January’s Book Recommendations

Hello! It’s a new year, and I’ve got a whole bunch of awesome plans for it, including a new release every month! For all the latest, be sure to sign up for my email list if you haven’t already. But first, I want to start off the year by sharing some books by other authors. If you enjoy my books, I think you’ll like these as well.

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I read Skye Object 3270a back in 2011, when I was just getting started with indie publishing. I think it showed up on my Amazon also boughts or something. Bought it, read it, loved it! It’s basically the story of a 14 year old girl who fell from the sky, and her journey to find out where she came from. Written for a younger audience, it’s a fun sci-fi adventure.

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I discovered On My Way To Paradise on the now defunct Mechmuse podcast, and picked up a tattered, dog-eared copy at Pioneer Book. I still have it on my shelf—I must have read it two or three times, and the ebook version at least once. It’s one of the greatest works of science fiction that I’ve ever read.

I can’t tell you how much it’s influenced my own writing. David Farland is truly a master. The depth and emotion in this book is incredible, and the story still haunts me even today. This is the kind of book that changes the way you see the world.

A word of warning, though: this book is not for the light-hearted. It is the most violent piece of fiction that I have ever consumed. It’s basically about a seventy year-old doctor trying to keep his humanity after being drafted as a grunt in an army fighting a war of mass genocide. He trains in a simulator device reminiscent of Inception and the Matrix, where he’s brutally killed over and over and over. To top it all off, he suspects that someone has tampered with his brain, and he doesn’t know how.

It’s a magnificent book. The short story that the novel is based on won the 1987 Writers of the Future award and launched David Farland’s career. If you want to try out the short story first (basically the first three chapters), you can find it on Amazon here. It’s also available on Kindle Unlimited.

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The last book this month is the one that introduced me to Miles Vorkosigan, one of the most beloved characters in all of science fiction. If you haven’t discovered Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, you are in for a real treat. This is classic sci-fi, and The Warrior’s Apprentice is probably the best entry point into the series.

The ebook cover is absolutely atrocious, probably because it’s published by Bujold’s literary agency (the heck?). Seriously, it’s like the cover of a 1970s college textbook for a psychology class. And the rest of the series? It’s like someone forgot to tell the cover artist that these books are science fiction, not high-brow literary whatever. The print editions are published by Baen, though, and you can find them just about anywhere, including your local used bookstore or library.

That pretty much does it for this month’s book recommendations. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

December’s book recommendations

I really enjoyed the experiment last month with the book recommendations. It seemed to go over fairly well, so now that it’s December let’s do it again!

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Don’t be fooled by the painfully self-published cover on this one. Captain Cosette is a light, clean, and really fun book. Imagine if Cinderella got a blaster rifle instead of a glass slipper, and became an ace starship pilot instead of going to the ball. I picked this one up a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it, and I think my readers will too!

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Michael Bunker is a really fascinating guy. He lives off-grid, writes off-grid, grows most of his own food, and is prepared for pretty much any apocalypse scenario you can think of. Not surprisingly, that’s also what he writes about. As a student of Russian history and literature, though, he puts a great deal of thoughtfulness into everything he writes. His stories are great, but I read him just as much for his insights into humanity, society, and the unsustainability of modern life.

Wick is an alternate history, where Hurricane Sandy in 2012 set off a series of cascading events leading up to the big SHTF. Just as Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Bezmenov warned us, the global communist movement did not die in 1989, and Sandy is exactly the sort of crisis that the Soviet sleeper cells within the United States have been waiting for. The modern world as we know it is gone, and something truly terrifying is rising to take its place.

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“Redoubt” takes place in the same universe as Wick, but out in the Rockies. Three ex-special forces guys and an artist get holed up in a summer home high in the mountains when the big SHTF happens, and have to fight for their lives. Again, the thing about this story that really shines is Michael Bunker’s insights into modern society and how people deal (or fail to deal) with the end of the world.

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Eric James Stone is a friend of mine, and his novelette “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” is my favorite work of his that I’ve read. It’s about an alien race of intelligent beings that live in the sun, and the human colonist who serves as the ecclesiastical leader to a small group of them who have converted to Mormonism. Theological hilarity ensues. It’s a fascinating story, and one of the most well-done treatments of religion in science fiction that I’ve ever read. I can see why it won a Nebula.

That pretty much does it for this month. Take care, and until next time, thanks for reading!

November’s book recommendations

So I thought it would be fun to start posting some monthly book recommendations on my blog, both of books I personally have enjoyed, and books like mine that I think my readers will enjoy. I’ve seen a lot of other authors do it, and it seems like a good way to pay it forward and invite good karma (and on a purely capitalist note, it also seems like a great way to bring in some affiliate income and spread my books around in the Amazon also-boughts).

For this month, I’ve chosen a novel, a novella, and a short story, all $.99 on Amazon (some of them are $2.99 on iBooks and Kobo). Two of the authors are personal friends of mine (Kindal Debenham and Annaliese Lemmon—we were both in the same college writing group), but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed their books and have no qualms recommending them.

We’ll start with Wolfhound by Kindal Debanham. This is a rip-roaring space adventure, and the first part of a trilogy that I highly recommend. Starship pilots from the frontier regions of space, fighting to defend their beloved home from pirates and invasion. This is exactly the kind of book I used to scour the local library for as a kid.

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I first discovered Date Night on Union Station from the Amazon also-boughts of my own Star Wanderers books, and it did not disappoint. Clean sci-fi romance with a generous helping of comedy. I haven’t read all the other books in the series yet, but I definitely plan to.

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Infant Insomnia is a bit of a departure from the kind of science fiction I usually write, but if you enjoyed Outworlder and Starchild I think you’ll like this one too. Short and tender, the story of a magical seer trying desperately to save her newborn child from the imminent death she sees in every possible branch of her child’s future.

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Thanks for reading!