An accidental find, but I like it. This is hard SF, involving a world past the brink of ecological disaster (with many people unaware or actively ignoring it), the US and China in a kind of military impasse, and Canada hiring itself out as the mercenary pool for the whole world.
Audiobook Review + Zoe Hana Mikuta
YA NA / FF / Post-apocalyptic / Mechas / First Person Present Tense.
Love betrayal combat mechas.
Can it get any better?
Audiobook Review + Xiran Jay Zhao
Iron Widow is the first part of a duology / trilogy / series (?) with the same name. It describes Wu Zetian's rise through the ranks, in a Chinese inspired scifi / fantasy setting featuring a mystical 'spirit power' (a kind of paranormal energy source) and very large mecha-like creatures called 'Chrysalis'.
Audiobook Review + Adrian Tchaikovsky
The third installment in the series, and (at first) very confusing, but in the end it all makes sense.
Again, Tchaikovsky takes a 'what if' and spins it all the way to its logical conclusion, in this case it's the Ship of Theseus concept.
Audiobook Review + Adrian Tchaikovsky
Book 1 featured intelligent spiders, and book 2 added intelligent octopi (?) and bacteria to the mix. (Not much of a spoiler as that's pretty clear from the start).
Audiobook Review + Amie Kaufman
First person, present tense, YA. romance / science-fiction. Classic recipe, and typical Amie Kaufman.
But... Published in 2026, this book is a bit of a let-down compared with her earlier co-op work with Jay Kristoff, especially the Aurora series, or The Illuminae Files.
Love. Life. And zombies.
This is a YA first person present tense audiobook exploring the 'I died and came back as a zombie' trope. Fortunately, it's better than the average wannabe-writer 'Isekai' project.
Faith Hunter (better known for her Romantasy stories) does a pretty good (Scifi) Apocalyptic series of novellas, all titled Junkyard Something.
Predictable, I admit, but enjoyable.
Down-on-her-luck wannabe-warrior falls in love. Add exo-suits, aliens, baddy evil to fall in love with, an empire, a love story, and Rachel Bach's writing skills.
And what you end up with is a great series.
Ryk Brown appears to have become a quite popular self publishing author. I've sampled some of his wares... It's a bit fannish, a bit 'wannabe', to be honest. Some of the jokes and characters are okay, and do bring a smile on my face. The plotholes though (especially the technobabble guffaws) are a bit of a let down.
And yet another space opera / military sci-fi series. Shades of Honor Harrington, and that's fine. Captain Grim leads the crew of his older but still powerful boat through a conflict between multiple sides, Consortium, Caliphate, Guild, Alliance...
Another space opera / military sci-fi series. Main protagonist might be a little too much of an anti hero in the 6th book, but it’s quite readable.
Series starts with greedy corporations that unload endless debts on wannabe students, then moves on to an interstellar conflict between several races.
Entertaining set of 3 (now 4) novels, in which a post-apocalyptic junkyard owner becomes a kind of queen bee, driven by biotech, and assisted (hampered?) by gen-engineered cats, after aliens overcame earth’s finest.
The Verdict: great read. Looking forward to book 4!
Supposed to be somewhat ‘lesbian scifi’ but - except for one scene that wasn’t even that explicit - these read as a fast paced nerd-becomes-heroine set of short stories. Does suffer a little from the Mary Sue effect.
Synopsis: dirtside engineer knows how to create sentient robots, and falls in love with a copper-without-impulse-control from the floating cities above.
The Verdict: perfectly readable, light SciFi.
You may have noticed that a large part of this blog consists of nothing but SciFi and Fantasy book reviews. I'm 58 now, and I've done nothing but reading SF and Fantasy over the last 40 odd years. There has been the occaisional side trip into other genres, but in the end I always return to my roots 😇 So, what are the best books I've ever read?
Linden A. Lewis proves that you should be careful how you title your book. Searching for 'The First Sister' on Goodreads gives more than ten pages of results 😅
After that little aside we get back to the core question: how's the book?
3 books by a debuting author. The series contains three books, and they're... cheap. Yeah. Literally, I mean. (Discounted on Amazon.)
Unfortunately, the price is somewhat a reflection of the quality of the proofreading. Someone should have given some feedback to the author, and that clearly didn't happen.
Your typical, macho, space marine novel, but it's readable.
The obligatory bootcamp scenes aren't overly extended, and the techno babble is within limits and believable. Meeting up with an older woman is something you rarely see in these kind of stories, and the enemies - though still faceless - aren't outright evil, just... culturally and biologically different.
