I’m may be the world’s least trustworthy recommender for Adam-Troy Castro’s first non-franchise novel, Emissaries from the Dead, just out from Eos.

I’ve been impressed by his work ever since I read his first published story, “Clearance to Land,” back in the same 1989 issue of Pulphouse that printed one of my own stories. I chose his “The Last Robot” as the first story in the first issue of Science Fiction Age. I published so many installments of the zany adventures starring his inept space characters Vossoff and Nimmitz that they eventually filled a book, one for which I wrote the introduction. His zombie tale “Dead Like Me” is one of my favorite short stories. And he’s been writing book reviews for SCI FI magazine and movie reviews for Science Fiction Weekly for years.

As you can tell, I’m a little biased toward his writing. So it might be pointless for me to talk up Emissaries from the Dead, since you’ll just figure that I drank the Castro Kool-Aid a long time ago.

But that’s not enough to stop me from saying publicly how much I enjoyed reading Adam’s new book. I was thrilled to finally be able to read him at novel length in a piece of fiction which didn’t star Spider-Man. Emissaries from the Dead is a science-fiction thriller, always a tricky sub-genre to pull off, because it’s tough to play fair with the reader in a mystery when tomorrow’s rules are so alien to our own. But Adam managed to write a book that worked both as SF and as mystery, at the same time creating intriguing alien intelligences, building a true sense of wonder, and introducing a compelling protagonist about whom he’ll be writing future novels.

Congratulations, Adam! I’m looking forward to many more.