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Review Archive

The Life Engineered – JF Dubeau

It takes courage-and perhaps audacity-to come out swinging, and I’d say JF Dubeau‘s debut novel, The Life Engineered, throws a few powerful punches that make his a book worth giving your undivided attention. In many ways, The Life Engineered is archetypical, but in other ways, it represents a novel approach to a classic medium: robot-focused science fiction. The Life Engineered, one of the Inkshares / Sword and Laser contest winners, is available today, at the end of a long and interesting road. Because of its publication through Inkshares, readers have had unprecedented access to information about the writing and publication process, and knowing Dubeau’s state of mind put some additional weight behind moments in the novel. But, as I’m learning in a wonderful book called Reading Like a Writer, it is important to look at the words themselves, rather than the extraneous meta-data of the circumstances surrounding their origin. So I

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Featured Author: Zack Jordan

Zack Jordan’s entry in the Inkshares/Nerdist space opera contest, The Life Interstellar, looks like one hellofa novel. His reader updates are wonderful, and the pitch is outstanding. I can’t wait to read this one. About the book:  The Life Interstellar is a rip-roaring, unapologetic space opera. It’s set in a crowded galaxy at some undetermined point in the future where the Humans, sadly, have been exterminated. No one seems to know what happened to them, a fact which only adds to their mystique. What kind of intelligence could wipe out four trillion beings in a single Galactic year and yet make each death look like an accident? From novas to starship crashes to an isolated escalator incident on Braka IV, what made the Humans so special–or so frightening–that they warranted such treatment? This is how legends are born. Humans have been the boogeymen of the galaxy for hundreds of years

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Firstborn & Defending Elysium – Brandon Sanderson

Any opportunity we have to see the progress of those we idolize, to humanize our creative deities, is a good thing. I’ve made no secret of my passion/obsession with Brandon Sanderson’s work both on and off the page. His contribution to genre fiction will surely go down in history as the most significant of our time. He’s our Tolkien, or our Bradbury. There are other authors who have made spectacular contributions to genre fiction, and I do not mean to minimize their impact, but I think Brandon Sanderson has made the biggest waves among them. And yet, he constantly makes his fans feel special. Like each and every individual matters. Like those fans of his who are aspiring writers (like me) have every chance to become great too. A great example of this kind of encouragement comes in the form of Firstborn & Defending Elysium, two novelettes bound into a single

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Featured Author: Christina Feindel

Christina Feindel’s The Revenant, another competitor for the glory of a top spot in the Inkshares/Nerdist contest, features the badass heroine we’ve all been dying to read. About the book: With its advanced weaponry, the Revenant was supposed to turn the tide of the war… but went missing instead. Ten years later, the Federation’s hold on the three suns is firmly cemented and corrupt in every way, and any Separatist hopes or dreams seem to have gone the way of Old Earth and its dinosaurs. Grayson Delamere was still a child when the war ended and she doesn’t much care why it was fought in the first place. In the vac, most lives are short and brutal with or without the Federation’s interference. She’s worked hard to keep her head low, making her living as a mechanic on any ship that’d have her… and covering her tracks well any time that ship happened to

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Featured Author: Michael Haase

Today The Warbler features Michael Haase, whose book, The Madness of Mr. Butler, looks like an interesting pseudo-Galilean tale in an absolutely fascinating setting. Read selected entries from Mr. Butler’s journal that he kept prior to the events chronicled in the novel at The Diary of Mr. Butler. About the book:  The Madness of Mr. Butler is a satirical space opera packed with adventure, mystery, and drama. Swiftly alternating between character perspectives, the novel has an aggressive pace that keeps the reader locked into the story. Mr. Butler is packed with sharp turns around every corner that will drive you to read more and more until you’ve finished the entire book, reflecting on how it made you think, laugh, and wonder the entire time. The story follows Thaddeus Butler, a man thought to be insane because he is the only person who believes his world is round and floating through space. One evening, Mr. Butler

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Redshirts – John Scalzi

I’ve been meaning to read the work of mega-prolific writer John Scalzi for quite a while, and was never able to get around to it, despite having purchased several of his novels last year. Then, by a happy chance, audible.com had Redshirts available for less than $5 during their Black Friday sale and I thought, “What the hell…I’ll pick it up.” I went into Redshirts confident that I knew the central plot based only on the title and the synopses I’d skimmed of it a while earlier. Turns out that my assumptions only captured one layer of this impressive and fun meta-novel. I usually shy away from meta-izing things, but it feels appropriate here because the term doesn’t really capture what’s going on in the book. Before diving into the layers that make up Redshirts, I’d like to talk a bit about the narration, which contributed to some of the

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Featured Author: Jason Chestnut

Author Jason Chestnut (Facebook, Twitter) is today’s featured Inkshares / Nerdist contest entrant. His book, To Live and Die in Avalon, looks absolutely wonderful. I am definitely getting this one. About the book: On New Year’s Day in the year 1970, the planet Earth was scorched and made uninhabitable by a mysterious alien terrorist force known only as the “Cleansing.” A benevolent race of beings saved over a quarter of the world’s population as well as many of the planet’s animals, cultural artifacts and history and relocated them to a massive space station on the far side of the Earth’s moon. The humans called it Avalon. Fifty years later, the human race has flourished on Avalon, which has now become a hub for humanoid aliens from throughout the galaxy. The remnants of humanity adopted what they believed to be the height of their culture and history…the aesthetics of the 1960’s. Penelope “Penny”

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Featured Author: RH Webster

Today, The Warbler is glad to feature RH Webster, another contestant in the Inkshares / Nerdist contest. Her novel, Lucky, sounds like a wonderful space-romance. Check it out! About the book: This novel is everything a reader could want from a space opera: space ships, romance, mystery, bar brawls, and a high speed car chase! Lucky is the story of down-on-her-luck graduate student Cassandra “Lucky” Luckenbach, who has been stranded on a far-flung, dusty, run down mining colony on the planet known as San Pedro. After working odd jobs around the colony for close to three years, she finally saves up enough money to get back to her family on Earth. She books passage on the freighter Rosebud (the spaceship), unaware that one of the crew members had been killed the night before (the bar brawl). She is offered an opportunity to work her way back to Earth as an administrative assistant to the

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Featured Author: Christopher Leone

Continuing the series featuring authors with projects in the current Inkshares contest, here’s another excellent entry. From Christopher Leone, proven screenwriter and all-around polite dude, Champions of the Third Planet. Follow Mr. Leone on Twitter: @ChristophrLeone About the book: Champions of the Third Planet is a middle-grade sci-fi adventure novel about a boy named Milo who find a mysterious black Orb in the woods behind his school. Soon Milo and four other kids — including his little sister and the kid that bullies him at school — all end up trapped inside this Orb, which kidnaps them to a planet on the other side of the galaxy. It turns out there are thousands of these Orbs throughout the galaxy that are collecting alien life forms and bringing them back to this planet, where our kids discover they MUST FIGHT ALIEN MONSTERS IN A GIANT ARENA. The kids are injected with a

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Featured Author: Patrick Jamison

Inkshares is running another contest with the Nerdist, so I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce the work of a fellow author. Without further warbling, here’s Patrick Jamison’s Infinity Mind. About the book: Mason is a non-violent protester against the dictatorial government of Raquel Velasquez, the reigning leader of El Dorado, the oldest and most secluded colony on Mars. For his actions, he is thrown in jail, beaten to within an inch of his life, then recorded as dead. Waking up in a lab, Mason soon discovers the government’s ulterior motives for his arrest when he realizes he has been surgically altered to have telepathic abilities. He is the first success in an ongoing experiment to create unstoppable assassins — a telepathic police force that will quell all resistance to the Velasquez regime. Despite his resistance, he succumbs to the brainwashing techniques of his new master, Oduya, the right hand

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