The unsinkable Nick Gevers has reviewed The Dragon's Nine Sons for the March 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. And he seems to have liked it.

Chris Roberson's finest work tends to fall within his alternate history of the Celestial Empire... A certain discipline and plausibility is imposed by this timeline--a need to respect the correctness of Chinese address and nomenclature, a need to reflect the earnestness of so great an Imperial enterprise. The pulpish waywardness of much of the author's other work is thus curtailed. And The Dragon's Nine Sons, the first Celestial Empire novel, benefits from this restraint. It is a tight space-opera thriller, full of claustrophobic tension and under-pressure characterization, a sort of Dirty Dozen of allohistory.
...
So this book is a sobering piece of military SF, skillfully handled and morally acute. It is easily Chris Roberson's best book to date.

I quite like the term "pulpish waywardness." I may have to start using that, myself!

Labels: reviews