Book Reviews

Callisto 2.0: Book One of the Shambhala Saga

She had to travel beyond the planet to discover her true self. Will she find the courage to walk through the doorway to a new future?
Shambhala Space Station, 2097. Solitary physicist Callisto (physics, after all, is a jealous mistress) never accepted conventional wisdom. So when she’s recruited to work on faster-than-light technology by a beautiful and mysterious older woman, she eagerly accepts the career opportunity at the women-only research station orbiting Earth’s moon. But her enthusiasm suffers when her first discovery is unexpected heartbreak.

Throwing herself into work on a problematic warp drive prototype, Calli blossoms in the utopian female community that shows her love and acceptance for the first time in her life. But when a twisted conspiracy, a disingenuous affair, and a disastrous betrayal test her place in this unique environment, the brilliant scientist must dig deep to find her moment of truth.

Will Calli embrace her destiny in an unexplored cosmos?
Callisto 2.0 is the transformative first book in the Shambhala Saga feminist science fiction series. If you like compassionate characters, deep-space intrigue, and hopeful visions of the future, then you’ll adore Susan English’s cosmic adventure.

Book Reviews

Sketching Rebellion

Conformity is mandatory. But seventeen-year-old artist Breel rebels anyway.
In the city of Lexum, personal choice is nonexistent, and defiance is severely punished. Breel is alone in seeing the injustices in her world. Isolated due to her beliefs and haunted by the disappearance of her uncle, she finds solace in the forbidden act of drawing. Creating art is a rebellion against an oppressive regime that stifles self-expression.
When a glimmer of hope emerges in the form of a resistance group, Breel faces a decision. Will she risk execution to join their fight for a society which would celebrate rather than condemn her artistic skills? Or will she continue hiding her non-conformity?
The outcome of her choice will not only define her own fate but may also set in motion a revolution that could reshape her world forever.

Book Reviews

SIMBiotic

t’s 2088 and tech has infiltrated every aspect of our lives: from the cyber-rich decked out in elective prostheses, to every Cybro-controlled citizen hooked up to their holographic heads up display. Humanity has become dependent on tech: SIMbiotic. Now, it’s starting to go wrong.
Trino, an under-the-radar specialist offering HUD alternatives and facial recog mods, can help you disappear. Just ask any of her anti-establishment, privacy-seeking clientele. But when a Cybro guard goes rogue at a nearby riot, her under-the-radar operation gets compromised, forcing her to run.
As the Cybro dragnet tightens, Trino receives an unexpected message that makes her question the authenticity of her father’s death. Desperate and alone, she turns to former client, Neb Fink, cyber genius and suspected Anonymous sympathizer, to help track down the truth only to discover more deception and mysterious death.
Compelled to work alongside her sworn enemy, Trino learns the startling truth about her father while struggling to overcome an even bigger challenge, one endangering humanity’s very future.

Book Reviews

Eve

They’ve spent their lives looking over their shoulders – knowing their parents’ pasts and fearing a return to their birthplace until they lost the youngest of their sisters a year ago.
One night shatters that tentative peace and sets Phoenix on edge, distracting the city from the growing threat of a viral outbreak. While the mass shooting lingers on everyone’s mind, no one notices the rising count of animal attacks and violence. Most people anyway. Arden and his sister are all too aware of what it means, and what they carry in their blood. As if being Anglo-Russian wasn’t difficult enough, they weren’t born human…
Finding Diana and keeping their secrets may be harder than it appears in a city teetering on a knife’s edge.

Book Reviews

Streetcab Seshjack

If you borrow a body, there is no going back.
Aedan Namakoto cares about one thing: saving humanity from being enslaved by an addictive virtual reality controlled by the adtech industry.
He’s also a man torn between two lives.
Online, he is the respected founder of a nonprofit VR network promising virtual worlds free from invasive ads and surreptitious surveillance.
Offline, he’s a guilt-ridden single father in poor health, working obsessively to escape the past.
But when a mysterious hacker pulls off an impossible crypto crime, Aedan is left broke and his network on the brink of bankruptcy.
The only one who can help him now is his estranged brother, the powerful CEO of an adtech network. But an enemy is a dangerous ally. And when Aedan does the unthinkable, borrowing a body against the will of its owner, he is betrayed in the worst possible way.
Set in a tug-of-war between IRL and VR as the main reality of humanity, Streetcab Seshjack is the story of a man forced to sacrifice one half of himself to save the other.

Book Reviews

Gearteeth

On the brink of humanity’s extinction, Nikola Tesla and a mysterious order of scientists known as the Tellurians revealed a bold plan to save a world ravaged by a disease that turned sane men into ravenous werewolves: the uninfected would abandon the Earth’s surface by rising up in floating salvation cities, iron and steel metropolises that carried tens of thousands of refugees above the savage apocalypse.
Twenty years later, only one salvation city remains aloft, while the beasts still rule the world below. Time has taken its toll on the miraculous machinery of the city, and soon the last of the survivors will plummet to their doom. But when Elijah Kelly, a brakeman aboard the largest of the city’s Thunder Trains, is infected by the werewolf virus, he discovers a secret world of lies and horrific experiments that hide the disturbing truth about the Tellurians.
When the beast in his blood surges forth, Elijah must choose between the lives of those he loves, and the city that is humanity’s last hope of survival.