“Mops” and her ragtag crew of rag carrying galactic janitors are back, and this time they’re going to clean up the mess the Krakau made of Earth once and for all.

In Terminal Alliance, the first book in this series, our favorite cleaning crew wound up the only ones left either alive or not zombified on the EMC Pufferfish, a warship in the midst of an encounter with the Prodryans, a race that believes in “them or us” in a big way. Not only did they survive, but they kicked butt, discovered the truth about the virus that turned all of mankind into ferals (don’t use the z word) and about the philanthropy of the squiddy Krakau, who have been restoring feral humans to rational (if not quite normal) beings. All her post-feral life Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos thought gratitude was the right thing to feel to the Krakau, and the chance to serve in their military as shock troops, janitors, or whatever, was a privilege. But that was before she learned the truth. Continue reading →

The RocketBook Everlast is one of the best examples of simple tech I’ve seen. It’s a reusable notebook, or pad if you get the smaller one, which uses the Pilot Frixion pen on waterproof pages that you wipe or erase clean. There’s an app that works with it to send pages to your phone, tablet, or cloud accounts, but I used it for weeks before even downloading the app.

They had me at erasable ink pad with a Pilot gel pen.

I like writi Continue reading →

The Murderbot Diaries just keep getting better. Murderbot is as SecUnit, part bio part bot, built to protect humans so insurance companies can sleep nights while people explore planets and other stuff.  It’s a character SF readers can relate to. Uncomfortable engaging with people, all it really wants to do is find a dark place and watch its favorite serial, Sanctuary Moon. It’s got baggage it went off to deal with in the last novella, Artificial Condition, and now it’s out to get the goods on the evil corp that’s breathing down the neck of the only human to ever help it out. This time its really going to keep its head down and not get involved in saving (or caring) about any humans it runs into on the way. 

Like that’s going to happen. Continue reading →

A woman, an orca, and a polar bear walk into a bar. Sorry, I had to say it. It’s not a bar, but an artificial island, she doesn’t walk into it so much as motor in on a skiff, but the orca swam alongside, the polar bear was in chains, at least until it wasn’t, and she’s definitely come to kick ass. Set in a world that’s paid the price of environmental recklessness and where refugees from plague and economic collapse are building an ad-hoc society north of the arctic circle, Blackfish City is an entrancing story, a vision neither utopian nor dystopic, but human in all its glory and weakness. Continue reading →