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a. reid johnson Posts

A Pale Light in the Black — K. B. Wagers

This is a story set in a post-apocalyptic future about 400 years after “the collapse,” which is never described in detail, though from context it seems to be a global warming and other human caused extinction events. Humanity has barely made it to the stars in time to get off the dying Earth, and now with the benefit of time, Earth has begun to heal. This is not the point of the book, but it…

Light of Impossible Stars — Gareth L. Powell

It was bittersweet to finish the book today. I really love this world, and you could sort of begin to see how he was going to tie it all up and end the novel (and series) about halfway through. That is when my interest began to peak, and I read the last 150 pages or so in one sitting… I wanted to know how it ended! I felt less connected to this book than the…

Velocity Weapon — Megan O’Keefe

This story opens with a trope that I’ve been told you should never do… the POV character wakes up in a sleep/med pod and struggles to survive. I suppose that the lesson here is that “never” means that it needs to be done well. I have a story where my main POV character also wakes up in a sleep/med pod, but as I’ve thought about that story over the years, I realize it isn’t essential…

Architects of Memory — Karen Osborne

This book hooked me right in. A salvage crew is working on a wreck in orbit around a planet and they find something that gets right into their minds. Only later do we find out the truth. The main character is a non-citizen, an indenture, working to free herself to become a free citizen, but she has a terminal illness that she is trying to hide from her captain and crew, but it might be…

Chilling Effect — Valerie Valdes

When the first scene of a novel involves a starship captain covered with scratches crawling along the passageways of her ship to disentangle psychic space cats from the wiring, it seems pretty clear what you’re going to be in for, and I don’t think the first chapter mis-sells the product. This is space opera, with no effort or attempt at hard SF. Ships travel FTL through portals left behind by an ancient race, and that…

NaNoWriMo 2020 Wrap up

My goal was to write a short story every day in November. I wrote from Nov 1 to Nov 12, averaging approximately 1000 words a day. And then boom, that was it. I wrote three more times for a total of 15, so I wrote half the days, and I got a total word count of just over 19k words. I’m going to count that as a success. I didn’t write 15 short stories, but…

NaNoWriMo 2020

I have been meaning to do NaNo for 9 years and just have never given it a try. On Oct 31, in a fit, all of a sudden I decided to do it. Jump in with both feet. I didn’t have a novel ready to work on (I know I need to work on my plot before I am ready to start writing otherwise it will be a disaster) so i decided to try to…

To be Taught if Fortunate – Becky Chambers

I read this novella on a short weekend getaway in the desert near Mono Lake. I had no idea what to expect, having read nothing about this book, but I saw the author speak at the Dream Foundry con earlier this year and I figured I would like her writing based on what I heard there. This is a space exploration story which is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about the future of the human race,…