The Warbler Books

Featured Author: Richard Slay

May 3, 2016 No Comments

Today’s author, Richard Slay, has one of the most exciting book summaries I’ve read in a long while. If The Upture delivers on these promises, this will undoubtedly be one of my top books of the year—whenever it’s released. About The Upture: With its cities flooding and its military in retreat, the ordinary people of near-future America look content to stay at home, working menial jobs made tolerable by masking them in virtual-reality fantasies. One of those is Walt Hrka, Army drone operator turned plumber. But his former commander, the terminally ill Colonel Lasker, has hatched a plan to put America back on top, by staging the Second Coming of Christ on the Internet where everyone believes anything. When millions of trustworthy Christians are electrocuted at their VR terminals and then resurrected online, Hrka joins a bizarre alliance with everyone from Chinese tech merchants to the Swiss Guard, in a desperate struggle

Featured Author: E.S. Evan

May 2, 2016 No Comments

Phew. After a hectic few weeks preparing for a move, then moving, and filling a house to the brim with boxes of books, I’m ready to get back to featuring books. Today’s featured author, E.S. Evan, takes us into paleontological digs and murder. I want to read Pirates of Montana! Follow along with E.S. and the book on Twitter and Facebook. About Pirates of Montana: The Pirates of Montana is the coming of age story of Molly Tanner, a 15-year-old woman who travels to Montana, USA to learn about the intricacies of finding, excavating, and preparing dinosaur specimens for academia to study and to captivate the masses. This trip is an amazing opportunity for Molly: she will work closely with one of the world’s most famous paleontologists, learn the ins–and-outs of dinosaur hunting from his team of specialists and graduate students, all the while making connections and friendships that will last a lifetime. For a

Featured Author: Erin Butler

April 27, 2016 No Comments

With the end of the Geek and Sundry Hard Science contest on Inkshares a few weeks away, there’s still time to feature more entrants! Today we feature Erin Butler’s Farm Boy. About Farm Boy: Farm Boy is the story of… hm. This is a bit awkward, really. The many final days of a clone, or clones. Finding the right pronouns is a bit tricky: normally I’d describe it as having multiple protagonists, but it is the same person who has been cloned and is force-grown inside an institution built for that purpose. As events outside the institution occur, how many would directly affect the life of the people being fought over, and to what end? I was raised on a farm myself, and as such I considered not just where my food came from but also what the life of the animals was like. To me, there was The Bargain: we

Chariots of the Gods — Erich von Daniken

April 26, 2016 No Comments

Several years ago, while working at PlayStation, I was introduced to the most compelling evidence I have ever seen for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. That there is extraterrestrial life is, to me, a given. That there is intelligent extraterrestrial life also strikes me as true, it not because of statistical likelihood, then certainly because of the aforementioned evidence. That evidence came in the form of a four hour documentary called “The Disclosure Project,” in which people who are trained observers — pilots, control tower operators, radar technicians… Mainly military and paramilitary personnel — soberly talk about their experiences with UFOs and other phenomena. I’m not asking you to watch all four hours of it, but I encourage you to check it out. It might blow your mind a little bit. “The Disclosure Project” started me down the rabbit hole of research into extraterrestrials. The issue is that the “good

Featured Author: Ronald Valle

April 21, 2016 No Comments

Let’s get back to some great books you should be checking out in the Inkshares / Geek & Sundry contest. Today, Ron Valle‘s We Clocked the T-Rex. It looks to be like the end-game speculation of Jurassic Park; fascinating, creepy, and not your standard hard sci-fi. About We Clocked the T-Rex: It’s the near-future and the dark forces of secret science and big money are preparing to engineer the world’s First De-Extinction Event. With her life’s work, countless species, and modern civilization on the line, Vee Whelan aims to stop them – but what’s so evil about a scientific miracle? We Clocked the T-Rex is a paranoid speculative adventure that takes the scientific gene editing and cloning techniques at our disposal today and asks, can’t we use these to make right all that we’ve made wrong about the natural world? Q: What part of your novel’s world excites you most? A: For this novel

Asteroid Made of Dragons – G. Derek Adams

April 20, 2016 3 Comments

It is obvious that G. Derek Adams, author of Asteroid Made of Dragons, understands the trappings and tropes of fantasy backwards and forwards. It is also obvious that he has tremendous love for the genre because (and in spite) of its cheesier clichés and frequent absurdities. I’m not getting down on fantasy here. Long time readers of the Warbler know that I, too, love fantasy well, even if my interest waned of late. Adams’s book was the perfect supplement to A Crucible of Souls—a book that took itself very seriously—in reinvigorating my love of fantasy. Asteroid Made of Dragons is a self-aware, funny, and action-packed novel that is basically a Dungeons and Dragons adventure in delicious prose. It is absurd and delightful, with a great cast of characters, fun set pieces, and suffused with a larger-than-fantasy-life essence that punctuates every page of the book. It also happens to be the third book

Featured Author: Landon Trine

April 18, 2016 No Comments

Happy Monday, dear readers! The featured author series continues, this time with Landon Trine, author of First on Mars, another entrant in the Geek and Sundry hard sci-fi contest. This book sounds awesome; I highly recommend checking it out. Landon can be found on the web on Twitter (@landontrine) and Facebook. About First on Mars: A diverse group of seven NASA astronauts are chosen for the first crewed expedition to the red planet: Kurt, Norbite, Kara, Rin, Aditya, Anesh, and Akshara. For some unknown reason, Aditya tries to sabotage the ship and then kills himself, leaving a trail of frightening implications with no time to investigate. China has launched its own mission to Mars in an attempt to claim territory and other countries are not far behind. Events back on Earth and on Mars complicate and raise the stakes of their mission. The team needs to work together to survive the unforgiving

Featured Author: Peter Ryan

April 15, 2016 1 Comment

Periodically, a book will come around that deserves some additional attention. While this one is not in the Geek & Sundry competition, it’s got eleven days remaining in its campaign. Time being of the essence, I felt it prudent to weave it in with this batch of featured author posts. Take a look at Peter Ryan‘s Sync City. About Sync City: Armed, surly and vulgar. Jack Trevayne is humanity’s best hope for the future. Just don’t tell him. Sync City is the first part of the Sync City cycle, a story set on Earth in a dystopian past, present and future. Jack Trevayne is a Keeper, a blunt, no-nonsense enforcer for a group of pacifist post-humans known as the Deacons. Jack’s responsibilities, with the help of his sentient motorbike and sometimes partner Vic, are to keep the timelines clean and protect humanity by killing the War Clans and the Scythers. He also doesn’t mind

A Crucible of Souls – Mitchell Hogan

April 14, 2016 No Comments

When the prologue of A Crucible of Souls started to play, I noticed a few interesting things happen simultaneously. First, I recognized instantaneously that the reader, Oliver Wyman, would be fantastic. Second, I thought “oh I know where this is going.” And finally, I thought, “this, again?” You see, over the past year I’ve found that epic fantasy has gotten a bit stale for me. This doesn’t cover all of epic fantasy, not by a long shot. But I’ve grown tired of some of the tropes endemic to the genre. This feeling was particularly pronounced when I listened to The Sword of Shannara, which I found tiresome and derivative, much to the chagrin of a few commenters on the internet. Poorly understood precursor civilizations, whose only remains are valuable artifacts, some language, and thinly veiled threats to not repeat their mistakes, lest you lead the world to a second “shattering,”

Featured Author: John Carter

April 12, 2016 2 Comments

Today’s featured author is John Carter, who can be found on Facebook and at TheWorldsofJohnCarter.com. His book, The Army of the Man, makes use of one of the most intriguing parasites around today, Toxoplasma gondii. I can’t wait to read this book. About The Army of the Man: 1968. The arms race spirals out of control as the world’s super powers push the limits of science to obtain superiority. Science fiction becomes fact with the breakthrough of the Sekhmet Serum. The dawn of the super soldier is on the horizon thanks to a common parasite: Toxoplasma gondii. 2018 Eric Lawson, a fervent protester and opponent of the United States government, is broke. With graduation at hand, he faces an uncertain future. When approached by a representative of “The Man,” he’s offered a chance to fulfill his lifelong dream of changing the world. After being injected with the Sekhmet Serum, Eric embarks on an epic

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