He's cute. He's cranky. His code is sleek as hell.
What's an amnesiac AI doing in a place like this? Helix has no idea. He knows he planned to build a life for himself on Gravas Station, but he has no clue what he's been doing for the last half cycle. Nor does he understand why his ship crashed. A genius Tiralan scientist saved him by copying his code into an organic host, and after meeting her meddling mothers, it seems like his problems have only just begun...
She's clever. She's creative. She claims that he's her mate.
Qalu has no interest in relationships. She'd much rather be working in her lab, innovating instead of socializing. Problem is, the Tiralan believe that one cannot be happy alone. When a solution literally falls from the sky, she leaps at the opportunity to advance her research and teach Helix how to be Tiralan while calming her mothers' fears. It might be unconventional, but she's ready to break all the rules for a little peace.
They agree to pose as each other's mates for the most logical reasons, but love always finds a way.
Read more: Love Code - Ann Aguirre
Review: Gatekeeper by Alison Levy
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Alison Levy's Gatekeeper was published by SparkPress in October 2020.
About Alison Levy:
Alison Levy lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with her husband, son, and variety of pets. When she’s not writing or doing mom things, she crochets, gardens, walks her collies, and works on home improvement projects. She lives in Greensboro, NC.
About Gatekeeper:
Rachel Wilde comes from a dimension that exists adjacent to ours. The people there have structured their society around daemon collecting: they locate, catch, and repair malfunctioning daemons (creatures out of phase with our world that tempt people to do good or evil). Now Rachel has been given two unusual assignments: 1) find a person who has been trying to break down dimensional barriers, and 2) track down a missing line of gatekeepers, human placeholders for a daemon that was too badly damaged to repair. Authorities of Rachel’s world believe the missing gatekeepers are descended from a girl who went missing from West Africa hundreds of years ago, likely sold into slavery. With no leads to go on, Rachel seeks help from Bach, a raving homeless man who happens to be an oracle. Bach does put her in the path of both of her targets - but he also lands her in a life-threatening situation. Somehow, Rachel has to stop the criminal, reunite a gatekeeper with her stolen past, and, above all, survive.
REVIEW: GATEKEEPER BY ALISON LEVY
Read more: Review: Gatekeeper by Alison Levy
Review: The Lost Tale of Sir Larpsalot by David Michael Williams
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
David Michael Williams' The Lost Tale of Sir Larpsalot was published in October 2020.
About David Michael Williams:
David Michael Williams has suffered from a storytelling addiction for as long as he can remember. With a background in journalism, public relations, and marketing, he also flaunts his love affair with the written word as an author of speculative fiction. His most recent books include the sword-and-sorcery trilogy The Renegade Chronicles and The Soul Sleep Cycle, a genre-bending series that explores life, death, and the dreamscape.
David lives in Wisconsin with the best wife on this or any other planet and their two amazing children. He joined the Allied Authors of Wisconsin, one of the state’s oldest writing collectives, in 2005.
Click here to visit his official website.
The Lost of Sir Larpsalot can be purchased here.
About The Lost Tale of Sir Larpsalot:
WIZARDS & WANNABES
As the first day of high school creeps closer, five friends agree to one last LARP* before splitting the party and ending their geeky game forever.
But the real adventure is just beginning...
Mistaking the teens’ costumed characters for actual warriors, a sorceress summons Sir Larpsalot, Elvish Presley, Brutus the Bullheaded, Master Prospero, and Tom Foolery to her world to complete an impossible quest. To succeed, they must become the heroes they only ever pretended to be.
And if they can’t find a way to win, it’s GAME OVER for real!
* Live action role-playing game
REVIEW: THE LOST TALE OF SIR LARPSALOT BY DAVID MICHAEL WILLIAMS
Read more: Review: The Lost Tale of Sir Larpsalot by David Michael Williams
Guest post: Turning My Time on a NASA Co-Designed Spaceship and Asteroid Base into a Space Opera by R. Peter Keith
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Guest Post
Risingshadow has an opportunity to feature an article by R. Peter Keith about creating the Wine Dark Deep series.
R. Peter Keith is a co-founder and creative director of a NASA Space Act Agreement partner company that specializes in the design, fabrication and display of museum exhibits and interactive experiences. The first three books of the Wine Dark Deep series (Wine Dark Deep, Encounter at Jupiter, and The Odyssey), will be released on October 12. Visit Uphill Downhill Press’ website, his publisher, to learn more.
Guest post: Turning My Time on a NASA Co-Designed Spaceship and Asteroid Base into a Space Opera by R. Peter Keith
Review: A Blast of Hunters by David Rix
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
David Rix's A Blast of Hunters was published by Snuggly Books in July 2019.
About David Rix:
David Rix is an author, composer, editor, artist and publisher active in the area of Slipstream, Speculative Fiction and Horror - not to mention hints of absurdism, miserablism, naturism and pissed-offism. Contemporary classical music, the seashore, urban underground, railways, rocks and canals. His published books are What the Giants were Saying, the chapbook Brown is the New Black and the novella/story collection Feather, which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill prize. In addition, his works have appeared in various places, the most notable being many of the Strange Tales series of anthologies from Tartarus Press, Monster Book For Girls from Exaggerated Press, Creeping Crawlers from Shadow Publishing, and Marked to Die from Snuggly Books. He also runs and creates the art for Eibonvale Press, which focuses on innovative and unusual new slipstream writing. As an editor, his first anthology Rustblind and Silverbright, a collection of Slipstream stories connected to the railways, was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in the Best Anthology category.
Click here to visit his official website.
About A Blast of Hunters:
London in the near future. A familiar city where the faces of the passers-by are painted with pain and where thoughts are dark and restless. For one of the city’s lost residents, waiting for oblivion on the railway tracks late one night, nothing should ever have mattered again. Instead, a chance encounter plunges him into the chasms of the city - to a place where prophecies of doom are muttered and where the urban hunters prowl, as the spectres of the Measuring Men walk the streets, rulers in hand.
A story of outsiders and subversion.
REVIEW: A BLAST OF HUNTERS BY DAVID RIX
Read more: Review: A Blast of Hunters by David Rix
Guest post: What the World Needs Now is Ridiculousness, Sweet Ridiculousness by Sean Gibson
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Guest Post
Risingshadow has an opportunity to feature a guest post by Sean Gibson, who is the author of The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True (The Parliament House, Dec 2020).
About Sean Gibson:
Sean Gibson is not a professional mini biography writer (if he were, this would be much more compelling). Instead, he’s a marketing professional by day, hangs out with his amazing wife, son, and daughter by night, and writes somewhere in between. He holds a BA in English Literature from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, but he really wishes he had been able to matriculate at Hogwarts (he would have been in Hufflepuff for sure). Sean is a fan of sports teams from Detroit, a distressingly large number of bands that rose to prominence in the 1980s, and writing in the third person. He currently resides in Northern Virginia, and, given how much he hates moving, and given that his house has an awesome library, is likely to remain there for some time.
In addition to The Chronicle of Heloise & Grimple, Sean is the author of The Camelot Shadow and its prequel short, "The Strange Task Before Me." He has written extensively for Kirkus Reviews, and his book reviews have also appeared in Esquire.
A new book featuring Heloise, The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True, is slated for release in December 2020 from Parliament House Books.
Follow him on Twitter @Gibknight, but only if you're really bored and enjoy tomfoolery.
About The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True:
Sure, you think you know the story of the fearsome red dragon, Dragonia.
How it terrorized the village of Skendrick until a brave band of heroes answered the noble villagers' call for aid. How nothing could stop those courageous souls from facing down the dragon. How they emerged victorious and laden with treasure.
But, even in a world filled with epic adventures and tales of derring-do, where dragons, goblins, and unlicensed prestidigitators run amok, legendary heroes don't always know what they're doing. Sometimes they're clueless. Sometimes beleaguered townsfolk are more hapless than helpless. And orcs? They're not always assholes, and sometimes they don't actually want to eat your children.
Heloise the Bard, Erithea's most renowned storyteller (at least, to hear her tell it), is here to set the record straight. See, it turns out adventuring isn't easy, and true heroism is as rare as an articulate villager.
Having spent decades propagating this particular myth (which, incidentally, she wrote), she's finally able to tell the real story — for which she just so happened to have a front-row seat.
Welcome to Erithea. I hope you brought a change of undergarments — things are going to get messy.
Guest post: What the World Needs Now is Ridiculousness, Sweet Ridiculousness by Sean Gibson