The Imaginary Realms of

Gilbert M. Stack

Day 4 Heroically Challenged by P.T. McCordic

While we’re marching, why not trek into an excellent parody of the fantasy adventure, Heroically Challenged by P.T. McCordic? There are four things I really like about this novel. First is the world building. This is a story that really fits solidly in the LitRPG genre, but unlike most of those books it is not about a bunch of people playing a game (or trapped in a game). Instead its about people who live in a world where people can level up in a host of adventuring professions. McCordic actually found a way to make “ascending” make sense by having this new ability have entered the world alongside magic when the Blight started to devastate the land. Before this, there were no monsters, no magic, and no adventurers. Now, the new wizards of the world are trying to understand their newfound magic while the adventurers try and keep normal people alive.

Second, there’s an awful lot of humor in these pages. Most of it comes from the absurd situations they characters find themselves in, but a lot of it is generated by McCordic’s dry wit. It makes the whole book a lot of fun because you really don’t know what bizarre twist McCordic will inflict upon his helpless cast.

Third, the character Alyx was absolutely wonderful—so much so that I wish the book had started with his situation instead of that of the reluctant farmer, Erik. Erik’s not a bad guy, but he’s a little dry in the beginning where as Alyx has a gift for getting right into the middle of things from the moment he first appears on the page.

Finally, the thing that puts this book over the top is the absolute incompetence of the characters. They are the Stephanie Plumbs (inept bounty hunter from the Burg) of the fantasy world and their hopeless efforts added a lot to the overall humor of the story. Yet, at the same time, it was easy to empathize with them. They are all courageous, trying to do their part to save their world, but their inability to do even the simplest things without mishap makes their adventures priceless. To tell the truth, I wonder how many of us might find ourselves similarly challenged if we were forced to pick up a sword and try to chop a skeleton to pieces.

If you’re looking for something that takes a humorous look at the LitRPG genre, you should give Heroically Challenged a try. I know I’m looking forward to the sequel. In the meantime, why not join in the conversation about the book at  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 5 The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

I doubt that there is any other character in fiction that does as much marching as Corwin, Prince of Amber. I first discovered him when I was in ninth grade and joined the Science Fiction Book Club. The club offered five-books-for-a-dollar to lure new members. I picked The Chronicles of Amber because it had a cool cover and the two volume set counted as one book. At the time I had never heard of Roger Zelazny, but after racing through the two-volume set, I would try and get my hands on everything he’d ever written. Yet even as I devoured his other works, I kept coming back to Amber. I’ve read the books a dozen times, listened to the audio version narrated by Zelazny, himself, played the RPG both in person and in an extended email version, composed my own stories imagining what would come next, and finally happily bought the e-book versions so I can continue to enjoy them again and again. This is one of the greatest adventure stories in science fiction and fantasy and if you haven’t yet read it you should stop reading this review right now and go get yourself a copy.

Like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Amber is really one novel broken into many parts, but unlike Tolkien’s masterpiece, Roger Zelazny took advantage of the publisher’s decision to present the work as five separate books to tell five different types of stories. Nine Princes in Amber is a Who Am I? tale. The Guns of Avalon is a straight adventure piece. The Sign of the Unicorn is about politics and intrigue. The Hand of Oberon is a story of manipulation. And finally The Courts of Chaos wraps up the adventure with an epic journey which completes the hero’s growth while simultaneously providing an exciting and highly satisfying ending.

So take a visit to Amber, or, if you’ve already read it, return as if you’re seeking out an old friend. In honor of March to Other Worlds, the Written Gems group on Goodreads has decided to discuss Nine Princes in Amber in early April. We’d love to have you drop in and join us.

You can find the discussion of Nine Princes in Amber at Written Gems: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/519247-written-gems In the meantime,why not pop over to my Facebook page and join in the discussion there:  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 6 Fierce Girls at War by Mike Adams

Marching to Other Worlds naturally brings military-themed fiction to mind and Mike Adams’ Fierce Girls at War is one of the best military SF series I’ve ever read. It holds its own with top series like David Weber’s Honor Harrington and John Ringo’s Troy Rising. Stylistically, it’s a mix of serious infantry action and behind the behind the scenes know how of a W.E.B. Griffin novel. The result is an often gritty, always fascinating, exploration of earth’s first colony and its run in with a peculiar alien species called the Rift.

In addition to the tight military action, politics plays a very important role in this series, but not the traditional high level presidential-style politics. In the Earth of the future, terrorism continues to be a significant problem and much of the anger of the terrorists is focused on the growing interstellar economy. Adams deftly uses this movement not only to establish the foundation of his series, but to add plausible tension at every level of the interstellar enterprise.

Another of the strengths of the series is the multiple points of views from which the reader gets to explore Earth’s first interstellar colony. Not only are their multiple POVs in the colony of New Hope, but Adams gets the reader into the nitty-gritty of life on a starship as the great ships transit the vastness of space. There is also usually a couple of chapters in each book grounded in the cast members still located on earth.

The cast is the greatest strength of the novel. Adams opens the series by introducing three generations of the O’Brien family. The matriarch, Kelly O’Brien, is in charge of firearms training for the NYC Police Department. Her children are almost preternaturally gifted marksmen, the beneficiaries of a training technique invented by their deceased father. Rick O’Brien and Sergeant Molly Bennett quickly run afoul of the Hassan Gul terrorist organization by killing several of the chief terrorist’s sons and are eventually forced to leave the planet to keep from being assassinated. From this very exciting beginning the whole series unfolds.

At New Hope Colony, Rick and Molly carve out a place of influence for themselves in the colonial logistics office while the alien Rift begin taking covert steps to reclaim the planet they feel the humans have stolen from them. The Rift are an advanced, economically focused, alien species with very little experience of war. They do their fighting with primitive mercenaries who are physically durable and are indiscriminate carnivores. Over the early books of the series, the reader watches the colony and an approaching starship begin to pick up hints that something is wrong, but not quite putting the facts together before the invasion begins in earnest.

From this moment forward, the series moves into overdrive, as the invasion advances, the colony struggles to respond, and Rick and Molly, together with a group of some fifty high school girls, find themselves marooned in the dangerous back country of New Hope Colony, hundreds of miles from civilization and unable to contact the colonial authorities for help. With their communications satellites rendered inoperative, the colony can’t even communicate with the starships slowly making their way into system. The already high tension continues to ratchet up as the war continues.

If you’re looking for a well-thought-out military sf series with plenty of action, you should take a look at Fierce Girls at War. You can also join the discussion at  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 7 Wearing the Cape by Marion G. Harmon

For our next series, we’re going to march into what I believe is the premier superhero series anywhere: Wearing the Cape by Marion G. Harmon. I first encountered this series through a free snippet (the first ten chapters or so of book #1) and the moment I finished I bought the full book and I haven’t stopped reading yet. I love it so much that I’ve also listened to it in audio format.

Wearing the Cape is the story of Astra—a young woman who undergoes her “breakthrough” when a supervillain drops an expressway on top of her car. She survives, but she can’t sit still waiting to be rescued when other people are dying all around her. So she pushes a few tons of concrete off of her vehicle and changes the world.

On the surface, that’s not very different than most superhero series out there. What makes Harmon’s books stand out head-and-shoulders above the rest is his attention to world building, continuity, and character development.

World Building: Wearing the Cape is the most realistic super hero world I’ve ever encountered. A lot of that realism is based on the politics Harmon has so carefully crafted. Marvel and DC have built their empires on the vigilante but he explicitly explores what the rest of us have always intuitively understood—there is no way the government would ever permit vigilantes to act the way they do in the comic books. In Harmon’s world, each state has developed its own policies regarding breakthroughs—and those policies seriously impact the ability and the willingness of supers to operate within their territory. And if that isn’t enough, Harmon shows a lot of sensitivity to how culture (like in Japan or New Orleans) would impact the breakthroughs and their relationships with the public and the authorities.

Continuity: Each novel builds seamlessly on what has come before. That’s important in and of itself, but Harmon is especially adept at finding ways to fix weaknesses that become apparent in earlier stories by enhancing, not destroying, his continuity. My favorite novel in the series, Recursion, cleverly reinterprets everything that happened in the early books in a way that strengthen the whole Wearing the Cape universe.

Character Development: On the most obvious level, this is simply making amazing and lovable characters that matter even after they’ve died. Harmon does this very well, but so do a lot of authors. But in the supers genre, the super abilities themselves also make a kind of character that often drives the plot and peoples’ actions, and Harmon develops the coolest of super powers both among his heroes and his villains. I never know what to expect when a new cape shows up on the scene. What’s more he’s found a way to incorporate supers with magical abilities and super science capabilities that doesn’t totally alter modern America from anything we can relate to.

So if you’re looking for a superhero series that gets it right every time unlike Marvel and DC, you should take a look at Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape. In the meantime you can read my reviews of the whole series here. And you can join in the conversation about Wearing the Cape on my Facebook Author's page here:  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 11 Morgaine by C. J. Cherryh

In the Morgaine series, C. J. Cherryh’s heroes literally travel to a new world in each novel, bringing pain and destruction to the inhabitants in their efforts to stop a large catastrophe striking all of human space. Like the Chronicles of Amber, I got the opening trilogy to this series as part of my initial membership in the Science Fiction Book Club. As I recall my mother had to sign off on my joining because of my age and she wasn’t happy about it, but she did it for me. (Thanks, Mom!) I stayed in the SFBC for the next ten or twelve years and bought hundreds of books from them, but those first ones stand out in my memory: A Heinlein Trio, The Chronicles of Amber, Riddle of Stars, and The Book of Morgaine. Each was at least a trilogy because I wanted to get my money’s worth, and oh did I get it. That was the single best dollar I have ever spent in my life!

Over the last four decades I’ve read dozens of Cherryh’s books and decided on Gate of Ivrel and its sequels for this event because they fit the theme so well. This is the story of the enigmatic, Morgaine, a cursed woman out of legend, and Vanye, who becomes bonded to her and her mission to save humanity by closing down a series of gates that can transport people through space and time. These gates offer the potential of great power, but they also have the potential to destroy civilizations if someone uses them to tinker with the past. A human civilization sent a company of soldiers through the gates to close them one after the other until there are no more. (So it’s a suicide mission because they will only discover that there are no more when they don’t come out the other side of the last gate.) Morgaine is the last (and possibly not the first generation) of those soldiers and her tale is amazing in no small part because the Gates offer power and the possibility of immortality and many fight her in her efforts to close them down.

Cherryh tells Morgaine’s story through the eyes of Vanye, the bravest man in literature who was ever condemned for cowardice. He is the epitome of honor and we watch him be tricked into serving Morgaine whom he loathes and fears as a witch who got ten thousand men killed a century earlier. Over the course of the book he grows to understand just how selfless and heroic his lady truly is. In doing so we watch him navigate a world in which none of his peers (save one) lives up to the ideals that he embodies. Cherryh’s greatest strength as an author has always been her ability to portray new and distinctive cultures in great detail but without exhausting the reader through long and tedious descriptions. Vanye is one of her better tools for accomplishing this. We learn about his people by contrasting his actions and motivations with those of everyone he encounters. I love this series and I bet you will too.

So if you're interested in amazing sf that reads like fantasy, why not drop over to my Facebook page and join in the discussion of Morgaine:  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 12 Dead Moon by Peter Clines

Zombies would normally be part of my Occult-tober event, but when they happen on the moon it seems to fit the March to Other Worlds just as well, so I’ve decided to make Peter Clines’ Dead Moon the focus of the twelfth day of this event.

In the future, the moon has become a massive cemetery with something like 16 million bodies interned there. A space elevator makes transportation to the moon really cheap and the notion that bodies buried on the moon don’t decompose appeals to a lot of rich people. So several cemeteries have sprouted on the moon and a new profession—caretaker—has developed to take care of the deceased.

On top of that, the moon is a tourist attraction with classes of rich students going to the moon instead of Disney World on elaborate field trips, not to mention business ventures, etc. So there are lots of potential victims for the coming zombie horde.

Matters begin in a pretty straightforward fashion. A meteor strike results in the undead beginning to rise and—very realistically I thought—no one believes it’s happening. Official reaction is extremely slow and further complicated by the fact that one of the first presumed victims of the zombies is the spoiled son of the company CEO.

Then things get really interesting. These zombies are not just mindless brain-seeking corpses. They have a disturbingly high level of cunning. They might even be smart.

I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises in the novel, so I’ll just say that the reader (with slightly more information than the characters) understands that there is more going on than the dead rising. Just what that is, however, is not immediately clear—even though Cline gives plenty of clues that I kicked myself for missing earlier in the book. This is a brilliantly plotted novel that also appears to be very well researched. I’m not an expert on the moon or conditions there, but the description of what a person goes through when exposed to the cold vacuum of space was riveting and totally believable. Even if the rest of the book had been terrible (and let’s be clear, it’s awesomely good) that one scene and it’s follow up chapter would have been worth reading the entire novel for.

Every time I thought I was approaching the natural end of the book, Clines shook things up and ramped the tension even higher. I’m proud to say I figured out a big chunk of how our heroes were going to deal with the final monstrous problem, but I’m not sure how much credit that should give me because I didn’t figure out that that particular problem was going to need to be solved until Cline hit me over the head with it.

I’d like to wrap up by noting that novels can be made or broken based on the skills of their narrators. Fortunately, Ray Porter has the kind of voice and cadence that could make the wandering dead stop and listen to him. He does a phenomenal job and it just makes a great book all the better.

If you’re looking for zombies in a new and interesting environment, you should listen to Dead Moon. You should also join the conversation at:  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 13  The Test of Fire by William L. Hahn

The Test of Fire is probably my favorite book by William L. Hahn. (I love Shards of Light an awful lot too, but The Test of Fire is a genuine standalone novel despite technically being a sequel to Plane of Dreams.) In this novel, Hahn proves that great writers do not need to have their heroes save the planet to construct a gripping tale. What it takes is fascinating, well-developed characters willing to risk everything they have for a cause they believe in. That’s the situation that Querlack finds himself in. He’s a retired adventurer who has invested the loot from his wilder days in a foef—a bit of mostly swampy land that doesn’t appear to have much of a future. A poor investment by any contemporary standard, made more so by Querlack’s determination to better the land for the sake of his peasants, not to milk it for every coin he can extract from it.

His neighbor, Sir Cran-Kalrith Pritaelseran, is a hard elf with a rigid sense of honor that basically comes down to the following—everyone exists to better him. He finds his new neighbor offensive and decides to continue a centuries old conflict and attempt to expand his own borders—a strategy he has used successfully on other neighbors. It’s a serious threat, but not the only one Querlack faces as he learns more and more about his new home.

This is a great book—made all the better by its primary focus on a relatively small territory. Hahn has always been capable of “painting” the master strokes of epic conflict—demons threatening his Lands of Hope. Now he proves he can be just as effective in small scale adventures and in doing so makes us cherish his characters all the more.

If you're looking for a new tale of heroic fantasy, why don't you join in the conversation here:  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 14 Redshirts by John Scalzi

Star Trek boldly marched to more new worlds than most series through a combination of television, movies, books, and comics. John Scalzi’s novel, Redshirts, is a laugh-out-loud parody of the original series through the eyes of the…well, redshirts—the expendable cast of extras who mostly die in horrific ways to drive home the point that the latest adventure is terrifyingly dangerous.

This novel is incredibly creative—no surprise for anyone familiar with John Scalzi’s writing—as the book focuses in on those all-too-expendable people. You see, they’ve figured out what going on an away mission means to them and they will do anything to keep from coming to the attention of the “stars” of their starship. But it’s not until one of the expendables decides to do something about the terrible situation he and his friends are in that the novel really gets trekking. Can an extra take over the show to stop it from killing off scores of people? That depends on just how well they’ve figured out the bizarre physics of this takeoff of the Star Trek universe.

You don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to appreciate Redshirts.

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Day 16: Tunnel through Time by Lester Del Rey

We’re marching through more portals in Lester Del Rey’s Tunnel through Time. I first read this novel when I found a copy in my grade school library. It’s an adventure story geared toward a younger audience told from the perspective of Bob Miller. Bob’s father has invented a time portal through which his close friend, a paleontologist, travels 80 million years into the past. Unfortunately, the paleontologist doesn’t return when the portal is turned back on sparking a crisis. After a couple of days of checking the equipment and worrying, 17-year-old Bob, and Pete, the teenaged son of the paleontologist, are chosen to go after him and find out what went wrong.

Obviously this decision on the part of the scientific team that invented the portal should require a substantial amount of disbelief by the reader, but it’s actually easy to get past as the boys begin their adventure. They find Pete’s father but the portal is damaged when a dinosaur stumbles into it and getting home quickly becomes a major problem. They can’t generate enough power to bring the three travelers back to the present in one jump. They can’t even generate enough power to let them jump together. So we get to visit more than the Cretaceous period. It was exciting when I was ten and it is still exciting now.

A final note of caution. Evidently, Lester Del Rey never read Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder even though it was published 14 years before this novel. Bob and his friends shoot and kill everything. They eat dinosaur eggs. They basically take no care to preserve the past at all and Del Rey never tries to deal with that potential problem. Now I personally think that if stepping on a butterfly could change the results of an election eighty million years later, than just breathing the air would have been a problem, but it still seems like Del Rey should have at least addressed the issue by throwing out some theory that the past is robust and can’t be affected by what time travelers are doing. That being said, I remembered these scenes vividly forty years later and especially the fate of the little girl, Gina. That’s saying quite a lot about a novel. This isn’t a great work of literature, but it’s a story that for me has withstood the passage of time.

If you're one of the millions who read this story growing up, or if you're thinking about doing it now, why not join the discussion on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

Day 17 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

For the 17th Day of March, we’re returning to the moon and one of Robert A. Heinlein’s all-time best novels and his most detailed exploration of his libertarian ideals. The moon is being used as a prison colony for mostly political prisoners from Earth. It’s a one-way sentence because after six months or so on the moon’s surface, physical changes to a human’s body chemistry make it impossible for people to return to earth and live a full and active life. However, three generations later, 90% of the people on the moon are the descendants of deportees—not actual prisoners even though the Lunar Authority continues to treat them that way.

The moon holds an important position in the Earth’s economy providing food for the mother planet’s 11 billion people. The market for lunar grain is completely controlled by the Lunar Authority which sets the price it will pay for grain and the lunar ice which provides the water to nurture the plants. In three generations it has never raised those rates even while the cost of production rises rapidly and the prices it charges individual Lunies for power, water, air, food, etc. continues to rise. It provides no genuine services (such as police protection or education) but exerts iron control over the lives of the people of Luna.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a tale of reluctant rebellion forced upon the inhabitants of the moon when they discover that the growing demands of the earth and the Lunar Authority for grain, coupled with the decreasing availability of the resources required to produce that food, have put the colonies into a downward cycle toward food riots and cannibalism. This discovery is made through the calculations of the most interesting character in the novel—Mike, the first (and only) self-aware computer in existence. Mike is the computer of the Lunar Authority, but he has hidden his “awakening” from the Authority because he finds their programmers “stupid”. They are not interested in conversations, but in programming him for routine tasks. The narrator of the story is a computer technician who is a third generation Lunie who has the advantage of being “not stupid”. He likes, Mike. Quickly understands what Mike is and accepts him as a friend, not trying to use him or to “fix” him. When Mike comes to understand the threat the Lunar Authority represents to Mannie (and two other friends) he joins (and in fact leads) the revolution to free Luna.

The novel is told from the perspective of Mannie many years after the successful revolution. Mannie was non-political at the start of the book. He has a steep learning curve if he is to save his family and friends so there is a lot of political philosophy in this book as Mannie comes to understand what a revolution requires and what dangers governments represent to the freedom of individuals. There is also a lot of exploration of alternate ways of structuring society (for example, family units) which helps to make the lunar society more vivid. These people may be transplanted earth men and women, but they have become something remarkably distinct from their terrestrial counterparts.

The novel is wonderful on multiple levels and well worth reading, but its ending is not truly a happy one. Why not join the discussion at  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

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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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/B083ST56P6/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

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/B083TB72PR?notRedirectToSDP=1&ref_=dbs_mng_calw_1&storeType=ebooks

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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.

If you're interested in this book, you can join the discussion on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

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.

If you're interested in this book, you can join the discussion on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStackAuthor/

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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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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Day 31 Winterhaven by Gilbert M Stack

March has come and gone amazingly quickly and as I began with one of my fantasy series, I thought I’d end the journey with the other. Winterhaven has been a labor of love for me going back to my senior year in college. After about six years of tinkering with it, I finally wrote the first draft while I was researching my dissertation in England. That draft led to many more and more than twenty years later I finally finished it and wrote two sequels that have been my honor to share with all of you.

In its largest sense, Winterhaven is the story of the last outpost of the Ardenesse who rallied to the call of their God, Vapin, and left their world to wage The War of Night in their current land. They have had their share of victories, defeats and betrayals, but now, centuries later the descendants of those original men and women think that the great deeds of their world are confined to the long past Age of Heroes. In Winterhaven, they begin to find out that they are very wrong and if my heroes and heroines survive the struggles of the first few books they will realize that the fate of many worlds will ultimately depend on the strength and courage of the last descendants of the Ardenesse and their Duchy of Winterhaven.

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