Reviews of The Ghost Sister
Outstanding novel! I couldn't bear to put it down. I snarled at each interruption.
Aphelion
Reviews of Empire of Bones
"...savvy and sophisticated."
New York Times
... EMPIRE OF BONES is a fast-paced science fiction thriller that shows what could happen when First Review occurs. The homeworld of Rasasatra's politics, culture and social structure is crafted in such intricate detail it feels as if Liz Williams is a native social anthropologist. Yet the talented writer never slows down the action while providing characters, both human and alien, that are believable and understandable inside the strong plot. All this makes for a great novel and easy conversion into an excellent movie.
Booklist
A new voice for the 21st century
It's always a pleasure to see a bright new talent explode onto the SF scene. Only the recurrent advent of fresh voices out of the gloaming can insure the continued health of the field. Liz Williams, who debuted just last year with The Ghost Sister, now proves with her second book that she possesses enough talent and ambition to leap to the forefront of the next generation of SF writers.
... Williams brings firsthand experience of India to the page, and the result is a fresh, believable and exotic setting and characters, thickly described and full of import...The biological sciences always come in second to the harder disciplines as well, but Williams' striking speculations on the life sciences of the Rasasatrans, whose spaceships and homes are alive and whose culture depends on pheromonal transmissions, lend a wealth of outré emotional resonance to the book. In this sense, Williams follows the pioneering work of Linda Nagata and Vernor Vinge in the same sense-of-wonder vein.
Finally, it's refreshing to see new talents riffing on classic Larry Niven tropes. Just as humanity proved a lost offshoot of the Protector race in Niven's Known Universe, so do Jaya and our species represent the long-range evolutionary machinations of the Rasasatrans. And Williams really follows the logic of her setup to the concluding massive paradigm shift. She does not simply leave mankind one rung higher on the technological scale, but reworks our entire destiny, as well as that of the aliens.
Liz Williams' third novel, The Poison Master, is already in the works. If she can keep up both the quality and quantity of her output, she will soon rank as one of the brightest new stars in the 21st-century SF firmament.
SciFi.com review (Paul Di Filippo)
....it would not surprise me were Empire of Bones to be hailed as an important work of feminist SF. It certainly should be hailed, and I recommend it very highly as one of the most interesting works of SF I have read in quite a while.
David Mead, The New York Review of Science Fiction
Empire of Bones is a fine novel with a fascinating alien civilisation and acute political sensibility.
Emerald City
Reviews of The Poison Master
LONG AGO - and no, we won't get into exactly how long ago -- opening a new science-fiction book was almost always an adventure. I didn't know the territory that well, so even the most hackneyed works had some glimmer of innovation in them, at least to my uninitiated eyes, and I especially loved those books that took me to unfamiliar worlds with strange customs and unsolved mysteries. But by now, very few books open new doors. I've been to more medieval worlds with sorcerers and magic than I can count, and, for whatever reason, tales that span the galaxy are few and far between. Every once in a while, though, the old spark is revived, and I'm happy to report that "The Poison Master" (Bantam Spectra, $5.99, 416 pages) is one of those special books. Liz Williams' first two books ("The Ghost Sister" and "Empire of Bones") were both excellent, but "The Poison Master" is clearly her best yet.
Contra Costa
