Posts

Showing posts from February, 2025

Small Spec Book Awards

Image
 I am pleased to announce that I am an official influencer for the Small Spec Book Awards!  What are the Small Spec Book Awards (SSBA)? The SSBA was co-founded by L. N. Holmes and Millie Abecassis . Their mission is to recognize and promote independent and small press authors writing exceptional speculative fiction.They wanted to create a free-to-enter award that was specific to small press and independent authors whose marketing often gets buried by the bigger publishers. This award will help draw attention to more of the awesome indie books out there. This is the first year of the award and currently, the award focuses on the adult age category, novels/novellas, and works of fiction published in a single year, but they hope to expand on this in future years. There are many things that make this award cool, but a couple of them are that it is free to enter, and they are working to avoid being yet another popularity contest, as so many awards are. All the nominated books wi...

Spin and Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

Image
Today, I'm bringing you two old reviews I wrote years ago. I posted them to Goodreads in the fall of 2016, but I read the books before that. These are the first two of a series, and for reasons I don't remember now, I did not review the third book. I know that I adored the first book, but my love diminished over the series.   Review #1: Spin   I loved this book. Just flat out loved it. Sci-fi isn't usually my thing, as I get confused by the hard core sciencey parts - which I did here - but it took nothing away from the book. The premise is that a strange membrane has surrounded the earth and hidden the stars. Outside of the membrane time moves much faster than on earth - like millions of years vs. a year Earth's time. It's kind of like outside the Earth is Narnia, but with fewer divine lions. People start to call it the "Spin", hence the title. The problem with the Spin is that with time moving as it is, instead of the death of the sun taking billions of y...