Sunday, April 25, 2010

Title: Prey for Mercy

Author: AE Rought

Publisher: Lyrical Press, Inc. 2008

Killing is easy, almost better than sex.

I learned that lesson the night I became a vampire.

Any novel that starts with opening lines like this has my undivided attention. Prey for Mercy is a straight-up yarn about how vampire Mercy falls for human Chase, and the trouble they run into when Angel, a woman scorned, decides to stalk Mercy and gain retribution for perceived wrongs.

What I like about Rought’s vampires is that although they enjoy the perks of vampirism (immortality) they’re not as indestructible as the conventions would have us believe. This gives humans more than just a fighting chance in the battle with the undead which, in Rought’s milieu, also breathe and have beating hearts. Another refreshing aspect is that they’re not too hung up about what it is they do (killing people and drinking blood).

Although at times I felt I could have gained a better sense of how time passes in Prey for Mercy, the author still delivers a punch read that keeps the pages turning, with some blistering eroticism thrown in for good measure.

* * * *

Find AE Rought online: http://www.aerought.com/

* * * *

Toad welcomes F/SF/H authors who wish to place excerpts, poems, short stories or editorial. Alternatively, she’s more than happy to throw a few questions your way and put up an interview. If you’re keen for some shameless self-promotion, send an email to nerinedorman@gmail.com and place “Toad’s Corner” in the subject line. Nerine will pass on your message to Toad, who’d prefer to sit at the bottom of Nerine’s garden eating worms. Darn hoomanz hav to b good for somefink.

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Sunday, April 18, 2010

Graham Storrs' Timesplash



Graham Storrs is someone who thinks a lot about the future. It’s a place we’re all going, whether we like it or not, a place where we, our children and their children will have to deal with changes we can barely imagine. Some of us can’t wait to get there, to see what it’s like, and how we will cope. That’s why Graham writes science fiction―he wants to know what happens next in this amazing story we’re all living.

After a career in research and software design, Graham has turned his gaze firmly to the far horizons and now lives and writes on a remote mountain-top in rural Australia. Surrounded by gum forests and wild animals, he relies on his wife, Christine, and their Airedale terrier, Bertie, to keep him anchored in the present.

Today Graham shares an excerpt from his novel, Timesplash.


* * * *

The light, when it came, blasted away her thoughts. Light and sound, gravity and pressure, rushed in on her. Something enormous smashed into her from the side, crushing her shoulder, her hip, slamming into her head. If it hadn't been for the helmet...

Gasping, winded, she gaped at the great slab of green that had hit her, and her mind wheeled and lurched. It was the ground. It hadn’t hit her, she had hit it. She had fallen—not very far, thank goodness!—onto a huge empty pasture. Sniper was there, close by, already bounding to his feet and looking around. Patty pushed herself up, shakily, looking for the others. They were there too, about twenty metres away, also getting to their feet. Sniper took off his helmet and surveyed the area. Then with a few deft flicks of the catches, he threw off his harness and strode across the field to where Hal and T-800 were unfastening themselves.

Miserably, Patty struggled to her knees, bruised and shaken, and took off her helmet. Sniper hadn’t even glanced her way. She might have been dead for all he cared.

They were in a large field. It had a rough, agricultural look about it. Could it be the same manicured and planned parkland Patty had seen earlier in the day? There were no people about, but the big house, Eerde Castle, was clearly visible, just about where it ought to be. There was the sound of traffic somewhere—not the whine and rattle of normal traffic but the growl and roar of old-fashioned petrol engines. Even in the middle of a field, she could smell exhaust gasses.

She was back in the 1980s! For a moment the fact drove all resentment and misery from her mind. If the lob had gone as planned, they would be spatially close to where they had been lobbed from, but temporally shifted sixty-five years into the past. She tried to get a better look at the far-off mansion, but she couldn’t see anything different about it.

“Are you okay?” It was Hal, standing over her, offering her his big hand and smiling. She took his hand and stood up.

“Yes, I think so.” She rubbed her shoulder. “A bit bruised.”

Hal grinned. “You get used to that.” He stepped close to her. For a moment she thought he was going to try to kiss her, but instead he started opening her harness catches. “It’s all a bit of a shock at first. You’ll get your bearings in a minute.”

“Is this really the past?”

“It sure is. The twelfth of July, nineteen eighty-two.” He looked up at the sun. “About ten in the morning, at a guess.”

Sniper, arriving with T-800, looked coldly at Patty but addressed himself to Hal. “Stop fussing with her. She’ll be all right. We need you to get us to the house. We only get a few hours, you know.”

“Right,” Hal agreed. He and T-800 stuffed the harnesses into backpacks, and then he nodded across the field toward the castle. “The road’s that way.”

They picked up their helmets and set off. Patty limped a little from the pain in her hip, but everyone else seemed okay. No one spoke much, taking their cue from Sniper, which suited Patty just fine. She watched his broad back with growing resentment, trudging along in a sulk in which her own pains and grievances gradually overwhelmed any sense of wonder she might have felt at being back in the twentieth century.

In fact, Patty had seen enough old vids from this era for none of it to be very surprising, yet when they left the grounds of the castle and walked into the road, little things began to catch her attention, like the number of telegraph poles, the quaint, old-fashioned cars that made such an appalling racket, and the huge, colourful signs that seemed to be directions for drivers. More and more, the fact that she really was in the time of her grandparents impressed itself upon her.

“Hey, watch this,” Hal called to her. They were passing an abandoned pile of builder’s sand beside the road. He ran across the pile of sand, kicking it around as he went. Patty thought he was just showing off, like young men often did around her, but then she noticed what was happening to the sand in his wake. It seemed to be jumping, vibrating, squirming. She screwed shut her eyes and looked again, as if they were the source of the strange blurriness she saw. Hal stopped at the far side of the pile and looked back at it proudly. With strange shifts of colour and position, the deep prints of his feet were slowly being erased. The weird, shifting of shape and colour spread briefly to the road surface around the heap, causing Patty to jump back in alarm as the effect rippled out toward her feet. In thirty dizzying seconds, the pile restored itself.

“Now do you believe we’re back in time?” Hal shouted.

“Stop pissing about,” Sniper snapped.

Hal gave Patty a grin and turned back to the road. Patty stared for a long time at the sand. It was a small splash, she realised. The little anomaly that Hal had caused—disturbing a pile of sand that should never have been disturbed—had righted itself. But for those few seconds before the restoration was complete, there had been a shake-up in spacetime around the sandpile. Causality had been thrown into disarray and it had taken a while for it to settle back to how it should have been.

She set off again, hurrying to catch up with the others, noticing for the first time that their footsteps left faint, blurry marks on the road that quickly faded behind them.

* * * *

See http://www.lyricalpress.com/timesplash

* * * *

Toad welcomes F/SF/H authors who wish to place excerpts, poems, short stories or editorial. Alternatively, she’s more than happy to throw a few questions your way and put up an interview. If you’re keen for some shameless self-promotion, send an email to nerinedorman@gmail.com and place “Toad’s Corner” in the subject line. Nerine will pass on your message to Toad, who’d prefer to sit at the bottom of Nerine’s garden eating worms. Darn hoomanz hav to b good for somefink.

If you wish to receive monthly updates from Toad, sign up at her FB group at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=106836496003074#!/group.php?gid=106836496003074&ref=ts

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Review: Nebula's Music

Title: Nebula’s Music

Author: Aubrie Dionne

Publisher: Lyrical Press, Inc. 2009

Each note brings her one step closer to the truth.

When the cyborg Nebula plays the piano she experiences memories from a time before her creation. These memories—which involve a captive rebel fighter being held on their ship—bring with them complex human feelings and awaken a desire for her to discover her origins.

Radian is the long-lost love of the woman from which Nebula was made. He’s vowed to avenge his fiancé’s death and rescue her sister from the Gryphonites, a fierce race out to enslave the galaxy.

Nebula grapples with her identity and how much of who she is comes from someone else’s past. She is not the woman that died, yet she is undeniably drawn to Radian. Together Nebula and Radian seek to rescue his fiancé’s sister and end the Gryphonites’ cruel reign. But can Radian learn to love again and can Nebula accept a past made from someone else’s memories?

When I think cyborgs I tend to think along the lines of Data of Star Trek fame, so I was quite unprepared for author Dionne’s interpretation of an age-old theme. It took me a while to get used to the idea of a cyborg that had so many human attributes but, without dropping a spoiler into the works, I was satisfied by the author’s explanation at the end of the novel.

This story plays on the standard trope based on Azimov’s robotic laws, but brings into the equation also the question of what constitutes life. Although the scope of this work is not such that it is going to go into the nitty-gritty of artificial intelligence, it does touch on an intelligence coming to terms with the issues of its origins.

The core of Nebula’s Music is a love story, of a romance that will transcend the bounds of what would be considered ordinary for that milieu. Nebula has to face the memories of the woman who was her origin and it is her acceptance of her own uniqueness despite this start in awareness that is the crux of the story, when she has to find a way to balance her sense of duty to those she has been programmed to serve while finding closure with her own issues.

I enjoyed Nebula’s journey, which was both one of self-discovery and that of rescue. The Gryphonites as antagonists were an interesting departure from some of the alien life forms I have encountered, although I would have liked to have seen more of their culture so they weren’t merely cast as the antagonists in this story.

I would have liked to have seen the try/fail cycle pushed a little harder with this tale. I felt the protagonists’ success against the enemy went off a bit too effortlessly but overall, the writing is slick and concise.

What added depth to this tale was definitely the all too-human flashbacks Nebula suffered, which kept me wondering about the true nature of the cyborgs in this milieu and what made them more human than the others I’ve encountered in other settings.

If you like narrative-driven space opera romances, Nebula’s Music will definitely deliver the kind of story that will keep the pages turning.

See: www.lyricalpress.com/nebulas_music

* * * *

Toad welcomes F/SF/H authors who wish to place excerpts, poems, short stories or editorial. Alternatively, she’s more than happy to throw a few questions your way and put up an interview. If you’re keen for some shameless self-promotion, send an email to nerinedorman@gmail.com and place “Toad’s Corner” in the subject line. Nerine will pass on your message to Toad, who’d prefer to sit at the bottom of Nerine’s garden eating worms. Darn hoomanz hav to b good for somefink.

If you wish to receive monthly updates from Toad, sign up at her FB group at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=106836496003074#!/group.php?gid=106836496003074&ref=ts

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Natasha Bennett's Ouroboros



This week Toad welcomes Natasha Bennett to her corner, to share an excerpt from her science fiction novel, Ouroboros, book two in her War of the Soulites series (Lyrical Press, Inc.)

Ever since she was a child, Natasha Bennett has been writing fiction, usually during school when she should have been listening to teachers. A fan of both science fiction and horror, she has a fascination with human psychology, often believing that a set of extreme circumstances can create a hero or a villain within a day.

When she's not writing, Natasha likes to spend her time designing web sites and watching horror films. She lives in Victoria, BC with her fiancé and two cats.

* * * *

Renolds looked at the view screen, and what he saw astonished him. There were hundreds of ships just floating in the graveyard, most having designs he had never seen before. One ship was a circle and nothing else. Another was pink, with red lights dancing over its hull. Some of the ships appeared intact. Others were just exoskeletons.

“It’s amazing that no one has discovered this weapon,” Renolds said.

“Actually, it seems pretty easy,” Jasper remarked. “Look at these ships! Some of them are far more impressive than the Vigilant, and those are the ones that were stripped right away. They hid Ouroboros in plain sight.”

Hannah looked down at the controls as a beeping alerted her. “Captain, one ship approaching. Very fast.”

Renolds turned around and saw a ship flying toward them. It was very small, practically the size of one of their shuttles. “Hail them.”

Hannah obliged. The face of a hairless alien came up on the screen, blue-skinned and with a face similar to an elephant. Blue smoke covered the alien bridge, obscuring its features.

“Waalaa!” the alien shouted, waving its stubby arms. “Waalaa!”

There was a brilliant flash of light, blinding the bridge crew. Then the words, signal lost flashed across the screen.

“The ship has been destroyed,” Hannah reported.

“By who?”

“Not sure. I’m reading three more ships approaching.”

“On screen,” Renolds ordered and the image of three cruisers appeared. They were considerably bigger than the ship that was just annihilated.

“Getting a message,” Hannah said.

“Let’s hear it.”

A muscular man with thinning black hair appeared on the screen. He was wearing an outfit made of what appeared to be some kind of blue leather. On his neck was a dab of blood. “Dramos Clain?” he asked with a trace of sarcasm in his voice.

Renolds shook his head. “What? What does that mean?”

“G’uck B’ulen?” the man asked with a strange clucking noise. He frowned. “English? I never thought I would have to speak that language again!”

Renolds opened his mouth. “I’m—”

“Unimportant, that’s who you are,” the man said. “My name is Ajalan, and this is Bocca territory. If you don’t leave now, I will be the last thing you ever see. We’ve already scanned your vessel. It’s on the brink of collapse, with nothing worth scavenging. You saw that other vessel that was destroyed? You don’t want to end up like them, do you?”

Jasper swallowed. “Wait...aren’t you cannibals? Don’t you want to eat us?”

Renolds suddenly remembered the story Rilek told him, and his stomach clenched.

Ajalan smirked. “You’re not exactly delectable. We’ll pass, thanks.”

“Wait! You know about the Soulites, right?”

“Heard of them,” the Bocca Captain said with a shrug. “So?”

“In this junkyard, there’s a weapon that can destroy them,” Renolds said. “Let me retrieve it, and I can save both our races.”

“On a broken ship? Somehow I’m not reassured,” Ajalan said. “Where is this weapon?”

Jasper shook his head frantically. Renolds was way ahead of him. “Sorry, but that’s privileged information.

A blond-haired woman stepped up and whispered something in Ajalan’s ear. He grinned at her, then nipped her neck playfully with his teeth. Finally, his green eyes regarded Renolds. “You might have a point, Captain. Here’s my proposal. We’ll send over an ambassador to show you what we can offer for this information.”

“I’m not sure if you have anything we want,” Renolds retorted.

“Don’t be so sure. We are far more than scavengers, Captain. Most of us are scientists. We have access to equipment and technology you can only dream of.”

“Fine,” Renolds agreed reluctantly. “Send your ambassador. I promise they won’t come to any harm.”

Without waiting for a reply, Ajalan shut off the transmission, switching back to Soulite space.

“This might be a waste of time,” Jasper remarked.

“If it stalls them from trying to blow us up, I don’t mind,” Renolds said.

****

After summoning Carl to replace them, he and Jasper left the bridge. Neilson joined them at the loading bay as a small blue shuttle landed. It didn’t appear very different from one of their own shuttles. They waited while the engine turned off, then waited another ten minutes.

“Why isn’t the ambassador coming out?” Jasper asked.

Renolds frowned. “Maybe he’s waiting for us to come in.”

Concerned, Neilson took out his medical scanner.

“Life signs?” Renolds asked.

“Yes—no,” Neilson said.

Jasper raised his eyebrow. “Yes or no? Which one is it?” When Neilson didn’t reply, he stepped forward. “I’m going in—”

“Wait,” Neilson commanded. His tone made Jasper stop.

“What is it?” Renolds asked.

“I’m reading pathogens. Fifty of them, most deadly.”

“Contagious?” Renolds asked, feeling his blood drop by a few degrees.

“Airborn,” Neilson replied. “The shuttle’s sealed tight. So far they haven’t escaped.”

“Yeah, for now,” Jasper said, panic in his voice. “Who knows how long before that door opens?”

Even as he spoke, a beeping started from the shuttle.

* * * *

For further information, go check out Natasha’s website at http://www.warofthesoulites.com and her blog at http://www.tashabennett.blogspot.com

* * * *

Toad welcomes F/SF/H authors who wish to place excerpts, poems, short stories or editorial. Alternatively, she’s more than happy to throw a few questions your way and put up an interview. If you’re keen for some shameless self-promotion, send an email to nerinedorman@gmail.com and place “Toad’s Corner” in the subject line. Nerine will pass on your message to Toad, who’d prefer to sit at the bottom of Nerine’s garden eating worms. Darn hoomanz hav to b good for somefink.

If you wish to receive monthly updates from Toad, sign up at her FB group at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=106836496003074#!/group.php?gid=106836496003074&ref=ts