C Gockel Writes

Featured Sci-Fi: Exile Sky (Parse Galaxy Book 4) by Kate Sheeran Swed

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Featured Sci-Fi: Exile Sky (Parse Galaxy Book 4) by Kate Sheeran Swed

New Release
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Sloane might not relish the situation that’s got her tangled in a web of Galactic Fleet and Trade Federation politics – but she’s knee-deep in it now. And she’s finished with dead ends.

When she finally cracks the clue her uncle left behind, it points directly to the worst spot in the galaxy: a barren wasteland of a moon (if it counts as a moon when the planet it was orbiting has been blown into bits) where her toes are guaranteed to freeze solid in about thirty seconds.

Between the bandits, the blizzards, and the cybernetic wolves, her hands are full. Not that she’s complaining… much.
Sloane only hopes she can escape the trek with all her toes intact – and the evidence she needs to save the galaxy from imperial rule.

No pressure.

Featured Sci-fi: Steamborn the Complete Trilogy by Eric R. Asher

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Featured Sci-fi: Steamborn the Complete Trilogy by Eric R. Asher

99¢ as of February 6, 2023
Available at: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon DE

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A supernatural swarm. A treacherous scheme. A tinker’s apprentice may be the village’s only hope…

Jacob has yet to meet a gadget he couldn’t fix or an adventure he could resist. With trade routes to his remote Lowlands town cut off, Jacob must exchange his boyhood adventures for petty theft. After all, his wages at the tinker shop aren’t enough to pay for his father’s medicine

But it soon becomes clear why few merchants brave the nearby roads as a plague of terrifying creatures descends upon the town. With the Lowlands under siege, Jacob and his friend have no choice but to run for their lives. When their escape uncovers a terrible secret, Jacob learns there are those who’ll stop at nothing to make sure the teen takes the scandal to his grave…

See all the Box Set List Featured Fantasy | See All Featured Sci-Fi

Featured Sci-fi: Primary Inversion (Saga of The Skolian Empire Book 1) by Catherine Asaro

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Featured Sci-fi: Primary Inversion (Saga of The Skolian Empire Book 1) by Catherine Asaro

$1.99 as of February 2, 2023
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The first book in the Skolian Empire saga by the Nebula Award–winning author. “Fast, smart, speculative . . . another stellar debut.” —Los Angeles Daily News

Soz Valdoria, a bioengineered fighter pilot—and first in line for the military command of her people—has found refuge with her squad on the sanctuary planet of Delos. It offers a respite from the war that rages between her Skolian people and their enemies, the Traders. Looking for rest and relaxation, they must still be on their guard for the Trader soldiers who also visit the sanctuary.

In a bar, they confront the worst of the worst: an Aristo from the Trader ruling caste, seemingly on the prowl for a “provider” he can use for his barbaric impulses. His presence takes Soz back to her days as a prisoner of war, when she became the plaything of a sadistic and soulless Aristo.

And yet something is off about this Aristo. Unable to ignore her instincts, Soz searches the city until she finds him in a secured mansion. Breaching its fortifications and eluding its guards, she discovers a devastating truth: this man is no true Aristo. He is a genetic anomaly like Soz, one of the few people who can handle the massive neurological demands of the psibernet, the technological marvel that gives the Skolians their only advantage over the Traders. This false Aristo, this sheep in a wolf’s clothing, is heir to the Trader throne. The emperor created him for one reason—to take control of the Skolian network and conquer Soz’s people.

But Soz has never felt such a connection as she does to this Trader heir. It may prove her—and the universe’s—undoing . . .

“This is one of the best SF first novels in years.” —Booklist

Featured Science Fiction: The Bohr Maker (The Nanotech Sucession Book 1) by Linda Nagata

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Featured Science Fiction: The Bohr Maker (The Nanotech Sucession Book 1) by Linda Nagata

$4.99 as of January 30, 2023
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Editor’s Note: I loved this novel. It has believable characters, adventure, action, strange new worlds, and a message that resonates.

“…phenomenal….This one is a winner—grab it when you see it…” —Analog Science Fiction & Fact

An award-winning novel of nanotechnology, adventure, and high-tech revolution.
Nikko is the first “post human” genetically engineered to survive in the airless void of space. But the research permit that allows his existence is about to expire. His body has begun an insidious, pre-programmed failure that will end in his death—unless he can cancel his own expiration date. His hopes ride on an illegal and extremely powerful nanotech device known as the Bohr Maker—but his attempt to steal it soon goes awry. The device escapes to infect a young woman named Phousita who lives on Earth, in an impoverished slum, where nanotechnology runs amok, regulated only by the black market. Nikko and Phousita are from different worlds, but their convergence sets off a domino effect of unforeseeable events that threaten to change the definition of “human” for all time.

A brilliantly original, fast-paced biotech thriller, The Bohr Maker won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

The Nanotech Succession is a collection of stand-alone novels exploring the rise of nanotechnology and the strange and fascinating future that follows.

A Classic Sci-fi Series! Foreigner (Foreigner Series Book 1) by C J Cherryh

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Featured Sci-fi: Foreigner (Foreigner Series Book 1) by C J Cherryh

$2.99 as of January 22, 2022
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The groundbreaking novel that launched Cherryh’s eponymous space opera series of first contact and its consequences … Editors note: I became an addict of this series. Now you can, too.

It had been nearly five centuries since the starship Phoenix, lost in space and desperately searching for the nearest G5 star, had encountered the planet of the atevi. On this alien world, law was kept by the use of registered assassination, alliances were defined by individual loyalties not geographical borders, and war became inevitable once humans and one faction of atevi established a working relationship. It was a war that humans had no chance of winning on this planet so many light-years from home.

Now, nearly two hundred years after that conflict, humanity has traded its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no atevi will ever visit. Then the sole human the treaty allows into atevi society is marked for an assassin’s bullet. The work of an isolated lunatic? The interests of a particular faction? Or the consequence of one human’s fondness for a species which has fourteen words for betrayal and not a single word for love?

Featured Sci-Fi: Ether War the Complete Series by John Walker

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Featured Sci-Fi: Ether War the Complete Series by John Walker

99¢ on Amazon
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A Resource as Precious as Life

Ether. It revolutionized human technology. Made faster than light travel possible. With this new form of energy, people expanded beyond Earth to distant stars in other galaxies across the cosmos. After years of conflicts, a rebellion, and countless skirmishes, the Human Confederacy is a thriving government, a beacon of civilization.

Until an ether facility is destroyed out of the blue with no one taking credit for the destruction. Enter the Morrigan, a state of the art ship with a brilliant but inexperienced crew. Their captain Noah Markel is no stranger to battle and he believes this may not be as simple as an act of terrorism but rather an incursion. Their first contact with an alien race. One bent on crippling human space travel in preparation for something far worse than a border dispute.