Hello and welcome to my (second) stop on on the Escapist Book Tours book tour for Duckett & Dyer: Dicks For Hire by G.M. Nair! I’ve already kicked off the tour by sharing a spotlight and mini-review over on my IG account, but I wanted to follow that up with a full review of this excellent novel!
Science Fiction
Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Out of everything I’ve read since the beginning of the pandemic, Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is the book that truly snuck up on me and made me soak in the reality of what we are living in. I write this from a place of relative isolation: I am a stay-at-home dad who makes a podcast, writes and gets most of his social fix virtually. So here we all are, in the midst of a strange world, a strange time, and Sea of Tranquility captures that isolating strangeness with a sublime beauty and simplicity. This book is at once a thought experiment in loneliness and the human condition, while also reveling in the love and connection that binds us a species across time and space. No other story in recent memory has made me think so deeply about what I have experienced during this pandemic, nor to ponder on the realities of what it means, for me, to be human.
Book Tour: The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August
Synopsis A dying universe. When the Home worlds finally achieved the technology to venture out into the stars, they found a graveyard of dead civilisations, a sea of lifeless grey planets and their ruins. What befell them is unknown. All Home knows is that they are the last civilisation left in the universe, and whatever […]
Book Tour Review: The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August
The Last Gifts of the Universe is a fairly short sci-fi novel (203 pages) and yet it is filled with so much heart.
Book Tour and Review: The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August
There are stories that are pure escapism, popcorn fueled jaunts through a fantasy world designed to entertain above all else. I love those kind of stories. Hell, I named my company after those types of stories. But, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel good to be completely and utterly destroyed by a book every once in a while. I’m talking reaching inside and scooping out all my feelings, scraping me until I’m hollow, leaving me sobbing in the dark with an empty can of Pringles in my lap. :smiley face:
Review: The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart
Summary: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake. From the author of The Warehouse…. “An engrossing and thought-provoking sci-fi mystery that is also an achingly beautiful meditation on grief and the pain of lost love.” (S. A. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of Razorblade Tears) […]
Review: The Blood Trials (The Blood Gift Duology #1) by N. E. Davenport
I loved N. E. Davenport’s The Blood Trials. I went into this book without any expectations and turned the final page both surprised and satisfied. It offers up a complex world, rife with geopolitical conflicts, futuristic technologies and awesome fight scenes. But it also introduces a dark, supernatural magic system that plays into the racial and social dynamics of its corrupt society. All of this combines for a solid debut and a wondrous world that I can’t wait to read more of.
Book Tour: Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick
Synopsis Terraforming — the mega-scale engineering of a planet’s surface to one more Earth-like — is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. Four billion miles from the Sun and two hundred degrees below zero, what this worldlet needs is light and heat. Through captured […]
Book Tour: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
Synopsis Some places you won’t find on any maps. Others, are only on maps… Nell Young has lived her life in and around maps. Her father, Dr David Young, was one of the most respected cartographers in the world. He’s also just been found dead — in his office at the New York Public Library. […]
Review: Dead Star (The Triple Stars #1) by Simon Kewin
Top notch sci-fi read. A true epic space opera that brings multiple sci-fi elements from religious Zealotry, Oppressive Overlords, Ancient civilizations, FTL travel and Lost mysteries all together into one sublime piece of sci-fi brilliance!
Review: Zero Day Threat (The Ungovernable #1) by R.M. Olson
Zero Day Threat is a semi-finalist in the SPSFC! This is my personal review and does not reflect the thoughts of the rest of my team.
Zero Day Threat has a trope that we all love, found family. R.M. Olsen takes a ragtag group of criminals and turns them into a family, who might fight at times, but ultimately work together to perform a heist to steal a piece of technology. We mainly read from Jez’s point of view, an incredible pilot who can perform every manoeuvre possible with her arms tied behind her back, literally.
Review: Dark Theory (Dark Law #1) by Wick Welker
Synopsis A robot yearns to remember. A thief struggles to forget. A galaxy on the verge of chaos. On the fringe of a broken civilisation, a robot awakens with no memories and only one directive: find his creator. But in the village of Korthe, Beetro finds only radioactive pestilence, famine, and Miree — a tormented […]