Shout-Out: Nomad by Matthew Mather

Something is coming from deep space...
Big enough to destroy the entire solar system...
And it's heading straight for Earth.

That's what Dr. Ben Rollins, head of Harvard's exoplanet research team, is told after being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. His first instinct is to call his daughter, Jessica, who's vacationing in Italy with his wife: something is coming, he tells them, a hundred times the mass of the sun. We can't see it, we don't know what it is, but it's there--they're calling the anomaly Nomad, and it's coming fast. In just months, the Earth may be destroyed.

But what is it? And how did they miss detecting it until now? In a desperate race against time, Dr. Rollins must unravel Nomad's secrets. A mysterious clue surfaces in his old research papers from the end of the Cold War, thirty years before.

With time ticking down, the world erupts into chaos as the end approaches-but Ben discovers that his wife and daughter are trapped in Italy. The key to humanity's survival rests in the final answers he pieces together, in the midst of his frantic scramble across Europe to find his family before Nomad swallows the planet...

Out August 15th.

Video: Ares 3, The Right Stuff

Ares Live are promotional videos for the upcoming film The Martian.  So far there are 2 of them, one (below) with clips from interviews with the crew after each has spent 10 days in isolation, the other video shows the protagonist, Mark Watney, on route to Mars, making a video to send back to earth introducing all of the crew members.  I loved the book this is based on and can't wait for the film to come out in October.

Book Review: The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski

Pros: interesting protagonist; fascinating world-building; thought provoking concepts

Cons: fair amount of repetition, especially at the beginning; several unexplained concepts and items, including one important to the plot

Jennifer Ramos Kennedy’s culture source was her great-grandmother, President Rosa Schwartz.  A few months after a family tragedy she’s setting out for Frontera, a university on an orbiting space station.  She chose it both because a family friend runs the school but also because it’s free of many of the things plaguing Earth: mosquitos carrying disease, risk of flood and methane quakes, the expanding Death Belt, and the need for DIRG bodyguards.  But university life isn’t quite what she expected: her teachers are all a little crazy, her roommate is weird and has an unhealthy affiliation for ultraphytes, the alien plants that crave salt and spread from their landing site in Utah to be a scourge on the world, her slanball coach wants her well rested, a hard thing when she’s volunteering for the understaffed EMS, and there’s so much reading and work to do for her classes.  

Meanwhile, she’s knee deep in helping the Unity party win the next Presidential election.  Jenny doesn’t understand how the Centrist Firmament belief is so strong when people live in space!  But things on Earth have reached the point that if change doesn’t come soon, it’ll be too late for the planet.  And yet the Centrists want to expand the solar array that’s expanding the Death Belt, intending for people to leave earth in the coming Rapture, relocating to other space stations.  Stations that couldn’t possibly hold even a portion of the people on Earth.

And it turns out that Frontera isn’t as free of Earthly disasters as she was led to believe.

I have a confession to make.  The plot synopsis for this book did not interest me.  At all.  I started reading it in the hope that 30 to 50 pages in I’d be bored and free to put it in my ‘discard’ pile.  But the more I read the more the world fascinated me.  There’s very little exposition.  You’re thrown into the novel with limited explanations of what things are and how the world has changed from what we currently know.  As Jenny reaches college and her classes start the novel became so interesting that I had to keep reading, just to learn more about the world.  And while it’s an entirely character driven novel, my interest never waned.  There are plot points that pull the story into a thought provoking conclusion, but for the most part the book follows Jenny through her days, questioning the world and the politics that run it.

As a scion of a political family, Jenny knows politics, making her an excellent character to follow.  Through her mother and conjoined twin aunts, she’s connected to the upcoming Presidential election; she helps when one of her professor’s runs for mayor; sees the struggle with personnel and supplies as she volunteers for EMS, and more.  She also takes two politics courses, one on Teddy Roosevelt and the other on Aristotle and democracy, the lectures for which come up often in the text.  The book’s ending questions how politics is done, and if it’s possible to fix a broken system. 

The second point of view character, Dylan Chase, is President of the university, and through him we see the difficulties of managing his staff and securing sufficient financing.  We also see him dealing with student problems: alcoholism, printer disease hacks, assault, and addiction.  

The world-building is top notch: Spanish colloquialisms, tax playing at casinos, unique fashion trends, amyloid (sewage processed by hab shell microbes that’s used to ‘print’ everything from food to clothing to the shelters everyone lives in), the anthrax cables that transport ships between Frontera and Earth, Toynet, Kessler debris, I could go on.  The sport of slanball is pretty cool too.

The supporting cast is wide and varied, though it focuses on Jenny’s family, a few professors, close students (including the players of her slanball team) and some of Dylan’s contacts (for his POV scenes).  Jenny’s experiences at the school are also varied, from class work to parties to helping build houses for colonists.

The first few chapters contain a fair amount of repetition, especially with regards to Jenny’s family.  Which makes it all the more strange that other concepts and terms are left unexplained.  You figure out what DIRGs are pretty quick, but I don’t remember the acronym being explained.  Similarly, Jenny notices an object on one of her teacher’s desks that affects the plot.  She brings it up to another character, implying she knows the relevance of the object, but it’s not until the end of the book that as a reader I figured out what the object was and what it meant.

If you like a lot of character development and world-building in your science fiction, this is a highly entertaining, and sometimes thought provoking, read.  I’m glad I gave it 50 pages.

Shout-Out: Time of Death by Josh Anderson

This is another 6 book series being published by EPIC Press.

What if you could go back and change the past? Kyle Cash made the biggest mistake of his life on March 13, 2014, when he crashed his friend's Audi into a school bus full of children. The accident haunts him every day, until the sister of one of the kids killed in the crash comes to visit Kyle at Stevenson Youth Correctional Facility and offers him the opportunity to travel back in time. Kyle learns, though, that time weaving is more complicated-- and more dangerous - than he ever could have imagined.

Publisher Spotlight: EPIC Press

EPIC Press is the new YA branch of Abdo Publishing.  They publish books that are "filled with content teen readers will love to read. Think big, edgy, emotional, and mature. These indulgent books are designed to captivate modern teens, speaking directly to their aspirant culture. 100% guaranteed to be EPIC."

Their opening line-up includes several 6 book series, where each book is already written and being published the same day, both in physical and digital formats.

Here are a few of their titles:

Bots by Nicole Taylor

Edmond West, a brilliant MIT drop-out, is convinced that humans will never move beyond their cruelty. West ventures to create a humanoid robot, one to be exploited so that people no longer have to be. Edmond succeeds in making a more sophisticated robot, leading to something unexpected. Now, a growing population of this new species of "Bots" is threatening the concept of what it is to be human. Has Edmond saved the world or created a new class of victims?

Book 1, Emergent Behavior

A robotics genius, Edmond West has developed a plan to create the world's first Artificial Intelligence truly indistinguishable from a human being. His Bots will eradicate global slavery and allow humanity to channel its darkest impulses safely, harming only these soulless machines. His greatest success, however, may also be his undoing. He's finally created the perfect humanoid robot; perfectly intuitive, perfectly emotive… and perfectly unpredictable.

Earth Aliens by S. E. Wendel

The end of days on Earth has come. If humanity is to survive, they must do so amongst the stars. In a last-ditch effort, a pioneer group of colonists are shot into space, making a seven-year journey to a new planet, and hopefully, a new home. Although the journey will prepare them to build their new colony, nothing can prepare them for the trials of sharing a planet with another intelligent species. Who will be the masters of Terra Nova -- the natives or the Earth aliens?

Book 1, The Expedition

The Earth is dead and humanity's last hope is amongst the stars. For 50,000 lucky souls, a distant, alien planet will be their home after they endure a grueling seven year journey. Assigned as apprentices to older specialists, Hugh O'Callahan and Elena Ames must learn quickly to survive their dog-eat-dog lives. Meanwhile, Zeneba, a young Charneki girl, is chosen to take the throne as mara. She must learn quickly, for it is foretold a cataclysmic event will mark her reign. Can she find the strength to lead her people against invaders from the sky?

The Haunting of Grey Hills by Jennifer Skogen

Everyone in Grey Hills knows about the fire that burned the old high school to the ground fifty years ago. It was just a tragic accident…right? High school junior Macy Pierce and her new friends learn that old mysteries can literally come back to haunt you. A door to the dead has opened, and evil is casting its long shadow once again in Grey Hills.

Book 1, The Burning

Everyone in Grey Hills knows about the fire that burned down the old high school fifty years ago. Macy Pierce grew up hearing horror stories about the students who burned alive inside it. When Macy starts seeing things--including a teacher bursting into flames--she begins to question her own sanity. Now, she and a group of new friends may be all that stands between the new high school and a doorway to hell.

Shout-Out: The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka

A quantum physicist shocks the world with a startling experiment, igniting a struggle between science and theology, free will and fate, and antagonizing forces not known to exist

Eric Argus is a washout. His prodigious early work clouded his reputation and strained his sanity. But an old friend gives him another chance, an opportunity to step back into the light.

With three months to produce new research, Eric replicates the paradoxical double-slit experiment to see for himself the mysterious dual nature of light and matter. A simple but unprecedented inference blooms into a staggering discovery about human consciousness and the structure of the universe.

His findings are celebrated and condemned in equal measure. But no one can predict where the truth will lead. And as Eric seeks to understand the unfolding revelations, he must evade shadowy pursuers who believe he knows entirely too much already.

I've had my eye on Kosmatka since his first book, The Games, came out a few years ago:

 Silas Williams is the brilliant geneticist in charge of preparing the U.S. entry into the Olympic Gladiator competition, an internationally sanctioned bloodsport with only one rule: no human DNA is permitted in the design of the entrants. Silas lives and breathes genetics; his designs have led the United States to the gold in every previous event. But the other countries are catching up. Now, desperate for an edge in the upcoming Games, Silas’s boss engages an experimental supercomputer to design the genetic code for a gladiator that cannot be beaten.

The result is a highly specialized killing machine, its genome never before seen on earth. Not even Silas, with all his genius and experience, can understand the horror he had a hand in making. And no one, he fears, can anticipate the consequences of entrusting the act of creation to a computer’s cold logic.

Now Silas races to understand what the computer has wrought, aided by a beautiful xenobiologist, Vidonia João. Yet as the fast-growing gladiator demonstrates preternatural strength, speed, and—most disquietingly—intelligence, Silas and Vidonia find their scientific curiosity giving way to a most unexpected emotion: sheer terror.

His second book, Prophet of Bones, sounds pretty interesting too:

A high-concept thriller set in an alternate world where radiometric dating proved the earth is only five thousand years old, yet the fossil record is the same as our own. The key to unlocking a terrifying secret lies in the hands of one man.

Fantasy Artist: Brian Richardson

I was looking through 3D printer designs recently and stumbled across one of Richardson's pieces.  I immediately looked for more.  He's created skeletons for a series of mythological creatures, including a dragon, mermaid, pegasus, jackalope, and Cthulhu.

From the about page: 

Mythic Articulations was created in late 2013 with one goal in mind ― to create what nature won't. More specifically, to create the skeletons and skulls of mythical creatures and cryptids. We offer a growing variety of replica osteological specimens of animals that you just can't get anywhere else, because they don't exist (or haven't been proven to exist). Be it the elusive Bare-Fronted Hoodwink, the mighty Wolpertinger, or something else that you might have actually heard of, we'll do our best to make it real. We use state of the art 3D Printing techniques to create each replica.

Check out his website, Mythic Articulations, for his designs, which are 3D printed to order and mailed to you via Shapeways (where I found his work) or his Etsy shop.  He also does prints and some poseable skeletons.