The war games are on, but the real battle has just begun…
The entire Alliance is ready for the war games. The spectacular show of innovation and strength may change the way war is waged, but on far-flung worlds, devastating incursions have already begun. The Merkiaari are back, but news can only travel as fast as a foldspace drone.
Captain Eric Penleigh of the 501st Infantry Regiment looks forward to an easy assignment. All he needs to do is evaluate the best cutting-edge tech the Alliance has to offer and make nice with new alien allies. But when preparation for the games turns into a deadly war, nobody will be ready for what comes next…
Incursion is the long-awaited fifth book in the Merkiaari Wars series. If you like breathtaking space battles and heart-pounding military sci-fi, then you’ll love Mark E. Cooper’s latest entry in the beloved space opera saga.
All stores/ vendors
Yeah, I noticed the trend and it bugs me a little. No, people, dystopian doesn’t mean post-apocalyptic. Post-ap is something after a major catastrophe, dystopian means Orwellian surveillance nightmare. You know, kinda like the God Complex Universe.
Sometimes the two genres overlap like in the Hunger Games, but one does not necessarily mean the other. Anyway, here are some grim and post-apocalyptic books for you to choose from.
Science Fiction
Space Opera
Dystopian
Fantasy
Horror
You’ll find all that, and most importantly, you’ll find it across all major retailers. Yeah, we’ve made it the norm.
Amazon
Kobo
iTunes
Nook
Smashwords
Google Play Books
Any shop you prefer, we’re on it. First weekend of November only, 5-6 Nov. Get ready cause it’s closing in fast.
Looking for some short but high-quality entertainment over coffee or a snack? Grab Bite-Sized Stories and fill your stolen moments with 33 indie flash fiction tales. Just 5 minutes per engaging story.
Discover new authors!
From a creepypasta horror farm to a bullish love tale and from the bloody metal deck of the ESS Arclight to superhero octopus food trucks, you can transform your shortest stolen moments into utter delights with this diverse collection of 33 flash fiction stories.
Commuting to work? Grabbing a quick coffee? Each story tells a complete tale in but a few short minutes with the added promise of a lifelong introduction to new indie writers.
You never know, you might just find your next favorite author.
If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. There’s a curated mythic fiction page up on http://www.mythographystudios.com/promo/. Make sure you sign up at the list and get the limited-time mythic fiction offers exclusive to that promo. That promotion runs separately from the Mythographers, you need to sign up once more at the page.
There are delicious pantheons to choose from, and selected series to binge on, full Netflix style. So like, Mythology and Chill.
Here are the best picks to binge on from that page:
And they are disguised as Asians. No really. That’s the backstory of Patty Jansen’s excellent Ambassador series.
Political space opera in an explosive eight-book series.
The story starts in Athens, that’s why it piqued my interest. There’s a sort of Masquerade going on, with alien refugees silently living on Earth, disguised as Asians. (They are of a pan-human origin, hence the similarities with us, and there’s a hint of Earth being an ancient colony.)
It’s been only a few years that the lid has been torn off, everybody knows about them and we are both fascinated and suspicious of them. They have of course star-faring technology, and it all culminates into the explosive event you see on the cover. Yes, that’s the Athens cityscape.
The story follows a young Ambassador to the alien species. Despite the importance of the mission, he is rather expendable. We are thrown into the deep end, the world feels lived-in and very complex, which demands your full attention as you read.
Ambassador: Seeing Red Description
24 October 2114: the day that shocked the world.
Young diplomat Cory Wilson narrowly escapes death in the assassination of President Sirkonen. No one claims responsibility but there is no doubt that the attack is extraterrestrial.
Cory was meant to start work as a representative to Gamra, the alien organization that governs the FTL transport network, but now his new job may well be scrapped in anger.
Worse, as Earth uses military force to stop any extraterrestrials coming or leaving, as 200,000 extraterrestrial humans are trapped on Earth, as the largest army in the galaxy prepares to free them by force, only Cory has the experience, language skills, and contacts to solve the crime.
But he’s broke, out of a job, and a long way from Earth.
A Matt Damon political thriller meets Total Recall action with Avatar otherworldliness.
This group is currently beta. Meaning things are about to change at any time.
So what can you do over there? Well, except talk about the God Complex books, we can discuss articles, favorite mythologies, movies like Wonder Woman and Thor, books like Ilium and Percy Jackson, anything you like. Keep it civil, but light swearing is allowed.
When a group of teenage gamers get shaken down by some local thugs, they decide to test their team skills on the real world. But will they manage to turn their neighbourhood back into a safe place again, when the local gang has kidnapped their friend, when their own inexperience is a threat to their lives, and when their involvement brings in more unwanted attention?
Meet the boys (and a girl)
Detroll is the chief. His hobbies include gaming, strategising and confronting trolls on the internet. Hellbovine is a PVP addict. A second-generation player-vs-player gamer that has taken up his father’s legacy and wants to climb the gaming charts. Ambassador is a sweet kid who works at his father’s gyro place. Zodovolo is pretty much their mascot. And Crazy Iva is the girl they never expected having on their guild (hence the sons naming). But no-one dares call her girl to her face, lest they get their nose bitten off.
We are on a path towards an interconnected world. Self-driving cars are already here, the tech for smarthouses exists but there are no standards yet, and people are finding creative ways to use smartphone apps in their daily lives.
Don’t worry, he always looks stressed like that.
The following is a direct quote from a Mr. Robot episode:
There’s a saying — ‘The devil is at his strongest while we’re looking the other way.’ Like a program running in the background silently. While we’re busy doing other shit. ‘Daemons,’ they call them. They perform action without user interaction. Monitoring, logging, notifications, primal urges, repressed memories, unconscious habits. They’re always there, always active. You can try to be right, you can try to be good, you can try to make a difference. But it’s all bullshit. ‘Cause intentions are irrelevant. They don’t drive us, daemons do. And me? I’ve got more than most.
Though he is using daemons as an allegory to our primal urges, the fact remains that they are similar things. As computer daemons become more and more complex, as we surrender more and more power over the real world to them, they will start having behaviors. Personalities even. How often do you have a computer that seems to have a mind of its own? This is due to our tendency to find patterns where there are none, to be honest, but some day, it will actually be true. Through complexity we will find intelligence. Emergent behaviors.
In the story Nanodaemons, I have tried to imagine the tasks of a group of daemons, that form a PAN (Personal Area Network). We already have PANs, even though we don’t really know it. A fitness tracker that connects to our cellphone and a bluetooth headset, is exactly that. A personal short range network of interconnected devices, that communicate between them to fit our needs. If you add some more to the mix, like smartclothing and a Hololens or Google Glass, you can see how that freaky cyberpunk story I made up is not really that far ahead.
Evil hands
To my joy, I stumbled on the TV series Limitless, the Arm-ageddon episode, where their villain of the week has hacked a bunch of prosthetic cyberarms and ended up in many crimes and one murder. The episode’s weight was more on the man behind it, but it was great seeing how a silly sci-fi crime like that actually makes it into an otherwise realistic show. It only goes to show that people at large are beginning to accept that there are serious security issues with those things, and that we need to get some smart people together in a room to figure it out. People need these prosthetics, and we need them to be secure and high-tech, but also comfortable and discreet.
Yeah, ok, his arm puns were better than mine. I admit it.
Meet the Daemons
In Nanodaemons, the arm is only part of the problem. And part of the solution, as you’ll see. Not to spoil anything, but there is a guy, being framed for murder. The story is about him trying to figure out what happened, and the unusual case of eudaemonia that afflicts him.
So, is it actually going to make our lives better? A Googler says it will create more profound means of expression. Maybe it will. Maybe we will evolve new ways to feel stuff, additional nuances to our communication between people. The internet is already changing the way we remember stuff. I see it myself all the time. If I can google it, then I don’t really need to remember it. We seem to like how things are going, it doesn’t scare us. How long till we actually plug a handy Brain-Computer-Interface that plugs some memories to a cloud?
