Category Archives: science fiction

Dunia

mtn fog

Phillip Wyatt 2020 Cadillac Mountain Fog

“I never thought anything could be so beautiful.” Natori, the young shaman’s son staggered on the rough trail in the lush forest. The fog was a widow’s shroud on the land. Though he was warm in the unfamiliar clothes of the Qu’ullad people, he still shivered.

Vastusia, took his hand, his flesh slightly darker than hers, and smiled. “I told you there was a world beyond the savanna.”

He frowned. V’rovi traditions do not forbid us traveling to other places.”

“Only discourage it.”

“Our land, our traditions define us. We would cease to be a people without them.”

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Review of Brad Linaweaver’s Novel “Moon of Ice”

moon of ice

© James Pyles

When I wrote about the recent passing of SF author Brad Linaweaver, and then reviewed his original novella Moon of Ice, a few of the people who knew Brad contacted me and shared a little of their experiences with him.

I was also gifted with a copy of the full length novel which I finished recently.

In a way, I’m not sure it was an advantage to have read the novella first. I was able to pick out seeming inconsistencies in the older material. A large part of this had to do with the novella being told from the point of view of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, while the novel had several primary voices, but most of all Hilda, Goebbels’ daughter.

In the novel, Goebbels’ long suppressed journals are on the verge of being released to the public by Hilda thirty years after the end of the second world war, and not long after her father’s death. In this alternate universe, the Nazis developed the atomic bomb and subdued Europe and England, but were prevented from conquering the U.S.

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Review of Mike Resnick’s Short Story “Kirinyaga”

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Cover art for the November 1988 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine

I first heard of the late science fiction author Mike Resnick in Louis Antonelli‘s response to Jaym Gates‘s Facebook complaint about him (and later, her twitter rant). I never really got to the core of her animosity toward Resnick and many other major SF/F writers, but I did chronicle my experiences, including her blocking me on the aforementioned social media platforms.

Oddly enough, Gates and her followers were the only ones who seemed to have issues with Resnick. Every other source of information I could find about him, including the File 770 fanzine, spoke quite highly of him.

Anyway, I settled on the Hugo award winning short story Kirinyaga, which he later developed into a novel by the same name.

Resnick originally wrote it as a submission to an anthology that was to be edited by Orson Scott Card, but the anthology never materialized. The theme was to be about stories dealing with developing a utopia. Resnick chose a reconstruction of an African savannah developed on a terraformed planetoid.

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How Evil is Google? Read This!

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Photo credit: Daily Sun

For the record, I’m going to say that the information in the Mercola article Google — A Dictator Unlike Anything the World Has Ever Known is horrifying.

I use Google and Gmail all the time, along with a lot of other products and services this story mentions. Oh my stars, they are not only spying on us, but totally manipulating public opinion on a whole bunch of levels.

Please click on the link and read. It’s long, but well worth it. I didn’t watch the video, but I was so influenced by Dr. Joseph Mercola’s content that I had to write about it.

Oh, my wife sent me the link, which is how I became aware of it.

I guess this falls under the heading of science fiction becomes dystopian fact.

But let me back up a second. The 2016 Hugo Award for best science fiction short story was written by Naomi Kritzer (and I’m stunned it won an award) and is called Cat Pictures Please (the link takes you to Clarkesworld.com where you can read it for free).

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Pre-Order “A Mighty Fortress” Which Features My Short Story “The Deseret War” NOW!

mighty fortress

Promotional image for the Immortal Works anthology “A Mighty Fortress”

By now, most of my regular readers know that my short story The Deseret War is going to be published in an Immortal Works anthology.

I just heard that A Mighty Fortress: A Mormon Steampunk Anthology Book 4 is available for pre-order NOW for automatic delivery to your Kindle device on February 18, 2020.

That’s less than four weeks away. Here’s a summary:

Once Stephen Isaac Eddington converted to Mormonism in his native London and realized the severe persecution the Church was enduring in the United States, he knew he had to use his unique skills to help defend the faith. But to do that, he would have to steal an incredible invention devised by his scientist mentor who had recently perished, and the greedy and corrupt tycoon who had financed the venture. Eddington and his ill-gotten technology arrived in Utah well ahead of the U.S. Army troops who the President commissioned to remove Brigham Young from power and establish a new Governor over the Utah territory. Now, instead of the Church being a mere pawn at the hands of the government, he provided them with mighty weapons that would not only protect the Church, but establish a brand new nation. However, even Eddington couldn’t anticipate the heavy consequences of his actions.

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Help “Cloaked Press” Publish Indie Authors!

cloaked press

Cloaked Press LLC logo

As my regular readers know, two of my short stories were published in Cloaked Press anthologies. “The Recall” was featured in Spring Into SciFi: 2019 Edition, and “The Demon in the Mask” appeared in Fall Into Fantasy, 2019 Edition.

I have another submission into them that I hope will make it into their 2020 science fiction edition, but something else is going on. I just got this email:

I’d just like to say thank you again for being part of the Cloaked Press Family, and if I could ask a small favor, that would be wonderful. I’d like to take Cloaked Press to the next level and begin taking on single author novels, novellas, and collections. To do this, I started a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a large bath of ISBNs (100 to start is the goal), as well as purchase cover designs and some marketing ads with Amazon, Facebook, etc. If anyone would be willing to reach out to their followers to see about getting us a boost, that would be wonderful.

So here I am giving a boost.

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TREASURE CHEST: Selected Short Stories is Available Now!

treasure

Promotional image for the Zombie Pirate Publishing anthology “Treasure Chest.”

Treasure Chest is Zombie Pirate Publishing‘s first “best of” anthology, a collection of short stories they’ve previously published in other works.

Founded in 2017, Adam Bennett and Sam Phillips have produced a plethora of anthologies, giving indie authors like me, the opportunity to have our tales see the light of day and become available to readers.

My short story Joey, originally published in the SciFi anthology World War Four (please readers, post more reviews), is featured in the “Treasure Chest.” It’s one of my strongest missives emotionally, and I’m glad it was selected.

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“I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” or How to Succeed in Both Offending and Encouraging Readers

clarkesworld

Cover image for issue 160 of Clarkesworld Magazine – Zarrio by Edwardo Garcia

UPDATE – January 18-2020: Fortunately someone archived the original story, so it is preserved, even though Clarkesworld it offline.

UPDATE – January 16, 2020: This story has been pulled from publication by the magazine, and the rationale can be found here!

On twitter, I happened across a tweet by Cora Buhlert. It was referencing a story written by Isabel Fall for Clarkesworld Magazine called I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. Actually, I saw that Buhlert was referencing a twitter conversation of someone called The 1000 Year Plan (actually a Marxist blogger named “Gary” who announces personal pronouns as “he/him”) commenting on Fall’s story.

As you can guess, he didn’t like it.

What got my attention first is that Gary tweeted:

All of the comments are absurdly over-the-top praise that appeared almost immediately after the story was published. There are way more of these than is normal for a Clarkesworld story.

I looked at the story and couldn’t see any comments anywhere. Slightly earlier, Gary tweeted:

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Book Review: “The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century”

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Cover art for the anthology, “The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century

Note that I’ve previously reviewed individual stories presented in this anthology, such as Brad Linaweaver’s novella Moon of Ice, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Lucky Strike, and Susan Shwartz’s Suppose They Gave a Peace. This review applies to the entire book.

The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century is a 2002 anthology edited by Harry Turtledove with Martin H. Greenberg. As the title suggests, it’s an eclectic collection of short stories and novellas crafted by various science fiction luminaries over a span of nearly fifty years.

As with all anthologies, it is pretty uneven.

Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee” was the toughest to slog through. It’s depressing and seems to be overly long, including details that may not have been necessary to tell the core story. Also, it’s hard to believe that the Confederate Army could have won the Civil War based on a single engagement, one that our hero managed to change by sheer ineptitude.

Both “The Lucky Strike” by Kim Stanley Robinson and “Suppose They Gave a Peace” by Susan Shwartz were anti-war stories, the former being Robinson’s wish fulfillment of a world with no nuclear weapons, and the latter, an alternate history that bore little difference from the actual one, as told through the eyes of one family.

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Why Is Kylo Ren a Hero?

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Promotional image of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) from the 2019 film “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”

A day or two ago, I saw a YouTube video on Mara Jade’s twitter account commenting on a Bounding Into Comics article titled Fans Threaten J.J. Abrams and Report Mental Breakdowns Over Kylo Ren’s Ending in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Frankly, I was amazed. I guess I shouldn’t be. As a fan of the television show Smallville (2001-2011), I watched fans on social media tear each other apart over which female lead should be in a relationship with Clark (Tom Welling). I watched the show for the superhero stuff, even though it really was a teenage/millennial soap opera.

So why shouldn’t Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) be any different?

However, the more I read the outrageous comments being supposedly made on twitter (to read them, click the appropriate link above), the more I became curious. Are these people real?

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