Terminus

Tendrils descend from the sky to threaten an island and dark ocean.

Terminus by Peter Cline (Amazon) is the fourth book in his Threshold series. It ups the stacks by shipwrecking its characters on a seemingly deserted island, as a deadly storm approaches. The rain, winds, and high seas are the very least of that storm’s dangers. The Threshold series started with a book called 14. The novel took place in an apartment … Read more

Dune Messiah

A human male sits on a throne, with a stylized circular pattern behind him. Taken from the cover art for Dune Messiah

Dune Messiah is the follow-up to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. The first book saw Paul Atreides (Muad’dib) conquering of Arrakis, defeating the Emperor, taking the Emperor’s daughter as his political wife, and unleashing his Freman on a holy jihad to conquer the galaxy. The sequel takes place 12 years later and features a galaxy cowed by … Read more

Age of Ash

The text Daniel Abraham, from the cover art for Age of Ash

Age of Ash (Amazon) by Daniel Abraham (half of The Expanse writing team James S. A. Corey) takes place almost entirely in a medieval city, on a world that is not our own. Magic exists, but it is old, powerful, and dangerous. Most people living on the streets and within the walls of Kithamar never experience it. The … Read more

Chaos Terminal

Chaos Terminal is Mur Lafferty’s follow-up to Station Eternity. Like the previous book in the Midsolar Murders series, Chaos Terminal features Mallory Viridian, a human with a penchant for solving murders. Like a sci-fi Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, murders tend to happen around Mallory. Or she tends to be attracted to where murders will happen. Or both. Once … Read more

Red Storm Rising

Cover art for the novel Red Storm Rising

Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising (Amazon) takes us back to the mid 1980s. America and the Soviet Union are the world’s only superpowers. Their respective alliances – NATO and the Warsaw Pact – have been engaged in a Cold War for decades. Neither is quite crazy enough to launch an all out nuclear war (at … Read more

Zork – Ready Player One Video Game Replay

Developed at MIT between 1977 and 1979, Zork is the quintessential interactive fiction adventure game. Descended from the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure (the game I’m actually much more familiar with), it started players at a simple White House in the woods and invited them to explore an expansive underground empire. I played the M.I.T. release for this … Read more

Sins of Our Fathers

A moon floats in space between two large planetary bodies in artwork taken from the cover of The Sins of Our Fathers

The Expanse novels and novellas were part of my summer reading list for years. The nine book series initially takes place our own star system, with a focus on the stellar political situation. Earth rules the star system, but martial-oriented (and slowly terraforming) Mars is a powerful countervaling force that seeks to usurp Earth’s position. … Read more

Action Park

A flame-skulled skeleton drives a four wheel buggy, one of the attractions at Action Park

Sometimes, nostalgia hurts. That’s rarely been more true than when reading Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park (Amazon) by Andy Mulvihill and Jake Rossen. The book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Vernon, NJ-based amusement park, which was equal parts famous and notorious for my generation growing … Read more

The Stone Sky

The Stone Sky cover art, featuring the title of the book in front of a stylized stone arch.

The apocalypse is here. Again. In The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin, what we’d consider the end of the world – toxic gases wiping out entire provinces, catastrophic earthquakes that destroy dozens of towns, drowning tidal waves – are just another season (albeit one that only happens every few decades or centuries). In the first book … Read more

Alien: The Cold Forge

A menacing alien roars at the viewer, its wasp-like body ready to attack.

The Cold Forge is a deep space research facility focused on deadly corporate research. Set in the Alien universe, the black site is funded by long-time corporate villains Weyland-Yutani. Along with ethically questionable bioweapons and a destructive AI, the Cold Forge is home to a cache of xenomorph eggs from … somewhere. Lead researcher Blue Marsalis is … Read more