Tag Archives: scifi

“Time’s Abyss” is Here!

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© James Pyles

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It’s here! I received a digital copy of my first science fiction novella Time’s Abyss today, which means you can too. Go to books2read to find it at all of your favorite booksellers.

So far, it’s gotten 2 five-star reviews on Goodreads, one of which also appears on Amazon.

I’m particularly excited about this one since it’s my premiere solo publication. In the fiction realm, all of my other tales are short stories to be found in anthologies. That’s not a bad thing, but there’s something about having just your name on the cover of a book.

This isn’t going to be the last time if I have my say about it. First off, a few days ago, I finished roughing out a plot for a sequel to “Time’s Abyss.” What happens to Carson Everett and his team at the end of the adventure when they meet an unknown group of people? Does Theodore Falkon return to the island and will he use the experiment in a desperate attempt to return the Earth to a single time frame?

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Advanced Review of my novella “Time’s Abyss”

time's abyss

Promotional image for “Time’s Abyss.”

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As my regular readers know, my first science fiction novella Time’s Abyss becomes available exactly one week from today (can be pre-ordered right now). Here’s the Amazon “blurb:”

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Two New Stories Now Available For You!

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As you can see my copy of Exploring Infinity, edited by Richard Paolinelli, just arrived. It contains my short story “The Last Astronaut”. Here’s a tidbit.

After PEM-1 had been struck by what he later surmised was a type of temporal energy, Booker regained consciousness in a completely ruined space pod. His right leg wasn’t broken, thanks to his EVA suit, but it hurt like the devil. Smoke swirled lazily through the interior and there were a dozen electrical fires smoldering.

The spacecraft was utterly still and leaning about ten degrees starboard. Out the port, he could see daylight and a flat desert with foothills beyond. Part of the chute fluttered into view. He’d landed. There was an atmosphere. The parachute deployed. He wasn’t splattered all over the landscape after all.

He blew the hatch and crawled out. None of the survival equipment escaped the devastation and worse, Mama’s Bible was just ashes.

He was peeling off his EVA suit when he saw some sort of structure in the distance. There wasn’t anything else. Not a road, a trail, nothing. Just a hot breeze carrying dry sand.

He limped to the Infinity Hotel, was greeted by a doorman who seemed unaffected by the heat, and welcomed inside. His leg healed rapidly, and even without a credit card, he was given a room key and told to enjoy himself. The phone system was out, but it would be repaired tomorrow if he wanted to call anyone. There would also be a shuttle to the nearby airport coming tomorrow.

Always tomorrow, except tomorrow never arrived.

To get a greater sense of what this is all about, read Richard’s novel Escaping Infinity. “Exploring is a collection of short tales that indeed “explores” what happens after the novel’s end. Here’s a few of my pages.

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Interviewed by Black Hare Press for my novella “Time’s Abyss”

time's abyss

Promotional image for “Time’s Abyss.”

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

My first science fiction novella Time’s Abyss is available for pre-order now with delivery to your kindle device October 15, 2021.

It is also available at multiple other vendors. Digital copies will be $3.99 USD, while paperback copies will go for 12.99 USD.

I’ve got 10 ARC copies available on Booksprout but readers MUST be able to leave reviews by the 10th of October. If you’re interested, please let me know ASAP so I can get you connected!

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Book Review of “Nemesis Games,” Fifth in The Expanse Novel Series

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Cover art for the novel “Nemesis Games.”

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James S. A. Corey is the pen name of fantasy author Daniel Abraham and writer Ty Franck, who once again return with Nemesis Games, the fifth edition in the Expanse novel series.

Actually, the first misstep in the story is the raid conducted by the belter thug Filip and his band of any man left behind gets killed on Callisto a year before the book really begins. It’s clear they’re stealing tons and tons of stealth material, stealthy, but that means it still have lots of mass. Yes, they get away with it, but stealth doesn’t mean immaterial (you still have to cover three really, really big rocks with it).

Ever since that moment, the owners act like they can’t figure out what was taken? What? It was stealthy so now that it’s gone, you can’t figure out what was there in the first place? You don’t have cargo manifests? You don’t have lot assignments? I guess it’s to keep the readers from figuring out too soon that the radical Free Navy version of the OPA run by Filip’s Daddy Marco Inaros is going to drop a bunch of rocks on Earth.

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“Time’s Abyss” Comes Out Next Month!

time's abyss

Promotional image for “Time’s Abyss.”

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

Last April, I announced that my novella Time’s Abyss was available for pre-order at Amazon for delivery to your Kindle device on October 15, 2021. That’s just a hair under six weeks now as I write this, and I’m really excited (you can find more links at books2read).

With a word count of over 29,000, this will be my longest published piece. Believe it or not, it can be difficult to sustain a set of characters and a common storyline past “short story” limits, at least for me, so this is a real accomplishment. Sadly, a long-time (in real life) friend of mine who was one of my biggest fans won’t be able to read it. He succumbed to ALS after many years of struggle.

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My Short Story “The Last Astronaut” to be featured in the anthology “Exploring Infinity”

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A few years back, I read Richard Paolinelli’s novel Escaping Infinity, which I subsequently reviewed. I found out that although Richard hadn’t planned on writing a sequel, the novel’s fans kept pestering him about it. So he did, or rather, he will, in the forthcoming book “Expanding Infinity.” 

However, in between this and that, he invited authors to write a series of short stories for an anthology he is calling Exploring Infinity. Technically, with a hotel blipping in and out of 5,000 years of human history, kidnapping people to repopulate a devastated Earth in the far future, there must be a lot of stories to tell. Pre-order it at Amazon.

For me, there was only one: “The Last Astronaut.” I mentioned this just a few days ago. It takes the events in Richard’s novel and does a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on the original material (a play first staged in 1966 which I first found out about through a Shakespeare-obsessed friend in the late 1970s).

My character Booker Robinson is the observer of the events in Richard’s novel, but by the end of the story, he becomes much more than that. In Richard’s introduction to my story, he says:

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Another Short Story About to be Published in the Anthology…

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This is one of those things I really want to talk about but I can’t give out too many details yet. The publisher hasn’t given me the green light to name names, but one of my short stories has been accepted in an anthology that should become available the weekend after Labor Day (or so).

It’s a tad unusual. The publisher wrote a novel and thus created a universe. He’s writing a sequel to that novel, but in-between the first and the second, he invited various writers to try their/our hand at crafting a short tale in that self-same universe.

So of course I did and it was accepted.

The graphic at the top is a heavily cropped image of the poster for all three books, and while it’s pretty colorful, it (hopefully) reveals nothing.

I will provide you with a bit of an excerpt just to whet your whistle, metaphorically speaking.

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Book Review of “Cibola Burn,” the Fourth in the “Expanse” Series

cibola burn
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Last night, I finished Cibola Burn (2015), which is the fourth book in The Expanse novel series by James S.A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). As with the previous novel Abaddon’s Gate, it was a little difficult for me to get into at first, but once I was hooked, I was hooked hard.

The general plot is pretty straightforward. Now that the Ring is operational and the gateways to other parts of the galaxy are open, a group of belter refugees took their ship on an unauthorized journey through a gate and ended up in another solar system. For a year, they’ve been colonizing Ilus (called New Terra by the UN) and have set up mining facilities. However, the UN has chartered the Royal Charter Energy (RCE) corporation to both scientifically explore and materially exploit the world, seeing the settlers as “squatters.”

A small group of settlers, including Basia Metron who we briefly saw in Caliban’s War (yes, people who have appeared before come back) planning to blow up the landing pad for the RCE ship’s big shuttle as a protest don’t realize the shuttle is on final approach. In trying to abort the explosion, Basia sets it off, either killing or terribly wounding everyone on board including the UN appointed regional governor.

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