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Showing posts from March, 2016

Supergiant by Scott Rhine

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Find an exploit; hack the universe. Chief Engineer Roz Mendez pilots a ship with a revolutionary star drive that could travel ten times as fast as current technology. The job has given her a chance to find riches, romance, and earn a reputation that will counter the discrimination she’s felt her entire life. All the ship needs to make history is a few repairs and a renowned physicist who can adjust the jump equations. The trick is finding the professor without tipping off the Bankers, the species with a monopoly on faster-than-light communications. Just making a profit at each port without getting arrested is hard enough. This is the second book in the Gigaparsec series and thus this review may contain spoilers for those who haven't read the first book. In Void Contract , we were introduced to Max, a war weary ex-special forces operative looking to make a life for himself in the civilian world, errr, galaxy. While on a job, he encountered Echo, a Magi (the mysterious race that ga...

The Results of the "Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off"

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Last year, Mark Lawrence convinced ten blogs that normally only review traditionally published books to participate in his " Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off ". 300 entries were sifted down to 10 finalists. The winner was announced this past weekend. We really haven't covered indie fantasy since 2014—those reviewers have resigned from this blog—so I recommend that you look through the list and follow the links offered to learn more. I applaud Mark Lawrence's initiative and effort. I also applaud those review blogs for being open-minded enough to take on the challenge. I hope that this experience changes their attitudes towards the multitude of authors who are either forced to self-publish or choose that path from the start. It seems suspiciously easy for people to forget that Hugh Howey, Martin Weir, Amanda Hocking, Anne Charnock, and Michael Sullivan (just to name a few) all got their start as indie authors. While I'm not saying that all self-published works are...