We’ve all seen movies and TV shows in which someone is forced to commit a crime on someone else’s behalf because the latter is holding the former’s loved one hostage. But while that’s also the premise of Mike Brook’s new sci-fi novel Dark Deeds (paperback, Kindle) — the third in his Keiko series after Dark Run and Dark Sky — in talking to Brooks about this novel, he revealed that the kidnap victim in his story didn’t just sit back and let this all play out.
After years of penning such fantasy novels as Heirs Of Grace and the Marla Mason series, writer Tim Pratt has started to explore the cosmos with his sci-fi novel, The Wrong Stars (paperback, Kindle), the first in an ongoing series.
Though in trading emails with him for the purpose of his interview, he revealed that while writing science fiction may be new for him, enjoying it certainly isn’t.
In his comedic military sci-fi novel Terminal Alliance (hardcover, paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Jim C Hines introduces us to the unsung heroes of the universe: the janitors. But rather than give us an entire book about people emptying trash cans and cleaning up the mess hall, he’s instead given us an epic saga that exposes the truth about our past. Er, future. Whatever.
Joy Division once proclaimed that “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” But in her science fiction novel Barbary Station (paperback, Kindle), writer R E Sterns introduces us to two women so determined to not let that happen that they end up on a space adventure that will eventually encompass three books. Though in talking to her about this, the first novel in a planned trilogy, Sterns pointed out that this didn’t actually start out as a sci-fi love story.
In 2012, writer Skip Brittenham and artist Brian Haberlin took sci-fi comics into a different realm by not only publishing the book Anomaly with a cinematic horizontal landscape format, but by also including interactive elements and an App to show how the comic was made. It’s territory they’re exploring again with Anomaly The Rubicon (hardcover), a sequel that not only utilizes the same format and behind-the-scenes interactivity, but a pinball game as well.
To coincide with the launch of a new Star Trek series, Star Trek Discovery, the good people at Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster who oversee the literary adventures of Kirk, Picard, and the rest have commissioned longtime Star Trek novelist David Mack to pen the non-canonical prequel novel Star Trek Discovery Desperate Hours (paperback, digital). But while Mack has written a number of Star Trek novels over the years — including 2004’s Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Time To Kill, 2012’s Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven, and the upcoming Star Trek: Titan: Fortune Of War — as he admitted in the following email interview, writing a book based on a show that’s still on the air made this experience rather unique.
In the video game The Last Of Us, a fungal infection turns people into mindless zombies. But while David Walton’s new sci-fi novel The Genius Plague (paperback, digital) is also about a fungus among us, he says that not only was his novel not inspired by that game, but also that his infected aren’t really zombies, and they’re really not mindless.