Jump follows two people struggling to keep their relationship together as they try to prevent their world from catastrophic collapse, while others are more interested in power and control than saving humanity. How did your vision for the series evolve as you moved from Hive into Jump?
I started with a simple idea: two people who screwed up their relationship get a second chance, courtesy of a time machine and the impending extinction of humanity. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, apparently.
By the time I finished Hive, I’d managed to destroy civilization, weaponize honeybees, and leave half my characters in situations that would require a miracle—or another book—to escape.
So I wrote Jump. Which was supposed to straighten things out.
Instead, I ended up with multiple universes, several versions of the same man, a time machine with a disturbing tendency to kill its passengers, and an artificial intelligence who thinks he can fix everything.
At this point, I’m beginning to suspect the problem isn’t with my characters.
How have Isabel and Diego changed since readers first encountered them in Hive, and what makes their relationship such an important emotional foundation for the series?
Isabel and Diego have loved each other for decades. Unfortunately, they’ve also spent a good portion of those decades making spectacularly bad decisions.
When we first meet them, they’ve been apart for fifteen years. Isabel has just divorced a billionaire who stole her research and treated her like an expensive appliance. Diego has been nursing a broken heart while trying to keep his perpetually cash-strapped NGO afloat. Clearly, these are two people with excellent judgment.
Then the world ends, and suddenly their relationship problems seem a little less important.
Except they aren’t.
Diego can repair almost anything, but he can’t fix Isabel’s grief. Isabel can program a swarm of microscopic robots, but she can’t make Diego stop trying to protect her. They’re stubborn, imperfect, occasionally infuriating people who keep choosing each other, even when the universe makes that choice almost impossible.
How does Isabel’s technology reflect the ethical challenges surrounding inventions that can be used for both beneficial and destructive purposes?
Imagine spending years inventing artificial bees to help feed the world. You finally get the technology working, and your billionaire ex-husband decides what it really needs is the ability to murder people.
That’s pretty much Isabel’s career trajectory.
The scary part is that nobody starts out announcing they’re going to build an army of killerbots. They begin with perfectly reasonable ideas. Better crop yields. Automated pollination. Protecting food supplies. Then someone suggests using the bees to defend the biodomes. And someone else decides the best defense is to eliminate anyone who might become a threat.
Before long, the tiny drones you designed to save the planet are exterminating its inhabitants.
I wish I could say this was wildly unrealistic, but humans have a remarkable talent for taking useful inventions and finding spectacularly awful things to do with them.
Isabel’s dilemma is that she can’t simply blame everyone else. At some point, she has to ask herself whether she’s willing to use those same weapons to protect the people she loves.
It’s a much harder question when the person standing in your way has a shotgun.
What larger themes or character journeys do you hope to continue exploring as the Madders of Time series progresses?
I always planned five books—and I know exactly how the last one ends. Getting there is the problem.
Three books in, the timelines are multiplying, my characters are scattered across several dying worlds, and a sixteen-year-old boy is trying to keep the entire multiverse from falling apart. I’m starting to feel a little sorry for him. I’m also beginning to think I need a better filing system.
One thing I love about writing parallel universes is that I get to take the same basic people and give them completely different lives. What if Isabel and Diego never broke up? What if the man who helped destroy the world had made one different choice? What if the person you love is still alive somewhere—but has never met you?
I also want to keep poking at our rather embarrassing human tendency to confuse wealth and power with wisdom. In my books, the billionaires build enormous luxury biodomes to ride out the apocalypse. Naturally, they hire the people who know how to keep everything running—and then ignore them.
But underneath the time travel, killerbots, and occasional naked physicist, I’m still writing about love, hope, and what we owe each other.
I’d like to believe we can save the world without sacrificing our humanity.
The multiverse is collapsing. The time machine is broken. And humanity’s last hope? Might already be dead. Seven months after the EMPs brought the world to its knees, a handful of scientists are racing against extinction—and each other. Somewhere in a flooded skyscraper lies a wormhole generator that might be able to undo the apocalypse. If they can find it. If it still works. If it doesn’t kill them first. Meanwhile, Diego Nadales wakes in a cell, his face bloodied and his memories fractured. He’s being accused of terrorism, treason, and time travel. The last one, at least, is true. Isabel is trapped inside a biodome ruled by the man she once trusted. But her bees—microscopic drones designed to save the planet—have been hijacked and weaponized. If she doesn’t find a way out soon, her creation will wipe out the last threads of life on Earth. Old friends return. New enemies rise. And somewhere in the chaos, one small spark of hope just might be enough to ignite a revolution. The clock isn’t ticking. It’s blowing up.
Jason Izumi’s Kalani’s Kalo is a children’s book about growing food, learning from elders, and discovering how much care goes into feeding a community. Set in Hawaiʻi, it follows a boy whose desire for a dependable supply of kalo sends him into the highland forest with his boar companion, Pua. That practical starting point gives the story an appealing sense of purpose. Kalani’s curiosity and occasional impatience make him easy to connect with, while the animals bring humor and companionship. There’s also a thread of mystery that makes the forest feel like a place worth exploring.
What I enjoyed most was the attention Izumi gives to doing things by hand. Preparing food, tending plants, and shaping tools all take time, and the story lets readers feel that effort. Its descriptions make everyday tasks interesting, especially when sounds and repeated rhythms invite children to join in during a read aloud. Hawaiian words appear throughout the dialogue and narration, tying the language closely to the people, plants, and objects on the page. The relationship between Kalani and his elder teacher gives these details warmth. Their exchanges show how knowledge passes between generations through questions, observation, and working together, with room for a child’s doubts and enthusiasm.
The textured drawings, delicate lines, and soft washes of color give the landscapes a dreamy quality while keeping individual leaves, stones, woven surfaces, and tools visible. Forest scenes are especially inviting: slender trunks and tangled branches surround the figures, and small touches of red and green reward a closer look. Elsewhere, warm browns make indoor scenes feel intimate, while pinks and purples soften the shoreline and distant mountains. I liked how the artwork moves between broad views of the landscape and close studies of hands at work. Those changes in scale help children notice both the setting and the skill involved in everyday activities.
The book asks for a leisurely reading pace, with enough text and practical detail to suit several shared sittings. Some passages explaining a process slow the momentum, though they also give curious readers plenty to ask about. The glossary and informational pages offer useful places to return when a word or object catches a child’s attention. For families and classrooms interested in Hawaiian language, food traditions, gardening, and relationships with the land, there’s plenty here to discuss. Its strongest quality is the way it connects care with action: listening, practicing, sharing, and paying attention all matter. It’s an affectionate, visually distinctive book that makes the work behind a meal feel worthy of a child’s curiosity.
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.
DL Orton’s Jump, the second book in the Madders of Time series, brings an endangered planet and an equally precarious love story into the same tightly wound narrative. Time travel, ecological collapse, artificial intelligence, and corporate power all have a place here, with each putting pressure on people who’ve already spent years making mistakes and trying to live with them. At the center are Isabel and Diego, whose attachment gives the book a clear emotional focus even as its timelines multiply. Orton makes the scale of the trouble easy to feel: civilization’s future matters, and so does the possibility of having another ordinary day with someone you love. That combination gives the story both urgency and intimacy.
The characters are the main reason to keep reading. Isabel’s intelligence comes with impatience, pride, and a sharp tongue; Diego’s devotion is tangled up with guilt and a stubborn belief that he should be able to protect everyone. They’re adults with histories, habits, and sore spots, and their conversations carry the weight of all three. The supporting cast brings its own energy, especially the scientists whose problem-solving involves equal amounts of ingenuity, exhaustion, and bickering. Humor is everywhere, from dry observations about institutional incompetence to affectionate needling between people who know each other’s weaknesses. The wisecracks occasionally arrive so quickly that you want a little more room for a painful moment to settle. Still, the banter makes these relationships feel lived in, and the quieter gestures of care often land beautifully.
Orton’s world is built through the practical business of keeping people alive. Power supplies, food production, medical equipment, and the maintenance of sealed biodomes make survival feel like a daily job with increasingly impossible demands. The brief AI log entries that introduce the chapters widen the view, setting individual struggles against a planet’s accelerating breakdown. Meanwhile, the time-travel machinery adds a puzzle that rewards attention: objects, messages, and different versions of familiar people acquire significance across timelines. There’s plenty to keep track of, and the book asks for an engaged reader. Its most compelling questions concern responsibility. Who gets protected when resources run short? What happens when a useful invention becomes an instrument of control? How much damage can someone justify in the name of saving the people they love? Those questions give the suspense a moral bite.
As a sequel, Jump draws much of its force from relationships and mysteries already in motion. The opening recap offers a useful foothold, while the story’s accumulated emotional history makes reading Hive first a rewarding choice. Orton has a particular talent for bringing enormous stakes down to a recognizable human scale: a shared meal, an argument between friends, the comfort of an animal’s company, the effort it takes to trust again. Love here includes romance, family, friendship, and the difficult work of making room for someone else’s pain. That breadth helps the novel sustain its warmth through some very dark territory. It’s an absorbing continuation for readers who enjoy intricate speculative fiction with outspoken characters and emotional consequences. Jump makes the survival of humanity feel inseparable from the daily choice to remain human.
Tiffany Nieslanik’s Home Planet begins with an astronaut, a pregnancy test, and a launch window that’s about to close. Bryn Rionnag is meant to travel alone to Caerus, a possible refuge for an overcrowded, overheated Earth. She intends to tell her husband Teddy that she’s pregnant and step aside, but her commander pushes the mission forward against her wishes. Once Bryn wakes aboard the ship, she discovers that Star Force V has kept a much larger secret about her origins. It’s a gripping start, but the question that stayed with me was more personal: how does Bryn decide whom to trust when the people directing her life claim to be protecting her? The voyage tests her judgment as much as her endurance.
Nieslanik gives that question a lively domestic texture. Bryn worries about food, makes jokes with the ship’s AI, Barbara, and tries to keep a line open to Teddy while knowing her messages can be watched. Teddy’s chapters give their separation weight; he’s piecing together her coded hints while dealing with a commander whose paternal affection comes with a frightening sense of ownership. The arrival of their daughter, Nysa, changes the rhythm again. Her rapid growth and brief first-person chapters bring humor and a strange, touching confidence to a story in which Bryn is still learning what she is. Scenes of swimming, gardening, cooking, and improvised childcare make the spaceship feel lived in. They also give Bryn’s choices a scale that’s easy to feel, even as the plot moves between planets.
Readers who enjoy Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet may recognize a similar interest in companionship, everyday routines aboard a ship, and the moral lives of people traveling through space. Nieslanik’s voice is more briskly conversational, with more immediate peril for one family, while Chambers tends to let an ensemble of travelers unfold through their relationships. In Home Planet, questions about who gets to decide a species’ future grow out of Bryn’s experience as a wife, mother, scientist, and explorer. Her discovery of Tern opens up a vividly watery world of living architecture, shared memory, and beings whose ideas about care challenge her Earth upbringing. The book’s ecological concerns become especially compelling when Bryn has to argue for humanity before people who can see its damage clearly.
The novel sometimes pauses to explain its biology and customs just when a scene has gathered speed. Bryn’s repeated spirals of worry can feel familiar, and some revelations arrive with a convenient answer close behind. Still, those habits grow from the book’s earnest curiosity about birth, belonging, and responsibility. Janis and the Ternian council each put pressure on Bryn’s freedom in different ways, which gives her developing resolve a satisfying thread through the story. The ending leaves the rescue of Teddy and the work of restoring Earth ahead of her, with a clear sense of what she’ll fight for. Home Planet is generous with tenderness and big ideas, and its most memorable image may be Bryn making room in her heart for both her daughter and the world that raised her.
Donors follows a brilliant scientist whose revolutionary program for growing organ-compatible biological hosts spirals into a fight over identity, freedom, and who has the right to own a life created by science. What sources informed this novel’s development?
The earliest spark for DONORS started with a group conversation about becoming an organ donor. That conversation evolved into organ wait times, surgery costs, and success rates. Eventually, someone brought up the idea of transplanting organs from animals. After that conversation, I didn’t think much about it, but one idea stayed with me. Could we grow viable organs? However, I didn’t want to hurt animals. Then, could we grow a vessel? From there, the story took shape, and questions emerged. What would the human stories behind those breakthroughs be? The scientists wrestling with moral boundaries, the patients waiting for miracles, and the philosophical questions about what makes a life “authentic.” Those emotional threads, together with some good old-fashioned intrigue, wove into the foundation of the novel.
Joseph begins the novel convinced that Donors are biological tools rather than people. What interested you about making someone with that worldview the character through whom readers confront the question of personhood?
I wanted to explore the worldview that Donors were tools rather than people. Joseph gave me a way to explore personhood from the inside out. I was drawn to the tension of a character who is brilliant, well-intentioned, and potentially wrong. By filtering the story through Joseph, readers experience the slow erosion of certainty as he confronts the consequences of his own beliefs. His perspective forces us to sit with uncomfortable questions: If you create life for a purpose, does that purpose define life? At what point does responsibility become complicity? Watching Joseph struggle with those realizations made the moral journey more intimate and more honest.
The alternating “NOW” and “THEN” structure gradually changes the meaning of earlier events. How did you plan those two timelines so that the revelations would feel surprising but still earned?
I wanted the dual-timeline structure to feel like a slow-burning fuse. I mapped both threads side by side, making sure each “THEN” chapter planted emotional or thematic seeds that would bloom in the “NOW” storyline. The goal wasn’t to hide information, but to let meaning evolve. The reveals weren’t meant to be “twists.” They were intended as shifts in understanding. When the timelines finally collide, the reader should feel both surprise and inevitability, as if all the pieces were quietly aligning from the start.
Beneath the conspiracy and action, the novel keeps returning to identity, belonging, and the right to choose your own life. What do you hope readers are still thinking about after they finish the book?
At its core, DONORS is about identity, belonging, and the right to define your own existence. I hope readers walk away thinking about how we assign value to human life, and how easily systems can strip that value away, especially when convenience or profit enters the equation. I want them to reflect on the fragile line between innovation and exploitation. I want people to realize it takes courage to claim autonomy in a world determined to categorize you. If the story lingers, I hope it’s because readers see echoes of these questions in their own lives and in the choices society is making right now.
Donors is a gripping sci-fi novel by A.B. Ruiz that plunges readers into the cutting-edge world of biotechnology and medical ethics. At Pacific West Labs, Dr. Joseph Murray spearheads a revolutionary Donor program that grows organs in biological hosts, pushing the boundaries of what science can achieve. When mysteriously sourced data unlocks astonishing breakthroughs, Joseph finds himself at the crossroads of ambition and morality. As powerful corporate forces close in and pressure mounts, he must wrestle with the ethical implications of discoveries that could reshape humanity forever. But the secrets buried within the program may prove far more dangerous than he ever imagined. Weaving together themes of scientific ambition, the quest for immortality, and the fragile line between progress and conscience, Donors is a thought-provoking thriller that will keep you turning pages until the very end. Awarded five stars by Readers’ Favorite, this is a must-read for fans of science fiction that dares to ask the hard questions.
A.B. Ruiz’s Donors is a science fiction thriller built around an irresistible idea: what happens when medicine gets so good at extending human life that the technology meant to save us begins forcing us to redefine what a human being actually is? In Ruiz’s future, replacement organs, gene therapies, body modifications, and dramatically longer lifespans are simply part of everyday life. At the center of it all is Pacific West Labs and its Donor program, which grows biological hosts capable of providing compatible organs on demand. It’s a fascinating world because the technology isn’t treated like window dressing. Ruiz follows its effects into relationships, business, politics, medicine, entertainment, class, and even the way people think about aging and death. That makes the setting feel authentic, and it gives the larger ethical questions real weight.
The heart of the story is Dr. Joseph Murray, the brilliant, socially awkward scientist responsible for pushing the Donor program into new territory. Joseph is particularly engaging because he approaches nearly everything as a problem that can be studied, measured, and solved. His certainty that Donors are biological tools rather than people gives the novel a strong starting point, especially as his research begins producing results that make that belief harder to maintain. Around him, Ruiz assembles a memorable group of characters with sharply different motives: the polished and calculating Steve Carvey, the guarded and highly capable Mia, the likable Adam, Joseph’s longtime colleagues Henry and Devon, and the increasingly dangerous General Strauss. Their competing loyalties turn a scientific breakthrough into something much larger, with corporate survival, military ambition, personal freedom, and human identity all tangled together.
I think one of the book’s smartest choices is its alternating “NOW” and “THEN” structure. Early on, the two timelines raise separate mysteries, but Ruiz keeps feeding the reader connections until names, experiments, relationships, and seemingly isolated events begin clicking into place. The result is a story that keeps changing the meaning of what came before. The Donors themselves evolve alongside the plot, moving from an abstract ethical question to something immediate and deeply personal. Ruiz also knows when to let the bigger ideas share space with action and humor. Lab disasters, covert operations, corporate maneuvering, shootouts, betrayals, and escapes keep the thriller moving, while Joseph’s literal-minded social awkwardness and the easy banter among the characters give the story some welcome humanity. By the time the different threads converge, the central question is no longer simply whether science can create life. It’s who gets to decide what that life belongs to.
What I liked most about Donors is the way its scientific premise becomes a story about identity and ownership of the self. A person may inherit DNA, memories, expectations, a job, a purpose, or even someone else’s ambitions, but Ruiz keeps bringing the story back to the choices made after that inheritance. The closing movement gives the novel’s earlier questions new emotional meaning, especially Joseph’s lifelong sense that he’s somehow separate from everyone around him. At the same time, the ending preserves the book’s wit and momentum, landing on friendship, belonging, and the possibility of choosing a life for yourself. Donors has the ideas of speculative science fiction, the machinery of a conspiracy thriller, and a surprisingly personal question beating underneath both: when everything about a human being can be engineered, what part of us is truly our own? Donors turns the science of creating life into something far more compelling: a gripping fight for the right to own the life you’ve been given.
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company follows a man who, after a devastating accident, receives an experimental computer interface and accidentally downloads his Linux computer directly into his consciousness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It’s the thing I would do. I have the photic sneeze effect that David has, and I thought, “Ok, what is the worst possible thing that could happen?” and then I made it happen. And before you ask me, yes, I would plug myself into my computer.
How do David’s extraordinary abilities change him as a person rather than simply making him more powerful?
At first, all he wanted was to rule the gaming world where he lives via his gaming console; then the upgrade/interfacing with Betsy allowed him to react with the outside world as they would with his games. Without worry of being made fun of due to his Asperger’s, giving him confidence through his newfound abilities.
Beneath its humor, the novel raises an enormous question: what would someone actually do if almost nothing were impossible for them? What interested you about exploring that idea?
Some would attempt to use the abilities for themselves and not for others, which is why I chose to explore the innocence and sarcasm of David’s life and help him create things to benefit others, which is his core persona.
The ending clearly leaves room for David, Betsy, Edith, and Harry to have more adventures. What possibilities excite you most about continuing their story?
Oh, the things they could do as a team. The Further Adventures of the Impossible 4 await, so get ready for more action and Impossible things. Albeit from the perspective of Edith and Harry.
What would you do if you could do anything? Talk to the animals maybe? Well I can become them. What about learning a new language or two? I download them into my brain. Or how about printing your own money? Me? I only borrowed $5,000 and went on a shopping spree and look where it landed me hey! Working for the president on above top secret missions that’s where! Now how is all this possible? Well, a single sneeze not only turned my world upside down, it turned me into a super hero. Able to gain WIFI access with a single thought, download operating manuals for any vehicle from land through sea to aircraft. all in a single thought. The possibilities are endless to me and Betsy. Who is Betsy, my other half (Literally the other half of me) my home supercomputer I ended up downloading into my skull. My name is David Vincent Gillespie, and this is a story of how I managed to bring down a multi billion dollar company with a single sneeze.
