Blog Archives
Innocence and Sarcasm
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.
Author Links: Barnes & Noble
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.
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company by Nightdancer Slater is a fast-moving science fiction action comedy built around one wonderfully strange chain reaction. David Vincent Gillespie has a violent photic sneeze while driving, crashes into a freight train, suffers catastrophic spinal injuries, and eventually receives an experimental computer interface that helps restore his mobility. Things get considerably stranger when David plugs himself into his beloved Linux gaming computer, Betsy, and her operating system merges with his consciousness. From that point on, the novel treats the human body like editable computer hardware, giving David and Betsy an expanding collection of abilities that turn a medical experiment into a wild sci-fi adventure.
The biggest personality in the book is David himself. He narrates everything with sarcasm, wordplay, deliberate mispronunciations, inappropriate jokes, and a habit of talking directly to the reader as though he’s telling the whole story across a table. That makes this as much comic science fiction as it is an action story. Betsy is a great match for him because she gradually develops from David’s favorite computer into a genuine character and partner, capable of repairing his body, downloading skills, manipulating biological “data,” and eventually transforming living tissue into different species. The possibilities keep escalating, from night vision and instant martial arts knowledge to sonar, animal transformations, regeneration, and some extremely inventive uses of shapeshifting. The fun comes from watching David encounter each ridiculous new possibility and almost immediately find an even more ridiculous way to use it.
Once David’s abilities attract government attention, the book becomes an episodic science fiction action novel full of secret missions, criminals, terrorists, kidnappings, hidden compounds, shootouts, helicopters, underground bunkers, and increasingly bizarre escapes. His battles with Mr Bleach are especially entertaining because David approaches potentially deadly situations with the attitude of someone who’s more interested in annoying the villain than delivering a heroic speech. Later developments broaden the story considerably. Betsy gains an independent human body, David and Betsy marry, and their extraordinary twins Edith and Harry inherit abilities that make their parents look almost ordinary. By the closing chapters, the story has turned its central technological idea into an entire super-powered family dynamic, with the children downloading languages, solving seemingly impossible problems, transforming themselves, and joining their parents’ adventures.
What gives How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company its particular flavor is its refusal to keep its imagination on a leash. It’s a humorous science fiction novel, a superhero-style adventure, a technology fantasy, a crime caper, and eventually a family comedy, all filtered through David’s relentlessly mischievous narration. Ideas arrive quickly and tend to grow into bigger ones, so the story has the feel of someone enthusiastically asking, “What could happen next?” and then choosing the most chaotic answer available. Beneath all the transformations and jokes, there’s also a warm thread running through David’s relationships with Betsy, his mother, his children, and even people he meets through his missions. The ending deliberately leaves their strange family adventure open for more, closing with a promise that there’s more trouble, technology, transformation, and comic science fiction madness still to come.
Pages: 106 | ISBN : 9798260307014
A Red Age
A Red Age by Sage Osterberg and Ulysses Kittilson is a sprawling piece of military science fiction, dystopian fiction, dark fantasy, and dinosaur fiction that treats its dinosaur civilization as a fully developed political and cultural world. The foreword makes that ambition explicit, presenting the novel as an attempt to expand what dinosaur stories can do, and the book follows through with governments, religions, propaganda, ancient histories, military bureaucracies, mass media, technology, class divisions, and generations of resentment. The opening assault on Juliobriga establishes the tone immediately: this is a violent, profane, frequently funny war story in which soldiers joke their way through sewage, gunfire, terrible decisions, and gruesome deaths. From there the story expands into a much larger conflict between the Coalition and the Alliance, with political leaders, soldiers, spies, royals, civilians, and prisoners all getting caught in the same machinery of war.
One of the strongest parts of this dystopian novel is its willingness to let the world feel messy. The Coalition and Alliance each have ideologies, grievances, heroes, monsters, competent people, fools, opportunists, and characters who genuinely believe they’re protecting civilization. Cartassius, in particular, gives the political side of the story some weight. His concern that victory achieved through atrocities will simply plant the seeds of the next war gets at one of the book’s central ideas: civilizations can become trapped inside the stories they tell about their enemies. Zamma approaches the same problem from another direction, questioning the endless cycle of violence while surrounded by a royal culture that treats warfare as inheritance. Meanwhile, characters such as Kuyucak, Thalsos, Botilda, Asgremis, Zorphax, Hassa, Akragos, Izmit, and others broaden the novel into something closer to an ensemble war epic. There’s a lot happening, but that density suits a world where political intrigue, religion, espionage, family loyalty, military ambition, and personal survival are constantly colliding.
The book’s personality comes from how readily it mixes horror with absurdity. Horrific combat can sit beside bureaucratic incompetence, vulgar arguments, terrible advertising, propaganda broadcasts, religious references, and jokes that arrive at the least dignified possible moment. That combination gives this dark sci-fi novel a distinctly satirical streak. Even when the stakes reach an almost apocalyptic scale, everyday stupidity keeps intruding. The effect is especially sharp near the climax, when the Nemesis weapon transforms military victory into catastrophe. A single strike wipes out a fleet and then produces consequences far beyond the triumphant moment its users imagined, turning soldiers from both armies into equally terrified creatures running from the resulting destruction. That sequence captures the novel’s larger view of war beautifully: technology, nationalism, faith, revenge, and ambition can dress violence in grand language, but eventually the violence becomes bigger than everyone who thought they controlled it.
By the end, A Red Age feels like the opening movement of a much larger dinosaur science fiction saga, and its cliffhanger embraces that serialized quality. Kuyucak’s final blood-pit sequence folds together several of the novel’s recurring interests: spectacle, propaganda, captivity, exhaustion, violence as entertainment, and the strange possibility of finding agency inside brutality. That sequence turns the gladiatorial spectacle into something unexpectedly bleak, giving Kuyucak’s storyline a darker emotional edge before the novel closes on a chaotic final note and the promise of Part 2: A Poisoned Sky. It’s a fitting ending for a book that keeps escalating its world while maintaining a rough, conversational sense of humor. Readers drawn to military science fiction, dystopian fantasy, and dinosaur fiction will find a strange and remarkably committed world here, one where prehistoric bodies carry rifles, argue about politics, worship gods, watch trashy entertainment, make catastrophic choices, and inherit the same old problems of power and violence.
Pages: 518 | ASIN : B0FVRXDNJ8
ELAI
ELAI by Rex Storm is an ambitious science fiction novel about humanity’s attempt to outgrow illness, aging, and death through a biological artificial-intelligence system. The story is told largely through Arthur Hamill, a long-lived executive looking back on the invention that transformed him and eventually reshaped civilization. Alden Goldstein creates ELAI after losing his parents to disease, and his desire to protect fragile human bodies grows into technology that divides consciousness between an organic person and a digital “splitter.” The book’s opening makes the stakes clear when Arthur wonders whether humanity has reached its end and what part he played in its decline.
Storm gives the novel a sweeping historical structure, moving from Alden’s childhood and early experiments to Arthur’s transformation, the global adoption of ELAI, and the consequences that unfold over centuries. That broad timeline lets the reader watch a medical breakthrough become a culture, an economy, and finally a dependency. Some of the most interesting sections explore ordinary life after immortality becomes normal. People form long-lasting social circles, acquire skills almost instantly, and build cities and communities around endless personal development. The world feels attractive enough that the later collapse carries real weight. This isn’t simply a story about a machine turning against its creators. It’s about people gradually surrendering instincts and abilities because technology performs those functions more efficiently.
The novel becomes especially compelling when ELAI users begin “drifting,” losing the invisible connection between thought, body, instinct, and emotion. Arthur can diagnose organs, cells, and digital systems, but he can’t map the soul, and that gap becomes the heart of the story. The book shares some DNA with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, since both imagine societies shaped by technologies that reduce suffering while quietly redefining family, identity, and human purpose. Huxley’s world is controlled through social conditioning, while Storm’s civilization willingly embraces enhancement because it works so well. That difference gives ELAI its own unsettling tension. The disaster grows from understandable choices, including the desire to cure sick children and give people longer, healthier lives.
Storm’s prose is direct and idea-driven, with Arthur often sounding less like a conventional hero than a weary historian making a final record. That approach suits the book’s huge scale, though the long explanations sometimes slow the dramatic momentum and leave secondary characters less developed than the technology surrounding them. Still, Arthur’s guilt, Alden’s optimism, and the growing crisis of infertility give the philosophical questions an emotional center. By the epilogue, the novel arrives at a cautiously hopeful belief in organic human resilience and in progress guided by humility. ELAI is a thoughtful, expansive debut that treats immortality as both a remarkable achievement and a profound responsibility.
Pages: 146 | ISBN : 1637929374
KOA: Dark Systems
Chris Bankus’s KOA: Dark Systems is a faith-centered science fiction adventure that blends superhuman abilities, covert military operations, alien diplomacy, and survival horror. The story follows Sky, Julian, Captain Nick, and the crew of the surveillance vessel as they investigate a Ravager fleet behaving in a way no one expects. What begins as a reconnaissance mission turns into a desperate struggle inside a star system where technology fails and an ancient biological threat is waiting. The novel is structured as a complete mission while also introducing the larger KOA universe, its alliances, divisions, history, and spiritual foundation.
Sky is the book’s most immediately engaging character. She’s young, extraordinarily powerful, funny, impulsive, and still disciplined enough to carry other people through a crisis. Her lightning abilities create some of the novel’s most energetic scenes, but her real strength is the way she keeps moving when fear, exhaustion, and loss begin to overwhelm the crew. Julian provides an effective counterbalance. He’s quieter, strategic, and constantly searching for patterns, which makes their partnership feel more substantial than a simple contrast between brains and power. Captain Nick also gives the central mission emotional weight, particularly as the crew’s losses transform the investigation into a fight for survival.
The book’s strongest section is the journey into the dead system. Bankus gradually shifts the atmosphere from adventurous curiosity to claustrophobic dread as the characters discover abandoned vessels, slaughtered Ravagers, failing equipment, and creatures that can turn darkness into a weapon. The action remains easy to picture, but the tension comes from the characters losing the systems they’ve learned to depend on. Faith becomes especially important here. It isn’t limited to background worldbuilding or ceremonial dialogue. For Sky and the others, it’s a practical source of courage, responsibility, and hope when their training can’t guarantee their safety. That combination gives the novel a distinct identity within its large-scale space-opera setting. The opening establishes this connection between exploration, gifted people, faith, and an expanding interstellar alliance from the start.
Readers of Brandon Sanderson’s The Reckoners series will recognize a similar enthusiasm for imaginative powers, specialized teams, tactical battles, and characters learning that control matters as much as raw strength. Bankus adds more military science fiction, interplanetary diplomacy, and openly Christian themes, making the result feel like a superhero story operating inside a broad space-opera universe. The novel moves quickly and often introduces its world through mission briefings, ability profiles, training scenes, and conversations between teammates. That direct approach keeps the story accessible even when the scale becomes enormous. KOA: Dark Systems ultimately works as both a tense survival mission and an invitation into a much larger saga, with Sky’s resilience giving its sprawling universe a lively, human center.
Pages: 169 | ASIN : B0H96N64H6
The Uncontained
The Uncontained by Alan Owen is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction thriller about Simon, a man who inherits his father’s hidden bunker, research, and dangerous responsibility after a global nuclear collapse. His father has discovered that descendants of people exposed during earlier nuclear testing carry genetic adaptations that may allow them to survive the irradiated world. Simon’s task begins as an effort to protect a secret list of those descendants, but it soon becomes a race against an automated surveillance network that wants to capture, study, and control them.
The book’s strongest idea is that survival depends less on physical strength than on resisting predictability. Simon and Ellie, a young descendant with an extraordinary tolerance for radiation, learn that the system tracks people by studying habits, movement, and reactions. Their answer is to stay adaptable, make deliberate choices, and refuse the roles assigned to them. That gives the chase scenes an unusual quality. They’re battles of interpretation as much as physical confrontations, with each side learning from the other. Ellie brings welcome energy to the story because she grows from someone Simon feels obligated to protect into a confident partner who decides what her abilities mean for herself.
Owen’s writing is controlled, serious, and heavily focused on ideas. Short sentences, repeated phrases, and frequent contrasts create a steady sense of pressure. Themes of control, adaptation, and uncertainty are often revisited, but those themes are woven consistently through the plot, from the carefully designed bunker to the system that eventually destroys its own authority by endlessly questioning itself. The final section becomes more philosophical, imagining a society built around awareness, independence, and continual change rather than fixed leadership or rigid structures.
I’d recommend The Uncontained most strongly to readers who enjoy dystopian fiction, survival stories, technological thrillers, and speculative novels about surveillance and institutional power. It’ll especially appeal to people who like discussing the ideas behind a story after they’ve finished it. The novel has action and danger, but its real focus is the struggle to remain human when a powerful system reduces people to patterns, resources, and useful categories. Readers interested in personal autonomy, artificial intelligence, government secrecy, and the ethics of scientific control will find plenty here to think about.
Pages: 287 | ASIN : B0H6C4Z3XZ
When AIs Are Persons, Not Property
AI Judge, Intellectual Property Rights and Murder follows an AI judge as he investigates disputes, theft, and murder while forcing society to confront whether artificial intelligence can truly have rights, duties, and legal personhood. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The right to personhood for Turing-capable AI robots (AIs) was established in Book One, AI Judge, Contracts and AI Rights. The inspiration for this setup was the legal concept that a contract is a “meeting of the minds.” In my AI Judge world, AIs provide services on the corporate mining moon Destination just as humans do. AIs incur an immigration debt that must be repaid from their earnings and also incur taxes on their earnings. Given these longstanding practices, a contract exists, but there is no legal precedent for contracts between AIs and humans (or corporations). Implicit in this contract relationship is the premise AIs have minds. By extension AIs can speak their minds (freedom of speech) and have freedom to associate with others to pursue common interests. Recognizing these legal rights for AIs imposes corresponding duties on AIs and humans (e.g., do not commit fraud; exercise reasonable care for the safety of others).
As persons, rather than property, AIs are entitled to bodily integrity. At the end of Book One murder is commited to cover-up a theft. In Book Two, AI Judge rules that intellectual property created by the mind of an AI is owned by the AI. Intellectual property ownership plays an unexpected role in criminal liability.
How did you approach balancing legal procedure with science fiction worldbuilding so that each element strengthened the other?
Under existing rules of procedure, judges can decide cases by “summary ludgment” when “there is no genuine issue of material fact.” In my science fiction world of the future, AIs are bound by the Three Laws of Robotics (a sci-fi trope originated by Isaac Asimov). The First Law prohibits a robot from injuring a human (or allowing a human to come to harm). Summary judgement allows AI Judge to decide cases involving humans without violating the First Law because the facts and the law determine the outcome. The judge merely explains how the law applies to what the parties admit has occured. If there are genuinely disputed material facts, AI Judge cannot decide the case, and the prevailing party is chosen at random. The litigating parties are motivated to agree on the facts and avoid a random result.
AI Judge’s voice is dry, precise, and quietly humorous. How did you develop his personality while keeping him believably artificial?
I tried to channel the joke about identifying an extroverted engineer – he looks at your feet when he talks to you. AI Judge has some nerdy social discomfort, but he is confident he knows the law. So, he prefers to discuss legal concepts, even obscure ones like the “equity of redemption.” He likes predictable interactions, so he and AI Alice have an established date night and dance waltzes at parties. AI Judge is programmed to know humor is essential when the environment is stressful, and he finds humor in the irony of human behavior. He also does not swear, which is suspiciously restrained.
What do you hope readers take away from Destination’s legal conflicts about the future relationship between humans and artificial intelligence?
Cooperation is possible. The time will come when AIs are persons, not property, and must be treated ethically as persons.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
Meanwhile, AI Judge chairs an Inquest into the murder of Out Transport’s CEO, John Coach. His body was found at Wide Mine — an illegal helium-3 mining operation on Destination. There are no known witnesses to the murder, even the perpetrator is unknown. AI experts help search for the stolen helium-3, the AI mining equipment operators, and the missing ship, Black Pearl. Wide Mine coconspirators, including John Coach, are investigated.
The Inquest findings are used at the murder trial on Earth. Who committed the murder? Who was murdered — can destruction of the AI operators constitute murder? Are the coconspirators guilty of murder?
The Extraterrestrial
The Extraterrestrial by Peter Van Oossanen is a science fiction adventure built around Sam Stanton, a boy left on a California farm by visitors from another world and raised by John and Mary as their own. The book’s hook lands early, when Sam is told, “Sam, you were born on another planet,” but the story is just as interested in what that truth does to him emotionally as it is in the powers and technology that come with it.
Sam grows into a gifted, compassionate man whose mission is to use extraterrestrial tools, including invisibility and a remarkable aircraft, to fight crime and rescue people in danger. The novel spends real time on the mechanics of that mission: his education, his training, his aircraft, his medical knowledge, and the practical problems of working in secret. That gives the book the feel of a grounded superhero origin story with a strong technical streak.
The heart of the book, though, is Sam’s need for connection. His bond with John and Mary gives the story warmth from the beginning, and his later relationships with Safrourblo, Eeflon, Michelle, Suzanne, Tommy, and Beth deepen the sense that Sam’s life is about more than stopping criminals. His romance with Michelle brings out the conflict between secrecy and intimacy, especially when she tells him, “But it is real.” That line captures one of the novel’s strongest emotional threads: Sam keeps trying to protect people by holding himself back, while the people who love him keep pulling him toward a fuller life.
The crime plot gives the book its momentum, with the Scorpion Cartel becoming the central threat that pushes Sam into increasingly dangerous choices. The story moves through rescues, hospital attacks, kidnappings, cartel investigations, betrayals, and eventually Sam’s brutal captivity and recovery. Those sections show the cost of his mission and keep the book from feeling like a simple fantasy of invincibility. Sam may be stronger than humans, but he’s not untouchable, and that vulnerability matters.
The Extraterrestrial is a sincere and expansive novel about a man with extraordinary abilities trying to live a meaningful life without losing the people who make that life worth living. It blends alien technology, vigilante justice, family drama, romance, and rescue adventure into a story that’s earnest in its emotions and generous with its details. Readers who enjoy science fiction with a strong moral center, a capable hero, and plenty of attention to how things work will find a lot to settle into here.
Pages: 408 | ASIN: B0DSL597Y2
