Cover Art - 'Pirate Sun' (Karl Schroeder)

Do you have the slightest idea what’s happening here? Nope, me neither... Isn’t it great though? Lots of crazy stuff blowing up and some guy on a jet bike who looks like he was out for his morning ride and has been caught by surprise by unfolding events around him. It happens to us all sometimes...

Luckily, the title is on hand to let us know that this is ‘Pirate Sun’, book three of Karl Schroeder’s ‘Virga’ series. Check out the blurb,

In the balloon world of Virga, Venera Fanning has fled from Spyre, and Chaison Fanning is suddenly rescued from prison. He falls in with two others from the same clink, Darius Martor and Richard Reiss, and Antaea Argyre of the Virga home guard. They set off, Chaison to confront the ruler who left him to rot for a crime he didn’t commit, and Antaea for her own complex reasons involving the still-mysterious world outside the bubble of Virga. Chaison still hopes to reunite with Venera, of whose adventures he has no inkling. All are caught up in the webs of those who want the key to Candesce, and the power that would come with it, for themselves.

I’m not normally one for ‘hard sci-fi’ but I did have a lot of fun reading Schroeder’s ‘Queen of Candesce’ way back in 2007. The series seemed to drop off the radar for a bit (well, my radar...) but is back with an omnibus edition of the first two books and ‘Pirate Sun’ in trade paperback, ‘The Sunless Countries’ in hardback and a fifth book to follow in 2012. I’ve got some serious catching up to do with this series (I never read the first book...) but, if ‘Queen of Candesce’ is anything to go by, I think I’m in for a good time. In the meantime, have any of you been reading this series? And what do you think of the cover art? I’m going for ‘confusing but cool’...