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Junk Man & the Chronicler
Junk Man and the Chronicler by M. A. Farrell is a science fiction novel with the feel of a framed story collection. Bremmer, a space-debris worker nicknamed Junk Man, encounters a mysterious floating Box called the Chronicler, an entity that records, removes, and replaces memories. As Bremmer fights to keep hold of himself, the book opens into a chain of strange, often unsettling stories about AI, simulations, violence, identity, ethics, and what makes human experience worth preserving.
The story doesn’t tiptoe into its ideas. It grabs the reader by the collar and throws them into danger, sarcasm, fear, and argument. The dialogue has a rough, talky energy, especially between Bremmer and GAIL, and that banter gives the larger science fiction machinery a human pulse. The bluntness can feel direct, particularly when characters explain the rules of a world or spell out the moral stakes. Still, there is momentum here. The book keeps moving. It wants to entertain, provoke, and unsettle all at once.
Farrell’s strongest choice is the frame itself. The Chronicler is not just a plot device. It becomes a question: are our stories still ours if someone else can take them, store them, and use them? That idea stayed with me. The book’s genre is science fiction, but it often leans into psychological thriller and speculative morality tale. The tech is flashy, with neurolinks, simulations, robots, memory transfer, and AI ethics, but the real subject is more intimate. Memory. Pain. Curiosity. The strange way one smell, like peach cobbler, can carry love and grief in the same breath. That is where the book feels most alive to me.
I would recommend Junk Man and the Chronicler to readers who enjoy idea-driven science fiction with a pulpy edge, shifting stories, and big questions about artificial intelligence and human identity. It will especially appeal to readers who like their sci-fi fast, strange, and morally uneasy. For someone who wants a book that treats memory as treasure, weapon, and evidence of the soul, this one is worth picking up.
Pages: 221 | ASIN : B0FW8VDH6S
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.
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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?
Envision and Sculpt
Talisman: Halcyon centers around a man who has already experienced loss and betrayal and now faces an almost insurmountable conflict involving the multiverse and the search for truth. What is the most challenging aspect of writing a series?
I think, as a pantser, the biggest difficulty comes from not necessarily knowing the entire story or character arc. To be frank, I had NO idea I was going to wind up in the multiverse in Halcyon. Ha! I really didn’t. It just grew and ballooned into something far beyond my own comprehension, and I was running alongside the story, panting, just trying to keep up. I’m so pleased with how it turned out, however. You have to have at least an idea of where to take the characters. For me, one thing I really longed to do was to tie this series into my other series and standalone novels. Through references, common characters, etc., you can link them, but that doesn’t mean that this story will serve its own ends as a standalone. It has to be robust and weighty enough to do that. And where that comes from is really allowing you to get heavily invested in the lives and purposes of the protagonists. I think by the end, it all worked out pretty well. I’m pleased with it.
Many of your characters wrestle with identity across timelines or realities. What draws you to the idea of “alternate selves” as a storytelling device?
The idea for the alternate selves was there initially when I first toyed with going into the multiverse, which in and of itself wasn’t really until I was about a quarter of the way through writing Halcyon. I thought more along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be neat if…” as opposed to “I’m intentionally going to do __.” But yes – when a character is forced to come face to face with themselves, there’s a primeval awakening that happens in that confrontation. You either awake to purpose or you awake to despair, I think. It really depends on who that character is and what they decide, within themselves, they must do. My characters awoke to purpose because of the greater conflict they were embroiled in. Any time you incorporate a doppelgänger, there needs to be a closure that happens that allows both selves to depart in peace, having accomplished their mission and resuming their independent life. The multiverse allowed me that, but it was still difficult to envision and sculpt. I very much enjoyed the challenge!
Was there a particular scene or moment that changed your understanding of the story while you were writing it?
Absolutely. There is a character in the story that I really needed to complete an arc that was painful. There were also elements at the very end that I wasn’t sure it were necessarily ’safe’ to travel down… tie-ins with other novels of mine that would definitely bridge the gap and allow more of the “Aaronverse” to take shape, but would they inherently violate the canon of those stories in the writing of this one? I really wasn’t sure. The best I could do was to honor them each with good storytelling. The arc of the character, and the subsequent arc of the story as a whole, really helped me to see the larger picture of what I was writing. I think that’s the luxury of being a pantser: your eyes are opened in the writing just as much as your readers’ eyes will be opened in the reading.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Definitely! I am currently working on my first overtly horror novel, Blood Echoes, set to be released in May. It is a standalone thriller. I do not have any plans to revisit the Dissonance hexalogy or The End or Talisman trilogies, but I do have hopes of constructing a fantasy novel to honor my primary literary inspiration, J.R.R. Tolkien. We’ll see if I’m finally courageous enough to do that, wink wink…. 🙂
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Liam “Foxy” Mayfield never asked to be the Last Iskander, nor to wield a power that can tear the omniverse apart. But then he, Arion Peridifyca – the haunted hunter of the Iskander legacy – and Onyx Sleater, now the cosmic nexus Soteria, discover their grief has been weaponized by the alien Aeterium Axis, and their uneasy alliance becomes the only hope for countless worlds.
As Arion struggles to unite the 743 Iskanders he once betrayed, Soteria’s growing powers make her both a beacon and a battleground for the hearts of her companions. Liam, caught between love, loss, and the terrifying force of the Iskander’s Justice, must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice to end the Axis’s reign of servitude. Their journey leads to the Great Convocation on Proxima Centauri b, where ancient crimes are confessed and a fractured army must choose unity or vengeance. With a monstrous Grievefiend lurking in the multiverse guarding the key to their enemy’s stronghold and betrayal lurking in the shadows, the trio faces a war not just for freedom, but for the very fabric of reality.In an omniverse where grief is currency and trust is fragile, can three broken souls rewrite fate itself—or will their pasts consume them before the final battle begins?
The Weight of Our Choices
Vendetta: Legend of the Iron Warrior, Vol. 3 follows a fallen hero who is pulled back into a war between heaven and hell, forcing him to confront his past, his faith, and his failures as he decides whether redemption is earned through power or sacrifice. How does Vol. 3 deepen or challenge Travis’s sense of identity compared to earlier books?
Volume 3 peels back the layers of The Iron Warrior like an onion. Volume 1 is the introduction, where we get introduced to him and gain an understanding of who he is. Volume 2 takes it another step up, where he must confront the darkness in him. As challenging as those obstacles were, there was still very much left in the man underneath the armor. Candace attacks him at the levels that no one is supposed to know about. His darkest secrets are exposed. So that leads to the question he has to face throughout the book. What happens when every bit of you is exposed? There is truly nowhere for him to run. It’s one thing to be a public figure, but it’s another when every part of your being is displayed for the world to see. Now he must choose if he should try to be the man he is expected to be or be the broken man he is without worrying about what everyone thinks. We all face that challenge in life. If we are truly aware of ourselves, can we choose the higher choice all the time. And at what point do we break down from the weight of our choices?
Candace Loveless is driven by something deeply personal. What makes her more than just an antagonist?
Candace was introduced in Volume 1: Slaying Paradise. Every scene with her became so much more. It sounds weird, but her voice was so easy to hear. There is so much life in who she is. She felt powerful. Candace is a fully realized person. Because there is so much to her, she can’t fall simply into one category. She is a well-rounded woman with so much more story to tell.
The novel reframes greatness as service rather than glory. When did that idea become central?
That was born in the moments when service is spoken about. Many of us chase greatness and the glory that comes with it. We’ll do things in hopes of attaining that attention, but when you truly look at what makes those who are great, you see service. Unapologetic service to someone or something else. They are unmoved by what they do, and their works capture our attention. It’s their service to others and what they give that we are drawn to. Those who serve the most, who give the most, are the greatest because it shows us what is possible. They become the ones whom we can strive to be. They become the example. Greatness for the sake of glory is worthless. Service is greatness. That is what’s remembered.
What does this volume reveal about the long-term journey of The Iron Warrior?
The Iron Warrior has been tested inside and out. Volume 3 was originally meant to be the end of the story, but Candace changed that. She brought so much to the table that the story with her deserved to stand on its own. The second half of this story literally takes us to hell, Brimstone, where it will end. We’re going to follow The Iron Warrior, who is almost a completely different man from whom we met in Slaying Paradise. It’s taking a man who is potentially at his most reckless and throwing him into a place where his nature will be right at home. A volatile man in a place where there are no limits. What’s the worst that can happen?
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A new enemy, Candace Loveless, knows every secret Travis buried and is determined to destroy him from the inside out. His reputation is destroyed. His allies begin to question him. His faith is pushed to the breaking point.
Now, Travis must face an enemy who knows his past, exploits his weaknesses, and forces him to confront the man beneath the armor.
Vendetta: Legend of the Iron Warrior Vol. 3 delivers cinematic action, emotional conflict, and supernatural warfare in a dark superhero noir fantasy readers have compared to The Batman and City of Bones.
The Proverbial Crock Pot
Space Station Halcyon follows a middle-aged gambler coerced into managing a derelict space station as he faces both mob pressure and a doomed government inspection. Where did the idea behind this story come from?
Hoo boy. Bits and pieces fell into the proverbial crock pot over the course of a few weeks. Daryl the manatee came from an awkward encounter I once had with a real life manatee in a beach bar (I don’t want to talk about it). Hali the AI was inspired by that time Chat GPT made me cry (for reasons I’ve now totally forgotten). Joey is basically a better version of me, but also a raging alcoholic.
All of this marinated for a few weeks in a midlife crisis, and voila! Space Station Halcyon was served!
Do you think comedy makes violence hit harder, or softens it?
Comedy is like the soothing back rub on the tense shoulders of deadly violence. It should be used lovingly, sparingly. Otherwise, it’s just a nuisance.
Do you see the station as a kind of found family, even if it’s a dysfunctional one?
The station is more like a high security cell block of felons who are so socially stunted, so painfully outcast, they need an AI to prompt them not to kill each other. So, yeah, they’re just like family.
What kind of reader do you hope finds this book?
The kind who will buy lots and lots of copies of my book and sprinkle them freely about their favorite watering holes, fitness centers, and places of worship.
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Joey Mumbai’s down on his luck and over his head. To pay off his gambling debts, he’s forced to run an old space station at the end of the galaxy as a “legitimate business” for the mob. All Joey has to do is make money—and not attract any attention. But Space Station Halcyon is like a floating death trap, with a rage-filled manatee, a psychotically cheerful computer, and a sports bar that may or may not be possessed.
When a government code inspector and her enforcerbot drop by the station, Joey must bluff, bribe, and connive his way through interstellar bureaucracy, laser gun fights, and the worst beer in the galaxy. Can Joey turn his derelict station and degenerate crew into something resembling legality? Or is the whole place going to explode in a cloud of code violations? Or maybe both?
Space Station Halcyon is a wild and raucous sci-fi comedy about bad luck, worse decisions, and the cosmic horror of being put in charge. A Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque romp that answers the eternal question: “Who’s in charge around here?”
Afterburn
Afterburn is a near-future science fiction novel, but it reads with the pressure and velocity of a prison break thriller. Author Michael Bodhi Green drops us into a 2070 America shaped by racial extremism, internment, surveillance tech, and the mythology of space travel, then centers the whole thing on Alton, a teacher trying to stay human inside a brutal camp system. That choice matters. The book isn’t just interested in institutions and ideology. The story is interested in what it means to keep thinking, reading, and teaching when the world around you is trying to flatten people into categories.
Alton is not built as a generic action hero, even though the book gives him action scenes with real snap and danger from the opening pages onward. He’s a damaged, reflective, yearning guy whose love of books and longing for the stars feel equally sincere. Early on, the novel tells you exactly who he is with the line, “Even in this hellhole, he still loved to teach.” That works because the book keeps proving it. His classroom scenes are some of the strongest in the novel, not because they slow things down, but because they show how ideas, memory, and story become tools for survival.
The novel is also doing something pretty ambitious with genre. It’s a dystopian political novel, a war story, a story about incarceration, and a story about people who were raised on dreams of cosmic escape. Green keeps all of that moving without losing the thread. I especially liked the way books inside the book become part of the argument. When Alton says novels are “windows into the thinking of another time,” I think Afterburn is quietly describing itself too. It wants to be read as both a story and a cultural mirror, and that gives even the pulpy, high-energy sections a little extra weight.
There’s also a real tenderness under all the steel, dust, and fire. The book keeps returning to the gap between fantasy and maturity, between the dream of transcendence and the harder work of living among other people on the ground. By the end, that tension gives the novel a satisfying shape. The title turns out to be more than a cool image. It becomes a way of thinking about aftermath, desire, and the lingering heat of past choices. The final movement gives Alton a resolution that feels earned because it grows out of who he’s been all along, not because the plot forces a neat lesson on him.
Afterburn is an earnest, high-stakes, idea-driven novel with a big emotional engine. It’s vivid, angry, heartfelt, and surprisingly thoughtful about reading, identity, and the seduction of heroic myths. What stayed with me wasn’t just the worldbuilding or the momentum, though both are strong. It was the way the book keeps asking what kind of future is worth reaching for, and what kind of person you have to become to deserve it. That makes Alton’s journey feel authentic.
Pages: 402 | ASIN : B0FTD4DQDH
The Structure of Society
Tyrants of Gravity follows the people of Earth who have survived the first alien attack and are now preparing for future attacks, while trying to survive the aftermath of the first war. Is this story more about survival—or about what survives?
The first book in the series, Gravity of Sol-3, is more about what or who survives. The alien sentinels sought to prevent humans from acquiring black hole energy technology that could threaten the dominant galactic worlds. The aliens also tried to prevent the evolution of man’s telepathic communication, deploying eugenic attacks to exterminate neurodiverse members of the population. If the aliens could have blocked these two elements of human civilization — one technological, the other biological — then humankind would survive but stagnate.
The aliens, Tyrants of Gravity, return in the second book to eradicate the human threat now that Earth has obtained both capabilities. Humans use black hole energy to power spacecraft, and human telepathy establishes contact with alien life. The alien antagonists plan to strike our world with relativistic kinetic energy weapons—releasing more destructive energy than a million nuclear weapons. In Tyrants of Gravity, the stakes are the survival of the human race.
Your battle planning and tech feel tactile and grounded. What research or frameworks shaped that realism?
This aspect of the stories came easily to me, as I have a background in science and engineering and have designed military weapon guidance systems and commercial computing systems. I used my experience with those systems, the teams of developers, and with government and military organizations. I also ensured the story’s events obey the laws of physics as closely as possible: I have a spreadsheet titled, Physics, for each story, and this is just as important as my detailed outlines of story structure and character arcs. The realism introduces natural constraints and obstacles that the characters must overcome.
The alien forces are not just antagonists—they react, adapt, and escalate. How did you approach their psychology?
The aliens rely on machine intelligence, MI, to operate their spaceships and their society. I extrapolated beyond our current AI technology to imagine systems that threaten their organic creators. The alien life forms, the organics, still manage to exert diminishing influence over the alien MI. I gave the MI characteristics of human political organizations, along with many of the weaknesses and faults humans exhibit today. The aliens must grapple with MI and organic conflicts as they pursue the greater objective of suppressing and destroying the human threat. The alien organics and MIs are flawed characters.
As a sequel, this book expands both scale and theme. How do you see the larger arc unfolding?
The first two books of the series focus on Earth and the first contacts with alien antagonists. These books are close together in time and result in the breakout survival and advancement of the human race, making Earth’s inhabitants viable contenders in the galaxy. The worldbuilding of the first two books was a straightforward extrapolation of present-day Earth. Future books will explore how humans exploit their new capabilities to travel to the stars and interact with the alien species that first watched over and then assaulted Earth. Human neurodivergence and telepathy progress and dramatically affect the structure of society.
I have two works in progress that transit across space and time and feature significantly more worldbuilding for the alien settings, cultures, and technologies of Luyten-B and Proxima-B. Humans travel to the home world of the Luyten, Cap, to find the captain’s world subjugated by Centauri masters. Human military and diplomatic missions journey to the Centauri fleet station on Proxima-B to confront the alien civilizations from a position of strength, but grapple with the unintended consequences of their missile and cyberattacks on the Centauris.
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Humans mount a frantic defense.
The aliens launch planet killers.
Earth’s civilization and billions of human lives are at stake.
Two autistic boys, Robby and Luca, search for their lost parent–lost in the dystopia created by the alien attacks. The rogue alien officer, Cap, is thrilled by the boys’ emerging telepathy mutation and helps them in their quest.
Scott Anderson, Robby’s physicist brother, joins the Space Force weapons development team to defend against the approaching alien fleet. But man’s technology, which harnesses the energy of primordial black holes, is primitive compared to the Centauri fleet’s weapons.
Creation Destroys
Creation Destroys: Phase III opens as a wartime nightmare and widens into a speculative family tragedy: Johnathan and Ginny, shaped by the Manhattan Project, become unwilling participants in Dr. Larson’s attempt to exploit their daughter Evelyn, a child whose strange powers can revive dying life but also invite control, militarization, and moral rot. The book moves through grief, confinement, scientific obsession, and the slow corruption of good intentions, asking what happens when a miraculous gift is treated less like grace than inventory.
I was pulled in less by the premise alone than by the intensity of the voice. Kovacs writes in a fractured, rhythmic cadence that feels like prose poetry under pressure; when it works, it gives the story a feverish texture that suits the material. I found the father-daughter bond especially affecting. Johnathan’s tenderness toward Evelyn keeps the novel from becoming merely a concept engine about power. Even when the manuscript turns toward experiments, trigger words, and state machinery, it keeps returning to love, guilt, and the grotesque bargain of trying to protect someone while also using them.
What stayed with me most was the book’s refusal to let creation remain innocent. Evelyn’s restorations are miraculous, but they are also unstable, temporary, and immediately coveted by men who think in weapons, outcomes, and leverage. That makes the novel feel less like simple superhero origin mythology and more like a dark meditation on custody. Who gets to name a gift, own it, direct it, or survive it? I also admired the manuscript’s willingness to be severe. It’s melodramatic in the old sense: unembarrassed by extremity, by anguish, by villainy spoken aloud. The book has conviction, and that conviction can be more memorable than the book’s polish.
I’d hand this to readers of speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, science fiction thriller, literary horror, and dark historical fantasy, especially people who like stories where the emotional engine matters as much as the speculative apparatus. It may appeal to readers who enjoy the moral pressure and altered-child unease of Stephen King, and I was occasionally reminded of Firestarter, though this manuscript is more mournful, more wounded, and more overtly interested in the theology of creation and ruin.
Pages: 131
