Tag Archives: novel

My Book “The Aliens” Has Been Accepted Into the Starry Eyed Press Series “Galactic Treks”

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Promotional image for the “Galactic Treks” series from Starry Eyed Press

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I’ve had a number of my works published by Starry Eyed Press before, but this one is different. A little while ago, they announced an open submission of a series called “Galactic Treks” The title is on purpose.

The general theme is “space opera,” but the word count can be anything from 5,000 up through novel length.

Wow. To be able to plot a story without worrying about exceeding a word count.

But that’s not all. Here are the specifics:

It should come as no surprise to hear that Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise is one of the most endearing and enduring pieces of quality space opera in the world.

There was even a time, many years ago, when anybody was allowed to write a Star Trek novel and submit it to Simon and Shuster for review!

Sadly, those days are long gone and Paramount would prefer to work only with authors and writing staffs of their choosing in developing Star Trek novels, comics, episodes and films.

So where does that leave the rest of us aspiring Trek writers? We’re glad you asked.

The Galactic Treks line is your time to shine. We’re seeking novels, shorts and series that center on space exploration, optimism, a protagonist or a crew as members of something bigger (a fleet perhaps), and an emphasis on thinking one’s way to final resolve over simply blowing everything up.

So write a “Star Trek-type” story without literally writing Star Trek.

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2022: A Very Brief Summary

2022

© James Pyles

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As you can see, compared to 2021 and before, my productivity this past year has waned considerably, at least of you count actual, published short stories and novelettes. Of course, I had two of those novelettes published in the same year by the same publisher for the 224-verse. Most of the other short stories, except for the one I have featured in “Shoot the Devil” were published the previous Spring.

So what have I been doing?

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Book Review of “Network Effect,” The Fifth Novel in the Murderbot Diaries

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Cover art for Martha Wells’ novel “Network Effect”

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I finished Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel yesterday morning. It’s the fifth entry in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. It’s also the first novel-length book in the series, with one through four being novellas or novelettes  (my reviews on the rest of the series can be found here).

It won the 2021 Nebula award and a bunch of other accolades and in this case, they were well deserved (In my experience, that’s not always the case). We continue to see Murderbot evolve becoming, in their/her own way, more “human” though I’m sure she would deny that.

Oh, even though technically Murderbot has no gender, I always hear her voice in my head as female, so I’m going to go with that. Probably has something to do with my knowing the author is also female.

Given the novel-length of the story, we’re able to go back and forth in Murderbot’s experiences. We start out seeing her as a fully autonomous SecUnit providing security for an archeological team, which definitely needs it. The story begins with a bang because we are then thrown into more back story on Murderbot and the supporting characters. This includes her close relationship (I hesitate to say “friendship,” although I think it is) with Dr. Mensah and interestingly enough with her teenage daughter Amena (relationships are confusing because this is some sort of “group marriage” where Mensah is Amena’s “second mother”).

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Book Review of “Out of Time” (2022) by Dave Sinclair

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Cover art for Dave Sinclair’s “Out of Time”

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I don’t remember what made me buy Dave Sinclair’s time travel/spy book Out Of Time: An Atticus Wolfe Novel. It’s the first of the three-part series (somehow, I think readers expect series these days rather than standalone books). I suppose it was the theme. An MI6 agent in 2024 is suddenly thrust backwards in time to London, November 1963 and joins the same agency, encountering all manner of anachronisms from sixty years in the past.

Atticus Wolfe is an accomplished MI6 agent currently in London. He’s been stalking an international terrorist named Omar Ganim who has been raiding various scientific organizations and is believed to be building a devastating weapon. Wolfe has been unsuccessful in finding Ganim, that is until a twist of fate puts him behind his quarry on a street. With no time to call for help, Wolfe pursues and corners Ganim. He finds Ganim apparently ready to activate a bomb.

Wolfe plays for time, trying to talk Ganim down. Ganim insists he’s not a terrorist or murderer. He appeals to Atticus as a man of color, who, like him, has never experienced justice from the white system. He says he’s going back to fix the mess that the French and English made of the Middle East. There seems to be an explosion.

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Book Review of Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary”

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Cover art for Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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Finally got to dig into Andy Weir’s 2021 novel Project Hail Mary. It’s a relatively new book in my local public library system, so I only get to keep it a max of fourteen days with no renewals. As of this writing, I have five days left.

My main reason for bumping it up on my reading list is also the reason I wrote my May 22nd blog post Does Every Single SciFi Story Absolutely Have to Have a Social Justice Theme?.

Some people I follow on twitter (and like) mutually complained that Weir’s book:

feels like the Hugo Award nod for Project Hail Mary fell out of a time travel portal from the year 1986 (Like many of the best-selling science fiction novels of that time, the book largely ignores pesky questions of race, class and gender).

My answer is that not every single story in the universe published after 2001 HAS to be about “pesky” race, class, and gender (my Oxford comma included).

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Book Review of “Dream Park” (1981)

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Cover art for “Dream Park” by Niven and Barnes

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I had originally read Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes in the early 1980s, not long after it was first published.

I decided to re-read it because I was looking for material from which to construct my one-on-one role playing games I play with my thirteen-year-old grandson.

Long story short, the novel was too involved for me to mine anything useful for what I had in mind. But having only a vague recollection of the book, the re-read was thoroughly enjoyable.

Imagine a future where role playing games have evolved with such sophistication, they can be played out live in a huge, high-tech amusement park. Games are big business because Dream Park, which puts a bunch of money into them to begin with, recoups its dough with movie, book, and other game deals based on the live-action game. The players must be in relatively good shape since, although lives are never lost and most of the danger is simulated, they must still withstand the stresses of “camping out” in a (simulated) wild environment for several days amounting to hard labor. There are also personal and professional reputations on the line.

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Book Review of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”

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Cover art for “Children of Time”

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I decided to read and review Adrian Tchaikovsky’s SciFi novel Children of Time when someone on twitter called him one of the top three living science fiction writers in the world. Wow! That’s quite a testimony. I was curious if that statement was anything close to being accurate.

I asked another person on twitter what would be the best Tchaikovsky novel to start out with. He mentioned a book that is hard to get outside of the UK and then the “spider” tome I just finished.

There are three basic “voices.”

The first is Dr. Avrana Kern who is running an ambitious experiment. With Earth at the height of its technological civilization, we are terraforming exo-planets in the galaxy. Kern’s planet is to be populated with primates and then a nanovirus is supposed to be introduced that will rapidly accelerate their evolution. Another scientist is supposed to wait in stasis in an orbiting platform to periodically wake up and observe their progress.

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Book Review of “Abaddon’s Gate,” the Third in the “Expanse” Series

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“Abaddon’s Gate” by James S.A. Corey

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Finished reading Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) which is the third in the Expanse series. It was a little harder for me to get into at first, unlike Leviathan Wakes or Caliban’s War. Starting things off with Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante drinking and gambling in the casinos of Ceres didn’t set the right tone for me, at least not in the beginning.

Also, there was the plethora of new characters to absorb. True, each of these novels introduces characters unique to a particular book, but this one seemed to have a ton, including Anna, Bull, Tilly, Cortez, and Clarissa/Melba, and that’s just the short list.

Since each chapter is told from a specific person’s point of view, I had to keep reminding myself who that person was in the earlier portions of the novel. It was a tad “offputting.”

Oh, and Joe Miller makes a comeback but not as you might imagine, thanks to he, Julie Mao, the asteroid Eros, and the protomolecule all being thrown into the atmosphere of Venus, “cooking” for a while, and then having “something” emerge.

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Book Review of “Galen’s Way”

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Cover art for Richard Paolinelli’s novel Galen’s Way

Richard Paolinelli’s novel Galen’s Way: A Starquest 4th Age Adventure attempts to re-capture the bygone era of space operas and makes a good run at it, but the cost is encountering more than a few space opera stereotypes.

Galen, a mercenary and smuggler, formerly an elite soldier, is covertly hired by a royal emissary to retrieve a kidnapped Princess from a fortress planet. The job, although sounding difficult, is almost too easily accomplished. However, what he finds is not one Princess, but four, plus a dark plot that spans an interstellar kingdom. In the course of this small saga, Galen alternates between encountering almost helpless and buffoonish bad guys to allowing himself to be captured and violently tortured just (seemingly) to get information.

On the run with the beautiful Princess Rhiannon and his spaceship’s (typically) sarcastic AI Cassandra, they must outwit bounty hunters and professional assassins to unravel a twisted conspiracy and restore justice to the galaxy.

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Book Review of “Terminum”

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Cover art for the novel “Terminum” by Lyla El-Fayomi

Disclosure: This is my first review of an indie SciFi book for Reedsy Discovery. In exchange for a free digital copy of a book, they ask that the writer craft a review of between 300 to 400 words in length and have it published on their site prior to a specific date. Basically, it’s free promotion for the book, Reedsy, and the reviewer.

I chose Lyla El-Fayomi’s Terminum to review because the premise was compelling. An experimental virus stops people from aging but at random points in their lives. However, the darker side is that some of those infected will be abruptly killed by an unknown side effect called Sudden Death Syndrome.

In investigating a cure, scientists Yasmine Holloway and Leo Genix suddenly become fugitives, being hunted down both by law enforcement and bounty hunters. They are thrust into the shadowy realm of a group of covert operatives who have, perhaps for decades, been aware of a conspiracy to hide the truth about the virus and to prevent them from ever delivering a cure.

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