Scifi Mars Colony in Big Trouble, But Can’t Be Bummed All the Time #cat #Mars #scifi #sciencefiction #trailer #story

Click to view

Anxious about her one-way journey, a young roboticist won’t back out despite tragedy in the tiny colony. Admirable, but it may get her killed, because something is terribly wrong on Mars.

While Emma and her friends struggle to save their lives and colony, what’s the cat they brought to Mars doing? It’s fun to imagine in this video.

All five books in the Mars series are available on Amazon, individually or in a Box Set (great value for hours of reading pleasure.) But you’re not stuck with Amazon! Also available from other favorite stores, individually or in that same Box Set. Join the colony. Read one today.

Advertisements

Conspiracy on the Moon drives this scifi heroine #bookreview #review #sciencefiction #scifi

Not the most exciting cover I’ve ever seen

If you enjoyed Andy Weir’s The Martian (the book or the movie) you’ll find his style carries over to Artemis. The story (with maps!) is set on the Moon, in an established (if small) lunar city. The main character, Jazz, is a young woman of Arab and Islamic descent. Her background contributes to the story, but she’s not observant and this isn’t a lecture on religion. It’s a crime story, with more than one criminal, and some of them are willing to murder. What the criminals are after is satisfyingly wonkish and believable, but no spoilers here. You’ll see when you read the book.

Despite being in a completely different setting, Jazz shares some traits with The Martian’s Mark Watney. She uses technology in her schemes, never gives up, wise-cracks a lot, and swears. There are references to sex, though nothing steamy in the story itself.

But Jazz is not a sympathetic character. She’s a young smuggler ready to commit larger crimes. Weir gives her a backstory to explain her willingness, but it never made me like her much.

The story flows well. I enjoyed the lunar colony, which relies on imports from Earth in an economy based on tourism. The Apollo 11 site is a major draw and fun to see through the story’s eyes. The lunar city itself is well presented along with its inhabitants – exactly what I’d want on the Moon.

In an interesting twist on flashbacks, messages back and forth to Jazz’s Earth-bound pen pal provide background and then catch up to the story to participate in the action. Nice touch.

Details of the technology Jazz uses were fun through most of the book, but in the climax I skimmed along, wanting to see how the story turns out.

One odd thing: the story is described as a heist, but it’s not. At least, not in the usual sense of a robbery. My thesaurus claims the word heist can mean attack, so I guess it applies, but why use a secondary definition?

Here’s another thing I find odd. The title of the book is Artemis: A Novel. I didn’t need to be told it’s a novel – there are plenty of clues (read sarcasm here.) I’ve seen other books add “a novel” to their titles, so I guess it’s a fashion of some sort. Doesn’t hurt anything – I just think it’s odd.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone who likes realistic science in their science fiction, and enjoys a bit of an anti-hero. And would like to visit a small city on the Moon.

What others are saying
At 3.9 stars, with over 1900 reviews on Amazon, it’s no surprise this book is in the top ten (not 10%, but top ten books) in its Amazon categories’ sales ranks. Although, in another oddity, the day I checked one of its Amazon categories was “time travel.” Huh?

Some reviewers had trouble following the science part of the story, while others thought it was too low-tech! Like me, some felt the main character wasn’t likeable, and one said Jazz was “what young boys THINK women are like.” Bit of an ouch there. But most readers enjoyed it,” Mr. Weir’s got humor, wit, snark” and “loved the plot, characters, and one liners.” Artemis by Andy Weir.

Interplanetary Diplomat Tackles Conspiracy on Dystopian Worlds #scifi #sciencefiction #review #bookreview

Does your reading get repetative? Does scifi feel like the same handful of galactic wars and teenage battle-games over and over. Read an indie author with a different perspective. Here are two books by EJ Randolph, an author in my own little town of Silver City, that offer optimism with their action. I bet there are authors in your town, too, you’d enjoy reading.

Retrograde

When a bucolic agrarian world seems too serene, its people too complacent, there’s bound to be trouble. Sent on an apparently simple mission, diplomat Kate Stevens is soon fending off attempts on her life and digging into the royal family’s intrigues.

I enjoyed exploring the society with Kate and discovering both the good and bad. She’s a straightforward hero with an admirable team and spaceship to help her. They puzzle out what’s happening on this world where the end of trade with other planets means a technological slid backwards. Was that bad luck or sabotage? And will the elite kill to protect the answer?

The Dead Don’t Believe

Interstellar diplomat Kate Stevens faces another puzzle. Three primary colors and three basic geometric shapes – what can the people hoisting them intend? And why is their planetary government willing to declare war over the movement? Joined again by the crew of spaceship Miss Appropriation, Kate travels to a new Federation planet to find out.

While rebellion and interplanetary war threatens and there’s plenty of action, Kate’s commitment to doing the right thing is the core of the story. It’s fun to find a scifi book with a unique view of societies as humanity colonizes the galaxy. There are also illustrations that my e-reader displayed very nicely.

Help an indie out! Leave a review, especially on Amazon (which is the Big Dog in book sales.) Like many indie authors (including me!) Randolph is just starting to accumulate reviews. Here are a few of the comments:

• She and her courier crew avoid lethal violence to bring harmony back to a broken society

• I read the book in one sitting until late at night. I don’t often do that.

• I liked the allusions to history, and to ethnic backgrounds.

 

Teens Battle to the Death in Ruthless Dystopian Games – Latest Big Hit Contribution to the Genre #review #bookreview #dystopia #scifi

Red Rising is in the scifi/fantasy dystopian genre – the sort where teenagers fight and kill each other in “games.”  Like other stories in this genre, adults are generally corrupt or ineffective. The genre favors medieval sorts of weapons with flashes of high-tech and high-fashion. The main character must win the game to maneuver into a position to topple the evil society. You may think this has become predictable stuff, but Red Rising by Pierce Brown is phenomenally popular.

The story delivers all the requirements of the genre, and grandly. The underdog hero, Darrow, is a Red slave in a society of many rigid classes ruled by the Golds. He chooses to join the game to give meaning to his murdered wife’s death, bravely suffers a dreadful preparation, and doesn’t really know what he’s getting into. There’s lots of violence and suffering by all involved, more than any one of us could endure because the characters are supermen and superwomen.

Darrow repeatedly ruminates about his lost love, which drives him and makes him unwilling to settle merely for revenge. He feels guilt over some of the terrible things he must do to win and sometimes suffers consequences. He makes and loses friends and enemies. The story is well done and doesn’t devolves into merely a video game plot.

At one point I was getting a little tired of the violence, and laughed out loud when a character said that he was getting tired of the game. How about that – an author who can read my mind.

What others are saying
There are always some negative reviews. Darrow’s ruminations strike some as “rehashing” and “tedious.” Others noted this is more of a fantasy than hard science fiction (though the scifi genre has been stretched into fantasy forever.) The book is set on Mars but there’s only one grim element that says “Mars” to me – the planet’s been terraformed, so the story could have been set almost anywhere.

Others disliked similarities to previous popular dystopias. “I am very bothered, and even distracted… because it is following The Hunger Games in 2008 and Divergent in 2011 and Red Rising came out in 2014 which wholesale loots plots and character arcs from the previous two books.” Joel De Gan.

The comparison wouldn’t bother the author – the Amazon description brags about the similarity to Ender and Katniss.

My bottom line.
I’ve read enough stories in this genre lately, and that may blunt my opinion. I’ve read that scifi is always about us today, so they make me wonder – do teens and twenty-somethings see school as an arbitrary game imposed on them by callous adults? And the real world on the other side of school as grim and rigged?

Red Rising is well done and if you’re looking for this sort of story, you’ll love it.

Want to Go to Mars? Why Wait? Take a Scifi Trip! Affordable Gigantic Set of 5 Books Will Make You Happy #scifi #series #top10 percent

Yee ha! Colony on Mars Box Set – my complete 5 book series – has debuted on Amazon in top 10% of it’s science fiction category.

Go to the Box Set on Amazon or other favorite online stores. The set and the individual eBooks and paperbacks, are available today on Amazon and will be popping up everywhere else over the week.

Or, search for my name, Kate Rauner, or Colony on Mars on other platforms and favorite stores. Value priced for hours of reading pleasure on Mars – you’ll save even if you already bought one of the books at the regular ebook price 🙂

The Amazon cover is above and the cover at other favorite online stores is below. Here’s the link to Smashwords, but the set should be appearing on B&N, Apple iBooks, Kobo and other stores this week. If you can wait 🙂

Available in Kindle and other eBook formats. Here’s what you get:

From NASA to Mars One, real-life visionaries plan to send settlers to Mars. Go today in science fiction, starting with a fragile foothold and reading on into the future. From the first twelve colonists struggling with a strange illness through the generations, follow one settler in each book as they face danger and build a life on Mars.

Glory on Mars – Emma wants to explore in her robotic walkabout suit, but something is terribly wrong as a strange illness threatens the settlement’s future.

Born on Mars – Jake didn’t ask to be born on Mars, into a failing colony. Perhaps he can save his friends and family by contacting new arrivals, but an earthly rival sent them, and they’re half a planet away.

Hermit on Mars – Sig’s life is falling apart when his mother calls for help. She lives with prospectors in the Tartarus Mountains, and the mysterious hermit no longer ensures their survival.

Water on Mars – Bliss thinks this is the best time to be Marsborn. She leaves her tiny burg behind for the biggest city on the planet, but her new boss is crazy, and threats inside and outside of the colony menace her plans.

Storm on Mars – Zeker joins the elite Tower Guilds to change Mars. But his neuroplasticity treatments may have failed, leaving his own impulses as his biggest challenge. Thrown out of the Towers, Zeker lands in a lawless burg filled with desperate people. Farther from his goals than ever, he must find a way back to the Towers, because more than his project is in peril.

This is Absolutely the Best Science Fiction Book I’ve Read in Ages – has Aliens and Surprising Catastrophes – Terrific Ending #review #bookreview #scifi #books #giftideas #giftidea

I’m an incorrigible skimmer, but I read every word of Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kess. The story begins with aliens who have a surprising link to Earth. They’ve already landed when middle-aged geneticist Marianne Jenner is summoned. She joins a team of earthly scientists working with the aliens to defeat a lethal danger that threatens both humans and extraterrestrials – a cloud of interstellar spores that could wipe out both worlds.

Nothing goes the way I expected. Disaster is slow and complicated, driven as much by human failings as the interstellar threat, with a fascinating impact on Earth and its children. It’s a good story – a global calamity told from the intimate perspective of Marianne and her family, with a chance to follow the aliens to their home world. There are action scenes, but a lot of the story covers Marianne’s relationships, so that’s my one caveat if you’re not into that. In addition to planet-wide impacts, climate change is raging, which is not related to the main plot but adds some colorful background.

In the latter half of the book, young children told some of the story from their point of view. Those sections were handled wonderfully. The kids notice exactly what a kid would, leaving me with more meaning than the children realize themselves. Kess occasionally drops names from science and the arts (Stephen Hawking, Melville’s Ahab), which is fun. I enjoyed the references I recognized, but none was vital to the story so they never slowed me down.

I liked both the science and the characters – lengthy personal interactions related to the overall story and held my interest. The rip-roaring climax was surprising, but all made sense in the end. It’s a good thing I finished the book on a weekend because I couldn’t put it down through the last quarter of the book.

What others are saying
With 3.5 stars on Amazon and 24 reviews, the book isn’t as popular as I expected. The alien portion of the book is based on an award-winning novella by Kess (one reviewer said “word for word”), and some readers were disappointed that the aliens left the story early in the book. The effects of the alien’s visit on individuals was belabored for some, too much like “filler.” Others loved both premise and characters. As is common, the features of the book that delighted some readers were exactly what others disliked.

Book Two in the trilogy is available now, though there were no reader reviews on Amazon when I checked. The description seemed a little disappointing – sounded like a rework of the original book’s plot.

When Physics Tries to Restore Magic for Shadowy Government Purposes, a Time Travel Romp Begins – delightful premise, crazy problems may destroy our world #review #bookreview #timetravel #sciencefiction #scifi

I was enthralled with the first quarter of this long novel, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Physics and magic intersect wonderfully when an expert in ancient languages, Melisande Stokes, is hired by a man representing DODO. DODO is “a shadowy government entity you’ve never heard of.” It turns out he’s telling the truth, which gives you an idea of the irreverent tone through much of the book.

The DODO team uses time travel to change the present for shadowy government purposes. Witches once used magic everywhere in the world, until science jammed its frequencies and it disappeared in 1851. But liquid-helium cooled quantum equipment can produce a small room where magic still works. The interplay between magic and physics, as well as with the physicist and witch who join the team, are fun. Not fun for all the characters, though, who quickly learn that it’s not healthy to be rude to a witch.

Melisande narrates from the past, from last few days when magic worked. A mission gone awry stranded her in Victorian London. Throughout the story, she occasionally reminds us that she misses modern toothpaste, that corsets are terribly uncomfortable, and she’s about to be trapped forever as the end of magic approaches.

Melisande took DODO’s first trip backwards in time. To raise money for the project, she plans to steal a book from colonial America that will become rare and valuable in the present. Unfortunately, a witch can only Send a person’s natural organic body (even fillings from teeth are left behind) so Melisande arrives naked and must hide the book so it survives for centuries to be retrieved “today.”

The mission depends on help from a local witch (there’s still magic in colonial times) and Melisande discovers that, when all you take with you is your naked body, all you have to trade with the locals is information (classified!) or sex. There’s quite a bit of sex as the story progresses, though not pornographically detailed.

After a harrowing trip, Melisande returns to discover… nothing where she hid the book. The modern witch explains she must change history on multiple Strands before the present changes. Stands are closely aligned alternative realities that communicate among themselves somehow. Melisande must repeat her adventure several times, and each trip is slightly different. A neat confluence of magic and physics that will probably drive any real-life theoretical physicist crazy. But I liked it.

Starting with the next mission into the past, the book slows down. Events and conversations are explained step by step in more detail than I wanted to read. The book is written entirely as the journals, letters, emails, and files of the characters, so redundancies and tangents creep in. I began to skim. I entirely skipped some sections, such as the Human Resource files on DODO’s new-hires (honestly, such things are included.)

The DODO team grows and there are several missions to different eras. Some will probably intrigue you enough to read every word. Did you know Shakespeare’s plays are anti-Irish? Everyone at the time saw that even though we moderns no longer do. This feels like a detail the authors turned up in their research, though I didn’t check to confirm.

The bureaucracy of DODO is equally detailed. ISO 9000 standards are mentioned, and if you don’t know what those are, you’re obviously not a Quality Assurance geek. With such details, I found it odd that the authors don’t seem to know what Power Point presentations look like. Long wall-of-words paragraphs do not fit on Power Point slides.

I enjoyed the story as pruned by my skimming technique, and read eagerly to the end. The last few pages set up for a sequel, although there isn’t one available yet.

What others are saying
Amazon posts 416 reviews for 3.8 stars, and the sales ranking of DODO is phenomenal.
“Lots of intrigue, science, and laughs.”
“Fun in the use of acronyms and parody of bureaucracy. Unpredictable development of villains.”
“Farcical sendup of the classic time travel trope, complete with witches, sword fighters, and physicists.”

Readers who didn’t like it ran aground in the middle.
“Gets stuck in the middle. Listening to the audiobook, nothing happens for hours.”