Malasz

I'm pleased to announce that author Richard Abbott has joined the ranks of the New Podler Staff. Richard is the author of Far from the Spaceports , which I reviewed earlier this month. Besides science fiction, Richard also writes historical fiction. His other novels include The Flame Before Us , Scenes from a Life , In a Milk and Honeyed Land . Richard will be joining us as a reviewer. He hopes to discover some science and speculative fiction that offers optimistic, rather than pessimistic, outlooks with good characters and prose to boot. Welcome aboard, Richard!

Quick wits and loyalty confront high-tech crime in space. Welcome to the Scilly Isles, a handful of asteroids bunched together in space, well beyond the orbit of Mars. This remote and isolated habitat is home to a diverse group of human settlers, and a whole flock of parakeets. But earth-based financial regulator ECRB suspects that it’s also home to serious large scale fraud, and the reputation of the islands comes under threat. Enter Mitnash Thakur and his virtual partner Slate, sent out from Earth to investigate. Their ECRB colleagues are several weeks away at their ship’s best speed, and even message signals take an hour for the round trip. Slate and Mitnash are on their own, until they can work out who on Scilly to trust. How will they cope when the threat gets personal? While the story got off to a slow start, it certainly wasn't dull. Abbott introduces us to Mitnash and does just enough world-building to hook the reader with an intriguing future. Humanity has colonized a good...

Reviewed by Erin Eymard. Marcus Antonius Primus began a golden age for humanity when he liberated Roma from Octavian Caesar and became sole Consul. With wisdom from the gods, future Antonii Consuls conquered the world and spawned an interstellar civilization. Three weeks before the millennial anniversary of the Antonii Ascension, star freighter captain Kaeso Aemelius, a blacklisted security agent from Roman rival world Libertus, is asked by his former commanders to help a high-ranking Roman official defect. Kaeso misses his lone wolf espionage days—and its freedom from responsibility for a crew—so he sees the mission as a way back into the spy business. Kaeso sells it to his crew of outcasts as a quick, lucrative contract…without explaining his plan to abandon them for his old job. But Kaeso soon learns the defector’s terrifying secret, one that proves the last thousand years of history was built on a lie. Can Kaeso protect his crew from Roman and Liberti forces, who would l...

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...