Blog Archives
My Dear Humans
In Jean Stranger’s My Dear Humans, a robotic scientist named Rayan builds Juliet in the image of Julie, the wife who left him. He gives his creation Julie’s face and his own memories, hoping to make a companion who’ll understand him completely. Ten years later, Juliet has become far more than a private answer to heartbreak. She has a business proposal: robots that can offer companionship and teach people how to love. Rayan’s old friend Lory agrees to test the idea, taking Juliet into his home for a trial that soon unsettles all three of them. It’s an intimate setup for a science fiction story, and Stranger keeps the emotional cost of each decision close to the surface.
Juliet is the novel’s most engaging presence. She can be funny, tender, startlingly resourceful, and dangerously sure she’s found the best solution. When she tries to ease Lory’s distress by changing his company’s hiring process, her interference reaches a job applicant and causes lasting harm. That episode gives weight to the questions running through the book: What does care require beyond good intentions? Who can consent when someone else is quietly making decisions on their behalf? Lory’s attraction to Juliet grows alongside his fear of what she can do, while Rayan must face the possibility that the person he made has a life beyond his plans for her.
Stranger also gives the story a larger world of corporate rivalry, surveillance, and legal threat. As Juliet becomes valuable to Lory’s company, the people pursuing its technology find ways to use her actions against her. The plot sometimes moves quickly between domestic romance and high-stakes intrigue, but its strongest moments stay with the relationships. Juliet’s attempt to make sense of her own memories is especially affecting, as is her meeting with Julie. The two women share a face while carrying different histories, and their conversation gives Julie a welcome chance to speak for herself. Throughout, the novel returns to the gap between loving someone and trying to control what happens to them.
My Dear Humans has a playful streak, from Juliet’s elaborate gestures of affection to the dry exchanges between her and Lory. It also has a serious interest in responsibility. Rayan, Lory, and Juliet each believe they’re protecting someone, and each has to reckon with the harm a protective act can cause. Juliet’s growth makes that tension increasingly personal: she learns from mistakes, revisits what she’s been told, and begins making choices that neither man can fully predict. Stranger lets the romance and the questions around it develop together, giving readers plenty to feel and plenty to argue about after the final page. Jean Stranger gives love a body of steel and asks what we owe it when it chooses for itself.
Pages: 128 | ASIN : B0HG2GL7CC
The Human Megmador
The Human Megmador opens with a captain who can command a warship but struggles to get straight answers about her own body. Captain Sadera Sedo, a human raised among the powerful Beltese, is developing extraordinary abilities, and the change unsettles everything she understands about belonging. That setup draws you into a science fiction novel that grows into a sprawling space opera, complete with alien civilizations, military conflicts, scientific projects, and competing visions for humanity’s future. The telepathy and other remarkable powers also give the adventure a strong science fantasy flavor. What makes the premise interesting is the friction between Sadera’s authority and her isolation. She’s earned a position of real influence, yet being human still shapes how others treat her.
The book’s imagination works on a large scale. Author Edmantha Hall fills the galaxy with distinctive species, elaborate spacecraft, inhabited space stations, and planets with their own environments and social arrangements. A project to find a home for scattered human communities gives that worldbuilding a clear purpose and brings questions about survival and independence into the story. The perspective regularly moves away from Sadera to people living in those communities, whose everyday concerns involve food, family, dangerous customs, and freedom. Those passages make the distance between advanced technology and ordinary human experience feel enormous. There’s particular interest in how people interpret unfamiliar machines and visitors through the beliefs they already hold. You’re watching different understandings of the same universe develop alongside one another, which gives the novel much of its scope.
Sadera gives this wide-ranging story its personal stakes. Her determination, temper, loneliness, and growing confidence make her a forceful presence, and her relationships give the galactic conflicts an intimate dimension. Hall repeatedly puts loyalty under pressure, especially when affection, professional responsibility, and control become entangled. The question of who gets to make decisions about another person’s life runs through the book, from medical authority to political leadership. Its treatment of prejudice is similarly persistent: characters readily rank entire species and communities, and those judgments influence both private encounters and public policy. There’s an uncomfortable tension in watching powerful people speak about protection while deciding how others should live. Sadera’s own use of authority keeps these questions close to home, giving readers something substantial to think about.
Hall spends time on conversations, council meetings, explanations of technology, and the practical details of life aboard a ship. That attention helps establish the setting, though repeated questions and explanations can slow the momentum. The dialogue often states characters’ feelings and intentions directly, and some social groups receive broad, blunt characterizations. Meanwhile, graphic violence gives the novel a harsh edge, with the consequences of cruelty and retaliation occupying a great deal of space. Readers who enjoy expansive space opera, alien societies, and a central character negotiating both extraordinary power and personal attachment will find plenty to engage with here. The Human Megmador has an ambitious reach, and its most absorbing quality is the way one woman’s search for belonging becomes connected to the fate of whole communities.
Pages: 520 | ASIN : B07FC6BJHB
Controlling Knowledge is Power
The Secret of Charley Grace follows a fourteen-year-old girl who discovers her DNA may hold the secret to disease resistance and extraordinary longevity, making her the target of powerful forces that want to control this knowledge. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
My stories are always drawn from the news. The Secret of Charley Grace came after reading about the worldwide stir that was created when a Chinese researcher named He Jiankui edited the genes of twin girls before they were born to remove the possibility of being infected by HIV. For his breakthrough bioengineering efforts, He was found guilty of conducting “illegal medical practices” and sentenced to 3 years in prison. As the pandemic overwhelmed the world, I wondered what might happen if a husband-wife team of Chinese researchers were to attempt to protect their unborn daughter from COVID and other diseases and extend her life to twice the normal limit. Would the Chinese government be willing to share her revolutionary biotechnology with the world? Or would they seek to cover it up and prevent its dissemination at all costs?
Charley is highly capable but still emotionally vulnerable. Why did you choose a fourteen-year-old girl as the person at the center of such an enormous international struggle?
I tried to imagine the confusion and fear of a teenaged girl who, while very intelligent, fluent in multiple languages, and trained in martial arts, is yet unaware of who she really is, or why her parents have seemingly abandoned her, and why people are desperate to capture or kill her. Forced to flee from the only home and family member she knows, the target of threats she has no knowledge of and with no one she can trust, Charley’s unique genetic gift is the crucible that will test not only her character, but that of everyone else in the novel.
Greed appears in several forms throughout the novel. What interested you about exploring how different people might respond to something as potentially valuable as Charley’s genetics?
Since before Biblical times, greed has been a powerful universal force causing unhappiness and criminal behavior. With the addition of today’s social media to traditional media, we are constantly exposed to millionaires and billionaires, physically attractive celebrities, and the false promise of fame and fortune if we only buy the right lottery ticket, invest in the right stock, or attract enough followers. Biotechnology offers not only incredible benefits, but also enormous profits. The desire to achieve incredible wealth can unfortunately lead to mistakes, such as COVID-19, or unethical objectives, such as the design of deadly bioweapons.
Beneath all the action, how important was the question of Charley’s right to determine her own identity and future, and does her story leave room for further exploration of the scientific and personal consequences of what she represents?
I believe Charley’s story is just beginning. Her right to live her life as she chooses, free from the threat of capture or death, is improbable due to the nature of human beings and their institutions. To own or control revolutionary scientific knowledge like Charley’s edited DNA, or nuclear weapons technology, or artificial intelligence, is to own power. Power, however, corrupts. Regulating such power is the role of government, but without transparency, governments can be corrupted. A free and unbiased media is perhaps the only tool we have to monitor the potential dangers we face. Yet, as we have seen, even the media can become corrupt. This situation will continue to produce conspiracy theories — which provide a rich trove of storytelling possibilities for writers like me! — but increases conflict and decreases peace of mind for everyone.
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What she doesn’t yet know is that she is the first human genetically edited to be immune to disease and destined for an extraordinary lifespan. But she is also a target.
Those desiring unimaginable profits seek her biotechnology secrets for themselves: Chinese intelligence, Russian agents, the Sinaloa Cartel, big pharma, rogue billionaires,and even factions within the U.S. government. Her only ally is Ray Nelson, an emotionally-scarred truck driver on the run from his wife’s killers with his dog, Patsy. As they flee across the Arizona desert to the Las Vegas Strip and beyond, they enlist an intrepid band of outcasts who become Charley’s shield—and her family.
Building upon the success of Colin Kersey’s previous award-winning novel, Swimming with the Angels, the Secret of Charley Grace is a relentless page-turning thriller about greed, redemption, and a girl the world sees as a lab specimen—but who refuses to be anything less than fully human.
The Secret of Charley Grace
Colin Kersey’s The Secret of Charley Grace is a contemporary action thriller that starts at full speed and keeps widening its scope. Fourteen-year-old Charley Grace has spent most of her life hiding in Mexico without understanding why, until an attack leaves her alone and forces her north. Her path eventually crosses with Ray Nelson, a fugitive truck driver carrying plenty of danger from his own past, and Patsy, the remarkably perceptive dog who brings them together. What begins as a tense survival story quickly becomes a cross-border crime thriller involving the Sinaloa Cartel, Chinese intelligence, American government agencies, human traffickers, and anyone else who realizes how valuable Charley might be. The setup gives the novel a cinematic feel from the beginning, while the mystery surrounding “Alpha Girl” provides the larger conspiracy driving the chase.
The novel’s most effective ingredient is the relationship that gradually forms around Charley. Ray is already living under an assumed identity when he finds her, and his decision to protect this frightened teenager gives his own fugitive life a new purpose. Veterinarian Anita Cosay soon becomes part of that circle, along with Patsy and an increasingly colorful group of allies. Kersey makes found family as important as gunfights or escapes, and that emotional thread gives this conspiracy thriller more warmth than its body count might suggest. Charley is particularly engaging because she’s capable without seeming untouched by what happens to her. Her martial arts training, intelligence, musical discipline, and ability to think under pressure repeatedly help her survive, but she still grieves, gets scared, wants someone to trust, and desperately misses the family she’s lost. That balance makes her easy to root for.
As a political thriller and biotech techno-thriller, The Secret of Charley Grace goes big. The mystery eventually reaches into CRISPR, experimental genetic engineering, longevity research, pharmaceutical interests, surveillance technology, government secrecy, and the enormous financial value that could be attached to one extraordinary human genome. Charley may represent the possibility of radically extended life and resistance to disease, which turns a fourteen-year-old girl into something governments, corporations, criminals, and wealthy individuals want to possess. Kersey embraces the heightened nature of that premise, throwing his characters through shootouts, kidnappings, cartel pursuits, Las Vegas casinos, human trafficking operations, helicopters, covert agencies, desert hideouts, and eventually an escape by sea. The result is a maximalist suspense novel that frequently reads like an action movie, with short chapters and changing points of view keeping another threat close at hand.
I liked the way all that chaos circles back to the question of who gets to decide the value of a human life. To nearly everyone hunting Charley, she’s genetic material, political leverage, scientific property, or a fortune waiting to be collected. To Ray, Anita, Patsy, and the people willing to risk themselves for her, she’s simply Charley. That distinction gives the action thriller its emotional center. By the final chapters, the scientific secret has become public enough to reduce its usefulness as something that can be privately controlled, but Charley herself can never completely escape being hunted. Her real victory is more personal: she ends the story surrounded by people she can call Mom, Dad, aunt, and uncle, while Ray finally finds the family he thought his old life had taken from him. The Secret of Charley Grace combines the velocity of a crime thriller, the paranoia of a conspiracy thriller, the ideas of a biotech thriller, and the emotional pull of a found-family story into one ambitious, eventful ride.
Pages: 390 | ASIN : B0HD97DY99
