Malasz

Earth. 11,000 BCE. A galaxy wide war between sentient machines rages and Earth is in the crossfire. Oblivious to the deadly peril above, Far Runner and his tribe face their own struggles. An unstable climate forces the group to migrate south and into the sights of a ruthless human foe. A merciless attack tears Runner away from his family and friends. A wounded alien cyborg soldier is stranded on Earth. Her views and identity are challenged when she finds herself face to face with a determined human named Far Runner. As if there weren't enough problems, Moorr, a radioactive four-legged freighter pilot, prospector, and drug smuggler, is displaced by a relic of the war. Lost, he searches for his kin, but finds Earth instead. The defenseless planet is ripe for exploitation. There's only one way for Far Runner to save his People. There's only one way for the stranded soldier to return home. And only one way Moorr's dangerous presence can be dealt with. Earth is in peril. Tim...

Reuben Black Ram has been a hacker for Special Forces, a DJ for pirate radio, and a real pirate who hotwires spaceships. The richest Goat in the galaxy, he is being asked to give up everything to save a race of alien mimics and his Human girlfriend. To accomplish this, he must cross Union space to reach the Convocation of Souls. The space battles, spies, and dangerously experimental tech don’t bother him as much as what MI-23 expects of him—to grow up and become a world leader. Reuben still has a few tricks up his bulletproof sleeves, including a psi talent that up until now has only made him an object of ridicule. Before I get into the review, I'd like to comment on the cover. Each of the books in this series has been told from the POV of a different character. In the first two books, that character was human and featured on the cover. Not this one. The main character is a "goat"—humans have applied Terran animal nicknames to many of the alien races they've encounter...

Well, that could’ve gone better. Saru had found the blue-eyed girl alright, but she’d blown up half of Philadelphia in the process. Whoops. Now she was a fugitive, robbed of her implants, relying on her "wits," hunted by aliens, Gods, and the monstrous spawn of fornicating universes. It was a crap deal, but it wasn’t all bad. She’d stolen a plane, a luxury model with a fully stocked minibar. And she had company, a rogue Gaesporan named John. And there was something strangely liberating about having screwed up so badly you couldn’t really do worse. Cloud Country is the sequel to No Dogs in Philly and picks up within hours of its end. The story reads a bit like a bad acid trip version of Alice in Wonderland —I don't mean that as a complement. It's all about Saru wandering around aimlessly in real and imagined landscapes, encountering people, aliens, and monsters who want to do her harm. It isn't until about three-quarters of the way through that the point of it al...

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...

A veteran of the Gigaparsec War, Dr. Max Culp catches alien war criminals with his skills as a !Kung tribal hunter. Suddenly, his only surviving teammate is kidnapped. To free his friend, Max is forced to take a mob contract on a Saurian fugitive hiding at the borders of Human space. But Max is tired of wet work and alien conspiracies. Can he find a path back to civilian life without losing what’s left of his soul or those closest to him? This is the first book in a new series, but it takes place in the same universe as Jezebel's Ladder , just 400 years later. While several books followed Jezebel's Ladder , they are not required reading for this book. However, if you enjoy this book and want to know how Earth got to this point, then you should consider picking them up. The book starts off with a fair amount of action. Rhine does a good job introducing us to Max and the universe he lives in without drowning us in background. Once Max is forced to accept the job from the alien mo...

"If this is Paradise, how bad could Hell be?" A sandstorm uncovers a long buried secret in the Iraqi desert, an ancient Sumerian temple dating back at least 6,000 years to the beginning of civilization. An American army patrol sent to investigate the ruins is trapped inside the temple’s eroded walls, first by an insurgent ambush then by another, even more powerful sandstorm. When an enemy mortar shell blasts an opening into a hidden burial chamber, Captain Adam Cadman and his soldiers take refuge deep in the ruins. What they find hidden inside threatens to destroy every belief about the beginnings of mankind—as well as modern civilization as we know it. Eden plays in a sandbox whose basic foundation is similar to the one that the Stargate movie and TV spinoff shows played in. Both were inspired by Von Däniken's controversial theory that Earth was visited in the distant past by aliens who helped shaped our early history. Whether or not you believe that, I find that in ...

Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells is what 2001: A Space Odyssey would’ve been if the monolith had actually talked to the crew. NASA has known about an alien spaceship parked in the Asteroid Belt since the 1960s but has kept the information from the public.   All efforts to establish radio contact have been met with silence.   In the early 21st century, NASA finally develops the technology required to send six astronauts to the ship to discover its secrets.   Dr. Jane Holloway is a linguist and a reluctant astronaut recruited by NASA to communicate with any possible aliens.   As soon as their capsule docks with the mysterious ship, she begins to hear voices.   She not only has a hard time convincing herself they are real, but most of her crew as well.   When the mission takes a disturbing turn that not even the highly trained astronauts are prepared for, it’s Jane’s connection to the ship that becomes their only hope for survival. Fluency was a finely wri...

Trust is the second book in the Trang series. The story picks up two weeks after the first novel ends. The shape-shifting alien known as "The Magic Man" has completed his conquest of the planet of the aggressive Cyclopes. Due to his world's experience with many forms of government, Trang has been tasked by the Magic Man to establish a government for the Cyclopes. Despite queasy feelings about imposing his political views upon another race, Trang reluctantly accepts. If he fails, the Magic Man may perceive that the entire race of Cyclopes are "diseased" and kill them all. Sisson has retained her soft sci-fi feel, but made Trust stronger than its predecessor. While dialogue continues to drive the story, she has added action and built up suspense to avoid lulls in the story's pace. Although this book is just as long as the first one, at no point did I feel it was dragging. While the first novel introduced us to all of the aliens on the space station, the...