Cover image for my novel “A Wobblegong and His Boy”
What can I say? It’s finally here and available in both Kindle and paperback formats. Be the first one to read and write an honest review of A Wobblegong and his Boy on Amazon and Goodreads.
Here’s just a sample of the excitement you can expect in this book:.
Cover image for my novel “A Wobblegong and His Boy”
Today’s the day when my boy’s adventure science fiction novel A Wobblegong And His Boy goes on Pre-Order. Just click on the link and on the Amazon page, pre-order my novel for delivery to your Kindle device on Friday, March 20th.
I’m incredibly excited about this one. This will be my second published novel which I hope will lead to other, larger works and successes.
Here’s just a taste of what you have to look forward to:
Cover art for the 2018 novel “Ghost Dog.”
And so ends the “Dog” trilogy by Ashley R. Pollard.
I just finished reading the third installment in the “Gate Walkers” trilogy, Ghost Dog: Military Science Fiction Across A Holographic Multiverse. I should say I bought all three novels for my Kindle just over two years ago so this is the completion of my reading and reviewing saga.
Just as I said in my reviews of Bad Dog and Strike Dog before it, “Ghost Dog” is faithful to military procedure and culture and at least what we imagine might be the inevitable conflicts between the military and civilian scientists on a joint mission to another planet.
In this book, the protagonist Lara Tachikoma has been promoted to Captain and is charged with leading yet another team of mixed military personnel and various scientific experts through the “pillars,” this time to a moon in orbit around a gas giant whose sun in a red giant. The site is an advanced alien civilization that seems to now be extinct. The mission is to locate and retrieve as much of their advanced technology as possible.
There are two hiccups.
Okay, I can finally talk about it.
I have a number of short stories published by Raconteur Press. They’re good people and seem to like my stories, even the ones they elect not to publish.
They also are in the process of publishing a series of Boys’ Adventure Books.
Generally, they’re short science fiction or fantasy adventure novels written specifically for young male readers between the ages of eight and eighteen in the tradition of Robert Heinlein’s juvenile books. While written for boys, they are intended to be equally enjoyable by girls as well as adults. But really, they’re mostly for boys.
The idea as I understand it, is that boys don’t read anymore in part because books aren’t really being written with boys in mind these days. With the surge in “updating the genre for modern audiences,” that “update” includes any audience except young boys. Boys (and often men) are thought to have been excessively marketed to in the past, and the current SFF gatekeepers thus decided to “move on” to other readerships.
I mean who is successfully publishing and marketing books in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” or “Tarzan series? What about E.E. “Doc” Smith’s “Lensman” and “Skylark” books? Heck, if it were written today, Robert Louis Stephenson’s “Treasure Island” would probably never see the light of day.
Cover art for Ashley Pollard’s novel “Strike Dog”
Way back in 2023, I read and reviewed Ashley R. Pollard’s military SciFi novel Bad Dog: Military Science Fiction Across A Holographic Multiverse.
It’s part of the “Gate Walker” trilogy and today, I just finished book two: Strike Dog. This continues the adventures of Marine Sgt. Lara Tachikoma and traveling through these gates to different worlds.
Spoiler Alert! This book was published in 2018, but you may not have read it yet. You have been warned.
Actually, Tachikoma is sent off to officer’s training school (as mentioned in the first novel) so she becomes Lieutenant Lara Tachikoma. She’s also somewhat unusual in being able to stay mobile while the gates are active and to pass through them to alien destinations.
Thus the search is on to find others like her so teams of scientists and military support units can explore these worlds.
It’s close enough to the New Year for me to post my annual “year in review” comments. 2024 has been pretty good as far as he number of stories I’ve had published.
It started out with my short story “I Don’t Want To Be Human” appearing in the Cloaked Press anthology Spring Into SciFi 2024. This tale goes back to my roots in terms of sapient robots, AI, while flying in the face of the common trope that all humanoid robots want to be like people.
Next up, I’m particularly proud of the 16-part science fiction serial I wrote for Starry Eyed Press called Our Legacy, The Stars: A Tom Corbett Adventure. It’s currently on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform, but Vella is going away (you still have time to read it). The folks at Starry Eyed say they’ll republish my work in book form, hopefully in the coming year. I’ll let you know.
© James Pyles
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I’ve been reading Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries for a while now and found them to be a great science fiction series. I’ve reviewed them all on this blog if you want to do a wee search and take look.
That’s why when I read the seventh and latest edition, System Collapse (2023), I thought I’d missed a step or two.
The story started out slow and I felt like I was walking in at the middle of a movie. I read the last book only four months ago, but I still had trouble following who was who (in most cases) and what the heck was going on.
Murderbot is changing. He/she/it/they had some sort of spontaneous shutdown following a false memory where its leg was being eaten. I suspect that our protagonist is becoming a bit more human all the time whether they like it or not. This may be a setup for future stories, but given how flat most of this book was, I’m not sure I’m anxious to go on.
© James Pyles
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
I discovered the existence is the Isaac Asimov collection Gold (named for one of the fictional stories therein) from an online source I have since forgotten. It is advertised as Asimov’s Final collection and I had never heard of it before (the usual Science Fiction fandom gatekeepers can take note and castigate me accordingly).
The book was published in 1995, three years after Asimov’s death. It is divided into three portions: Final SF Stories, Essays on Science Fiction topics, and on the matter of Writing Science Fiction.
I imagined that I’d be most interested in the stories themselves and was disappointed to find I was wrong. The stories weren’t particularly strong examples of his work, at least as I remember his work. I can’t recall the last time I read anything by Asimov, especially something I hadn’t first read in my adolescence of early adulthood, but it was certainly years if not decades ago.
Cover art for the Alastair Reynolds novel “House of Suns.”
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I just finished Alastair Reynolds’ 2008 science fiction novel House of Suns. The book’s scope in time and space is vast, so it’s difficult to summarize let alone absorb.
Warning: Spoiler Alert!
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, a few individuals including one Abigail, decide the only practical way to explore the galaxy is to replicate themselves (almost) into a vast number of copies or “shatterlings.” Eventually, these shatterlings organize into Houses (such as the House of Moths and the House of Flowers) and inside the Houses family lines, such as the Gentian Line. This Line has emanated from Abigail, a person who was kept in childhood medically for decades before being allowed to become an adult and lead her family.
We get glimpses into Abigail’s early life up to her decision to create the shatterlings and to become one herself. These events parallel what occurs much, much later involving the shatterlings Campion and Purslane.
These two travel with each other albeit in their own spacecraft. Shatterlings, through a combination of relativistic speeds and stasis chambers, travel throughout the Milky Way and only have reunions with the other members of their Line once every “circuit” of the galaxy.
© James Pyles
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
Last night I just finished book seven in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series called Fugitive Telemetry. The story is actually set between books five and six, but that doesn’t take anything away from the adventure.
SecUnit, otherwise known as “Murderbot,” is basically a cybernetic being, mostly machine with some organic parts. They (technically SecUnit has no gender but I always think of her as female for some reason) is a Security Unit designed to provide bodyguard and security protection for humans conducting dangerous off world activities. They are property and although capable of independent thought, are forbidden from independent action. There are consequences.
Our SecUnit managed to override their internal governor in the first book becoming an independent entity. Thanks to her former employers, who are from a very egalitarian space station orbiting a planet currently being terraformed, she (I keep saying “she”) has more rights than she knows what to do with.
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