For Love of Distant Shores, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tales of the Apt # 3)

A kind of fix-up novel in the Apt world about a Beetle professor/explorer and his Fly assistant Fosse, written by the latter. It’s in the style of old-school pulp adventures and consists of their explorations in corners of the Apt world that we either never saw in the novels or saw only glancingly. The conceit is that Fosse is writing these as essentially serials, and occasionally mentions the reception of previous installments. She’s a really fun narrator, adventurous, put-upon, and with an eye for handsome men.

Rather hilariously, the stories take place before, during, and after the events of Shadows of the Apt, and extremely important events in that become mere backdrop for these stories. At one point a gigantic battle going on in a city, which is the subject for an entire novel in Shadows, just means that to Fosse’s annoyance, her planned vacation there gets canceled in favor of an expedition into nearby forests where there won’t be any fighting going on.

The worldbuilding and the kinden was one of my very favorite aspects of Shadows, and this book is almost 100% about that, plus fun characters having adventures. One story, “Spires of the Builders,” contains a kinden and Art that is hands-down the most horrifying and nightmarish thing in the entire series, so thanks I GUESS for putting that in my head. I can’t quite regret reading it because it’s so damn clever, even though it will probably haunt me forever.

There are two previous volumes of stories which are more scattershot, tales of various kinden without a narrative throughline or recurring characters. The first one, Spoils of War, was pretty gloomy so I skipped ahead. You don’t have to read these books in order.

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