Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Early in 1964 two aging men lie dead of gunshots in the back. They’re sprawled on the pavement in an alley in a seedy uptown neighborhood. One is J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary Director of the FBI. The other is Assistant Director Clyde A. Tolson, Hoover’s lover. But when police rush to the vicinity, they discover not two bodies but five, all of them FBI agents. The others are Hoover’s bodyguards and his driver. And when the FBI belatedly shows up, a turf battle erupts over jurisdiction. It’s resolved only when the two most senior men on the scene reluctantly ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Let’s say you want to write a superhero story without superheroes. What do you do? Simple. You endow ordinary people with superhuman intelligence and enhanced senses by implanting something in their brains. Chips, maybe. Or nanocytes. Then suddenly you’ve got people with extraordinary abilities. Not the capacity to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but to think and act faster than anyone else and perceive in a flash five or ten steps down the road the consequences of your actions. And you’ll meet such people in author Dima Zales’s Human ++ Trilogy ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of the more prolific and successful science fiction authors of the twenty-first century. And the voters at the World Science Fiction Convention confirmed his status as one of the best when they granted his Children of Time Trilogy the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023. Like some of the most memorable work in the Golden Era of Science Fiction and its successors in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Tchaikovsky’s trilogy spans tens of thousands of years and depicts humanity scattered among the stars. But the Children of Time novels portray huma ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes London. 1952. Twelve years earlier, the United Kingdom had surrendered to Nazi Germany following a brief and humiliating war in Norway. Now, Prime Minister Lord Beaverbrook leads a cabinet that includes the Fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, in the critical post of Home Minister. Mosley’s police and his bully-boy Auxiliaries crack down on any sign of dissent. Meanwhile, as the Nzi war against the Soviet Union rages in the East, England is poor and getting poorer. And, under pressure from the enormous German Embassy, the government has adopted ever more restri ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When we read a science fiction novel, we’re entitled to expect three things. A story that’s at least minimally plausible. Suspense about how the action will unfold. And a style of writing that clearly conveys what happens in language that communicates without raising questions about its meaning. Unfortunately, in The Ark, Christopher Coates’s novel about surviving an extinction event, we get none of those things. Like a lot of Independent (i.e., self-published) work, the book cries out for a proofreader. But The Ark simply doesn’t cut it at all. A story that ..read more

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Christopher Walters is a trauma surgeon in a place where life itself is traumatic. He carries the nominal rank of captain in the United States Army in southern Siberia. There, the Americans are attempting to hold firm on the Western Front in a war with the Novos, the strange extraterrestrials who crash-landed near the city of Novosibirsk, which gives them their name. Because the Novos can detect even low-level electricity from a great distance, human forces can employ no machinery or electronics. The aliens wield lightning bolts to destroy anything moving and ..read more

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes When COVID first struck with lethal fury a few years ago, the pessimists among us conjured up visions of a landscape devoid of human life. Bodies in the streets and on the roads. Cities everywhere depopulated. Farmlands lying fallow for lack of attention. Government services failing to nonexistence. And that scenario is the backdrop to Alice Sabo’s five-book series of short dystopian novels, set some six years after Zero Year. But this is a scene full of possibility. These stories center on a makeshift community growing into a self-governing town that becomes ..read more

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes It’s 2075, and the human race is in the earliest stages of colonizing the solar system. A trillion-dollar high tech company named Maverick Enterprises has built Elderon, Earth’s first space colony in Low Earth Orbit. It’s designed to house five thousand colonists. Accommodations range from spartan quarters resembling prison cells to first class suites worthy of a five-star hotel. Meanwhile, on Earth, high-intensity war is raging between Russia and the United States. Cyber-attacks are frequent and devastating. It seems only a matter of time before Russian hack ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes When we think of surveillance so pervasive that it seems impossible to hide, most Americans’ minds turn to today’s China. Certainly, the Chinese have surpassed past totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union and East Germany in tracking the actions—and thoughts—of their citizens. But in the United States, whistle-blowers and a vigilant press revealed overreach by our own National Security Agency in the past decade. However, those efforts pale beside the total surveillance state envisioned in a public-private partnership between the CIA and Silicon Valley i ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Somewhere in the vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of stars and innumerable planets in orbit around them, intelligent life must have arisen. The circumstances of our emergence on Earth are unusual. But it’s hubris of the highest order to insist that they’re unique amid all this vastness. Yet decades of intensive effort to scan the heavens for signs of some other sentient species have come to naught. “Where is everybody?” Enrico Fermi famously asked in 1950. And we still don’t know. Why? Science fiction author Peter Cawdron offers a ..read more