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March to Other Worlds Day 29: The Hunter and the Sorcerer by Chris L. Adams

Day 29 The Hunter and the Sorcerer by Chris L. Adams

As the March nears its end, I’m excited to return to the works of Chris L. Adams. If you will recall back on Day 3, I spotlighted a Conan short story written by Adams which showcased his love for the pulp era of adventure stories. In his newest book, published just a few days ago, Adams takes that love of grand adventure stories and pours it into a short novel that plays homage to the old masters while producing a thoroughly modern tale.

 

Bru the Hunter’s whole life is falling apart. Gla, the worthless fire-feeder, has just tricked the tribe into thinking he killed Tysk, the mighty tiger, and now Bru’s love Oona is to be married to Gla. To make matters worse, when Bru objects, the tribe turns on him. Outcast, Bru doesn’t think things could possibly get worse, but he is about to discover just how wrong a hunter can be.

 

Kidnapped by an alien creature from an extraordinarily advanced society, Bru will be tortured into becoming something radically different than he began—an extraordinarily intelligent well-educated man. And that is where this story truly begins for to return to his people and the woman he loves, Bru is going to have to go head to head with the galaxy’s most advanced civilization. They haven’t got a chance!

 

I found a lot more in this novel than the simple adventure story I thought I was reading. So brace yourself! While there’s plenty of adventure, you’ll also find heaping helpings of culture clash, hypocrisy and prejudice, and ultimately you’ll be forced to think about what it means to be human.

 

I’d also like to point out that the multi-talented Adams painted the cover to this novel himself—but did the idea for the novel come first or the painting? With someone as creative as Adams, even he might not know the answer.

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March to Other Worlds Day 28: Team Newb by M. Helbig

Day 28: Team Newb by M. Helbig

Here’s another example of the increasingly popular LitRPG subgenre. I think this sort of novel works best when it mixes its action in the game with events in the real world. Helbig has found a fairly unique way of handling this interaction by having his main character trying to find out why he was murdered—not to mention get justice for the crime.

 

Resolving this situation is not easy for Lucas because, let’s face it, he starts out as one really stupid player with no impulse control whatsoever. But as you would expect, he matures as the game is played which in practical terms means he gets smarter through a believable story arc. This shows up in his dealing with his murderer, but also in his interactions with other players in the game and in his ability to resolve the many problems he encounters in the game.

 

Other subplots also involve real world problems. One of the players is looking for his son who has been lost in the game while a different player has some strange interactions going on which appear to be connected to life outside of the digital realm. Lucas has to put a lot of the brain power he’s developing through playing into solving the mysteries that these two players bring to the game.

 

Which leads me to another place where Helbig excels. While he includes tons of damage counts and hit point checks in his prose, most of the important battles are not solved by in game skills but by clever tactics and problem solving. I suspect that if I were playing the game, this would annoy me, but as a reader it made for a much more enjoyable experience.

 

If you like LitRPGs and are looking for one that is both clever and humorous, you should give Team Newb a try. And if you prefer to read in audiobook format, you’re in for a very special treat, because Will Hahn has delivered another superbly theatrical performance.

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March to Other Worlds Day 27: Planetside by Michael Mammay

Day 27 Planetside by Michael Mammay

Michael Mammay is staking out a reputation for constructing sophisticated mysteries that intertwine the interests of his futuristic military and the corporations that supply them with their hardware. His novel, Planetside, caught my interest from the very first pages and didn’t let it go until I’d read the final word. Colonel Carl Butler is getting ready to retire when his old friend and the second most powerful general in his branch of the military asks him to travel to the planet, Cappa, halfway across the galaxy to investigate the disappearance of an important politician’s son. It actually seems like a pretty straight forward assignment except that at Cappa, no one will cooperate with him. And Butler does need help. After all, the injured young man was evacuated from the battlefield by a shuttle but the hospital claims he never arrived and the shuttle pilots can’t be questioned because they are conveniently dead. As if that isn’t bad enough, all the records that might trace what happened have disappeared—and all of that is BEFORE the mystery gets complicated.

 

This is both a great story and a great mystery. Carl Butler is a superb character—an old colonel with a heroic past he won’t discuss and very little in the way of diplomatic skills. He’s a bulldog who won’t stop once he has a mission and yet he also has a peculiar sense of honor and duty that becomes very important to the resolution of the case.

 

Mammay plays fair with the reader throughout this book. I don’t say that just because I figured out the core of the mystery halfway through the novel. There are plenty of clues, many of them coming in the middle of shocking surprises. The ending was powerful, made total sense, and yet, I didn’t see it coming. Anyone who likes a good mystery will enjoy this novel.

 

Finally, narrator R.C. Bray, really enhances an already superb novel with his spot-on depiction of Butler’s voice—a totally credible aging colonel who lacks patience for most of the BS happening around him.

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March to Other Worlds Day 26: Optional Retirement Plan by Chris Porteau

Day 26 Optional Retirement Plan by Chris Porteau

 

Optional Retirement Plan by Chris Porteau walks us into a different kind of world—the world of mental illness. Oh, it’s also a great sf adventure involving travel in the solar system, but that’s not what I found most intriguing about it. No, this is a novel about a hitman whose boss thinks he’s slipping into Alzheimer’s and wants to “permanently retire” him before he can spill any more of the company’s secrets. To make matters even worse, the hitman, Stacks Fischer, isn’t sure if he’s really sick. So while bounty hunters and corporate assassins are coming after him, he’s trying to figure out if he’s actually losing the ability to think the way he always has.

 

 

 

Stacks Fischer is a fascinating protagonist. He should not be likable, but he truly is. He should not be sympathetic, but you can’t help but feel for him as he struggles to find out what’s wrong with his mind. He has a code of honor and a sense of—well not justice, but something remarkably close to it that makes him easy to cheer for. It helps that narrator R.C. Bray has the perfect voice for Fischer, bringing his pain to life as he struggles to keep living for just a few more days.

 

 

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 25: The Singularity Trap by Dennis E. Taylor

Day 25 The Singularity Trap by Dennis E Taylor

Dennis E. Taylor is probably best known for his Bobiverse trilogy (which rumor has it may get more novels) but I thought I’d take a look at one of his other sf adventures, The Singularity Trap, for our March 25th spotlight. This is a remarkable novel with a strange twist on first contact. The aliens arrived well before humanity existed, prepared a “gift” (the Singularity Trap of the title), and left again. The story picks up with the human mining crew who are going to discover the aliens’ parting present.

 

This is where the story moves into high gear and gets incredibly interesting. The alien gift begins to transform one of the mining crew members and threatens his ability to control his own mind and body. This naturally scares the authorities of his nation and heightens the tensions in a futuristic cold war. There are issues of strategic defense, human rights, and mob mentality to deal with. At the same time there is an extraordinary mystery to be uncovered—what are the aliens, what do they want, and why are they messing with our hero’s body?

 

As we move toward the finale of the novel, our hero must carefully outthink just about every side in the book as he struggles to find a path through the complex future maze that leads to the survival of humanity. This is a thoroughly enjoyable, thought provoking, science fiction novel that took me in directions I never expected to go.

 

One again, narrator Ray Porter really shines as he brings the cast of this novel to life. He’s one of those narrators who really adds value to the books he reads by making each and every character distinct and vivid.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 24: The Reaper of Iremia

Day 24 The Reaper of Iremia by Kenneth Rocher

Marching back to fantasy, we have The Reaper of Iremia by Kenneth Rocher. It’s an action-packed fantasy novel set in a very modern-feeling city that seems to have been modeled on the medieval Italian city states. It’s got strong characters and an involved mystery with a lot of surprises. But the thing I liked the most about it was the big bad’s magic item. I don’t want to give away the coolest part of the plot, but this item was an extremely creative idea that I don’t remember coming across before in the hundreds (thousands?) of fantasy novels I’ve read. And it creates a truly fascinating problem for our heroes as they attempt to save the day.

 

So if you like mystery, mayhem, betrayal, action, a little vigilantism, all culminating in a fight to save everyone, you should take a look at The Reaper of Iremia.

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March to Other Worlds Day 23: Poor Man's Fight by Elliott Kay

Day 23: Poor Man’s Fight by Elliott Kay

Marching to Other Worlds brings to mind military fiction, so I think it’s time we look at another great series. Poor Man’s Fight by Elliot Kay has everything you need in military sf—great action and memorable characters. It also has the extras that take a book from being fun to great—convincing politics, really rotten bad guys, and a setting that helps build the credibility of the storyline rather than burning it away. Let me start with that setting.

 

The key to understanding Kay’s future society is debt. The major interstellar corporations have succeeded in basically taking over human space by corrupting politicians and effectively tricking the population into enslaving themselves through various kinds of debt. It starts when children are actually children being charged for their education and continues throughout their lives with a thousand tricks to keep the debt rising no matter how hard people work to pay it off. And if that isn’t bad enough, the whole system is secretly rigged to make certain that nobody can actually get out from under the corporate thumb and take control of their own lives.

 

Enter the solar system of Archangel—ninth largest economy in the Union—whose newly elected leaders have constructed a very dangerous plan to free their people from what is effectively debt slavery. This ongoing effort is important to the entire series, but it’s just getting ratcheted up in this first book. It’s driving the action, but it’s mostly behind the scenes making you wonder which of the many bad things that are happening to and around Archangel are really the result of nefarious corporate efforts to stop Archangel from freeing itself and its citizens.

 

While all of that is happening in the backdrop, Kay spends most of his energy focusing on Tanner Malone. He’s an incredibly bright kid who gets shafted by his parents and the system and ends up tanking on the all-important Test that determines how much money each student owes as he graduates high school. Feeling he is out of options, Tanner joins the navy as a way to start paying down his debt and getting some help with college. The early portion of the novel is a boot camp story that was surprisingly interesting despite the fact that I’ve probably read a couple of hundred other boot camp stories over the years. It’s entertaining and really helps us get into Tanner’s head. The young man really isn’t fit for the military because he really hates the idea of hurting other people. He’s not a pacifist, but he’s really too nice for his own good. Helping him come to the point where he understands on an emotional level why militaries sometimes have to hurt people is a great set up for the crises he faces in the rest of the book.

 

I don’t want to put any spoilers into this review, but I will say that the crises—especially the final one—are exceedingly well done. Tanner accomplishes things that should have had me closing my book and saying—no, that’s too much—and yet I really didn’t have any problem believing anything that happened. That not only requires great writing, it demands superb characterization. Something that has always been a strength of Kay’s novels.

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March to Other Worlds Day 22: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Day 22 A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars reads as a pretty straight forward adventure piece. Earthman John Carter finds himself on the planet Mars, meets the woman of his dreams, and moves the Martian equivalent of heaven and earth to rescue her from a horrible fate. Along the way there are loyal and heroic friends, terrifying monsters and epic fights and battles. When you sum it up like this, the novel doesn’t sound that ground breaking, and yet it has inspired the dreams of generations of readers and many of those readers (such as Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Jack Vance) grew up to inspire even more readers of all ages.

 

This book is also important to western culture in general. First off, it’s inspired two movies, numerous comic books, and an amazing amount of both fan fiction and authorized sequels by ERB’s estate. It’s also an important piece of literature in its own right as it (and its many sequels) popularized the science fiction subgenre called the Planetary Romance.

 

Planetary Romance is not a term that’s used a lot today, but anyone who’s seen Avatar knows exactly what this subgenre is all about. The hero (or heroine) encounters adventure on a foreign planet and moves heaven and earth because of love. Another prominent modern example is the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk comic series. Classic examples can be seen in Buck Rogers, Adam Strange, Dune, Pern, the World of Tiers, Darkover, and the Hainish Cycle.

 

So how does A Princess of Mars stack up today? In my opinion it’s one of ERB’s absolutely best works. He will later be accused of being formulaic in his prose, but that charge cannot be brought to bear against this work because it’s his first. What we have instead is a pretty straight forward adventure story with awesome heroes in the form of John Carter and Tars Tarkas, one of the best pets in the history of fiction, and the titular heroine who—while not a fully formed modern heroine—breaks early twentieth century gender expectations both as a stateswoman and as a selfless defender both of John Carter and her nation, Helium.

 

If you’re interested in this book, stop by Written Gems at Goodreads. This was the first book we discussed in that forum and it’s never too late to make a comment or ask a question. You can find Written Gems here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

 

March to Other Worlds Day 21: Oblivion Threshold by J.R. Mabry and B.J. West

Day 21: Oblivion Threshold by J. R. Mabry and B. J. West

In Oblivion Threshold, J. R. Mabry and B. J. West put a twist on the classic space war for the survival of humanity. Actually, they put two twists on it and both are really good. First, the alien Prox are just weird. They ride on the outside of their spaceships and scavenge solar systems for all of their collectable metals. There are a lot of creepy images associated with this trait, but the best is the sound of alien creatures landing on human spaceships and starting to carve them open so they can harvest their metals. Humans aren’t food here—they’re just in the way.

 

The second twist is the accidental solution that might let humanity survive these creatures. Captain Jeff Bowers is killed while spying on the Prox but a second group of aliens—a sort of group intelligence who have transcended above physical bodies—intervene and reconstruct him. In doing so, they accidentally show him how to translocate objects across lightyears of space instantaneously. If Bowers can master this power, humanity will be able to bolster its defense against the Prox by fully utilizing all of its military assets while jumping them around space to keep them out of harms way. Problem—the second set of aliens don’t want Jeff using his powers this way. They seem to think that there’s a decent chance he’ll accidentally destroy the universe.

 

So Oblivion Threshold develops two very different, but totally intertwined, storylines involving two different alien species—and it is fascinating watching the cast try and sort through their problems. I do have a couple of nitpicky complaints, but I want to stress that these didn’t harm my overall enjoyment of the novel. First, and most importantly, the obvious solution to the second alien race’s fear is for them to help humanity defeat the Prox by doing the translocation for them. They might have said no, but they needed to be asked. Second, I found it unlikely that the one military commander whose ship successfully fought and escaped the Prox would have later been risked in an experiment that any captain could have handled. It seems to me that her expertise would have been tapped to prep humanity for its next encounter with the hostile aliens.

 

Those complaints aside, this is a really fun book that people who love a bit of military space opera are likely to enjoy.

 

Oblivion Threshold authors Mabry and West have made the novel free on Amazon from March 20-24. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...

 

 

The second book in the Oblivion series is selling at 99 cents on Amazon until March 30. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 20: Maelstrom by Peter Cawdron

Day 20 Maelstrom by Peter Cawdron

Worlds collide in Peter Cawdron’s Maelstrom—a book I almost didn’t buy but am now very glad I did. On the surface, Maelstrom struck me as a run-of-the-mill story of beings and creatures passing between parallel earths, but it proved to be much better than that.

 

The novel is broken into three parts. The first is told from the POV of Elizabeth Cali, an American doctor working in rural China. Security guards at her medical center have a violent conflict with a tribesman from the nearby desert. The tribesman has brought in a sick elderly man and for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, the guards are fighting with the younger tribesman who performs feats of amazing strength and basically wins the battle. The doctor calms him down, gets security to back off, and starts to help the sick man who is dying of heart problems. She realizes that both tribesmen have deformities. Neither can speak, their skulls are elongated, and more. She gets x-rays and realizes that both are Neandertals. Excited that she thinks she has discovered a possible Neandertal tribe that has survived into the present day, she investigates further and learns that the situation is much more bizarre than that. The Neandertal have been passing from their world into ours for centuries and there is frightening evidence that more worlds are colliding with ours, opening up passes between them in a manner that will eventually destroy our planet.

 

The second portion of the story follows a NYC cop, named Mark, and a jogger in Central Park who are caught in the next collision of planets and transported to a world where Homo Sapiens does not appear to have risen and prehistoric lions, saber tooth tigers, and more roam what on our planet is NYC. This is both the best section of the novel and the one that requires the greatest suspension of disbelief—it seems highly improbable that for the first time a portal will open in a major city just as Dr. Cali was discovering that the portals exist. That small problem aside, I was extremely impressed by how the author, Peter Cawdron, handled this dislocation and the terrible problem of trying to help a woman trapped in the rubble of NYC buildings that collapsed when they were pulled onto this new planet. This is a painfully powerful section that had me on the edge of my seat.

 

The third section follows many of the people introduced earlier in the novel as they move through the portal (called a maelstrom) in China to try and figure out how to save our planet. This seemed hopeless to me when they started, but again, Cawdron has brilliantly thought through the situation that caused the maelstrom and I was totally satisfied with his conclusion. This is among the very best of parallel universe stories that I’ve ever had the pleasure to read and the three narrators in the audio book do a magnificent job of bringing the text to life. I’m very glad I bought the story and I’ll be looking up other books by Peter Cawdron.

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