fantasy-land. Amat is an overseer of a trading company when the story starts. Later she takes over a whorehouse to fund her efforts to restore what she sees as justice. In other stories, his heroines are bankers. 

When you've read fantasy/SF as long as I have, you really welcome new voices and new ways of looking at things. Daniel Abraham fills that niche for me. I'm always glad to read what he writes.