Rastas In Space

I posted about the Tobias S. Buckell short story collection "Tides from the New Worlds" here. I mentioned that I had tweeted to Buckell that I couldn't find his Xenowealth novel trilogy to purchase, and he emailed me the ePubs! I love living in the future!

Anyway I finally got around to reading them:

1. "Crystal Rain", 2006
2. "Ragamuffin", 2007
3. "Sly Mongoose", 2008

This is a great space operatic universe which Buckell has created. Various generations of galactic civilizations interacting and superseding each other. Our humans characters are mostly from the Caribbean and as such are mostly black, FTW! There's a bit of a red herring in the 1st novel as to who the main character is - it is not John, it is Pepper! Pepper is a great SF character: a centuries old cyborg Idris Elba channeling Samuel L. Jackson with dreads and a long coat filled with weapons - the rasta John Wick. But with a good heart.

Feeling like binging, I then read another short story collection, "Xenowealth: A Collection", 2016, 195 pages, 56k words. Definitely a good follow up to the novels, filling in lots of Pepper's backstory.

Per the Wikipedia article, he did a 4th Xenowealth novel "The Apocalypse Ocean" via a Kickstarter in 2012. The Kickstarter was closed, so I contacted him again, and emailed me the ePub, FTW! Thanks again, Tobias!

He also pointed me at his Patreon page, where I signed up to get 1 new story/month for $5/month. A bargain! It's nice to be able to subscribe to artists you like this way.

I started writing this post and noticed I had another of his I had not read: "Mitigated Futures", 2013, 225 pages, 65k words. A couple of duplicate Xenowealth stories, the rest varied and interesting. I particularly liked the story he wrote with Karl Schroeder, who is another of my fav new authors of the last 5-10 years.

I had a little gap before starting "The Apocalypse Ocean" that I filled with "The Last Emperox", the "thrilling conclusion" of John Scalzi's "The Interdependency" trilogy, 2020, 295 pages, 80k words. Maybe 2 chapters to go and I'm like "No way he can wrap this up", but - he wraps it up very nicely! A very well plotted series, and Scalzi definitely wants this one to go to video. Name actresses will be seriously vying to get the part of the female character whose every other word is "fuck".