Malasz

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...

While stumbling around the internet today, I came across this . In essence, it was an author bemoaning a rejection letter he received from us. He was having a bad day and chose to rant on his blog about it. I've copied the pertinent part below, but you can click on that link to read the whole thing and verify that I'm not misquoting him. My magnum opus received a rejection today, not for publication, but rather, that it was not qualified for a review by any “reviewers” on the website “The New Podler Review of Books: Small Press and self-published books worth reading”. Now I don’t remember ever submitting a review request to this site, although it’s possible. I don’t normally ask for reviews except when I am just putting a book out there and need a few ARC reviews posted so that the almighty ad sites will consider my money worth spending (and then I normally impose shamelessly on fellow authors). Now the facts that the aforementioned review site is built on the most hideous of t...

Reviewed by Erin Eymard. The final novel wraps up the journey of John Raimey, who, thirty-five years before, became the first bionic soldier ever deployed in the field. He is a giant, a Tank Major, fourteen feet tall and with enough power in his fists to level buildings. He is a legend of war, cursed with a fate where everyone he touches - even in love - dies. Evan Lindo, the father of bionics, now rules the world through his most ingenious creation, The Northern Star. But a war in the Middle East has triggered events that lead to Raimey. And a secret has been unveiled that sets Raimey on one last mission before he finds his place in Hell. Mike Gullickson's The Northern Star: The End is the perfect ending to his The Northern Star trilogy. It brings the series and your favorite characters to satisfying conclusions. I read the book in three days but kept putting writing a review aside because nothing I wrote seemed to do justice to Gullickson's story. One of the things that I ...

In the battle to defeat King Ruin and protect the Bridge between souls, ex-Arctic marine Ritry Goligh tore his own soul into pieces. Now those pieces, embodied as six rugged marines spread across the tsunami-blasted world, are adrift without Ritry to guide them. Their captain, Me, is addicted to dying in raids against the remnants of King Ruin's army. Ray longs for the love he lost. Far seeks the mythical heart of the Bridge, So is lost to her calculations, while twins Ti and La have split as far apart as possible. They trudge from bunker to bunker blinded by loss, mopping up holdouts from the war. But the war isn't over. It's only just begun. From the ashes of King Ruin's defeat a godlike power rises, one that understands the Bridge better than Ritry ever did, and means to bring a flood so vast it will erase every soul from history. Me's only hope is to ascend to godhood himself, before everyone he loves is washed away forever. If you haven't read the first two...

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...

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...

When reformed dream hacker Nix Nighthawk's sleep chip malfunctions, he is forced to seek help from a world he is trying to avoid—his old friends in the pirate dream network. But that world has changed, and Nix soon finds himself at the center of a complex plot to overthrow the vast corporation that controls every aspect of society. Betrayed by his lover, his friends, and even the technology that defines him, he has to choose: go back to living his safe and controlled existence, or be the hero and join forces with the revolutionary known only as The Somniscient. My first thought when I read the title was, "What the heck does 'somniscient' mean?" It's not listed in the dictionary, so I tried to break it down into its parts. somni- : a combining form meaning “sleep”, used in the formation of compound words. omniscient : having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding; perceiving all things. When I put both parts together, I get someone that ha...