science fiction author
I became aware of Dotson’s writing on social media (twitter, specifically), mostly because Gareth Powell regularly lifts her up. I love space opera and so I decided to look into this author. In many ways, her life story sounds a lot like mine. We both created worlds as children and young adults, wrote stories and fleshed out our characters, but are not full time fiction writers. The difference, of course, is that she has followed…
Shards of Earth is a space opera that takes place in a future where the Earth has been destroyed. This is not a spoiler, as it is in the prologue. The Architects have come, giant moon sized entities who do not respond to our communication attempts, and they destroy settled worlds while leaving empty worlds alone. There is a rich cast of characters including heroes from that war, merchants, bureaucrats, religious cult leaders, several alien…
I really enjoyed the first installment of the Expanse series so I was looking forward to this one and I was not disappointed. The book follows the same set of main characters from Leviathan Wakes, Holden, Amos, Naomi and Alex, and introduces/focuses on some additional characters, such as Bobbie, a Martian marine, Prax, a botanist on Ganymede, and Chrisjen Avasarala, a high ranking member of the UN. The switching between the four PoV characters (Holden,…
The author described this book as wanting to experience what Guardian’s of the Galaxy felt like. If he meant a wild ride with a fast-paced plot and a varied collection of aliens working together, then I think he succeeded. The story is principally a story about a collection of three aliens who work on the same ship. One is a human from Earth (Max) who accidentally stepped on a portal and got teleported to a…
This book popped up on my “recommended reading list” on Amazon and I read the preview. I am a big fan of military SF and the first three chapters hooked me in, so I bought it. I ended up reading it in one day while on a quick start of summer vacation. The book is action packed, following the exploits of a young space marine, Cam Alvarez, who joins up to avoid a lengthy “hibernation”…
I believe heard about this book I believe at the online Dream Foundry convention 2 months ago during a panel on AI characters. I started reading it a few days ago and it is not an exaggeration to say that this book has been inhabiting my dreams for the last few days. I couldn’t stop thinking about it! This is one of the best descriptions of what life onboard an ark ship would be like…
I read this book on the strong recommendations I’ve seen online, but in the end I don’t feel like I got very much out of it. This book is a collection of short stories and novel excerpts that were chosen by his fans and collected. They are presented in chronological order so you can see his growth as a writer. That is the theory. I saw a change in tone of the stories but honestly,…
I decided to review these two together, having read the first of the series about a month and a half ago. Overall, I really enjoyed this trilogy. It was good “fluff” reading, by which I mean, I could read it during an extremely busy time at work and still get a good story out of it. The main character, Hail Bristol, is a former gunrunner who has now become the empress of Indrana. But her…
One of the people in my writing support group Discord server was begging us all to read this novella this week. I did a little research and found that it is very much a different voice for Scalzi. Since I really enjoyed his voice in Redshirts and the Old Mans War series, I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t like this so I downloaded the first chapter as a free sample. I was hooked.…
This book has received an enormous amount of press (at least I’ve seen a lot) and accolades for a first novel, so I went in expecting to really love it. There is a lot to like about this book, but I found some aspects of it less convincing. This book is set in a universe (possibly even our universe) that has bubbled off smaller universes at its growing edge. these universes are covered by “rinds,”…
