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Featured Author: Landon Trine

April 18, 2016 No Comments

Happy Monday, dear readers! The featured author series continues, this time with Landon Trine, author of First on Mars, another entrant in the Geek and Sundry hard sci-fi contest. This book sounds awesome; I highly recommend checking it out. Landon can be found on the web on Twitter (@landontrine) and Facebook. About First on Mars: A diverse group of seven NASA astronauts are chosen for the first crewed expedition to the red planet: Kurt, Norbite, Kara, Rin, Aditya, Anesh, and Akshara. For some unknown reason, Aditya tries to sabotage the ship and then kills himself, leaving a trail of frightening implications with no time to investigate. China has launched its own mission to Mars in an attempt to claim territory and other countries are not far behind. Events back on Earth and on Mars complicate and raise the stakes of their mission. The team needs to work together to survive the unforgiving

Featured Author: Peter Ryan

April 15, 2016 1 Comment

Periodically, a book will come around that deserves some additional attention. While this one is not in the Geek & Sundry competition, it’s got eleven days remaining in its campaign. Time being of the essence, I felt it prudent to weave it in with this batch of featured author posts. Take a look at Peter Ryan‘s Sync City. About Sync City: Armed, surly and vulgar. Jack Trevayne is humanity’s best hope for the future. Just don’t tell him. Sync City is the first part of the Sync City cycle, a story set on Earth in a dystopian past, present and future. Jack Trevayne is a Keeper, a blunt, no-nonsense enforcer for a group of pacifist post-humans known as the Deacons. Jack’s responsibilities, with the help of his sentient motorbike and sometimes partner Vic, are to keep the timelines clean and protect humanity by killing the War Clans and the Scythers. He also doesn’t mind

A Crucible of Souls – Mitchell Hogan

April 14, 2016 No Comments

When the prologue of A Crucible of Souls started to play, I noticed a few interesting things happen simultaneously. First, I recognized instantaneously that the reader, Oliver Wyman, would be fantastic. Second, I thought “oh I know where this is going.” And finally, I thought, “this, again?” You see, over the past year I’ve found that epic fantasy has gotten a bit stale for me. This doesn’t cover all of epic fantasy, not by a long shot. But I’ve grown tired of some of the tropes endemic to the genre. This feeling was particularly pronounced when I listened to The Sword of Shannara, which I found tiresome and derivative, much to the chagrin of a few commenters on the internet. Poorly understood precursor civilizations, whose only remains are valuable artifacts, some language, and thinly veiled threats to not repeat their mistakes, lest you lead the world to a second “shattering,”

Featured Author: John Carter

April 12, 2016 2 Comments

Today’s featured author is John Carter, who can be found on Facebook and at TheWorldsofJohnCarter.com. His book, The Army of the Man, makes use of one of the most intriguing parasites around today, Toxoplasma gondii. I can’t wait to read this book. About The Army of the Man: 1968. The arms race spirals out of control as the world’s super powers push the limits of science to obtain superiority. Science fiction becomes fact with the breakthrough of the Sekhmet Serum. The dawn of the super soldier is on the horizon thanks to a common parasite: Toxoplasma gondii. 2018 Eric Lawson, a fervent protester and opponent of the United States government, is broke. With graduation at hand, he faces an uncertain future. When approached by a representative of “The Man,” he’s offered a chance to fulfill his lifelong dream of changing the world. After being injected with the Sekhmet Serum, Eric embarks on an epic

Featured Author: Peter Ravlich

April 11, 2016 No Comments

With the Inkshares/Geek & Sundry contest into its second week, it’s time to continue the featured author series! This time, Peter Ravlich’s Phase Three, which touches on some classic science fiction themes while addressing some very real elements of our lives today as consumers. Peter Ravlich can be found on twitter (@PeterRavlich) and on inklings.co.nz. About Phase Three: The world has an addiction. Augmenting reality – augmenting ourselves – averted a looming energy crisis, but it has become something more than that. “Overnight equality,” promises the slogan, and what’s a decade or two between advertisers? We redefined what it means to be human, then bought our own bullshit retail. But the physical world still exists, however much we stare into the infinite. People yet remain, living outside the reality bubbles we create. And so do the consequences of our inattention. Three individuals, each a casualty of flawed implementation, face intimate, inconsequential decisions

Featured Author: Tal M. Klein

April 9, 2016 1 Comment

Readers, it is once again time to feature a group of great books on the blog. Inkshares is running a new contest, this time with Geek & Sundry, searching for the next great works of hard science fiction. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of hard sci-fi, I boil it down to this: hard sci-fi is fiction that builds upon the known rules of plausible science, emphasizing and explaining the science as an integral part of the world and/or plot. That definition might not capture hard sci-fi for diehard fans, but it’ll suffice for us. So, let’s dig into our first featured author, Tal M. Klein, and his book, The Punch Escrow. About The Punch Escrow: It’s summer in New York, 2471. Teleportation is the elite mode of transportation. Air pollution isn’t a problem anymore. Advanced nanotechnology has made everlasting life possible. Artificially intelligent things make daily chores a cinch.

Calamity – Brandon Sanderson

April 6, 2016 No Comments

With Calamity, Brandon Sanderson gives fans the rarest of treats: an ending. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I love Brandon’s work, am beyond thrilled at his expansive and intricate Cosmere, and am fully committed for the long haul, if it ends at thirty-six books, or fifty, or one hundred. But to see the pieces click into place, to watch the carefully laid plans line up and deliver on an epic-if you’ll pardon the pun-finale; that’s a special feeling. And while it doesn’t answer every question raised in the Reckoners series, Calamity ties up the story with an explosive bow. (See my Steelheart and Firefight reviews before continuing, and beware of spoilers below.) The Reckoners series is about fear. It’s about what feat does to us when we let it own us, and it’s about how it can be taken advantage of as a means of control. It is also

An Unattractive Vampire – Jim McDoniel

March 29, 2016 No Comments

Now that the past few (very busy) weeks are behind me, I can focus on reviewing Jim McDoniel’s An Unattractive Vampire, which I finished a few weeks ago. It’s the second of three winners from Inkshares’s Sword and Laser contest—the first being The Life Engineered—and is a pleasure to read. An Unattractive Vampire is a humorous swing of the pendulum, a witty response to a zeitgeist flooded with angsty teenage vampires who are no longer monstrous, no longer the stuff of horror. It is a guffaw in the face of the “sexy vampire” that boldly states, “you think that’s a vampire?! THIS is a vampire!” And yet, there is angst, and kitsch, and a healthy number overly-sexualized teenage vampires in An Unattractive Vampire. And it all serves to move along an active, interesting, quickly-paced plot that rewards the reader greatly. It follows an unlikely trio, orphaned siblings, the older sister—a

Every Heart a Doorway – Seanan McGuire

March 16, 2016 1 Comment

After seeing her at a reading at Borderlands in San Francisco, I became a fan of Seanan McGuire. Before that reading, I’d only seen her work in Altered Perceptions, wherein she wrote a very moving personal piece about living with OCD. I knew she was rather prolific (from her essay more than anything else), and knew that I wanted to read something by her, the gods of my ever-growing to-read list willing. The opportunity came to request her upcoming novella, Every Heart a Doorway from NetGalley, and I was delighted. Two birds with one stone, as they say. Every Heart a Doorway is a tale of belonging, of a community of misfits and ill-fits, and of self-discovery. While it is, superficially, a simple tale, it is built on a wonderful, rich concept that is so large in scope that it encompasses worlds. It’s appeal lay in its telling-which was beautifully executed-and in its

Bands of Mourning – Brandon Sanderson

March 9, 2016 No Comments

The sixth book in Brandon Sanderson’s outstanding Mistborn series, Bands of Mourning is a wonderful read. Like all of the Mistborn books, it is action-packed and fast-paced, but the purpose of Bands seems-to me at least-to be more of an informational novel. It’s no secret to fans of Sanderson (and fans of this blog, if there are any out there,) that most of his novels take place in a single universe: the Cosmere. The deeper we get into a single series, the more the connection to the Cosmere becomes apparent. Bands of Mourning blows the lid off of the connection to the Grand Story, making it direct, and raising as many questions as it begins to answer. For a die-hard Sandersonian, it’s an epic feast of thought-provoking Easter eggs. I bet the forums at the 17th shard (the Sanderson fan site) are still out of control with discussions about the ramifications of what we learned

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