I bought this book when I went to the Thursday night book signing for Garage Sale Vinyl by Christopher Jones. As you might remember, I have bought Samuel Rikard/Levi Samuel’s books at various LibraryCons in the Before Times (before the government spergout in 2020), and I’ve read Dammit Bre! (Samuel Rikard) and The Pandora Gambit (Levi Samuel)–which means I still have, what, five or six of his books around here to read, including a fantasy trilogy whose spines together make a picture (which I would say is why I haven’t picked them up–I don’t want to spoil the look on my bookshelves–but that’s not really it; I just don’t want to commit to a trilogy, and even C.S. Lewis could change my mind on that).
So I picked up this book because it never left my desk after I bought it, and it looked short, and…. It seemed rather familiar.
Apparently with the repseudonyming from Rikard to Samuel, Rikard/Samuel renamed this book to The Pandora Gambit. Perhaps so that he could have thematic names for the sequels–but, no, his Web site indicates the series is Miami Knights. I dunno. Maybe he thought The Pandora Gambit was a better title. I suppose it is.
I thought about re-reading the book, which often happens here when I pull something from the stacks where I’ve picked up a duplicate copy, but the second night, I thought, geez, I have thousands of things in my stacks to read that I don’t know I’ve read before (or that I’ve restocked because I explicitly wanted to read it again). So I’ll put it on the read shelves and in the 26-year-old books database, creaking atop its Microsoft Access backend and Visual Basic type-ahead feature, but I will not count it on my annual total.
So if “Levi Samuel” ever reaches his goal of being one of the greatest fantasy writers of our era, I will have a real collectible here.
