An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

Freedom. Love. Family. Tyranny. Trust. 

All words that come to mind in relation to the epic story Sabaa Tahir has woven for her readers. 

The more I read, the more I wanted to know about the lives and society she had created for us. I wanted to know how far she would push her male and female protagonists and the cast of characters around them. What each of them was willing to do to secure freedom, to love, for their family - or in spite of it, all in the face of a tyrannical regime. 

Who could be trusted to help Elias and Laia - could they even trust each other? 

I thoroughly enjoyed finding out! For all of those readers out there looking for a new world to sink their teeth in to with new protagonists to cheer for - even if you don't really WANT to cheer for them - I highly recommend An Ember in the Ashes. I seriously hope that she gets to continue this story for us in the VERY near future!

Tin Men by Christopher Golden

Christopher Golden's novel Tin Men has officially hit stores - and it's hitting hard. Without giving too much away, l can tell you, this timely story is going to stay with you. Here's the mini-summary from the publisher:

Brad Thor meets Avatar in this timely military thriller for the drone age, which spins the troubles of today into the apocalypse of tomorrow. A rocket ride of a read packed with high action, cutting-edge technology, and global politics, Tin Men begins with the end of the world as we know it and takes off from there.

I love sci-fi stories that are based in science and technology, stories that present us with possible, plausible situations that stir up society as we know it - I adored the original Twilight Zone and was intrigued by Black Mirror - and Tin Men is right in that category. Christopher Golden's take on technology, society, and responsibility will make you think about very real near-future possibilities. Are all of these advancements in medicine, military, and media doing more harm that good? Fueled by strong characters made stronger through interwoven stories, Tin Men will open your eyes to how the world could be, for better or worse, because of human decisions and indecision, action and inaction.

Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Bonus points for those willing to discuss the various Cybermen storylines from Doctor Who with me.

Read an excerpt from TIN MEN by Christopher Golden.

Monkey Wars by Richard Kurti

Group think, lust for power, oppression of minority groups and flimsy justifications for war are all themes explored in Richard Kurti's Monkey Wars. If you think that those themes sound like they have been plucked from news headlines over the past decade then you are correct.  The only difference is that these things occur in a monkey society in present day India.

The Infects by Sean Beaudoin

As if it isn't bad enough that Nick is being carted off to Inward Trek, a short term detention/reform excursion experience in lieu of doing time in juvie, but it just HAS to be the Zombie apocalypse as well. Nick has been stepping up lately working the night shift at the chicken processing plant in order to keep his family in their home, fed and his sister in her Asperger's meds. Dad - The Dude used to work R&D for the same chicken chicken company but that didn't really work out.
As a reader, you start to pick up on the fact that things might not be quite right, especially the really strange way people are acting as all of the kids are being transported to the excursion site to start their "rehabilitation." Once the zombies start to attack though, it's time to find out who can lead, who follows, and who gets eaten.
A fun zombie story with a little twist.

The Rule of Three by Eric Walters

As Adam and his classmates are working in the school's computer lab, all power goes out. Everything electronic is dead - no computers, no cell phones, no cars. No cars that is, unless you happen to own a car built before they were run by computers. As Adam and his neighbors start to realize just how widespread the problem is, they realize that things could get really scary  really quickly.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book!  Walters does a great job of  detailing the downward spiral of civilization as people become more and more desperate for all things required for life. It really gets the reader in the frame of mind for what it would be like and what we would face if we were to lose power indefinitely.
I highly recommend this title to those readers that enjoy survival stories and post apocalyptic worlds.

American Neolithic by Terence Hawkins

Several years ago a I wrote a review for Lives of the Monster Dogs, an odd, wonderful book that exists somewhere at the corner of speculative fiction and social critique. As a strange coincidence, Terence Hawkins reached out to me with a copy of his book, American Neolithic, after having read that review. American Neolithic, he explained, was inspired in part by the writing of Kristin Bakis and her Monster Dogs book.

American Neolithic is equally peculiar and wonderful in its premise: in a near future police state where a theologically tinged Homeland Security has supreme control over civil liberties and the court system, Raleigh, a jaded lawyer with a cynical, old-school sensibility and an affinity for lost cause cases, gets drawn into a high-profile murder case involving hip hop artist Newton Galileo and the member of his entourage left holding the gun -- Blingbling, a guy everyone thinks of as a half-witted dupe.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Blingbling is really an honest-to-God Neanderthal, one of the last of a band of Neanderthals secretly surviving in hiding on the lower east side of Manhattan.

Mort(e) by Robert Repino

Between this book and Grasshopper Jungle I feel I've discovered my true weak spot: humanity at the mercy of mutant animals and insects.

Underground, for thousands of years, a colony of intelligent ants has been slowly, silently plotting their revenge against mankind. To do this they have found a way to turn the humans own pets into an army that will help bring about the war to end all wars.

At the heart of this story is a house cat named Sebastian who, before his emancipation, sees himself as the protector of the house. His human "parents" seem to be going through some troubles, not the least of which include his mother sleeping with the neighbor who owns a dog named Sheba. Sebastian and Sheba eventually form a loving bond all their own, but it comes to a chaotic and abrupt end when the animals become sentient and the war with the humans becomes violent. Sebastian, now named Mort(e) becomes a hero of the war and takes on dangerous missions in the hopes of finding Sheba.

Repino has a way of crawling inside the heads of all these creatures that surround us and shows us the world like we've never imagined it. Just the thought of a super breed of ants breeding and plotting for thousands of years is enough to creep me out, but then to have it all be part of a long plot to lull mankind into a false sense of superiority so they can came come back and take what they've long felt was their world to begin with...

It's crazy. But brilliant-crazy, entertaining-crazy, and a whole lot of fun.

Mort(e)
by Robert Repino
Soho Press 2014

Click on the link (attached to the title above) to read the first chapter at Powell's Books.
No, Powell's did not pay me to say that, or provide me with the book. They're just awesome.

Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner

Standish Treadwell can't read, can't write, Standish Treadwell isn't bright. At least, that's what his teachers and classmates think. The truth, of course, is much different.

Standish's dyslexic brain does operate on a slightly different frequency than everyone else, that much is a given, but he's anything but slow. His hyper-vigilance gives him an extraordinarily sharp & vivid insight into the world around him.

And what a world it is.

Don't be fooled, Maggot Moon is no syrupy, coming of age story. Standish doesn't find redemption in a group of misfit friends, he doesn't grab the eye of the girl that's way out of his league, he doesn't score the winning touchdown to the cheers of his newly-converted classmates. No, there's none of that predictable claptrap in this novel. No happy endings in Zone 7.

New Old School Sci-Fi

Perhaps it's not fair to call Sergei Lukyanenko's The Genome (released today) "old school" sci-fi. But the book feels like it comes from another era. Not that that's a bad thing. Not at all.

Alex Romanov is a starship master-pilot with an animated tattoo on his shoulder that acts out his current emotional state. He's just been released from a hospital on a distant alien world called Quicksilver Pit. He's low on cash and without a job when he meets Kim, a teenage girl who is getting harassed by some unsavory characters on public transportation. Alex offers to help her out, but she declines and deals with the problem directly by smashing the head of one of her tormentors through the bus's window.

Book Review: World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters

World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters is the last book in a trilogy starring detective Hank Palace taking place when the world is about the end. The first two books The Last Policeman and Countdown City were a good read and I was looking forward to reading the ending of the trilogy.

Detective Hank Palace leaves the comfortable nest he shared with his friends in New England, waiting for an asteroid to hit Earth, to find his sister Nico. Nico has joined a group of revolutionaries who intend on freeing scientists out of jail so they can save the world.

During his investigation Palace meets a cast of characters and observes a world gone mad with anxious anticipation to its destruction.

 World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters is a fitting end to a wonderful trilogy. I really enjoyed the fact that Mr. Winters doesn’t back out of the doomsday scenario he has created for a sappy Disneyesque ending which I was expecting.

This novel ties up some loose ends which were introduced in the previous books, also the author concentrated on police procedural more than in the previous novels. That was a good call, I believe, since the first novel as well as part of the second, focused on how society has gone berserk in preparation of the impending doom.

In his investigation, Palace meets many characters, some take advantage of the situation for their own benefit, some just try to survive, and some (like Palace) hang on to their jobs for sanity. Palace even meets an Amish man who told his family and community that the outside world has contracted an epidemic and they must stay enclosed in their own village, with no outside contact, in order to stay protected. This way the man believes he will spare his family the curse of anticipation.
That, for me, was one of the highlights of the book.

In the same style of the first two novels, Mr. Winters keeps the pace quick and the plot moving. While the details of the world falling apart are not as evident as they were in the first two, this novel is a fitting end, I would, however, recommend reading the first two before reading this novel.

Article first published as Book Review: World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters on ManOfLaBook.com

Disclaimer: I got this book for free

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

It's impossible for me to write an intro to Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson without hearing the voice of the late, great voice actor Don Lafontaine in my head. So here we go: In a world where all superheroes are evil and all hope is lost, a small group of rebels must work together to save the Earth from total annihilation.

So that's Steelheart in a very small nutshell, although the actual story is a lot more complex and interesting: One day, something appears in the sky, people call it Calamity. It looks like a star or a comet, but nobody really knows what it is or where it came from. What they do know is that Calamity grants a random number of ordinary people super powers, they decide to call them "Epics." Also, for reasons unknown, the Epics are huge jerks.

Each Epic has a specific power, like the ability to fly, see the future, create life-like illusions, repel females without speaking a single word - wait, that last one is my superpower. Since there are no superheroes around to stop them, each Epic takes charge of a city of their choice, ruling without consequence and degrading the quality of life for everyone living there. Just imagine if every major city was run by Rob Ford and you'll get the picture.

California Bones, by Greg van Eekhout

Daniel Blackland is an osteomancer, able to absorb and wield magic by consuming the bones of magical creatures. But this gift is a bit of a drag, because it's an osteomancer-eat-osteomancer world out there - eat the bones of an osteomancer, and you absorb all the magic that they absorbed in their lifetime, which means that powerful osteomancers need to constantly watch their back for all the people looking to eat them and steal their power. Daniel should know. As a young boy he watched his dad get eaten by the tyrannical Hierarch of the independent nation of Southern California. 

Since then, he's been on the run. Ten years later he's living underground and organizing heists with his motley crew of buddies magical and mundane. People like Moth, whose healing powers allow him to regrow kidneys (and come back from the dead), and shape-shifter Jo, and Cassandra, his ex, who is good at lots of things, and who he maybe, kind of, sort of, still has feelings for.

As the son of a famous enemy of the Hierarch, keeping his head down has been a matter of life and death. And when he gets the opportunity to invade the Hierarch's own personal bone stash, where enough magical artifacts are stored up to make him a wealthy man many times over, he knows he shouldn't do it. Nothing about this job feels right, but it's also an opportunity to settle an old score, and he takes it anyway. And shenanigans ensue. There are betrayals, reversals, surprises, and several truly awesome deployments of radical crazy wacky magic. 

Revolution 19 & Fugitive X

  
The next Revolution is happening now: Kevin, Nick, and Cass are lucky —they live with their parents in a secret human community in the woods, safe from the Bot City established after the robot revolution of 2071. Then their village is detected by bots and completely destroyed. Hopeful that their parents have been captured by bots --and not killed--, the teens risk everything to save the only people they have left in the world—by infiltrating a city controlled by their greatest enemies.
In Fugitive X, Nick, Cass, and their little brother Kevin are separated by warring forces in a dystopian world controled by robots. Nick ends up with a group of hostile rebels. Cass is captured and reeducated by the bots. Kevin is indoctrinated into a hidden encampment in the forest known as The Island, where he discovers secrets about the origin of the bots, and about his family.

Countdown City by Ben H. Winters

Count­down City by Ben H. Win­ters is the sec­ond novel in a tril­ogy. The first book, The Last Police­man, intro­duces the reader to a doomed world and a cast of characters.

Hank Palace used to be a police offi­cer with the Con­cord, NH police depart­ment, how­ever the world is com­ing to an end and the PD has been fed­er­al­ized. Hank still has a sense of pur­pose, and when an old friend asks him to find her miss­ing hus­band he takes on the challenge.

How can he find some­one in a world with no gaso­line, no phones, no way to tell if the hus­band is sim­ply ful­fill­ing his wishes before he dies.

Count­down City by Ben H. Win­ters finds the world 77 days before a huge meteor will hit and will end life as we know it. As expected many peo­ple are going nuts, the gov­ern­ment declares (basi­cally) mar­tial law and no one is really pay­ing atten­tion unless you have a gun.

Our hero, ex-policeman Hank Palace, does have a gun and a sense of duty and pur­pose but he starts los­ing hope as it becomes more clear that the inevitable is about to hap­pen. The char­ac­ters around Hank start speak­ing as if they out­side the novel, but can talk to the pro­tag­o­nist, basi­cally telling him to stop being so naïve and start fac­ing reality.

The mys­tery is far­fetched and the author asks the reader to take a leap of faith when it comes to the plot. Palace eye sight must be super­hu­man for him to observe all the minis­cule clues and leaps in logic – but that’s not what the story is really about so he gets a pass.

This is another well writ­ten, inter­est­ing book where the sto­ry­line takes sec­ond place to the descrip­tions of a soon to be doomed world and how soci­ety falls apart at the seams. Mr. Win­ters nar­ra­tive is well writ­ten, eas­ily read and cre­ates a thrilling world.

• 320 pages
• Pub­lisher: Quirk Books; First Edi­tion edi­tion (July 16, 2013)
• Lan­guage: English
• ISBN-10: 1594746265

Buy this book in paper or electronic format

Article first published as Book Review: Countdown City by Ben H. Winters on ManOfLaBook.com

Lockstep, by Karl Schroeder

Toby McGonigal is a seventeen year old boy on a routine space mission, heading for a far-off moon of the planet his family has colonized.

But something goes wrong. And when he wakes up, 14,000 years have passed. And everything has changed.

Lockstep is an inventive YA science fiction novel that will appeal to brainy readers who enjoy complicated worldbuilding, and many young men will connect to Toby's fundamental challenges (you know, looking for his mom, taking care of his brother, who by the way has become a dictator ruling over 70,000 worlds, pretty standard stuff).  

Wolverton Station / Sleep Donation

As much as I wanted to review something poetic this month the closest I'm going to get is the pair of rhyming digital-only book titles listed above!

First up, a delightful appetizer of a short story called "Wolverton Station" by Joe Hill, where an unctuous American businessman suddenly realizes between stations on a British train that he is surrounded by wolves. Literally. Not werewolves, but human-sized, clothes-wearing canis lupus. Casual as he can our businessman tries to pretend that its a prank, a hoax, a protest against The Man, but toward the end there's no denying these wolves are real, and so is the danger.

"Wolverton Station" is the kind of story that plays out like an episode of The Twilight Zone by keeping the action claustrophobic and as close to the main character as possible. Why are there wolves, why is he the only human, how did he end up in the situation... questions for which there is no answer, and none is really necessary. It's a breezy read, the kind its easy to get caught up while traveling and short enough to gobble down in one sitting.

For Karen Russell's e-novella Sleep Donation I don't know whether to recommend being well-rested before diving in or to try and time it so you drop off immediately after reading. Either way, you're going to want to be sure you can sleep afterward.

Under The Never Sky by Veronica Rossi

Back to my "comfort zone" with UNDER THE NEVER SKY by Veronica Rossi. This book was a complete and total surprise. I found the premise intriguing enough that I downloaded the book (I think it was an Amazon deal) but the execution was terrific. Rossi does a ton of stuff that I like as a reader and am insanely jealous of as a writer.

All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrell

I think we must love to read about dystopian futures because they allow us to imagine the unimaginable and shiver in the dark while feeling grateful that things aren’t quite that bad. The thing I dislike most about dystopian literature is this way that our horrible future is so engrossing, we forget to ask how we ended up there. Cristin Terrell's All Our Yesterdays takes that dare and explores the possibility of using the past to change the future.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Pierce Brown's Red Rising is a little like Ender's Game in that it involves children's brutal training for war. It's also like the Percy Jackson series in its obsession with Greek and Roman myth and history. It's also like The Hunger Games in that it pits children against each other in deadly games and it's like Game of Thrones with its rivalries between powerful families and it's like Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series in its exploration of power and body modification. If someone accused Pierce Brown and his publisher of trying to capitalize on every trend in YA fiction this side of wizards and werewolves, you might just have to concede the point.

Yet, while the book is somewhat like all of these other books and is a bit jumbled as a result, it's not exactly like any of them. After a somewhat rough opening, the novel settles in and ultimately works better than expected. It also sets up a series that promises to be intriguing.

Transreality by Chris Lackey

Last Fall, I read about this Kickstarter campaign by the cartoonist Chris Lackey to fund his graphic novel about "a 21st Century man thrust into a post-singularity transhuman world." It had been funded back in 2012, and it was available to order. I love science fiction that wrestles with notions of a time of and after singularity (everything from Philip K. Dick to Charles Stross), so I sent off for a copy. I'm glad I did, because the resulting graphic novel, Transreality, hits all the high notes of this kind of SF: questioning what it means to be human, how we understand identity, self, free will, particularly in a day and age where these things are increasingly becoming something it is easy to opt out of. Also, pink gorillas, localized nano-swarms, and earning enough credit for a body.