In 1966, I traveled to brave new worlds with the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Star Trek immediately became my lodestone, the focal point of my ten-year-old self, and I never missed an episode. A few years later I found Dune, and my love for the SF genre was cemented. I freely admit that I am not a hard science writer. I like to have fun with my stories, to play with ideas. I write first to entertain myself, and hopefully a reader or two along the way. I am a philosopher, a reader, and a writer.
Clones. Emotionless as droids, highly specialized clones mediate negotiations galaxy-wide. Failure to close the deal means certain–and immediate–termination. When clone…
I couldn’t imagine what this book could be about with a title like this, but I enjoy Cat’s short stories so I took a leap of faith. I’m glad I did.
You Sexy Thingis the name of a sentient bioship that believes it is being stolen. Fast-paced and action-packed with great characters, You Sexy Thing also has depth–found family, personal ethics, and a pirate king bent on revenge. Immensely entertaining.
Farscape meets The Great British Bake Off in this fantastic space opera You Sexy Thing from former SFWA President, Cat Rambo.
Just when they thought they were out…
TwiceFar station is at the edge of the known universe, and that’s just how Niko Larson, former Admiral in the Grand Military of the Hive Mind, likes it.
Retired and finally free of the continual war of conquest, Niko and the remnants of her former unit are content to spend the rest of their days working at the restaurant they built together, The Last Chance.
Take the concept of diving on shipwrecks and move it into space, then add a mystery and a whole lot of adventure, and you have Rusch’s awesome Diving series.
The Renegat is the 10th book in the series and the most ambitious one yet. Rusch is a master of character and world-building and it shines here. I can’t recommend this series enough.
As a young recruit, brilliant engineer Nadim Crowe accidentally destroys an entire Scrapheap full of ships. Now, decades later, he ends up on the crew of the Renegat, the only ship in the Fleet ever sent on a mission backwards to investigate an ancient Scrapheap.
Something invaded that Scrapheap and the Fleet wants to know what. Or who.
The Renegat: The only ship the Fleet dares risk. The Renegat: A ship of misfits and screw-ups sent on an impossible mission. All alone in deep space.
The second book in Bear’s White Space series, Machine is an entertaining blend of SF adventure and multiple mysteries that sucked me right in. A space hospital begins to experience escalating mishaps after a rescue mission returns with the cryo-suspended crew of a stranded generation ship along with its memory-challenged ship’s mind.
Trust is a key theme in Machine, and you can trust Bear’s capable writer hands to tell a whopping good story.
She hasn't had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years.
The first part of her job involves jumping out of perfectly good space-ships. The second part requires developing emergency treatments for sick aliens of species she's never seen before.
She loves it.
But her latest emergency is also proving a mystery:
Two ships, one ancient and one new, locked in a dangerous embrace. A mysterious crew suffering from an even more mysterious ailment. A shipmind trapped in an inadequate body, much of her memory pared away. A murderous virus from out of time.
Ringworldmight be a little dated after 50+ years, but it’s still entertaining and clever.
Ringworld is a giant wheel that rotates around a star with a habitable inner surface. When four travelers crash their ship on Ringworld’s surface, the adventures begin. This is hard science fiction that doesn’t go over your head with impossible-to-understand jargon. It’s a classic for a reason.
Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of…
Arguably the best-selling SF novel ever, Dunedoes not go away. (Frank’s son Brian has teamed up with another great writer, Kevin J. Anderson, to keep the Dune franchise humming along.)
This is the book that inspired my love of all things science fiction. The book came out of research Frank Herbert did for the US Department of Agriculture for ways to stabilize sand dunes. Creative world building and politics set on a desert planet with giant sand worms. What’s not to love?
Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
Clones. Emotionless as droids, highly specialized clones mediate negotiations galaxy-wide. Failure to close the deal means certain–and immediate–termination. When clone T564 cannot break the impasse between two parties who refuse to compromise, her owners give her twenty-four hours to find a solution or die. In a galaxy where clones are little more than slaves... What happens when a clone defies her owners and goes off script?
The first book in an exciting new sci-fi series, A Desperate Gamble introduces an unlikely hero: a clone who dares the unthinkable.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
