Blazing Reader,

From J. Kenton Pierce's A Kiss for Damocles (which I just found out is the winner of the 2026 Prometheus Award for best scifi/fantasy novel with a freedom theme):

We caught a good eight hours' rest before the midnight shift came. Kethie looked like she'd been rode hard, left for dead, got eaten by a skizzer, and then pooped off a cliff some. The sweet ale had punished her in terrible and awful ways.

What kept me going with this novel was its first-person narration. Shai's character has such a distinct, enjoyable and engaging voice. It made long chapters about cargo being hauled around, alien funeral services and meetings in libraries enjoyable enough.

Continuing my review from Wednesday, I can genuinely say A Kiss for Damocles makes for an intriguing high-tech cowboy tale — akin to the style of Firefly (but not as funny).

Westerns also are a great genre for exploring the theme of individual freedom versus collective tyranny (a requirement for the novel's Prometheus Award nomination). However, such controversy doesn't really come to the fore until later in the novel. Nonetheless, it has some great pro-freedom moments and lines, such as:

I still had a wagonload of cargo to sell, so I decided to butter things up a little.

"But for all that," I said, "there's no reason we can't work together and trade. We can still help each other out, but we'll only do it as partners, not subjects...

"Salvage and cargo are politics," my mouth said before I could catch it. "Politics is how folks decide what belongs to whom. The Imperial Family understood that back when they set up the Articles of High Law and the Commonwealth. They knew there'd be folks looking for ways to tramp their smaller neighbours down, all polite and legal-like."

Or this other observation by the blossoming protagonist:

I knew the histories well enough to know that folks who pounded desks and yelled "Unity" a lot usually just wanted everyone else to shut up and do what they were told.

The story ends with some high action, providing a satisfying ending, leading into a promising second book. I feel A Kiss for Damocles's flaw was that the story moved too slowly with too much setup. Pierce's world-building is brilliant, his protagonist's voice engaging, but the chapters are filled with too much exploration and not enough drama — at least for my liking. I suspect, though, with this first book having now set the stage, developed the characters and raised the stakes, the sequel looks quite promising.

If you like stories about a scrappy frontier girl navigating a world where your toaster will get you toasted, then check out J. Kenton Pierce's A Kiss for Damocles.

John C.A. Manley

P.S. You can watch a video of me ranking the five finalists for this year's Prometheus Awards on YouTube, Rumble, BitChute, Instagram and X.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.