Ninth City Burning Sends Superhumans to Fight Transdimensional Aliens

It’s somewhere around the year 2500, and things aren’t looking so good for the human race. Centuries earlier, an alien species popped through a dimensional barrier and obliterated much of the world, destroying cities and eliminating entire populations without provocation. The surviving groups congregate in a dozen remaining cities, huddle in scattered settlements, or work in factories making bare essentials like canned bread and milk, all enduring constant offensive prods from the aliens. It’s not quite the rainbows and hovercrafts kind of future we hoped for, but it’s not exactly a hopeless dystopia, either—thanks to a little thing called thelemity.
When the aliens attacked, they brandished a power previously unknown to mankind: thelemity, a pervasive force that allows the user to effortlessly power machinery, create objects out of thin air, and even manipulate the lay of the land. The bad news is, thelemity allowed the invaders to cause massive amounts of damage in an instant. The good news is, humans can use it too. At least, some of us; Fontani are those rare souls who can wield its awe-inspiring power. It’s a bit like magic (which the fontani like to joke about) and a bit like the the Force (knowledge of Star Wars has naturally survived the apocalypse), but Black has laced his ideas with just enough science to make the extra-normal ability a believable part of his science fiction universe.
Setup aside, the narrative is told in first person through the eyes of half a dozen main characters. We start with Jax, a fontanus living in one of the remaining cities whose power and status are still rather shaky. Then there’s Torro, a factory grunt who is conscripted and sent to the front lines a few dimensions over. Naomi and her sister Rae aretwo members of a nomadic tribe identified as potential fontani, ripped from their people, and thrown into the academy. Other characters claim their own chapter headings, but it’s through these four young perspectives that witness most of the story. Each offers a slightly different view of the world at large, coloring the wartime effort with the struggles their people must endure.
Ninth City Burning stands apart for its guileless mixing of genres. On one page it feels like military science fiction; on the next, a school age fantasy tale. Sometimes you’ll swear it’s a novelization of an anime. Yet the narrative never buckles under the strain of serving so many ambitious ideas, maintaining a ripping pace that will keep you going for just one more chapter. A perfect balance of world-building, character exploration, and mysteries that leave and the perfect ratio of unanswered questions for a series-starter make this the next addition to your list of series that need a sequel, stat.
Ninth City Burning is available now.