Book picks similar to
Distant Suns by Patricia Smith
reviewing
sci-fy
d20-modern
scifi
Athena's Choice
Adam Boostrom - 2018
She watches reality shows with her friends, eats well, and occasionally wonders to herself: what would life be like if men were still alive?It has been almost 50 years since an experimental virus accidentally killed all the men on earth. However, a controversial project is currently underway to bring men back. There's just one catch. The project has been sabotaged.So begins Athena's Choice. When the police of 2099 are tasked with finding the saboteur, they receive a mysterious command to investigate the otherwise innocuous Athena Vosh. After it becomes clear that the young girl might know more than she lets on, Athena is brought in to participate in the official investigation. Simultaneously, the girl begins to experience a series of cryptic dreams featuring a ruined library and an old book containing the saboteur’s true identity. As the police close in on their prize, Athena finds herself on a journey of her own. Her clue-filled dreams and incorruptible spirit bring her face-to-face with a pair of forgotten truths about happiness and gender. The world waits to see if men will return as Athena fights a separate battle, culminating in the choice that will define her and others' lives forever.
The Black Cloud
Fred Hoyle - 1957
Tracks the progress of a giant black cloud that comes towards Earth and sits in front of the sun, causing widespread panic and death. A select group of scientists and astronomers - including the dignified Astronomer Royal, the pipe smoking Dr Marlowe and the maverick, eccentric Professor Kingsly - engage in a mad race to understand and communicate with the cloud, battling against trigger happy politicians.
Above the Ether
Eric BarnesEric Barnes - 2019
John Mandel's Station Eleven and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood.In this prequel to Eric Barnes's acclaimed cli-fi novel The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change.A father and his young children fleeing a tsunami after a massive earthquake in the Gulf. A woman and her husband punishing themselves without relent for the loss of both their sons to addiction, while wildfires slowly burn closer to their family home. A brilliant investor, assessing opportunity in the risk to crops, homes, cities, industries, and infrastructure, working in the silent comfort of her office sixty floors up in the scorching air. A doctor and his wife stuck in a refugee camp for immigrants somewhere in a southern desert. Two young men working the rides for a roadside carnival, one escaping a brutal past, the other a racist present. The manager of a chain of nondescript fast-food restaurants in a city ravaged by the relentless wind.While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken—a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails—until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm.
Ascendant
Richard Denoncourt - 2013
But what really exists in the war-torn "Eastlands," where no one is allowed to venture? What horrors lurk in that post-nuclear wasteland?When Michael discovers he is telepathic, a man who lives on the other side visits him with an offer of a new life. This outlaw knows something about Michael – about the power growing in his brain, which makes him unique and dangerous, and why certain triggers cause Michael to cry blood and lose control, causing death on a mass scale.To learn the truth about the experiment that created him – and stop a terrifying telepathic army on the brink of being unleashed – Michael must cross to the other side and join a community of freaks and rebels who don’t trust him, some of whom will stop at nothing to make him disappear.Will he tame his power and became an Ascendant? Or fuel it with hatred and become a Bloodcrier?
Soul of a Warrior
Denna Holm - 2013
But he also claims to be from another world. She does what any sane woman would do in her situation. She runs. Tagging along are her two best friends and a feisty tabby cat. No one could anticipate the second stranger showing up, one with a completely different agenda. Kimi and her friends are abducted by the second man, a vampire, then tortured and abandoned on a hostile alien world. Given only the clothes on their back, they must now try to find a way back home again. One man will do everything in his power to see Kimi and her friends are brought safely back home, even sacrifice his own life. The second man wants Kimi and her mate to suffer, alive, but forever out of reach of each other. Kimi and her friends must work together against astronomical odds for any hope of surviving this nightmare.
Displaced
Stephen Drake
something that might cost them all their lives.
The Lightest Object in the Universe
Kimi Eisele - 2019
Working his way along a cross-country railroad line, he encounters lost souls, clever opportunists, and those who believe they’ll be delivered from hardship if they can find their way to the evangelical preacher Jonathan Blue, who is broadcasting on all the airwaves countrywide. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Beatrix and her neighbors turn to one another for food, water, and solace, and begin to construct the kind of cooperative community that suggests the end could, in fact, be a promising beginning. But between Beatrix and Carson lie 3,000 miles. With no internet or phone or postal service, can they find their way back to each other, and what will be left of their world when they do? The answers may lie with fifteen-year-old Rosie Santos, who travels reluctantly with her grandmother to Jonathan Blue, finding her voice and making choices that could ultimately decide the fate of the cross-country lovers. The Lightest Object in the Universe is a story about reliance and adaptation, a testament to the power of community and a chronicle of moving on after catastrophic loss, illustrating that even in the worst of times, our best traits, borne of necessity, can begin to emerge.
Retribution Required
C.R. Daems - 2018
There smuggling, bribes, and a wild-west live-free-or-die attitude prevails and an eye-for-an-eye is the preferred method of retribution. For Zenaida, a child of the Rim, the death of her father requires retribution. But she must first learn how to survive while trying to track down her snow leopard's stolen litter and her father's killers. But unknown to her, her father's killers spared her for a reason—a secret that could mean her death if she discovers it.
Skye City: The Trials of Arturo collection
R.D. Hale - 2014
If you have purchased these Episodes separately, you do not need to purchase this product.My name is Arturo Basilides. I am an orphan living in the slums of Medio City – the capital of a nation ravaged by a war which was won by extremists. Offered a choice between slavery and disenfranchisement, we exist in an underclass so disconnected we effectively inhabit a different era. Daily life involves scavenging, theft and substance abuse with a bunch of misfits who are somehow still in one piece after years of abandonment. I am a natural born fighter and although I despise warfare, I must witness the downfall of those bastard elites whilst fulfilling my romantic intentions with the forever unattainable girl of my dreams.Skye City is a biopunk adventure set in a world where science is indistinguishable from magic and oppression is near-inescapable. Technology has created a newer, 'superior' form of human and genetically engineered monstrosities are as terrifying as anything encountered in your nightmares. The underclass have been underestimated and as they fight back the boundary between freedom fighter and terrorist becomes increasingly blurred. Meanwhile, the drug-induced haze of a traumatised mind places a question mark over the meaning of reality.'Skye City interweaves heavy social issues and philosophy, milking the sci-fi genre for all its worth. The slum dog's efforts to maintain their humanity in such a heartless age, when everything is going against them is palpable. The 99% versus 1% theme focuses our minds on where society might be heading and forces us to look at things how they are, if we wish them to be truly different.' Dean C. Moore – Author of Renaissance 2.0
The Wanderers
Meg Howrey - 2017
Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they’re the crew for the job by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation ever created.Retired from NASA, Helen had not trained for irrelevance. It is nobody’s fault that the best of her exists in space, but her daughter can’t help placing blame. The MarsNOW mission is Helen’s last chance to return to the only place she’s ever truly felt at home. For Yoshi, it’s an opportunity to prove himself worthy of the wife he has loved absolutely, if not quite rightly. Sergei is willing to spend seventeen months in a tin can if it means travelling to Mars. He will at least be tested past the point of exhaustion, and this is the example he will set for his sons.As the days turn into months the line between what is real and unreal becomes blurred, and the astronauts learn that the complications of inner space are no less fraught than those of outer space. The Wanderers gets at the desire behind all exploration: the longing for discovery and the great search to understand the human heart.
Sanctuary
Pauline Creeden - 2013
But it seems as though there is no place sacred, no place secure. First the aliens attacked the sun, making it dimmer, weaker, and half what it used to be. Then they attacked the water supply, killing one-third of Earth’s population with a bitter contaminate. And when they unleash a new terror on humankind, the victims will wish for death, but will not find it…When the world shatters to pieces around her, will Jennie find the strength she needs to keep going?
The Atlantis Gene
A.G. Riddle - 2013
They will set off a race to unravel the deepest secrets of human existence--and an event that could change humanity forever.
The City Center
Simone Pond - 2013
Not about her city. Not about their leader, Chief Morray. But when Joseph gives her a secret journal from the past, the truth is revealed. She escapes with Joseph to the Outside, sending Chief Morray on an obsessive pursuit to retrieve his property. Ava has to decide if she should keep running, or return to the city center to save her people.
The Mission
Shaun Messick - 2005
Adrian's brother, Kevin, wastes no time funding the Mars II rescue mission, commanded by Jake Palmer, Adrian's son. Jake and Dr. Steven “Skip” Hendricks, a NASA physicist, travel through a wormhole that Skip believes was the reason the Mars I crew disappeared. They eventually crash-land on the planet Terrest and are thrust into a dangerous conflict. The native Terrestrians are at war against a super-race of humans called the Gnols, led by Koroan Chast. The Terrestrian's struggle is futile because of the Gnols godlike abilities. Now, the only hope mankind has may rest on a 2000-year-old prophecy discovered in an ancient temple on Terrest. But before the prophecy can come to pass, Adrian and Jake must first stop the Gnols from attacking Earth and enslaving the human race.Message from the author:Worlds Without End: The Mission is a book that is deeply embedded with doctrine from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its intended audience is for fans of LDS fiction. However, I have had several readers who are not LDS comment on how much they enjoy the book. If you don't mind the religious doctrine, which is pertinant to the story line, then you will enjoy this book. The Mission is the first book of a four book series. This book does contain a lot of scriptural references to LDS doctrine, but this sets the foundation for the rest of the books in the series. Aftermath, the second book in the series, is scheduled for release in the Summer of 2012.
Nod
Adrian Barnes - 2012
Or almost no one. A few people, perhaps one in ten thousand, can still sleep, and they’ve all shared the same mysterious dream. A handful of silent children can still sleep as well, but what they’re dreaming remains a mystery. Global panic ensues. A medical fact: after six days of absolute sleep deprivation, psychosis sets in. After four weeks, the body dies. In the interim, a bizarre new world arises and swallows the old one whole. A world called Nod.