Tag: SciFi (nonspecific)

Book Review: A Fall in Autumn

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Amazon Cover

A Fall in Autumn by Michael G. Williams

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON

**WINNER OF THE 2020 MANLY WADE WELLMAN AWARD**

WELCOME TO THE LAST OF THE GREAT FLYING CITIES

It’s 9172, YE (Year of the Empire), and the future has forgotten its past.

Soaring miles over the Earth, Autumn, the sole surviving flying city, is filled to the brim with the manifold forms of humankind: from Human Plus “floor models” to the oppressed and disfranchised underclasses doing their dirty work and every imaginable variation between.

Valerius Bakhoum is a washed-up private eye and street hustler scraping by in Autumn. Late on his rent, fetishized and reviled for his imperfect genetics, stuck in the quicksand of his own heritage, Valerius is trying desperately to wrap up his too-short life when a mythical relic of humanity’s fog-shrouded past walks in and hires him to do one last job. What starts out as Valerius just taking a stranger’s money quickly turns into the biggest and most dangerous mystery he’s ever tried to crack – and Valerius is running out of time to solve it.

Now Autumn’s abandoned history – and the monsters and heroes that adorn it – are emerging from the shadows to threaten the few remaining things Valerius holds dear. Can the burned-out detective navigate the labyrinth of lies and maze of blind faith around him to save the City of Autumn from its greatest myth and deadliest threat?

 

MY REVIEW

Full disclosure: I edited this book.

In a future of flying cities, created beings, and limitless potential, Valerius only gets to enjoy one of the three. He is what 2019 would call “heritage stock”; seeds and animals saved from previous times without genetic modifications of any sort, as a bank against potential disaster. So fixing little things like a cut with the wave of a medical wand is unavailable to him as it could damage the historic conservation; people worship his genes for their unmodified purity, and cross to the other side of the road to avoid his person.

Without the boost to brain power enjoyed by so many, jobs are few and far between. Valerius worked his way through everything the street has to offer, finally reaching the pinnacle of his potential careers as a gumshoe. Private eye is a little too upstanding for what he does – Valerius puts foot to pavement investigating the worst for the worst, and hopes to get paid when he shows his employers the results.

This is the best life he could ever grasp for in the flying city of Autumn. Or anywhere on or off Earth.

Then a being walks through his door offering the chance of a lifetime. Unfortunately Valerius is at the end of his.

Initially he was just going to take the money and wait it out, but curiosity gets the better of him. Because there are two things that always made him feel alive, and they are solving a mystery and risking death.

REREAD 2020 August
I reread this book after 18 months. Still is awesome.

What this means is AFTER developmentally editing it, and reading it three times in the process, I read it again after publication. I don’t normally create, let alone publish, book reviews of books I edited, but, dang, I fan-girl over this one.

Book Review: This is How You Lose the Time War

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Amazon Cover

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON

* HUGO AWARD WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA *

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

 

MY REVIEW

This F-F science fiction romance follows the complicated pen-pal communication between two time agents. They were competitive before they started “talking”; and writing to each other, while hiding it from their hive-mind supervisors, takes that competitive nature to the next level.

In jobs where equals don’t exist, and “deep cover” can last for a generation, communication of something outside of work doesn’t exist. The slow burn of falling in love through words is a wonderful thing.

Read for book club.

Flash: Always Lead with Kindness

Erin Penn Leave a comment

ID 75056156 © Mik3812345 | Dreamstime.com

“Pops, will you slow down? Ain’t we suppose to be running in the other direction?” The thirty-five year old man scrambled over fallen pine trees.

At the crest of the impact crater, his gray-haired father bellycrawled the final few feet, his deer bow in hand. Pye, Junior’s teenage daughter, right beside him. Nuts, the two of them. And him, the tree tying them together following in their wake. He crouched crawled to their location.

Looking down in to the cleared sand of the pine barrens, he saw a circular UFO with the disc vertical and the half the circumference buried deep. Junior quiet-whistled against his teeth, “Someone is having a very bad day.”

“I’m not sure,” Pye squinted through the early mist rising out of the aquifer below the pine barrens sand. “I mean if they are a spinning ship, and that is kind-of what it looked like as they streaked overhead, then the gravity would be on the outer edge, so if you were to dismount, it would be through the floor. It would make sense for flying saucers to land edge up, right?”

“Good point, girl” His father whispered.

Junior was glad all those comics and adventure books leaked something into his kid’s brain. “Still it is a crash, pretty sure.”

George grunted agreement.

“Any landing you walk away from is a good landing, isn’t that what you say Pops?” Pye asked.

“Not seeing much walking.” George observed and started to stand. “The mist has made down the walls and isn’t burning off near the hull. Whatever that material is, it took care of the heat quickly. Come on, they might need help.”

Pye bounced up, following her grandfather down the sandy sides of the crater in a sideways slide. Youthful curiosity burst the question out burning in Junior as he followed the two with the dune-sand walk he picked up during his time in Afghanistan.  “What should we do if they say, ‘Take us to your leader’?”

“Well, election is next week, so I guess I’ll make introductions depending on their attitude.” George limped across the loose sand in the bottom of the crater. “If they are rude, they’ll get one. Nice, the other.” He winked at Junior. “But in the meantime, they might be in trouble. Always lead with kindness.”

“But pack heat while doing so.” The perky teenager touched the flare gun she carried beside the hunting arrows.

(words 402; first published 11/2/2024)

Flash: Bounty or Bother

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo 10010716 | Muddy Boots © Nadezhda Bolotina | Dreamstime.com

(Paid for single use, if you reuse, please pay the artist too)

“Argh!” Talsin yelled as he enter the slapwood and ceramic-crete house, kicking the stool by the door they normally used to remove their boots across the mudroom. “I hate that woman.”

“It’s okay boss, we’ll get her the next time,” said a member of his gang, coming in after him. Larrie always sucked up. “Kill her good.”

After securing the airlock, Maizee and Adman looked at each other before dropping their eyes, the woman in question had cost them a quarter million in rustling today after nearly four day’s work to get everything in place but killing women carried a steep price if anyone found out. Not a conversation they wanted to butt into, and with that quick look, they agreed to let Larrie calm the boss down, bless his bootlicker soul.

They dropped to the floor to remove their boots. Prairie kept a lot of critters in its mud, and everyone knew, no matter how stomping-mad they got, to not bring no dirt into the sleeping quarters. A single earbitter egg could wreck a day worse than a dove on her monthly.

Talsin righted the stool and sat, pulling off his deep treaded boots with his pleaky-leather gloves. “The bitch is worth more to us alive than dead.”

“Fine then, we get her and the bounty too!” Larrie smiled through his breather and scraggly beard. “Upgrade the pass-thru with that kind-of coin.”

“Nah, you don’t get it.”

Everyone slid the boots into the lower decon area, then dropped their hats, breathers, and gloves into the upper area before heading to the pass-thru. The unit was built to handle a family of four, meaning a grown man, woman and their gov-approved knee-biting offspring, so four sturdy bullmen didn’t fit none too well, but running it twice in a day-cycle strained the batteries and usually meant the air conditioning wouldn’t kick in until mid-day after the batteries got replenished from Prairie’s white star. Meanwhile the house would bake like a tin can, making it impossible to get a good day’s sleep. Upgrading the pass-thru, or at least the energy storage, would be as welcomed as the fall rains.

“We need her to keep running around.” The boss snapped the controls on and they all breathed deep as the green mist and gas filled the pass-thru chamber. Each in turn shook their pants and jacket as best they could in the tight quarters. The lights cycled purple, yellow, and red. Finally natural white, imitating Earth-light showed overhead at the end of twelve minutes. Ain’t no one talked during the double-handful of minutes as the sensors had broken from a leak during the spring rains and registered any sounds after the cycles started as distress and would stop and toss them back into the mudroom and ain’t no one wanted to fill their mouths and lungs with Scheele’s Green more than they had to.

The stripping room hamper in the center filled with denim, pleaky-leather chaps, flannel, and mint-thread shirts as the men undressed. Maizee tapped it to start the cleaning and infusion process once everyone was down to their BD suits. Prairie manners, and as rough riding as Talsin and his crew were, they abided by manners, said no one talked to each other, or really looked at each other while starkers.  The pass-thru shower could only handle one full-grown man at a time, but the final decon only took a quick rub to get the oil everywhere. Adman went through first as he had dinner chores. Bossman oiled down second, Maizee with the dishes, setup and washing, third. And finally Larrie, since tonight was his night off chores.

He came through, stroking the oil through his beard as best he could, envious of Maizee’s genes which kept his chin clean even after a week outside, to find the boss combing extra oil through his hair, shaping it. All of them needed time with razors and scissors after the past week outside except Maizee who braided his straight black hair like his ancestors did back on Earth and kept it under a skullcap while outside. The doves back in town loved playing with his waist length hair when they had extra coin to spend. After Larrie pulled on his houserobe, he asked, “Why do we need Silver around? We should just collect the bounty and let her be sent polar.”

“As annoying at that bitch is to me, she is three times as annoying to the sheriff and his kin. Equal rights for the doves and catalog women and all that.”

Larrie grunted.

Talsin tilted his head one side to the other in the mirror, checking out his pompadour. He switched to the pick and worked out the matting the breather had knotted into his goatee. “We just need to figure out how to keep her out of our business, while she does her business and distracts the sheriff from our business.”

(words 820; written 5/18/2024; first published 7/21/2024)