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World Lines: From space-time to apocalypse
World Lines by EB Diamond is a science fiction adventure with the restless mind of a thought experiment and the voice of someone telling you an increasingly strange story across the kitchen table. At its center is Professor Nathan Sloan, a physicist whose fascination with space-time becomes a deeply personal quest to understand what happens when a human “world line” refuses to behave normally. His theory suggests that certain people, known as Alternates, can cross time, space, and dimensions along unusual paths, turning ideas like ghosts, prophecy, disappearance, and even immortality into problems that might be plotted on a graph. Around that premise, Diamond builds an adventure involving ancient Egypt, a neutrino mine in Newfoundland, a missing graduate student, an Air Force pilot in North Africa, a mysterious emerald ring, an eccentric businessman, a shape-shifting mathematician, and RCR23, a decidedly peculiar robot who becomes one of the story’s most important links between realities.
I think what gives the novel its personality is the way Diamond mixes serious scientific curiosity with absurdity, wordplay, literary references, and a narrator who’s perfectly willing to interrupt the proceedings. Physics and metaphysics bump into Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Moby-Dick, fairy tales, religion, archaeology, computer technology, and jokes about the habits of scientists. TD1 and TD2 can argue about invisible particles or a fisherman’s “magnetic pole” while the fate of civilization hangs somewhere in the background. Marco Spelling can worry about turning a profit from a disaster-prediction business while realizing that a successful prediction might leave nobody around to collect the money. That humor isn’t decoration. It’s part of the book’s way of thinking. Diamond repeatedly follows logic until it circles back on itself, becomes ridiculous, and then unexpectedly raises a question worth considering. The result is a novel that feels curious, playful, argumentative, and cheerfully unwilling to stay inside a single genre.
Beneath all that intellectual play is a surprisingly human story about people trying to recover what they’ve lost. Sloan’s obsession reaches back to the death of his wife, Jean, and his discovery of an impossibly modern ring in an ancient setting. His daughter Darien, tough, impatient, resourceful, and fiercely loyal, takes up the search when Richard Watson disappears during Sloan’s experiment. Andrew McBarrister, the enigmatic Alternate who appears in different identities and different moments, gives the novel another emotional thread as protector, observer, mathematician, and Fisherman. The characters keep asking scientific questions, but many of the questions underneath them are painfully ordinary: Where did someone we love go? Can we reach them again? Does death represent an ending, a transition, or simply a point we can’t see beyond? That emotional current gives weight to a story filled with cosmic forces and multidimensional speculation. The apocalypse may provide the scale, but mortality provides the stakes.
By the end, World Lines brings its scientists, soldiers, Alternates, skeptics, believers, and competing explanations together at the Newfoundland mountain, where the abstract questions become immediate and physical. The conclusion is eerie, sad, strange, and fittingly circular. Diamond doesn’t turn the book into an answer key. The novel remains committed to uncertainty, leaving the reader to decide how much has been proved, how much has been imagined, and whether those categories were ever as separate as we thought. That openness feels entirely appropriate for a book so interested in the boundaries between science and faith, life and death, reality and story, and one moment in time and another. World Lines invites you to look at a straight line, wonder where else it might lead, and entertain the possibility that an ending is simply the point where our view runs out. World Lines turns the mysteries of time, death, and the universe into a funny, imaginative adventure that leaves you wondering whether the impossible is simply reality seen from the wrong dimension.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0D9TQNDQX
Cobalt Lungs
Cobalt Lungs is an intimate post-apocalyptic novel built around a frightening idea: the air itself has become hostile. Cobalt spores have transformed ordinary rain, forests, and even breathing into sources of danger, leaving survivors dependent on masks, filtration systems, and tightly controlled shelters. B.A. Bellec gives this catastrophe a distinctly Canadian setting, moving through Langley, Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and Victoria while turning familiar places such as Rogers Arena into convincing monuments to a vanished way of life. The result is a world that feels both eerily recognizable and thoroughly changed.
At the center of the story is Maddy, a gifted pianist whose life narrows from music and family dreams to the daily demands of survival. Her relationship with music gives the novel its emotional rhythm, especially as songs become a way to hold grief, memory, and hope when ordinary language can’t carry enough. Ethan, a scientist driven to understand the cobalt organism, offers a compelling counterpoint. Where Maddy feels the world through sound and instinct, Ethan approaches it through systems, data, and control. Watching these two guarded people learn to understand one another gives the book its warmest and most human passages.
Bellec is especially good at finding tension in quiet details. A delayed breath, a damaged filter, a shift in air pressure, or a faint blue shimmer can become more unnerving than a loud action sequence. The novel’s different timelines gradually reveal how Maddy and Ethan were shaped by the collapse, while its larger conflict explores what happens when scientific ambition, corporate power, and the basic human need for safety become tangled together. Even as the scale expands, the story remains grounded in personal choices, family bonds, sacrifice, and the question of what makes survival worth pursuing.
There’s real tenderness beneath the novel’s cobalt haze. Cobalt Lungs is a story about making room for love, art, and a future after loss has changed the shape of everything. Its scientific mystery gives the plot momentum, its atmosphere gives the book a memorable identity, and its characters give the ending its emotional weight. Cobalt Lungs turns every breath into suspense and every song into proof that hope can survive even the most poisoned world, and it is a perfect read for fans of both romance and dystopian science fiction.
Pages: 456 | ASIN : B0H4DQWGB4
Children of Eternity
Macaulay Christian’s Children of Eternity is big, ambitious speculative science fiction with the feel of a future history already carrying centuries of weight. The story opens with Holindrian, an ancient figure caught between trauma, myth, and cosmic purpose, then shifts into a wider galactic crisis centered on the mysterious Signal and the Telegraph Device. From the start, the book is interested in scale, not just the scale of starships and civilizations, but the scale of responsibility when entire peoples have to decide what kind of future they’re willing to build.
At the center of the novel is the Union Republic’s uneasy place in a crowded galaxy. President Macnair Rein, Captain Heron Agathon, Vidya, Pastor, Holindrian, and others move through a story where politics, military command, philosophy, and survival are all tangled together. The Telegraph Device begins as a possible point of contact with something beyond the Milky Way, but its activation pulls the characters into danger far larger than diplomacy alone can handle. Christian gives the crisis a layered structure, moving from political negotiations to disaster response, from stranded survivors to war against the Harbingers and the Encephalon Singularity.
What makes the book engaging is how seriously it treats institutions and ideals. This is a novel about councils, fleets, treaties, command decisions, refugees, occupation, and the moral strain of leadership. One line captures the story’s working ethic neatly: “Go, and don’t stop.” That sense of forward motion drives Agathon and the Banterra crew through some of the book’s strongest sequences, especially when duty becomes less about glory and more about getting people home alive. Vidya also gives the shipboard sections a welcome spark, adding personality and warmth to moments that could otherwise be dominated by strategy and crisis management.
The worldbuilding is dense in a way that suits the book’s chosen form. Christian writes like someone building a mythology, complete with ancient species, political histories, invented terminology, archival material, and a long view of human development. The Aeternam, the First People, the Ways, and the Harbingers all give the story a mythic layer, while the Union Republic, Sarii Olga, Drazenbor Empire, and Galactic Concert keep it grounded in recognizable questions about democracy, empire, fear, and cooperation. The prose often leans grand and ceremonial, but it also knows when to settle into a more human beat, especially in scenes of grief, loyalty, and exhausted courage.
As the first part of the Apocalis, Children of Eternity reads like the opening movement of a much larger saga. I recommend Christian’s novel to readers who thrive on stories that offer space battles, political tension, alien civilizations, artificial intelligence, and ancient mysteries. The final revelation lands with a darkly funny bluntness when Uilliam says, “There is the matter of impending galactic annihilation we must discuss.” That sentence fits the book well: huge stakes, mythic scope, and just enough personality to keep the cosmic drama from floating too far away from the people living through it.
Pages: 405 | ASIN : B0GHP7YM1S
Seeker
Seeker, by Glenn S. Robertson, is a post-apocalyptic western set in a fractured Wyoming more than a century after the Red Death has broken the old world into scavenged towns, armed territories, and hard-won loyalties. Andrew “Ghost” Shelton, a weary seeker with a violent past and a stubborn moral core, returns to Casper only to be pulled into a dangerous pursuit involving a kidnapped girl, raider factions, old grief, and a self-styled king whose brutality threatens everything Ghost still considers worth saving.
What I appreciated most was the way the novel treats survival as more than gunfire and grit. The barter economies, fortified settlements, weapon scarcity, and patched-together rituals of civic life give the world a lived-in texture. Robertson’s Wyoming is not just a backdrop; it’s a flinty, weather-beaten character in its own right. The story has plenty of action, but its strongest moments often come in the quieter spaces: Ghost tending to his horse, weighing what a book is worth, remembering the dead, or trying not to let old wounds calcify into something uglier.
I was also drawn to the book’s moral architecture. Ghost is capable of violence, and the novel never pretends otherwise, but it is more interested in what violence costs than in making it look glamorous. The supporting cast gives the journey welcome shape, especially Neva, Carl, Jake, Leonidas, and Hannibal, whose presence broadens the story beyond one man’s revenge. The novel moves with the sprawl of a frontier saga, but that largeness suits a story about ruined nations, improvised families, and the stubborn human habit of building meaning out of ash.
This book will appeal to readers of post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian westerns, survival adventure, frontier science fiction, and gritty action novels. Fans of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower may recognize a similar fusion of wasteland myth, gunslinger melancholy, and strange-road questing, though Seeker keeps its boots planted more firmly in Wyoming dirt. Seeker is a rugged, mournful, and blood-warmed ride through the ruins, where the real prize is not survival, but the courage to remain human after surviving.
Pages: 384 | ASIN : B0GV4TGLTL
Long Leg: From the Blighted Earth: Book II
R.M. Tembreull’s Long Leg: From the Blighted Earth: Book II is an ambitious work of environmental fantasy that blends mythic adventure, eco-fiction, and climate fiction into a sweeping speculative tale. Set in a damaged world where the Natural Order struggles against Chaos and the Force Corrupted, the novel moves north into the Great Plains and centers its conflict on drought, water, ecological collapse, and the fragile bonds that connect all living things. It’s a book with large stakes, but its emotional pull comes from small, unlikely heroes carrying the fate of the world on their shoulders.
At the heart of the story is Long Leg, a Gifted burrowing owl whose loyalty to the earth elemental Okaraxta gives the novel both intimacy and purpose. Through Long Leg’s journey, Tembreull turns animals, elementals, fungi, water, wind, and land into active participants in an ongoing struggle for balance. The result is a richly imagined mythic fantasy world where the natural world isn’t just scenery; it’s alive, wounded, watchful, and capable of resistance. The book’s use of Lakota-inspired themes, especially the idea that all beings are related, gives the story a spiritual framework that feels central to its identity.
The novel’s strongest quality is its sense of scale. Tembreull writes with the scope of epic fantasy while grounding the story in recognizable environmental concerns: drought, wildfire, overuse of water, disappearing habitats, and humanity’s troubled relationship with the planet. Water becomes both a sacred presence and a force of renewal, which gives the adventure a clear emotional and thematic current. The prose is often expansive and philosophical, but that style suits a story designed to feel like a legend, a warning, and a quest all at once.
Readers who enjoyed Richard Adams’s Watership Down may find a familiar appeal here: animal protagonists move through a dangerous world shaped by forces larger than themselves, and their courage matters because they’re vulnerable. Tembreull’s book is more overtly supernatural and environmental in its focus, but it shares that sense of small creatures becoming central to a vast struggle. The journey also carries the feel of an eco-fantasy quest, where survival depends not on domination, but on cooperation, memory, sacrifice, and respect for the living world.
Long Leg is a thoughtful and imaginative speculative fiction novel for readers who appreciate mythic worldbuilding, animal-centered adventure, and environmental themes woven into epic fantasy. It’s not simply a story about a broken world; it’s a story about connection, responsibility, and the possibility of restoration. Tembreull delivers a distinctive continuation of the Blighted Earth series, one that invites readers to care deeply about the smallest beings and to see the natural world as a powerful, sacred community.
Pages: 338 | ASIN : B0GVPT5DMM
Fiercely Independent People
No Home Without You follows a woman living in solitude with her cats after an asteroid struck Earth, who encounters a man who shows up at her refuge with an injured ankle, leading to feelings she wasn’t expecting. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for the story was to continue the Love and Survival series with two people who had opposite experiences in the post-apocalyptic world. Cam grew up in the shelter of xTerra, the bunker complex in South Dakota. His family were preppers who had been there before the asteroid. Lissa had lived in the outside world, but grew frustrated with her lonely existence at a refugee center. Both were intended to be quite different from the couples in the previous two books (The Edge of Life: Love and Survival During the Apocalypse and Aftermath: Into the Unknown).
I wanted to have a love story between two fiercely independent people who weren’t used to relying on anyone else. Cam comes from a community but feels apart from it. Lissa has chosen to be alone for six years before Cam arrives.
I also wanted the political aspects and questions about refugees and the right to have safety to simmer throughout the story. Several characters from earlier in the series continue, even if the main characters, Cam and Lissa, are new.
xTerra represents safety, but also control and exclusion. What drew you to that kind of community dynamic?
The refugees that flooded xTerra immediately after the asteroid would have changed the quiet prepper community that lived there already. There were hints of this in The Edge of Life (Book 1). It continued when we see xTerra when Robin and Kory arrive in Aftermath (Book 2), so No Home Without You was the logical next step.
I can see many of the original inhabitants feeling like they’d been invaded or taken over, as this influx of people would have changed their community. When resources are scarce, including safety, those who have it would be reluctant to share.
Cam’s mother, the mayor, represents those people. She was modeled on someone I know in a position of power who seemed kind and positive on the outside, but was actually rage-filled, insecure, and petty. I saw through her from the beginning, and over time, my co-workers saw the real her, too. She reminded me of Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter, which came up in the story.
The romance grows from trust and shared labor rather than instant attraction. Was that always your intention, and how do you define love in a world where survival is the first priority?
From the beginning, I wanted Cam and Lissa to build trust, friendship, and attraction before it became about love. Neither of them trusted easily and had been self-contained for years, not admitting that they were lonely or needed anyone else. It didn’t seem realistic to have them open to love and instant attraction in a world where everything is hard-won.
In a world where survival is the priority, love can only occur if you trust someone to have your back and work with you to secure survival. Neither Cam nor Lissa is someone who is casual about anything. Their lives are planned and deliberate, and I felt like love would develop this way, too.
Where do you see your characters after the book ends?
After the book ends, I see my characters living out their lives together, choosing to work together to survive. They’ll live in xTerra for the winters and on their own the rest of the year.
I hope No Home Without You ties up the Slains and xTerra arc with the three books in this series. While there are many spin-off tales I plan to write, the community of xTerra is safe for now. I imagine them rebuilding community and society, mostly from within their walls, while people like Cam and Lissa choose to come and go, living their lives with a degree of independence and self-sufficiency.
Author Links: GoodReads | Lena Gibson | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When Cam defies orders to help a desperate refugee family, his mother, the mayor, is ousted. She disowns him, calling him a traitor. To let her hurtful words settle, Cam leaves on an extended trip.
Solitary for six years, Lissa lives in an abandoned mansion in Nebraska. Fiercely independent, she trusts no one. But one day, spying on a hunting party, she encounters Cam. Fascinated, she watches him, unable to get him off her mind. Injured in an early snowstorm, Cam stumbles upon her refuge. They strike up a friendship, but despite their mutual attraction, Lissa keeps him at arm’s length. After his ankle heals, he returns to xTerra. Alone.
When Lissa overhears a plan threatening xTerra, she embarks on a harrowing journey, risking everything to protect the man she’s come to love. If she and Cam can save xTerra and open their hearts, they may find a home together.
Don’t miss No Home Without You, not just another post-apocalyptic romance, as Cam and Lissa battle for love and survival.
Alpha-Female
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts follows a teacher and trauma survivor who comes back to ordinary life after a brutal ordeal called Project Purple, only to find that ordinary life is no longer stable, and maybe never was. What inspired the idea of Project Purple, and how literal is it meant to be?
“Project Purple” is about thirteen Americans who recreate the lives of the early colonials for a worldwide online audience. They don’t know their ordeal has been gradually, brutally altered by their organizers, and a struggle for food, shelter, and survival turns deadly as an Arctic winter approaches.
The nutshell of this idea emerged from a conjoining of two mediums—the first being a PBS TV series called Colonial House back in 2003, and the second being an extraordinary novel about the harrowing saga of the Donner party called The Indifferent Stars Above. Somehow, the ordeals of these people from different centuries fused. I think “Project Purple” seeks to understand what it takes to draw on one’s inner survivor. I just started thinking: What could a writer do to give this story more adversity and more propulsion?
Purple Bleed Naughty Beats follows the three survivors of the ordeal that took place in the first book. The color purple, here, is the blending of red and blue that forms the majority of US political thought.
Henri lives in a constant state of uncertainty. Did you always intend for readers to question her reality?
Henri’s initial uncertainty is due to the medication foisted onto her. Once she kicks the downers, we can see her alpha-female persona reemerges.
The Rot feels physical, social, and spiritual all at once. How did you develop it as a unifying force?
The Rot begins in the first book—the beginning of a new world order with an entirely new language, and with an entirely new taxonomy: a new way of ordering and naming things in life—the Rhizome. It follows a fierce path of human destruction and rebirth in the second book, which is more about the cyclical nature of human history—how we progress to a certain point, only to fall back, destroying ourselves in senseless hatred and warfare. It’s loosely structured on a classic science fiction book called A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. If you remember that story, you can see similar plot devices and characters. And the message is, of course, the same.
The spiritual aspects of the story come from the role of the Catholic Church, which plays a large role in the affairs of state in Canticle. And it’s a monastery of monks that preserves history. Scientific discoveries are also, once again, made in the monastery.
What do you hope readers feel after the final page: clarity, dread, recognition?
When reading Canticle as an eighteen-year-old in a college science fiction class, I recall being stunned by what happens to the protagonist in the story. Killing one’s protagonist halfway through your book is not something anyone would recommend in a writing seminar. In Canticle, no character really picks up the slack to resume the mantle of lead. I’ve structured the story the same way, but Reygil steps up, and we follow him and his journey for answers in a post-apocalyptic world, some thirty years later.
I know a lot of readers don’t like somewhat open-ended messages, but I do them a lot. I hope they’re not disappointed that any stark resolution gives way to a weary kind of acceptance of a new world order—as the cycle continues.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
As the Rot spreads, it dissolves bodies, memories, and entire realities. Henrietta Dobie survives by instinct alone, guided by masked figures who insist she has been chosen for something greater. Each collapsing world forces the same brutal demand: adapt—or die.
Elsewhere, Reygil Buford staggers through the wreckage of civilization, torn between cowardice and grace. He wanders a landscape of false prophets, feral survivors, and absurd wars, where history repeats itself not as tragedy—but as grotesque farce.
Reality fractures. Empires decay. Survival becomes a test of the soul.
Darkly comic, hallucinatory, and unflinchingly violent, Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts is a genre-bending survival thriller where humanity consumes itself—and the only way forward may require becoming something unrecognizable.
What part of you must die so the rest can learn to fly?
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts is a work of speculative fiction that blends apocalyptic horror, satire, and psychological thriller elements into one jagged story. At its center is Henrietta Dobie, a teacher and trauma survivor who comes back to ordinary life after a brutal ordeal called Project Purple, only to find that ordinary life is no longer stable, and maybe never was. As Henri tries to navigate small-town routines, old classmates, a psych ward, and the creeping collapse of the country around her, the book keeps asking whether she is unraveling, seeing the truth, or trapped in some awful overlap between the two. That tension drives almost everything in the novel, and it gives the book its pulse.
The author writes with a mean streak, but also with real control. The book can be funny in a way that catches in your throat, then ugly, then sad, sometimes all in the same scene. A principal trying not to fart, a baby shower gift of shotgun shells, an Olive Garden that feels like a haunted checkpoint in the end times, all of that sounds absurd on paper, yet the writing commits so hard that it becomes its own reality. I also think the author makes a risky choice by pushing satire right up against trauma and social breakdown. Sometimes it feels brilliantly unhinged. Sometimes it feels like the book is daring you to keep up. For me, that mostly worked because Henri is never treated as a gimmick. She is bruised, sharp, isolated, and believable even when the world around her goes feral.
What I found most interesting is how the novel refuses to give easy comfort about what is “really” happening. The hallucinations, the bodily disgust, the public violence, the cult logic, the talk of worms in soft wood, all of it builds a world where decay is social, spiritual, and physical at once. That could have turned into noise, but Greco keeps returning to the same core ideas: betrayal, surveillance, hunger, the desire to belong, and the danger of surrendering yourself to a story that explains everything.
This is a bold, abrasive, and oddly mournful novel. I would recommend it most to readers who like genre fiction that crosses lines, especially people drawn to horror with satirical teeth, dystopian fiction that is less about neat world-building and more about psychic collapse, and stories that leave you unsettled rather than reassured. If you want something fierce, strange, and uniquely intriguing, this is a worthy read.
Pages: 190 | ASIN : B0GSCPBFS3
