Yesterday was the pub-day for my friend Jim C. Hines’ eighth book, LIBRIOMANCER, the first in a new series.

That’s right, LIBRIOMANCER.

Unwittingly, independently, Jim and I both wrote geeky self-referential urban fantasies with a ‘mancy’ root for the title, which just happened to come out less than a month apart. This actually happens fairly often in publishing. Not this exact case, but the idea of similar-ish novels coming out from two different houses is usually more a sign that the two books are both hitting a part of the zeitgeist than that one person is copying from the other (I can assure you, we did not copy from one another. I was neck-deep into GEEKOMANCY before I even knew that Jim was writing LIBRIOMANCER. It was just kismet. Nerdy, geeky, kismet).

I’ve read about half of LIBRIOMANCER, more than enough to tell you a few things:

1) It’s delightful. For anyone who grew up with a love of reading, who ever wished to be whisked away into a book’s world, this novel will scratch that itch.
2) It’s funny. Just as in GEEKOMANCY, there are tons of in-jokes and geeky references. LIBRIOMANCER is more literary-focused, but there’s a scattershot across geek culture, as Hines’ protagonist Isaac Vainio, is a big geek himself.
3) It’s different from GEEKOMANCY. The two leads are very different people, with different approaches to conflict, different magical skills, and very different plots.

So if you’ve read and enjoyed GEEKOMANCY, I can wholeheartedly recommend LIBRIOMANCER for a fairly similiar kind of fun. Each novel stands on its own, but I hope that coming out close together will prove to help both LIBRIOMANCER and my own GEEKOMANCY.

Check out Jim’s launch day post on his blog for more about LIBRIOMANCER.