A stranger with no name travels from desert town to desert town, pistol on their hip and trouble in their wake. Cue Ennio Morricone’s theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, put your boots up and settle in for a great read.

The stranger fell out of the sky, something that hasn’t happened on Earth since almost everyone boarded massive arks to leave the climate- and eco-devastated planet behind. Like Eastwood’s character, she’s a former soldier and a crack shot, but unlike him, she’s determined to give up killing. Not that the hardscrabble residents of the ruined Earth make that an easy thing to do.

Crawling out of her escape pod with only her gun, her wits, and a good pair of boots, she sets off on a mission to find her ship, and hopefully the person she fell in love with. Not something she’d planned on doing when she signed on as security for a scientific expedition to explore the re-terraforming of Terra, but sometimes these things just happen.

The story is told in a sequence of short episodes as the Stranger shows up in different people’s lives, leaving them all changed for better or worse as she travels towards the one place she might find a working communicator, lawmen hot on her trail for reasons only they know.

I expect fans of Sarah Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted [2020] and Becky Chambers’ Voyage to a Small Angry Planet will find that this resonates nicely. I certainly enjoyed it and at 300 pages (hardcover) it went by pretty fast. Recommended.

(From my Amazing Stories column: Science Fiction To Look For – February 2023)

Frontier is exactly what it says it is - a science fiction, western, LGBTQ+ romance. When I received an advanced copy of this book I was so unsure of what to expect. Sometimes that is the best way to go into a book because it leaves so much room to be pleasantly surprised. So often we get books that are strictly science fiction or futuristic Earth but rarely do authors create a cohesive world that hits all the points of futuristic sci-fi plus adding in elements of westerns and romance.

This book is a nice, shorter read that still manages to be a full-length novel. It is one that would be perfect for someone not ready to get invested in a big sci-fi series right now. The feel of the setting and premise reminds me of certain video games out there, in the best way possible. The characters are enjoyable to follow - relatable without being anything touching on high-stakes topics (other than climate, humans ruining Earth). Perhaps I did enjoy the characters as an idea more than I enjoyed the writing style and presentation. That to me makes this title difficult to rate because I did very much enjoy the premise and wanted to be invested in the plot and characters.

I also would have enjoyed a slightly different pacing. For a book leaning towards the shorter side of things, there was a lot of build-up. This left very little time for the reader to enjoy the meat of the characters and and plot.

Even with some sticking points going through this book, I will very likely recommend for it's unique approach to the genres it tackles.

For anyone fans of western scifi books this one is the right pick for you. Dustborn by Erin Bowman a similar concept, everyone who could leave the planet did and the people left behind are reverting back to an old wild west mentality. I wanted to really enjoy this one I truly did but it fell a little flat for me. Still has a lot of western action and treachery. Still pretty enjoyable for someone looking for a story with multiple points of view about one character. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced readers copy for review.

This was like someone played Fallout: New Vegas and went, let me do you one better. I dug how the chapters kicked around the perspective, so we got different interpretations of the characters. I enjoyed it!

Imgr link is to a Instagram post scheduled for the 14th
First Youtube link is weekly vlog that features Frontier
Second is to a Short that goes up on the 14th
Blog Post goes up the 14th as well


I was so excited when I finished this book I completely forgot to write this review. That… almost never happens. I even hurried off and pre-ordered a beautiful special edition.

Frontier is a collection of short vignettes telling the story of a mostly unnamed narrator as she searches a scorched, post-apocalyptic Earth for her lost love. The two were on a mission of aid and peace to the planet and were shot down. We follow her through the eyes of the people she meets and interacts with along the way, and we see the best and worst of the planets inhabitants.

Our narrator and all the other characters all felt very genuine and unique to me so this read so well. The setting was easy to picture and imagine, the atmosphere was just cloudy enough to make it easy to fill in the details. This was just overall a well structured and thought out story. The truly wonderful part for me was the hopeful feel of this. Around the 70% there is a shift in the story and by the end I genuinely felt a hope and happiness there. It’s still a desolate earth and there were still terrible people on it but there was also hope, and that’s something rare for me in SF these days.

I would recommend this one for fans of Becky Chambers, and really any SF fans. It’s genuinely one of my favorite books I’ve read so far this year but I don’t want to say too much without spoiling it! I highly recommend this one, it is a fantastic hopeful SF that is going to go on my shelves.

5 out 5 Empty Laser Pistols

[Graphic: Religious bigotry
Moderate: Xenophobia and Violence
Minor: Suicidal thoughts, Ableism, Torture, Sexism, and Vomit]

What a wild ride! I really enjoyed this queer, space opera, western. The narrative structure was really unique and felt almost like interconnected short stories which I thought worked really well.

I have never in my life intentionally read a Western but I will give anything queer a shot and I'm so happy I did. Frontier by Grace Curtis was nothing like I was expecting. I was expecting tumbleweeds, lots of dust, some horses. All that typical western stuff. Instead, I got conversations on a dying planet, a dystopian landscape, a corrupt justice system, and Gaia. Plus everything queer and fluffy and gut wrenching in between. Overall, an amazing read that exceeded all of my expectations.

**Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Frontier is definitely an interesting read! This takes place on a practically abandoned earth. This is told through a variety of sources. We don't know much about the main character entering the novel which led to a confusing introduction but I can definitely see why the author did that. I feel many will enjoy this aspect especially if they love a good mystery.

Frontier is kinfolk to The Mandalorian, Firefly, and Mad Max, but I’d also point to the 1972 television show, Kung Fu. In that series, a Shaolin monk named Kwai Chang Caine (played by David Carradine) wanders through the American old west, looking for his half-brother. But these comparisons are only of value in helping readers decide if this book might appeal to them. Once you crack into Frontier, the comparisons will soon fall by the wayside.

Told in a series of vignettes and interludes, the story begins in the future on a ruined, mostly-abandoned Earth. The sparse population that remains struggles to survive in spite of a corrupt justice system, dwindling water supplies, and starvation. Most folk cling to a new religion that worships Gaia—a female planet-god that binds them close to her heart through gravity and an encouraged hatred of technology.

We enter this future alongside a trio of grubby, pathetic scavengers scheming to salvage a newly-crashed escape pod, after witnessing its fiery plunge to Earth from outer space. Greed takes over and once that dust settles, the way has been cleared for a boot-clad, gun-toting woman to emerge from the pod.

Referred to only as “The Stranger”, we soon learn that she wants to find a working communication device. She’s desperate to send a message. She needs to find someone who’s gone missing; the woman she loves. Through various adventures, mishaps, detours and standoffs, she makes her way towards a place rumored to have the technology she needs to send her message, in hopes it reaches the ears of the love of her life. And so she keeps moving, any way she can, towards that destination.

As she travels, she encounters a variety of people and situations. Each reacts to her differently, and thus The Stranger becomes The Courier, who temporarily teams up with… well, Garraty. I quite liked Garraty. That’s all you’ll get about him from me, so as not to sand away the shine of discovery for you.

And when The Courier’s vignette ends, she becomes The Tramp to a small boy struggling with the local concept of God. Later, she is The Stowaway on a problematic train ride. As she continues the struggle to reach her destination and fulfill her dream of finding her lover, she becomes The Traveler, Darling, The Guest… and when the time is right, we learn that she has a name.

The interludes tell one story, while the chapters tell another. Eventually, they twine together. The worldbuilding that created this post-apocalyptic Earth is strong enough I could almost taste the dust in the air while squinting at the scenery, from small decrepit towns, to open desert, to a huge and crowded city. The author crafts a future Earth that wobbles between the brink of despair and the edge of hope. Which way will it ultimately tilt?

The character development is some of the best I’ve ever encountered—succinctly managed, and with a sharp understanding of ‘show, don’t tell’. The plotline(s) wander about in an easy, organic fashion, and while they might seem to be disjointed in the moment, each proves in the long run to be anything but. To my astonishment, I learned that this is Grace Curtis’s debut novel. I absolutely want to read more from her in the future.

My thanks to author Grace Curtis, Rebellion, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a digital review copy of this book. This review is my honest and unbiased opinion.

A mysterious stranger lands on Earth. We know next to nothing about her other than her quest to find someone, and we gradually learn more as she journeys through a desiccated, post-apocalyptic Earth.

A curious little novel that's a combination of Weird West, Station Eleven, Christelle Dabos, and perhaps a little Douglas Adams, Frontier has perhaps one of the best first chapters I've ever read. This introduction is an utter delight— a callback to tropes of genre fiction and some stellar scene-setting, all without any of the main characters hardly making an appearance.

The rest of the book didn't strike me quite as successfully. The first 70% or so is made up of our hero's meandering journey, often seen through the eyes of the Earth-natives who encounter her, many of whom we do not see again. It's a neat bit of artifice, but it means it's hard to connect with our hero and her quest.

Each chapter is progressively more fanciful, starting with a drug-running turtle and culminating in a sort of phantasmagoric explosion that made me question if I was running a fever. It felt very much like the later Mirror Visitor books from Christelle Dabos where the plot was about 90% whimsey and 10% nonsense. While I wish the flashbacks that provide useful context occurred earlier in the book to build out the emotional core, I still enjoyed the ride.

A novel that grew on me as I read it, Frontier is a blend of Western, Sci-Fi, and love story.

In terms of how post-apocalyptic this novel is, it’s closer to Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow than Mad Max. As such, it still definitely qualifies as post-apocalyptic, but if it was a Fallout-type landscape, society has recovered a bit from that. It’s more of a "rebirth of the earth" novel.

The people who remained have taken a step backwards in time, living in a mish-mash of 1800s Western culture/technology with a spattering of future tech lying around. People aren’t shocked by high-tech stuff (as maglev trains still run, and some cities are built around downed or unlaunched spaceships), but they also are comfortable not using it. The religion that has sprung up is one devoted to Gaia, or the earth itself, which is why some people refuse to use technology to a certain extent. The combination of Western + Sci-Fi reminded me a lot of the show Firefly.

The plot takes a while to get into. We have an unnamed woman, from a crashed ship, on a mission to find her missing girlfriend. We don’t know why she crashed or where the girlfriend is, so the stranger (who gets a new title every few chapters) travels from place to place just … looking for clues? For the first few chapters, I wasn’t very engaged, but I pushed through and by halfway I was really into it. The second half of the novel is excellent!

In terms of Romance, I would characterize it more like a “love story.” Getting to her girlfriend is the driving force of Kai’s journey, but it doesn’t fall under the tropes or 3-act structure of Romance as a genre. I liked the relationship quite a bit (it's a little bit enemies-to-lovers and I love a soldier + scientist couple). They were so cute!

The book takes some liberties with the point of view, which I enjoyed, where we get a few chapters here and there following other characters. This serves to broaden the world-building and gave it a bit of a literary flair. The prose in the novel is quite lovely, with the occasional lyrical description. The action is quick-paced and easy to follow.

The stakes waiver a bit in terms of tension, especially in the first half, as because Kai isn’t really sure where she’s going, we’re also not sure where the story is going, but as her goals become more concrete, the story becomes very engaging.

It’s also quite fun in you’re not sure what or who Kai’s going to run into next, whether it’s the deranged sheriff on her tail (for reasons unknown), a comic book seller who refuses to do business, a sexy thief, or a tortoise.

Overall, if you’re fine with a slow start, Frontier is a lovely, intriguing Western sci-fi novel that would be perfect to read around Valentine’s Day.

4 stars.

It starts off slow, and you really have to commit and plow through while getting used to the style. Reading the first chapter gave me the feeling of being stuck in traffic. And it’s not that the pace ever picks up, no, you just get sucked into the story. Or rather you want to know the story, you want to know what’s next, so maybe you’d be able to figure out what happened before. The writing is good. It has some pretty awesome quotes. There’s enough description, but I sometimes had a hard time imagining the described things, although it might be me, not the author. The book reminded me of a movie script, honestly. I liked the structure. You don’t get a five-page dump of the main character’s background and why you should like them. You’re getting to know the character slowly, and you have a chance to make up your own mind about them. If you stick with it for the first three chapters, you get to read an interesting book.

3.5/5
Thanks to Rebellion Publishing and Netgalley for the ARC.

Frontier is a sci-fi tale that is a climate horror story with wild west/Firefly vibes as well as being a sapphic love story. The world building and descriptions of the Earth after the majority of humanity has fled to the stars is terrific. The way groups of people have deified the planet, vilified technology plus the lengths the remaining people have gone to survive is really well done. The structure of the story with you not knowing who the Stranger is until much later in the story is unique and did keep me interested enough to want to finish. I think ultimately it kept me from attaching to the characters emotionally and blunted the impact of some of the later story elements. Overall the story is a worthwhile read and the climate catastrophe certainly rings true.

Thank you to Pride Book Tours and Solaris publishing for an ARC

Frontier by Grace Curtis is a queer sci-fi western about loyalty, love, and finding what you’ve lost. This book reads almost like a short story anthology in the beginning and I’m here for it. We have a stranger from space crash to earth and because we don’t know her name, she’s given a different name in each chapter by the different characters and perspectives. I loved the format of these stories and how they worked together to tell the whole story. The main character was easy to spot in these narratives and it was fun getting to see her from all these different perspectives. The format did change near the end once the backstory was revealed and that was difficult to adjust to, but I couldn’t put the book down in the first half. and the worldbuilding was very well done. I loved how religion tied into the story as well, and how it created a large amount of tension because of their bias against those who “abandoned the earth”.
I enjoyed the first half of this book immensely, but after the backstory was somewhat abruptly revealed, it launched into the second half of the book which was written in a much different format. Gone were the short stories and instead our main character has a name and a fully revealed purpose and it just felt underwhelming. The pacing was much faster but more difficult to follow. While I had my questions about what was behind the story in the first half, the abrupt change just wasn't enjoyable to me. It has good rep and themes, but i also found the romance underwhelming as well considering that they're willing to do all these things for each other in the name of love but they've known each other for a few months.
Overall though, this is a well-written sci-fi western with dynamic and interesting characters. I only wish that the format and pacing had remained consistent throughout.

This was an epic standalone book.

The Stranger (as we know her) is stranded on earth. A foreign plant with dangerous characters at every corner. Stalked by a power hungry sheriff, our hero trudges through desolate barren places searching for her love, who she’s lost when her ship has fallen earth-side.

The Stranger is your classic gun slinging, wise cracking hero of this apocalyptic sci-fi western. Through every chapter I rooted harder for this misfit. As she meets a bevy of characters. human and not, that help her along her journey.

I gasped, I sighed, I swooned. Definitely recommend this one for adventure, sapphic romance, and intrigue.

Thank you to Rebellion and NetGalley for this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was so charmingly wonderful. A little bit western.. a little bit sci fi.. a little bit love story...and all delightful.

The nameless main character is moving through a destroyed future Earth searching for her lover, that she was separated from. As the story progresses we learn a little more about her, how she got here, this sad Earth, some of the people who live her (many of whom are quite interesting) and the Deputy who is determined to hunt her down. It all unfolds very slowly, and satisfying.

Excellent!


Thank you to NetGalley for an eArc in exchange for an honest review.

- FRONTIER is a fantastic sci-fi western, set among the humans who stayed behind on Earth, adopting a new religion worshiping the planet while also being ruled over by a network of old-fashioned sheriffs.
- I loved the structure of this book. For most of it, we follow the Stranger from the points of view of other people as she travels, giving us short glimpses of the different cities, beliefs, and factions of this world. When we do get to her perspective, her story is a punch to the heart.
- This book is full of gunslinging, witty retorts, inventive worldbuilding, and queer love. I hope you'll seek it out if those things pique your interest!

When I first read about this book, everything about it appealed to me. In practice, I found it to be quite a tough read. Despite not being terribly long, it was disjointed and dense. I found that I had a tough time convincing myself to pick it up each reading session, but once I opened it, I was enthralled. I enjoyed the ending more than the beginning, and it was definitely worth the wait. I love the western hope-punk vibes and know several of my science fiction readers who will too.

I was excited for this one and loved the concept -- sapphic space Western sounds like fun. Unfortunately, the writing really didn't work for me. It felt a bit chaotic, with an ever-shifting cast of characters and writing that was a bit too surface level for me. I didn't really get a sense of the setting or depth to the characters.

Thanks to NetGalley and Rebellion for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Hopepunk meets western with a sprinkle of Doctor Who in this brief, shining look into a possible future for humanity. To be published on Valentine’s day 2023, Frontier is a charming story about queer love and human connection written by Grace Curtis.

“What passes for justice is presided over by the High Sheriff, and carried out by his cruel and ruthless Deputy.

Then a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet’s first visitor in three hundred years. This Stranger is a crewmember on the first ship in centuries to attempt a return to Earth and save what’s left. But her escape pod crashes hundreds of miles away from the rest of the wreckage.

The Stranger finds herself adrift in a ravaged, unwelcoming landscape, full of people who hate and fear her space-born existence. Scared, alone, and armed, she embarks on a journey across the wasteland to return to her ship, her mission, and the woman she loves.”

I, admittedly, don’t have a lot of experience with the western genre, but I am slightly familiar with hopepunk as an enjoyer of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series. Set in the dystopian remnants of Earth after climate fallout, Frontier has a wild and varied cast of characters and many interesting ideas about what could become of our planet and culture in the future. Let’s get into it.

Frontier is a fairly episodic book with an overarching storyline that doesn’t fully come into itself until the back half of the book. In the beginning especially, the movement of the Stranger is told through her interactions with members of small communities as she moves further south in search of a communicator to try to contact her lover.

I found the Stranger, Frontier’s main character, to be a highlight of the book. Through the course of her travels, she is called by half a dozen names and titles, including the Courier, the Stowaway, Darling, and several others. It isn’t until a little over two thirds of the way through that she introduces herself (which I’ll leave you, dear reader, to discover for yourself) and this lack of her name adds not only an air of mystery to her but also lends more characterization to the people she encounters, as the name she is given is reflective of how the people around her view her. She is the highlight of the narrative, a semi-reluctant agent of justice who does her best to help anyone who can aid her journey.

The episodic nature of this book is truly where its strength lies. It’s a wonderful way to show the variability of the world–where one small town might be extremely adherent to the teachings of Gaia, another might be more lenient–and the people who might live in a world of many extremes. While Frontier starts fairly slow, it picks up its pace as the story goes on, and by the halfway mark I was drawn thoroughly into the story.

Which brings me to the ultimate draw of this story: the underlying queer romance. The Stranger’s motivation hinges on reuniting with her lover, or at the very least discovering her fate. While this isn’t your traditional enemies to lovers, there is hostility between Noelle and the Stranger in the flashback chapter, the resolution of which is satisfying to see.

Conclusion:

I cannot recommend this story highly enough. Fast paced, uplifting, and heartwarming, Frontier is perfect for fans of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series or Doctor Who. If you like stories about queer love and devotion, this is the book for you!