Yup. Still reading these. Next up is Swords of Mars, which features John Carter as the protagonist for the first time since the third book (I think Fighting Man is the sixth or seventh book). But let’s not talk about John; let’s talk about Tan Hadron and his lady love, Tavia.
What’s the plot? There’s a kidnapping, beautiful women (including the most capable female character yet in Tavia, who is able to fence and pilot rocket ships with the best of them!), and plot twist after plot twist. The heroes keep encountering the enemy, having him at their mercy and then somehow getting captured and dumped into a new and terrible situation. This keeps happening. There are three or four books worth of plot crammed into several hundred pages, so let’s just say the action never lags.
And I still love it!
An alternate history ‘novelette’ (that’s what the good folks at 
This was an interesting book, but it is, perhaps, hard to untangle those facets that make it interesting as a hybrid fantasy novel (with some elements of science fiction; I have heard the genre described as a ‘silkpunk’) with its sexual character, which is entangled with the author’s non-binary sexual identity. Characters are genderless until they make a decision (which, it seems, usually occurs in the late teens or very early twenties) to choose it and then there is some sorcery (the term used is ‘slackcraft,’ the ‘Slack’ being an all pervasive something that rather resembles the Force). The main characters are twins who choose different genders and different paths (one becomes a revolutionary, associated with a group that seeks to use technology to give the ordinary people more power, making them less dependent on ‘slackcraft’ practitioners, known as Tensors; the other marries an abbot, which, I guess, is ok in this world). The society is also matriarchal.
I read this book when I was in elementary and it was a little lost of me, not in the least because Verne almost always have a pedagogical goal, in addition to wanting to tell a roaring good yarn (which he did).
