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Peridot Shift #2
Salvage
The follow-up to 2018's epic cross-genre hit, Flotsam, is here!
Peridot is headed for its second cataclysm. War has broken ancient alliances, sealed borders, and locked down the skies. The Five, Peridot's alchemist gods, have seen one of their number die and another fall in their efforts to protect their world from invaders beyond the stars. Defeated and diminished, they have ceased to answer the prayers of their people and have left the rapidly unraveling world to fend for itself.
Talis and the orphaned crew of the lost airship Wind Sabre have a plan to set things to rights, but they're stranded on a rock far from the heart of the conflict. When an old enemy comes and offers them a ship and a path forward, it comes with strings that will pull them further from the home they are so desperate to save.
Can Talis and her crew chart a course through hostile skies, shifting allegiances, and subverted governments before the true enemies of Peridot claim a power that can destroy the world once and for all?
Peridot is headed for its second cataclysm. War has broken ancient alliances, sealed borders, and locked down the skies. The Five, Peridot's alchemist gods, have seen one of their number die and another fall in their efforts to protect their world from invaders beyond the stars. Defeated and diminished, they have ceased to answer the prayers of their people and have left the rapidly unraveling world to fend for itself.
Talis and the orphaned crew of the lost airship Wind Sabre have a plan to set things to rights, but they're stranded on a rock far from the heart of the conflict. When an old enemy comes and offers them a ship and a path forward, it comes with strings that will pull them further from the home they are so desperate to save.
Can Talis and her crew chart a course through hostile skies, shifting allegiances, and subverted governments before the true enemies of Peridot claim a power that can destroy the world once and for all?
Kindle Edition
First published September 3, 2019
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About the author
R.J. Theodore
14 books55 followersR J Theodore* (they/she) is an author and graphic designer. Their short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed and Fireside Magazines as well as the award-winning Glitter + Ashes and Unfettered Hexes anthologies from Neon Hemlock Press.
Their Peridot Shift trilogy comes to an adventures conclusion in December 2022! Learn more at rjtheodore.com
*Note the preferred spelling, please. Spaces, no periods.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 1, 2022
Read a physical copy
Content warning: deicide, vomiting, parental death, dismemberment, murder, chemical warfare
A god is dead, another one has been transposed into the body of a raven, and a sealed-away goddess is on the loose. Talis has lost her ship and part of her crew, but still has several jobs to complete in order to literally stay afloat and keep their lives. The stakes keep escalating, and in this volume, we get a hefty dose of interstellar court intrigue on top of the normal dangers of space piracy.
Magic rings, alchemy, aliens, chanteys, and found family, there is so much goodness from both science fiction and fantasy to be found within the continued misfortunes and advantage of Captain Talis and her crew.
The danger simply escalates and there are so many intricacies introduced right off the bat. We have an empress coming into power far too young, Hankirk making a really poor attempt to fix things, and Talis trying to keep those she cares for safe. I really like the specific ways Theodore tests the range of personalities and elegant escalation of cause and effect that kept the book rolling at an incredible clip. There’s a great mix of new alien and magical nonsense plus some brilliant banter, plus cause and effect.
Of the characters, I found myself growing so attached to Talis, especially when she pulls off some incredible pieces of decision making and also gets to punch Hankirk in the face not once but twice. It is everything. The love Talis feels for her crew is at once familial and platonic, especially when it comes to balancing all their needs while keeping an eye on the stakes horizon. Dug really goes through it in this one, and I find myself the most nervous for him going into the last entry. All the characters have great challenges ahead of them, especially since they’re the only ones who can share the knowledge about the tattoos that can save lives from a deadly poison which separates soul from body. It’s harrowing in a way that takes the best from fantasy’s genre expectations and tropes.
Theodore once again shows readers that one doesn’t have to choose between fantasy and science fiction, but that the two genres can build upon each other to create something truly epic.
Content warning: deicide, vomiting, parental death, dismemberment, murder, chemical warfare
A god is dead, another one has been transposed into the body of a raven, and a sealed-away goddess is on the loose. Talis has lost her ship and part of her crew, but still has several jobs to complete in order to literally stay afloat and keep their lives. The stakes keep escalating, and in this volume, we get a hefty dose of interstellar court intrigue on top of the normal dangers of space piracy.
Magic rings, alchemy, aliens, chanteys, and found family, there is so much goodness from both science fiction and fantasy to be found within the continued misfortunes and advantage of Captain Talis and her crew.
The danger simply escalates and there are so many intricacies introduced right off the bat. We have an empress coming into power far too young, Hankirk making a really poor attempt to fix things, and Talis trying to keep those she cares for safe. I really like the specific ways Theodore tests the range of personalities and elegant escalation of cause and effect that kept the book rolling at an incredible clip. There’s a great mix of new alien and magical nonsense plus some brilliant banter, plus cause and effect.
Of the characters, I found myself growing so attached to Talis, especially when she pulls off some incredible pieces of decision making and also gets to punch Hankirk in the face not once but twice. It is everything. The love Talis feels for her crew is at once familial and platonic, especially when it comes to balancing all their needs while keeping an eye on the stakes horizon. Dug really goes through it in this one, and I find myself the most nervous for him going into the last entry. All the characters have great challenges ahead of them, especially since they’re the only ones who can share the knowledge about the tattoos that can save lives from a deadly poison which separates soul from body. It’s harrowing in a way that takes the best from fantasy’s genre expectations and tropes.
Theodore once again shows readers that one doesn’t have to choose between fantasy and science fiction, but that the two genres can build upon each other to create something truly epic.
May 22, 2022
I found this one confusing and not always engaging. I read the previous book in the series about five years ago, and remembered very little of it; while there were eventually enough reminders of the key elements of backstory, I was at sea for a while. Looking back on my review of the previous volume (which I put on my Best of the Year list for 2017), I was also confused while reading that one, so it may be a fault of this author.
The worldbuilding, in particular, made no sense to me then and makes even less now. The cosmological setup is that five ancient alchemists (alchemists = wizards differently named; there doesn't seem to be any good reason for terming what they do alchemy specifically) destroyed the planet of Peridot in order to get enough power to make them gods, and then rearranged the pieces and each created a sentient race to follow them, plus various other species as they saw fit. The world now consists of a ball of energy called Nexus which somehow (apparently not by gravity as we know it) holds a number of floating islands in place around it, mostly in the same plane. They don't appear to rotate around it. There is gravity; things other than the islands (and airships which, improbably, pump steam into rigid wooden balloons in order to create lift) fall, not towards Nexus but in a direction perpendicular to Nexus, until they reach the flotsam layer at the "bottom of the gravity well," but nothing appears to be causing this gravity. It's just magic (sorry, "alchemy"). Also, weirdly, the air is thinner at the bottom of the gravity well. So physics as we know it is completely out to lunch. There's a passing mention of sunrise or sunshine at one point, which may be an error, as the lighting seems mostly to consist of bioluminescent pumpkins producing a day/night cycle. This leaves two alternative questions: If there's a sun, how is it producing day and night when the planet is no longer blocking it half the time? And if there isn't a sun, where did it go, since presumably there was one prior to the cataclysm? (And if there isn't a sun, where is the energy coming from to light the glow pumpkins and produce food and do all the other things that sunshine is needed for? Though I suspect the answer to that one is "alchemy".)
This wasn't the only thing that made me think that the author was doing something because it would be cool or serve the plot, at the expense of suspension of disbelief. Nor was it the only thing that confused me or left me unclear on how things worked. The five races, and the characters, are all described in an extensive glossary/gazetteer at the end of the book, but I didn't get enough in the text itself to get much idea of how most of the characters appeared, or to get straight for a long time what their membership in the different races meant for their appearance (or even which race they belonged to, sometimes).
The narrative is close third person, mostly but not exclusively following the viewpoint of the ship captain who was the main character of the first book also. She's an interesting character, and we get some interiority from her and, to a lesser extent, from the other viewpoint characters, but the characters around her are much more two-dimensional, including her beloved and loyal crew. I never really got much sense of Tisker or Dug's personalities, in particular. They exist almost entirely in relation to Talis, the protagonist.
She is a protagonist, not merely a main character; she's constantly striving to prevent worse things happening to the world, and reverse some of the bad things that have happened already. The thing is, she's not all that effective at it, and partway through we get a major tragedy of the type that I personally dislike in my fiction.
Early on we're promised a heist, but this is one of the many plot directions that Talis ends up abandoning because of external factors. I'm all for a good try-fail cycle, but the thing about try-fail cycles is that they should generally complicate the protagonist's attempts to achieve their goals, not derail them entirely. Also, I wanted to see the heist, and I wanted to see Talis succeed in preventing disaster; I got neither.
I received a copy via Netgalley for review, which is labelled as the second edition and apparently will come out in July 2022 (the book has been published for a couple of years). Accordingly, I won't go into too much detail on the state of the copy editing except to say that it needs some more, including a spellcheck, a lot of work on misused vocabulary, and the insertion of some missed-out words in sentences. Not sure why almost all books with airships in them display poor writing mechanics and a lot of vocabulary problems, but that does seem to be the case. My review of the first book gave good marks for the copy editing, so I'm not sure what's going on there; maybe a different and less capable editor for the second one. If so, I hope they can get the original one, or someone else as good, to go over this one between now and July.
All in all, I was disappointed and confused and at times found it a slog. There's good potential here, but it needs a lot of polishing, and I don't think I'll bother with the third book when it comes out.
The worldbuilding, in particular, made no sense to me then and makes even less now. The cosmological setup is that five ancient alchemists (alchemists = wizards differently named; there doesn't seem to be any good reason for terming what they do alchemy specifically) destroyed the planet of Peridot in order to get enough power to make them gods, and then rearranged the pieces and each created a sentient race to follow them, plus various other species as they saw fit. The world now consists of a ball of energy called Nexus which somehow (apparently not by gravity as we know it) holds a number of floating islands in place around it, mostly in the same plane. They don't appear to rotate around it. There is gravity; things other than the islands (and airships which, improbably, pump steam into rigid wooden balloons in order to create lift) fall, not towards Nexus but in a direction perpendicular to Nexus, until they reach the flotsam layer at the "bottom of the gravity well," but nothing appears to be causing this gravity. It's just magic (sorry, "alchemy"). Also, weirdly, the air is thinner at the bottom of the gravity well. So physics as we know it is completely out to lunch. There's a passing mention of sunrise or sunshine at one point, which may be an error, as the lighting seems mostly to consist of bioluminescent pumpkins producing a day/night cycle. This leaves two alternative questions: If there's a sun, how is it producing day and night when the planet is no longer blocking it half the time? And if there isn't a sun, where did it go, since presumably there was one prior to the cataclysm? (And if there isn't a sun, where is the energy coming from to light the glow pumpkins and produce food and do all the other things that sunshine is needed for? Though I suspect the answer to that one is "alchemy".)
This wasn't the only thing that made me think that the author was doing something because it would be cool or serve the plot, at the expense of suspension of disbelief. Nor was it the only thing that confused me or left me unclear on how things worked. The five races, and the characters, are all described in an extensive glossary/gazetteer at the end of the book, but I didn't get enough in the text itself to get much idea of how most of the characters appeared, or to get straight for a long time what their membership in the different races meant for their appearance (or even which race they belonged to, sometimes).
The narrative is close third person, mostly but not exclusively following the viewpoint of the ship captain who was the main character of the first book also. She's an interesting character, and we get some interiority from her and, to a lesser extent, from the other viewpoint characters, but the characters around her are much more two-dimensional, including her beloved and loyal crew. I never really got much sense of Tisker or Dug's personalities, in particular. They exist almost entirely in relation to Talis, the protagonist.
She is a protagonist, not merely a main character; she's constantly striving to prevent worse things happening to the world, and reverse some of the bad things that have happened already. The thing is, she's not all that effective at it, and partway through we get a major tragedy of the type that I personally dislike in my fiction.
Early on we're promised a heist, but this is one of the many plot directions that Talis ends up abandoning because of external factors. I'm all for a good try-fail cycle, but the thing about try-fail cycles is that they should generally complicate the protagonist's attempts to achieve their goals, not derail them entirely. Also, I wanted to see the heist, and I wanted to see Talis succeed in preventing disaster; I got neither.
I received a copy via Netgalley for review, which is labelled as the second edition and apparently will come out in July 2022 (the book has been published for a couple of years). Accordingly, I won't go into too much detail on the state of the copy editing except to say that it needs some more, including a spellcheck, a lot of work on misused vocabulary, and the insertion of some missed-out words in sentences. Not sure why almost all books with airships in them display poor writing mechanics and a lot of vocabulary problems, but that does seem to be the case. My review of the first book gave good marks for the copy editing, so I'm not sure what's going on there; maybe a different and less capable editor for the second one. If so, I hope they can get the original one, or someone else as good, to go over this one between now and July.
All in all, I was disappointed and confused and at times found it a slog. There's good potential here, but it needs a lot of polishing, and I don't think I'll bother with the third book when it comes out.
February 27, 2020
I'm giving this a very tentative 4 stars. Flotsam had ended on such a low note with the destruction of the Wind Sabre, and this book picks right back up on that low note with its crew stuck on land for 2 years and planning a heist to get them back into the skies.
The "gods" are useless - 1 dead, 1 stuck in the form of an annoying 6-eyed raven, and the remaining 3 absent as they battle Meran, who is likewise unhelpful.
This leaves the Veritors and the aliens running around unchecked.
And Talis decides to step up and start thinking about someone other than herself and her crew. As she makes moves to save the people of Peridot, the mood and my enjoyment of the book climbed... only to plummet again at the end.
Oh, Hankirk is back and so infuriating that I had to put the book down for a while and read something else. Can we just yeet him into space already?
The "gods" are useless - 1 dead, 1 stuck in the form of an annoying 6-eyed raven, and the remaining 3 absent as they battle Meran, who is likewise unhelpful.
This leaves the Veritors and the aliens running around unchecked.
And Talis decides to step up and start thinking about someone other than herself and her crew. As she makes moves to save the people of Peridot, the mood and my enjoyment of the book climbed... only to plummet again at the end.
Oh, Hankirk is back and so infuriating that I had to put the book down for a while and read something else. Can we just yeet him into space already?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 26, 2020
Second in a the steampunk space opera series by R.J. Theodore, you’ll definitely want to read the prior book Flotsam first.
A unique world like I’ve never seen before with an action packed story and a lovable crew of characters. Looking forward to the next installment!
A unique world like I’ve never seen before with an action packed story and a lovable crew of characters. Looking forward to the next installment!
January 25, 2023
Salvage by R. J. Theodore
My enthusiasm continues for this new series. This is the second book of the trilogy and….I enjoyed it too. The setting is a planet, Peridot, that has suffered some sort of cataclysmic event that has sundered the planet into diverse cultures. The interaction between sections is primarily a craft that appears to be the marriage between a traditional ocean-going vessel and a hot air balloon. The alien Yu’Nyun and the homegrown Veritors undercutting each other while pretending support is one of the underpinnings for this book.
The conflict between the various gods and the simula that is the embodiment of the planet itself leads to further conflict. Tempest a rebel organization with its own goals adds to the complexity of the plot. Once again though, the plot centers on a crew of misfitting individuals. Captain Talis, Tisker, Dug, and Sophia are provided depth and color and all have a major role in the tale. The relationship of captain to crew changes as the story progresses.
Captain Talis privately exhibits misgivings about her leadership while facing the world with bravado. Theodore gives the characters flaws and personalities. I admire the style and thoroughness of her work.
This is an adventure as well as a world-changing experience.
I highly recommend it.
My enthusiasm continues for this new series. This is the second book of the trilogy and….I enjoyed it too. The setting is a planet, Peridot, that has suffered some sort of cataclysmic event that has sundered the planet into diverse cultures. The interaction between sections is primarily a craft that appears to be the marriage between a traditional ocean-going vessel and a hot air balloon. The alien Yu’Nyun and the homegrown Veritors undercutting each other while pretending support is one of the underpinnings for this book.
The conflict between the various gods and the simula that is the embodiment of the planet itself leads to further conflict. Tempest a rebel organization with its own goals adds to the complexity of the plot. Once again though, the plot centers on a crew of misfitting individuals. Captain Talis, Tisker, Dug, and Sophia are provided depth and color and all have a major role in the tale. The relationship of captain to crew changes as the story progresses.
Captain Talis privately exhibits misgivings about her leadership while facing the world with bravado. Theodore gives the characters flaws and personalities. I admire the style and thoroughness of her work.
This is an adventure as well as a world-changing experience.
I highly recommend it.
May 28, 2022
3.5 stars
Thank you so much to Netgalley and Robot Dinosaur Press for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I was SO excited to be approved for this one. I loved the first book in the series and couldn’t wait to dive back into this incredible world Theodore has created.
I was a little underwhelmed, I won’t lie. I still loved these characters and I’m still interested in where the overall plot is going, but for a 500+ page book which already had an entire book before it to set things up, not a whole lot ACTUALLY happened until the last 100 pages or so.
In the first book, I appreciated the slower pace and the care taken to deliver the smaller details and build suspense, but in this book, it felt stagnant instead of suspenseful.
Still, I can’t wait to see what happens next!
Thank you so much to Netgalley and Robot Dinosaur Press for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I was SO excited to be approved for this one. I loved the first book in the series and couldn’t wait to dive back into this incredible world Theodore has created.
I was a little underwhelmed, I won’t lie. I still loved these characters and I’m still interested in where the overall plot is going, but for a 500+ page book which already had an entire book before it to set things up, not a whole lot ACTUALLY happened until the last 100 pages or so.
In the first book, I appreciated the slower pace and the care taken to deliver the smaller details and build suspense, but in this book, it felt stagnant instead of suspenseful.
Still, I can’t wait to see what happens next!
February 23, 2023
This is the second book of the trilogy and….I enjoyed it too. The setting is a planet, Peridot, that has suffered some sort of cataclysmic event that has sundered the planet into diverse cultures.
A unique world like I’ve never seen before with an action packed story and a lovable crew of characters. Looking forward to the next one!
Theodore gives the characters flaws and personalities. I admire the style and thoroughness of her work.
This is an adventure as well as a world-changing experience.
I highly recommend it.
Wonderfully well written 2nd book in this series. Extremely excited for the conclusion to this series.
A unique world like I’ve never seen before with an action packed story and a lovable crew of characters. Looking forward to the next one!
Theodore gives the characters flaws and personalities. I admire the style and thoroughness of her work.
This is an adventure as well as a world-changing experience.
I highly recommend it.
Wonderfully well written 2nd book in this series. Extremely excited for the conclusion to this series.
February 7, 2023
Rating: 3.6/5
Review: As good as I remember from the first. This writer has some awesome world building chops. Couple that with interestingly built characters that you can bond to, and “Winner”!
Castoff is out and I have read it but it does not seem to exist on Goodreads. Get it though, it is a great finale’.
Review: As good as I remember from the first. This writer has some awesome world building chops. Couple that with interestingly built characters that you can bond to, and “Winner”!
Castoff is out and I have read it but it does not seem to exist on Goodreads. Get it though, it is a great finale’.
October 7, 2024
A well written continuation of the adventures of Talis. This is an enjoyable novel, though it's best to read the first installment before getting to this one, mainly for familiarity with the world and characters. There is depth to the plot and characters, and the author does a good job of mixing scifi elements with steampunk.
January 8, 2023
The "found family" trope is one of my favs. The Peridot Shift series does an excellent job with this by taking the reader on the adventures of a group of friends who must navigate their way through a very cruel world. Salvage was fun, and I've already picked up the next book!
December 17, 2022
Loved this! I loved the first book in this series, Flotsam, also, and was looking forward to this one. I would definitely recommend reading Flotsam first, Salvage is a direct continuation of the story with mostly all the same characters. This is set in a unique and fascinating world, where magic or at least sufficiently advanced technology as to appear magical has changed fundamental things like gravity and physics. Captain Talis is a strong, admirable character, and struggles to make the right decisions for her small crew, who are fiercely loyal and more like a family. Stranded in a mostly underground city, they patiently plan, save, and wait for their opportunity to once again have a ship. The wealth of mundane details like their carefully tailored clothes and frugal meals really give a sense of the characters' experiences and personalities. Plans go awry, less than ideal seeming opportunities present, and Talis and the crew find themselves once again on a ship, caught up in the conflicts that affect the entire world. This book, like the first, comes to a very satisfying conclusion, but there is clearly more story to tell and I'll be watching for the next installment!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews