Tag Archives: scifi

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 Joe Haldeman’s “The Accidental Time Machine”

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Cover art for Joe Haldeman’s “The Accidental Time Machine”

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In going through my “Facebook memories” the other day, I found I’d posted a full review of Joe Haldeman’s 2008 SciFi novel The Accidental Time Machine way back in 2009. Haldeman is a highly acclaimed, award winning author, but while I enjoyed his earlier works some decades previously, this one made me decide to never read Haldeman again. Like so many other “science fiction luminaries,” not only do they disdain almost all people of faith, but in this case actively mock them. Read my views from thirteen years ago for more.

Surprise. I normally review books on actual and not fictional technology, but I came across the hardcopy version of this book at my local library and, having not read a Haldeman novel in a couple of decades, decided to revisit science fiction as one might revisit an old girlfriend. I wanted to see how much my interest in the genre and specifically Haldeman’s writing, had held up over time. I’m also kind of a sucker for time travel stories.

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My Own Copy of “Meteor Fall”

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© James Pyles

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It’s in my hands.

I’ve now got my own personal copy of the Cloaked Press anthology Meteor Fall: An Anthology of The Collective. It features two of my short stories, “Eden and the Starcat” and “The Sins of the Fathers and the Sons”

Here’s a brief description:

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Publications in 2021 and the Impending New Year

2021

© James Pyles

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I’ve noticed other indie authors doing this sort of thing, creating a graphic representation of the books and stories that were published in the past year. Sounded like an interesting idea, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I’ve already posted the graphic on social media, but thought I’d add some details for my blog readers.

Here’s a list of my publications from the beginning of 2021 to the end:

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Of Sales Rankings and Libraries

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Screenshot from Amazon

There are certain milestones that I think a lot of authors pay attention to. One of them I chronicled yesterday when I said that Time’s Abyss received 3 five-star reviews on Amazon and Ice had received it’s first five-star review.

Having also created a promotion for Ice where it can be downloaded to Kindle for free from now until Christmas created another interesting effect. It started “selling” much, much better (see image above-right). Well, it’s free and I have been telling everyone on every social media platform to which I belong about it, so why not? Still, it’s pretty satisfying.

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“Ice” is Available to Download for Free through Christmas

iceStarting midnight Pacific Time on December 21 through Christmas, my SciFi/Fantasy novella Ice will be free to download onto your kindle device. That’s right, just in time for the holidays, give yourself the gift of this unique tale of adventure on the high seas, of magic, science, and dinosaurs, or make it a present for a friend.

I first announced the release of this book at the beginning of the month and published an excerpt just a few days ago.

All that, plus I was interviewed on a podcast about “Ice”, Time’s Abyss, my two short stories published in the Meteor Fall anthology and other projects soon to come.

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Excerpt from My Novella “Ice”

iceIf you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

As I’m sure my regular readers know by now, my self-published novella “Ice” has been available for nearly two weeks now. Since I’m the publisher as well as the author, I’m doing all of the marketing for the book myself. While I’ve written summaries and discussed the book on one podcast so far, I still plan to promote the daylights out of it.

To that end, I’m putting up an excerpt of the story. It’s adventure and mutiny on the high seas, but these seas and the ships that sail upon them exist at the farthest reaches of human history where magic and science co-exist. The state of things on the merchant vessel “The Star of Jindo” have gone from bad to worse following a devastating storm that has crippled the ship and killed most of the crew. Captain Ki-Moon Yong has lost control of his command of his vessel for the first time in his career. Here’s what follows:

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“The Fallen Shall Rise” To Appear in the 224-Verse

Andromeda Galaxy

Andromeda Galaxy captured with a Celestron cpc1100 from the Israeli Desert by Deddy Dayag 9 July 2019

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I now have permission to discuss a small novella that has recently been accepted by Starry Eyed Press for their 224-Verse series.

First, a little background from their 224-Verse page:

What is the 224-Verse?

The 224-Verse is an interconnected fictional universe set within the sprawling starscape of Galaxy NGC 224 – Andromeda.

In terms of sheer size, Andromeda is 220,000 lightyears across and is home to a trillion stars and roughly four-trillion planets.

So the “verse” is a shared set of stories set in the Andromeda galaxy, potentially over hundreds of thousands of years of time and 220,000 lightyears of space. But that’s not it.

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Still Good Award Winning SciFi in the World

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Cover art for Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion.

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It’s been almost three years since I wrote Hugo Award Winning Novels I Have Read. I authored the blog post mainly in response to the idea that these awards have really changed over the years. At the time, I was reading for review N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season in an attempt to understand how I remembered Hugo award winning novels being so outstanding in “the old days” vs. how I perceived the more modern tomes.

If you click the first link, you’ll see a list of the winning and nominated novels I’d consumed in my youth, their awards issued between 1953 and 1988. I read most of them.

I was posting something similar in a Facebook group earlier today and started wondering if, by now, I’d read any more recent Hugo recipients. I have:

  • 1990 Hyperon by Dan Simmons (winner).
  • 1993 Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (nominated).
  • 2013 Redshirts by John Scalzi (winner).
  • 2021 Network Effect by Martha Wells (nominated).

I read and reviewed Hyperion mainly because it was a Hugo winner AND Simmons was being trashed on an online fanzine (which shall not be named) by modern SciFi fans because of his politics. I hear that after all these years, it’s going to become a movie. Simmons is still with us and I wish him success.

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