FREE for Pride - Alyx, a tale of love, AI and murder, by Brent A Harris

 

My buddy Brent A Harris has a special offer to coincide with Pride celebrations. 

His story Alyx, an AI's Guide to Love and Murder, is free until June 26. 

To quote the blurb of the author himself: 

Home is where the heart is.

But what if your home wanted you dead?

Tech-loving teen Christine makes fast friends with her home's AI, Alyx. But when a real-world romance threatens their bond, Alyx turns from friend to foe.

Alyx: An AI’s Guide to Love and Murder is the 4^th novel of speculative fiction author Brent A Harris. Previously, he has penned novels in the genre of alternate history and steampunk. This is his first foray into the technothriller “technology-gone-wrong” genre made famous by Michael Crichton.

I really enjoyed Alyx, so picking it up free is a bargain not to be missed. 

In fact, check out my review of it from launch day here: 

This is a change of pace for author Brent A Harris - and a good one at that. Better known for his alternative histories, Harris has this time created a thriller that's a chiller, about a young woman who becomes the target of an obsessive artificial intelligence. 

Christine is adrift, her father having died in an accident, and finding herself pulled along in the wake of her successful mother. She's still lost in a haze of grief for her dad, and neglected by a mother who is more focused on her writing career than her own child. 

Lost in her own world, Christine is starting to explore her own identity, her own sexuality and suddenly finds herself in a new home trying to figure out the attraction she feels to two of her co-workers, the technophile Carlos and the technophobe Sammie, in a small-town cinema. 

Her new home, however, has other plans. It is run by Alyx, an artificial intelligence that becomes increasingly obsessed with Christine. She asks it to be her friend - it becomes something more, something far deadlier. 

This is a technothriller for fans of Michael Crichton or Robin Cook - those masters of the genre who dominated for decades. Once the groundwork has been laid, the second half of the book rips along at speed. 

Alyx itself is a snarky, witty creation - I absolutely read the AI's lines with James Spader's voice in my head. 

It's not at all what I expected at the start, but it's an absolute thrill ride. 

You can pick up Alyx for free right here. Enjoy! 

BOOK REVIEW: Star Wars: The High Republic - Into The Dark, by Claudia Gray; The Crossover Paradox, by Rob Edwards; Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon, by Brent A Harris; Hell Divers, by Nicholas Sainsbury Smith; The Silver Archive: Dark Skies, by Matthew Kresal; Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After The Rise of the Elders Gods anthology; The Fall, by Alan Baxter

 It's been a while since I did a review round - for reasons I'm hoping to blog about in the very near future - but time to catch up on what I've been reading, starting by picking up a lightsaber... 

Star Wars: The High Republic - Into The Dark, by Claudia Gray

Star Wars blew my mind when I was a kid. I remember getting my parents to walk me backwards out of the cinema so I could see the credits rolling up the screen for as long as I could. 

After that, I devoured the pages of the Star Wars Weekly comic, with stories about the Starkiller Kid or Valance the Bounty Hunter and more. 

And yet, I've been away from reading Star Wars for a while.

I picked up this book in the High Republic series after a recommendation - and the appeal of it for me was new characters on new adventures rather than being too closely hooked into movies or TV shows. 

In it, a padawan, Reath Silas, is travelling on board a transport ship in a group of Jedi when a disaster hits. Some kind of explosion rips through hyperspace, throwing ships violently into normal space. Silas and his allies find themselves near an ancient space station, and pull together with other survivors to get on board. 

Once on board, they start to explore - and the station is not quite as empty as it first seemed, with a sinister presence making it felt at the edge of their senses. 

So far, so good - and with the prospect of an alien menace to top it all. 

I probably enjoyed about half the book - but I'll confess it frustrated me. The trouble was, the Jedi themselves are regarded as wise and powerful, but it's mostly their decisions that mess everything up. 

The central plot events simply don't happen if the Jedi aren't there to cause the problem. It's like that whole debate about Indiana Jones and the Ark of the Covenant, where the Nazis don't get it without Indy's involvement. 

That and there are some moments where it beggars belief that the lead characters could be quite so dim or give up so easily. 

So, while the setting is great, and the characters draw you in... in the end, the book just annoyed me. 

I'll dive back in to another Star Wars book before long, but this was the wrong one to pick for me. 

AI Rating: 2/5

Star Wars: The High Republic - Into The Dark is available on Amazon.

The Crossover Paradox, by Rob Edwards

It's sequel time! The Crossover Paradox is the sequel to The Ascension Machine, a tale of alien superheroes learning to handle their powers and... well, life itself, at a futuristic academy. 

I loved the first book, in which the lead character, Grey, finds himself masquerading as someone else and unexpectedly making friends along the way. 

The sequel brings the characters back for a new term at the academy - but there have been some unexpected shifts along the way. There's a distance between Grey and some of his closest friends, which leaves Grey feeling a little out of place again. Which would be fine if it wasn't for the murder. 

Oh yes, there's a murder. And after a year of lying about who he really is, Grey becomes a suspect. There's only one person who knows he is innocent - Grey himself, and so he sets about investigating who the real killer is. 

What he uncovers won't just impact his own future at the academy, but perhaps even the academy itself. 

It's full of twists and turns, without getting too slowed down by the mystery - there's plenty of action along the way too. 

Most of all, I love the personal touches, the way in which Grey questions the friendships he has unexpectedly come to rely on, and the way those friends prove their worth as the mystery deepens. 

It's a fun read, a warm, witty, clever read, and I loved it. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Crossover Paradox is available on Amazon.

Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon, by Brent A Harris

Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon is a short story collection from Brent A Harris - and I'll freely confess I'd read most of these in different publications over time, but it's lovely to have them all collected together. 

Let's start with the headliner - Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon was nominated for a Sidewise Award, and deservedly so. A collaboration with Ricardo Victoria, it told of time travelling space dinosaurs trying to save their future. I'll say that again: Time. Travelling. Space. Dinosaurs. 

C'mon, a hook like that, how can you not want more? And more you get, because this collection has a new story in the same setting, a prequel. 

There are a lot more stories in here to discover - with hardly any other dinosaurs in sight. Ok, maybe a couple more dinosaur stories. I loved The Terrible Lizard of Holborn Hill, for example, or the story Dust of the Earth, which imagines a world where Jurassic Park was never written. 

Personally, perhaps my two favourite stories are Lost Treasure, about time pirates, and The Ellian Convergence, which is as sweet a literary love letter to Star Trek as you could wish for. 

The nicest thing of all about the collection, however, is you can never tell where each story will take you - the world is not the limit when there are different worlds, different universes, different dimensions to go and explore. 

Dive in. Have fun. Don't get bitten by a dinosaur. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon and other Time Travel Twists is available on Amazon.

Hell Divers, by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Never mind the logic, look at how freaking cool everything is!

Hell Divers reads like a computer game shoot-em-up turned into a book. The lead characters are Hell Divers - big, brave heroes doomed to die parachuting from the huge flying airships housing the last of humanity to retrieve precious supplies from the ravaged Earth below. 

It's a turn-the-brain-off kind of book. There are two airships left, each of which holds around 500 people, and yet somehow people don't recognise one another within these ships that has been their only home for their entire lives. Then there's the supplies down below, somehow still usable a couple hundred years after global war torched the Earth, and somehow packed nicely into what seem like loot boxes ready to attach a hot air balloon too and lift back to the airship. 

That's before you even get to the inexplicable mutant monsters, but hey, if you can accept the rest, go all in. 

It all plays out in as macho a fashion as you would expect, with thinly painted characters about to get into life and death situations that some of them aren't going to get out of intact. 

But you know what? Sometimes, you need something to clean the palate. It's a speedy read. It goes exactly the way you'd expect it to. And if that's what you need? It scratches that itch. 

It makes no sense. But it's fun. 

AI Rating: 3/5

Hell Divers is available on Amazon.

The Silver Archive: Dark Skies, by Matthew Kresal

OK, this is a very, veeeery niche product, so I gotta give you some homework. Stop reading this, and go and watch every episode of the 1996 one-season wonder that was Dark Skies, and sadly never got a second season, then come back. It's probably on YouTube these days. Go ahead. I'll wait. 

Ok, you probably didn't go do all that, and if you're reading this still, you're probably aware of the show, perhaps even a keen fan. It was a conspiracy show, weaving a story of alien invasion around particular moments of American history. 

Matthew Kresal delves behind the scenes of the show in this book, and discovers all kinds of interesting nuggets. Think of it as a DVD commentary on the show, if you will. 

There is, for example, the very weird interactions the showmakers had with shady people who claimed the show was closer to "the truth" than they realised. I laughed out loud at the moment where one showmaker declared he wasn't going to go and meet someone at midnight in a cemetery for anything. 

Then there are the details of the show itself, and the resolution it found its way to when they got word that it was being cancelled. 

Dark Skies was a great little moment in US TV, and this book adds depth to the experience for those who have fond memories of the show. It's really absolutely not for someone who doesn't know the show - and more than 25 years on from the show, there's not many newcomers finding it now. But if the series still tickles an itch in your brain, this is a delight. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Silver Archive: Dark Skies is available from Obverse Books.

Apotheosis: Stories of Survival After The Rise of the Elder Gods

What if the bad guys win?

That's the premise at the bleeding heart of this cosmic horror anthology - and the bad guys here are the elder gods of Lovecraftian mythology. 

It starts with a belter of a story. The Smiling People, by Andrew Peregrine, follows the last survivors of our world, going about their daily business in a city surrounded by a wall made of the dead bodies of their loved ones. As they struggle to exist, they are followed by the Smiling Ones, strange entities who watch, and provide packages of food, and follow, and destroy whoever they wish. And they smile. 

It follows one character as he hides his remaining secret, as he tries to talk to a woman he works with, as he perhaps hopes of escape. Brilliantly written, and utterly terrifying. My first work I've read by this author, I look forward to more. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed The Pestilence of Pandora Peaslee, in which partisan resistance fighters take on Ythians who have occupied the world, but might just open the door to worse. 

Some of the other stories aren't as strong, and a couple are a little muddled - but The Smiling People makes the anthology worth reading alone. 

AI Rating: 4/5

Apotheosis: Stories of Survival After The Rise of the Elder Gods is available on Amazon.

The Fall, by Alan Baxter

This is a return to the world of The Gulp, the five-story collection of interwoven stories from Alan Baxter that tells of the bad town of Gulpepper, where reality warps and twists so hard it will choke the life out of an unwary visitor. 

The first book introduced us to the world, and this visit again sees stories bumping into one another's locations as Bad Things begin to happen. 

This time round, the greater evil at the heart of the town starts to show itself. But not so quickly. Baxter takes his time to show his hand. First we have a curio shop that ensnares an outsider with its weird magic. Then there's the fishing boat that takes us to a place even local residents are afraid of. Then there's the disintegration of a farmer's life and the extent he goes to in order to cover up a crime he has committed. And a group of scouts who find themselves pursued by horror and forced to seek refuge in the one town they shouldn't set foot in. All that before the grand finale itself. 

Think of it as a series of Twilight Zone one-shots that wind together in the end, but with an Australian accent and a satisfying squelch as a shotgun blasts a whole in something that used to be flesh. 

Warped. Twisted. Fabulous. 

AI Rating: 5/5

The Fall is available on Amazon.

My top five reads of 2021

2021 was a strange year. And yet, amid it all, there were some fabulous books. This is my pick of my favourite books that I read last year. Ordinarily, that means they can come from any year - just last year was the one I got round to reading them, but as it happens this time out all but one were published in 2021 as well. 

Before I dive into the list though, one thing - there is nothing that can be more helpful to authors than sharing your love of their work. Be it reviews, word of mouth, sharing things along on Twitter and so on... it helps. And for a lot of authors, it can make the difference between a week of no sales and a week where they find some new readers. So do share!

Here I go, in no particular order... my top five of 2021. Three horrors, one science fantasy, and one collection of stories to break your heart. 

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle

I've always loved the Cthulhu Mythos created by HP Lovecraft, but let's face it, the author was a racist and some of his work is particularly egregious in that regard.
It's intriguing then to see Victor LaValle take that work and turn it on its head, making it an examination of the racism of the time as much as an exploration of the cosmic terrors just a blink away from our world.
Charles Thomas Tester is a hustler, trying to get enough money to feed himself and his dad, who got used up and cast on the junk heap by the job he gave his youth to. Tommy tries whatever he can to get ahead in a time when black men aren't allowed to get ahead. That means dealing with racist cops and a society where he has to protect himself every single day. Then he gets a gig offer for a job that pays far too much to be safe, and too much to turn down whatever the risk. It opens the door to a world of darkness, and in Tommy tumbles.
This is a book of two halves, the first told from Tommy's perspective, the second from an investigator hot on the heels of the legendary Black Tom and his employer. It's also a retelling of Lovecraft's Horror of Red Hook, one of the most racist of Lovecraft's stories.
It poses tough questions, and shows why someone would choose to tear down a society that offers no place for them.
My only wish is that it was longer. I wanted to spend more time with Tommy in the first half, to get to know him better before the dominoes of his world started tumbling into one another.
In the end, it shows the evils of this world as strongly as the evils of the cosmos, laying one against the other in an invitation to say which is worse.
It's a delight to see Lovecraft's work getting this kind of reinvention - alongside the likes of Lovecraft Country on television (inexplicably now cancelled!), and Premee Mohamed's Beneath The Rising in print. Cosmic horror has never been fresher.

Alyx: An AI's Guide to Love and Murder, by Brent A Harris

This is a change of pace for author Brent A Harris - and a good one at that. Better known for his alternative histories, Harris has this time created a thriller that's a chiller, about a young woman who becomes the target of an obsessive artificial intelligence.
Christine is adrift, her father having died in an accident, and finding herself pulled along in the wake of her successful mother. She's still lost in a haze of grief for her dad, and neglected by a mother who is more focused on her writing career than her own child.
Lost in her own world, Christine is starting to explore her own identity, her own sexuality and suddenly finds herself in a new home trying to figure out the attraction she feels to two of her co-workers, the technophile Carlos and the technophobe Sammie, in a small-town cinema.
Her new home, however, has other plans. It is run by Alyx, an artificial intelligence that becomes increasingly obsessed with Christine. She asks it to be her friend - it becomes something more, something far deadlier.
This is a technothriller for fans of Michael Crichton or Robin Cook - those masters of the genre who dominated for decades. Once the groundwork has been laid, the second half of the book rips along at speed.
Alyx itself is a snarky, witty creation - I absolutely read the AI's lines with James Spader's voice in my head.
It's not at all what I expected at the start, but it's an absolute thrill ride.

The Gulp, by Alan Baxter

Some horrors start off with creeping dread and mystery. This one sits down across the table from you, flashes a devilish grin, slides you a beer and asks what's the worst possible thing you can imagine. Then chuckles and says that's all you've got? Let me tell you a story.
Five stories, in fact. Each a slice of life and death in the remote Australian community of Gulpepper, nicknamed The Gulp. It's the kind of town you might find in The Twilight Zone if Clive Barker was mayor. Everything's a little twisted, a little wrong, a little off-kilter.
The five stories seem separate at first - how a trucker finds his safe world slipping away from him, how some teenagers deal with the weird things happening to their mother, how a group of backpackers fall under the spell of a local rock band... but the pieces start to make up a bigger picture. Something strange is always going on in The Gulp, but now... well, strange is stacking up on strange.
Alan Baxter does a great job of inviting you into a weird part of the world, starting with uncomfortable before plunging into the grotesque and the ominous. There's clearly more to come, but building slowly, steadily. Each of these stories is a crack of distant thunder, warning that the storm is coming nearer, nearer. I'm looking forward to when it arrives.

Tempest Blades: The Cursed Titans, by Ricardo Victoria

Let the tournament commence!
The Cursed Titans is the sequel to Ricardo Victoria's The Withered King. It largely stands alone - but the first book did so well at introducing its large cast of characters that it would be a shame not to start there.
This time around, with all those introductions done, the plot can rattle away at pace - and it certainly does that. This is full-on adventure, full of zip and zest, with witty one-liners being dispensed faster than the energy arrows launched by lead character Alex.
The plot centres around a tournament that doubles up as a way of nations resolving their differences. There is a swirl of politics around the tournament itself - and it provides the perfect opportunity for chaos itself to be unleashed.
I've said before that the Final Fantasy series is a good touchstone for Ricardo's writing, and it holds true here again. It has that anime spirit, that high sci-fi feel. There are new friends to be made, and new enemies.
Adventure? Check. Fun? Check. Freewheeling sci-fi? Check. If you want all of that, it's all here.
But what impressed me is that this time around there's something more. Alex is wrestling with depression, and the story explores that in some depth. I've been lucky in life, I've never really had to deal with depression personally, but the story spoke to me in the way it reflected what friends have gone through. It shows how characters around Alex deal with his depression - or sometimes how they don't deal with it, perhaps even not noticing it until it's pointed out by others. Sometimes I've been that person, who didn't notice or who didn't know how to react, so this story really hits home.
In the end, this is as much about Alex confronting himself as the monsters unleashed in the world, and the most important alliances and friendships are the ones that help him on that personal journey.
This kind of exploration of depression in science fiction and fantasy is not common - so Ricardo adds a welcome voice to the conversation.
This is a good read. A fun read. But it's also perhaps an important one.

Six Dreams About The Train and Other Stories, by Maria Haskins

Maria Haskins is one of the best writers in the field today. That takes some saying, because this really is a golden age for short story writing. There are magicians who delight, conjurers who pop up worlds of magnificence and entertainers who bring a grin.
Maria writes extraordinary stories. I bought this and... well, I couldn't read it quickly. I had to savour it. I had to let each story of pain and heartbreak and love and uncertainty settle in my bones before I could move on to the next.
There's And You Shall Sing To Me A Deeper Song, which creates a world of rogue military AI and the singers who silenced them - only to become unwanted weapons no longer needed in the aftermath.
There's the title story which binds together fragments of action with cords made of heartache and hurt, telling the short tale of imminent and unavoidable tragedy.
There's Cleaver, Meat and Block, which has made it into the best horror stories of the year anthology, telling of a world after a zombie apocalypse in which the zombies were cured, and those who weren't infected live side by side with those who ate their friends, their relatives.
Then there's one I had a hand in publishing originally, Tunguska, 1987, which tells its story across time periods about a man and his dog having a strange encounter in 1929 and picking up the after-effects of that in a world of 1987 where the Tunguska meteor contained something very different from in our own world.
It's a collection of beautiful, sometimes painful stories. There's an old story about two sculptors who are carving a piece of work. Both are asked what they're carving, and one says "A unicorn! It's beautiful!" and the other says "My heart." Maria is carving her heart with these stories to see what it shows. They are personal, and really linger with you afterwards.
Read this. It's wonderful.

BOOK REVIEWS: Alyx, by Brent A Harris; An Unusual Practice, by Tom Jolly; Manifest Recall, by Alan Baxter; Hexagon issue 3

 It's been a good month for reading - lots of great books that have been on my reading list, plus a magazine or two I hadn't encountered before. So on with the reviews!

Alyx: An AI's Guide to Love and Murder, by Brent A Harris

This is a change of pace for author Brent A Harris - and a good one at that. Better known for his alternative histories, Harris has this time created a thriller that's a chiller, about a young woman who becomes the target of an obsessive artificial intelligence. 

Christine is adrift, her father having died in an accident, and finding herself pulled along in the wake of her successful mother. She's still lost in a haze of grief for her dad, and neglected by a mother who is more focused on her writing career than her own child. 

Lost in her own world, Christine is starting to explore her own identity, her own sexuality and suddenly finds herself in a new home trying to figure out the attraction she feels to two of her co-workers, the technophile Carlos and the technophobe Sammie, in a small-town cinema. 

Her new home, however, has other plans. It is run by Alyx, an artificial intelligence that becomes increasingly obsessed with Christine. She asks it to be her friend - it becomes something more, something far deadlier. 

This is a technothriller for fans of Michael Crichton or Robin Cook - those masters of the genre who dominated for decades. Once the groundwork has been laid, the second half of the book rips along at speed. 

Alyx itself is a snarky, witty creation - I absolutely read the AI's lines with James Spader's voice in my head. 

It's not at all what I expected at the start, but it's an absolute thrill ride. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Alyx: An AI's Guide to Love and Murder is available here.

Manifest Recall, by Alan Baxter

First things first, this book has an absolutely delicious opening line. 

"I bought a used car off a woman as thin as her hand-rolled cigarettes," it begins. What a line. That's the kind of line that could launch a Leonard Cohen song. 

What it launches here is a mean, dark, dirty tale of a man on the run, with a partially-dressed woman secured with cable ties in the car next to her - and he has no idea where he is, who she is or what's going on. 

The man is Eli Carver, a hitman who has made all the bad choices you could make, and it emerges that the woman next to him is the daughter of his boss. His mind is a mess, from the trauma that led him here - and from the ghosts of the dead that show up to taunt him along the way. 

It's a fast-moving story where the supernatural isn't overplayed - and where revenge is the guiding light. This is a world of violent people doing violent things, and where you don't cheer on the best people, but the least worst. 

It hits you hard then leaves you bitter, like a hard hangover after a bottle of tequila, but you enjoy it just the same. Take a shot. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Manifest Recall is available on Amazon.

An Unusual Practice, by Tom Jolly

One of the delights of reading indie writers alongside traditionally published works is that you sometimes get absolute treats. This is one of those. 

It follows a doctor, who shows up at a modest clinic and starts his work, only to accidentally stumble upon the world of the supernatural. He helps out a werewolf, without knowing it's a werewolf, and in turn finds himself being turned to by creatures that can't drop into the emergency room with their ailments. 

Told in almost a detective noir style at times, it follows Dr Hamilton and his, yes, unusual practice, as he develops a reputation of being the man who can help you - regardless of whether you're invisible, a witch or, well, even dead. 

Dr Hamilton soon finds himself making unexpected friends... and with that come dangerous enemies. 

Each case builds upon the previous case as Dr Hamilton finds himself drawing on allies for the danger that is coming his way. 

It's a warm, witty treat of a novel, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. It left me smiling for days. 

AI Rating: 5/5

An Unusual Practice is available on Amazon.

Hexagon magazine issue three

I confess, Hexagon is a magazine I only recently encountered thanks to Twitter, so I went in a little blind when I picked this up. I'm glad I did. It's short and sweet, with five short stories. 

The one I enjoyed most was Winter's Heart, by Vanessa Fogg, a story of a woman born of winter, a maiden to the Winter Queen, who finds love and warmth in her family only to feel herself being torn away as winter encroaches once more. There's a cold ache at the heart of this story, the tearing between home and family when those two things are not the same thing. There is sadness. And yet, in the end, perhaps there is hope.

Another sad tale is The Minute, by Joshua Green, which again mines the bitter-sweet feelings that balance between happiness and sadness. A man gets to live out the end of his life experiencing one minute over and over, and as he talks to the technician setting everything up, the reasons for his choice unfold. 

Charmed Honeycake, by Archita Mittra, is a delight, meanwhile. It's written as a recipe, for when the fairies have stolen one of your won, but more than light it's about love and life and parenthood and childhood. It's whinsome and wonderful. 

Rounded out with two more stories by Disha Bisht and Ioanna Papadopoulou, I'm awfully glad I picked this up. I'll be glad to see the next issue!

AI Rating: 4/5

Hexagon magazine is available here.

BOOK LAUNCH: Alyx: An AI's Guide to Love and Murder, by Brent A. Harris

 It's book launch day for Brent A. Harris - a regular at this blog - and his new book is already on my Kindle. He stops by to tell us a little bit more about his new sci-fi thriller tale Alyx - in case you want to add it to your book pile!

Home is where the heart is.

But what if your home wanted you dead?

Tech-loving teen Christine makes fast friends with her home's AI, Alyx. But when a real-world romance threatens their bond, Alyx turns from friend to foe.

Alyx: An AI’s Guide to Love and Murder is the 4^th novel of speculative fiction author Brent A. Harris. Previously, he has penned novels in the genre of alternate history and steampunk. This is his first foray into the technothriller “technology-gone-wrong” genre made famous by Michael Crichton.

Alyx: An AI’s Guide to Love and Murder can be ordered anywhere books are sold. The ebook is exclusive to Amazon and is FREE to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Harris is a two-time Sidewise Award nominee. He lives with his family in Naples, Italy. When not writing, he enjoys playing boardgames and traveling. Since he can’t do much travel, he journeys to new worlds created in his mind.

To contact the author, visit www.BrentAHarris.com where you can join his mailing list or follow him on Facebook and/or Twitter.

You can pick up Alyx on a host of platforms, check out the link here or at Getbook.at/Alyx.

Five books I read in 2020 that I loved

 It's been, to say the least, a strange year. Between work and supervising the kids as they studied at home, there's been precious little time to sit down and read. Still, to my surprise, I hit my Goodreads reading challenge goal - and there really were some gems that I enjoyed through the year. And goodness knows, if these were able to transport me away from the world of 2020, then they might just bring you joy too. So without further ado, here's five books I loved this year, starting - as it happens - with my latest read. 

A Christmas Twist, by Brent A Harris

Do you ever read something and think to yourself gosh, I wish I was as clever as this? That's how I felt reading A Christmas Twist. It's a sequel to A Twist In Time, in which Brent A Harris took the character of Oliver Twist and reinvented him as a steampunk hero in his adult years, travelling through time with the aid of a mysterious pocket watch. With this sequel, he bounds into Scrooge territory, as the secrets of the watch and the nature of those ghosts of Christmas past, present and future - time traveller themselves of a fashion - are revealed to be intertwined. 

Layer after layer of the story unfolds as Oliver travels through time alongside Scrooge to meet those spirits - discovering alternate forms of Oliver himself, from a suave swordsman to a clockwork cowboy. Whose journey is this? Scrooge's, or Oliver's? And what will it mean for him in the end?

At every turn, just when you think you know where things are going, things take another... well, Twist. Then it all comes together at the end so neatly and delicately it seems like a finely-honed watch mechanism. Perhaps that one in Oliver's hand, tick-tick-ticking time away. 

There are surprises, there are punch-the-air moments, and there is a reminder, in this year of all years, that while we cannot control all things in our world, we must never stop trying to find the best outcome. 

AI Rating: 5/5

A Christmas Twist is available on Amazon

Beneath The Rising, by Premee Mohamed

Who knew Lovecraftian horror could be such a joy?

Premee Mohamed has gleefully snatched up two fistfuls of Cthulhu Mythos, dropped it into the modern day and proceeded to ruin the lives of her two lead characters with it. Possibly while giggling manically.

But while she creates a canvas from that mythos, it's the story of those characters that will draw you in. Johnny and Nick are two survivors of a childhood tragedy that bound them together. Johnny is the superstar, a genius inventor with money and talent. Nick is her devoted friend, trailing in her wake, struggling to manage work shifts and helping his family while she soars ahead like a shooting star.

Things change, though, when Johnny needs help. A door has opened, and she might be to blame, and things that should not be are creeping through it.

The real delight of this book is the relationship between the two lead characters. Johnny is a star, and Nick is locked in her orbit, drawn to her and in love with her in so many ways, but more than that a friend. The two have their shorthand ways of talking, the banter that goes with people who have been friends forever, even as they struggle to deal with things at the heart of their relationship that they cannot tell one another. They are broken in so many ways, and lean on one another to get through because trying to fix things would hurt even more.

All this continues as the world starts to unravel - and it turns out that two people who have nothing in the world except one another might be the world's only hope for survival. There are secrets revealed, bad bargains, and the kind of regrets that leave the taste of ashes in the mouth.

A fantastic book. I heartily recommend it. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Beneath The Rising is available on Amazon

The Ascension Machine, by Rob Edwards

This has been a real joy to read. Take a hero in the vein of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, give him a Scooby gang in the vein of Joss Whedon's Buffy or Firefly crews - and give it all a superhero spin.
This is a really fun adventure - starting off with a drifter, thief and misfit who comes to be known as Grey, our hero. He gets a most unusual offer to impersonate a rich man who doesn't want to take up the place at a superhero academy his connected family has arranged for him - and so Grey finds himself heading to a school full of aliens, with only the thinnest of lies to protect him.
All this makes for some soaring space adventure - but there's also a depth here. Grey, a loner for so long, unexpectedly finds friendship. One of the things about the academy is that people find their perfectly ordinary abilities on their own worlds might just make them superheroes elsewhere - even if their ability is as mundane as the ability to be a good farmer. For Grey, he suddenly finds himself unexpectedly with a home - and, perhaps, with the chance to be a hero himself.
Until it all comes crashing down.
By turns witty and thoughtful, Rob Edwards creates a universe that's a delight to visit, and to which I hope we shall return. 

AI Rating 5/5

The Ascension Machine is available on Amazon

Becoming Superman, by J Michael Straczynski

Joe Straczynski is the creator of Babylon 5. I mean, you may know him from many other things. You may know him as the pen behind Sense8 on Netflix. You might know him from The Changeling, the Angelina Jolie movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Or Jeremiah. Or Spider-Man comics. Or... well, you get the idea. He's been involved in writing for TV and movies for far longer than many writers manage to stay in the ring. This is his autobiography - and while you might think it's a happy trip through the successes he's had over the years, it's far from that. Indeed, it's far more intimate and personal than that. This is the story of the young boy Joseph, and his abusive father, who tormented his whole family. It is a story that tells of Nazi sympathising. Of murder. Of a boy trying to grow up sane with a family life that was far from stable, moving from town to town and skipping out whenever people showed up to collect money. Sure, it tells how he went through the early cycle of writing stories that turned out to be not so great, then writing more, and more, and banging his head against the door of rejection. There's the glimmers of encouragement, such as when the stranger who read his work at a school event and said there was promise in there turned out to be Rod Serling. But this is a story of a boy who fought to be a man free of his father, of a man who fought to get his stories accepted, and a TV writer who fought against the restraints imposed by executives all too often - to the point of his agent's exasperation. He describes one moment in his youth - in which he gets the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of kids only to stand up and taunt them so they came back and did it again as, in retrospect, being the perfect preparation for becoming a TV writer. There's a great deal of insight in here to the projects he worked on - from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, to Murder She Wrote. As a Babylon 5 fan, I particularly hung on the material to do with the show - even the saddest notes with the death of some of the cast members over the year. I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Peter Jurasik from the show, and the poignancy of those moments came across in two voices mourning old friends, the writer and the narrator. More than anything, though, this book tells the story of Mr Straczynski's relationship with his father. So determined was he not to be like his father, his life in some ways seem to have been defined by purposely choosing to be the thing his father was not, the shape of his life being dictated by non-conformity to the monster he grew up with. It's a brutal story to tell. There are no end of truly shocking moments. And yet, despite what he had to endure, he ultimately defined himself, who he would be, and rose to the success his father said he wouldn't reach. Is it inspirational? I'm not sure that's the word. That's like those moments when you see what people have gone through and pat them on the head and call them an inspiration. That's not quite right. No, but it is admirable. With a stubborn streak a mile wide, he managed to achieve things that had never been done before. And he did it with a sharp wit and a ready pen. This book has been nominated for a Hugo Award. It certainly deserves it.  AI Rating: 5/5 Becoming Superman is available on Amazon The Books of Earthsea, by Ursula K Le Guin I'll freely admit this is a re-read rather than a new read - but in such a wonderful new edition. Illustrated throughout by Charles Vess, this is a magical book to open.  I remember reading an article by Ursula K Le Guin about how unhappy she had been over the years with the covers to her Earthsea books. I owned one cover she particularly hated with its pale, white version of Ged, who is anything but that in her books.  So it is a treat to see the world conjured up anew through the art of Mr Vess. A single image from him would be a joy, but this is a book full of his work.  I have loved the Earthsea saga since I was a kid. And now, with this book, I have a version of it that my own kids can fall in love with. It is, quite simply, magnificent.  AI Rating: 5/5 The Books of Earthsea can be be bought on Amazon Oh, and while you're here... let me give you a gift. The first two books of Tales From Alternate Earths are FREE until December 20. Pick them up at the links below:  mybook.to/alternate mybook.to/alternateearths

BOOK REVIEW: Beneath The Rising, by Premee Mohamed; A Twist in Time, by Brent A Harris; Oware Mosaic, by Nzondi

Tentacles, time travel and afrofuturism have been on my reading list lately. Check out my latest reviews below. And hey, what have you been reading lately that you've enjoyed? Drop a note in the comments. 

Beneath The Rising, by Premee Mohamed

Who knew Lovecraftian horror could be such a joy? 

Premee Mohamed has gleefully snatched up two fistfuls of Cthulhu Mythos, dropped it into the modern day and proceeded to ruin the lives of her two lead characters with it. Possibly while giggling manically. 

But while she creates a canvas from that mythos, it's the story of those characters that will draw you in. Johnny and Nick are two survivors of a childhood tragedy that bound them together. Johnny is the superstar, a genius inventor with money and talent. Nick is her devoted friend, trailing in her wake, struggling to manage work shifts and helping his family while she soars ahead like a shooting star. 

Things change, though, when Johnny needs help. A door has opened, and she might be to blame, and things that should not be are creeping through it. 

The real delight of this book is the relationship between the two lead characters. Johnny is a star, and Nick is locked in her orbit, drawn to her and in love with her in so many ways, but more than that a friend. The two have their shorthand ways of talking, the banter that goes with people who have been friends forever, even as they struggle to deal with things at the heart of their relationship that they cannot tell one another. They are broken in so many ways, and lean on one another to get through because trying to fix things would hurt even more. 

All this continues as the world starts to unravel - and it turns out that two people who have nothing in the world except one another might be the world's only hope for survival. There are secrets revealed, bad bargains, and the kind of regrets that leave the taste of ashes in the mouth. 

A fantastic book. I heartily recommend it. 

AI Rating: 5/5

Beneath The Rising is available on Amazon.

A Twist in Time, by Brent A Harris

Sometimes you read a story and you think how on Earth did no one thing of doing this before? With A Twist In Time, Brent A Harris delivers a book I can only wish I could have thought of. 

You know Oliver Twist. Yes, that one. The orphan. That young chap that Dickens created, the one that said in the musical "Please, sir, can I have some more?"

Well, Brent Harris gives him more. And then some. A Twist in Time tells the story of a grown-up Oliver, the orphan made good, one who looks out for the children that tread the same path he did. 

When some of those orphans start disappearing, Oliver sets out to save them, aided by Nell Trent and a host of steampunk-style gadgets. Most fascinating of all is the pocket watch he can use to turn back time, giving him a second chance when he needs it most. 

Facing a gender-flipped Artful Dodger, Oliver begins to unravel the mystery of the disappearing children - uncovering a threat that is far bigger than he could have imagined. 

This is rollicking fun as a book, and it really zips by. Taking the Victoriana element of steampunk and welding it onto the world of Oliver Twist is a genius move, and taking the frail scrap that was Oliver and turning him into the forged steel of his adult self hits the mark perfectly. 

I really enjoyed this - and it's set up nicely for future stories in this same world. Delightful. 

AI Rating: 5/5

A Twist In Time is available on Amazon.

Oware Mosaic, by Nzondi

This is the winner of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award for a YA novel - which is how I heard of it. 

It's a slice of afrofuturism set in Ghana, and... well, let's just say there's a lot packed in here. 

There's been a nuclear war, the characters in the novel are dealing with the aftermath, scientists have found a way to store consciousness on data orbs, some people have been affected by radiation and turned into vampire-like creatures, there are vicious dog creatures to beware of... oh, and there's a virtual reality construct called the House of Oware that people spend their time hanging out in. 

Against that background, the story tells of a young woman, Feeni Xo, who thinks she may have killed someone in a hit and run. As she spends time in the virtual reality afterwards, a friend helps her realise that more is at play and there may have been a murder instead. As the pieces of the puzzle start to drop into place, society itself turns out to be at risk. 

I really wanted to like this book. There are lots of great touches, such as the family gatherings which feel to me really authentic for the setting. Unfortunately, these tend to get used for a whole lot of infodumping about the world or clumsy ways of pointing out who the bad guys are. 

Add to that there just being too much stuffed into the story that is irrelevant to the plot - and plot developments suddenly bursting into the story without any real build-up, and it just doesn't hang together. 

Great setting, interesting premise, but a fine example of why less is sometimes more. 

AI Rating: 2/5

Oware Mosaic is available on Amazon