Author: Dave (Page 1 of 14)

Team 1.21 Gigawatts semifinal round report for SPSFC#5

August 8, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

Team 1.21 Gigawatts recently concluded our judging for the semifinal round of this year’s SPSFC (the 5th annual competition). All of our reviews and posts can be found at our team homepage.

We nominated two semifinalists from our initial allotment of 25 books. These were:

Black Sails to Sunward by Sheila Jenné
Who Nuked Silicon Valley? by Mike Donoghue

For the semifinals, each team was given four more books to read from the other teams’ semifinal picks (there were ten semifinalists in total). Our four additional semifinalists were the following, in alphabetical order:

ab inito by Jacob Terracina
Cold Blooded by Rohan O’Duill
Generations by Noam Josephides
Time Traitors by Eli Donovan

We’ve posted reviews on our team homepage, so if you’re looking for our thoughts on the individual books, head there. I’ll give you a general summary of how it went here.

We had a target of having at least two of our judges read each book. We achieved this goal. For most of the six books, we had three or four readers, although for two of them, we had two readers. We also wanted to post at least one judge review for each book, and we’ve accomplished that as well.

We liked all of these books and found them worthy of the semifinals. We were required to rate each book on a ten-point scale to combine ratings with other teams. Our average rating for each book ranged from a bit under 7 to almost 10. In ranked order, our average ratings led to positions as follows (including the two books we initially promoted as semifinalists).

ab initio (1st place)
Black Sails to Sunward (2nd, tied)
Who Nuked Silicon Valley? (2nd, tied)
Time Traitors (4th)
Cold Blooded (5th, tied)
Generations (5th, tied)

In some cases, there was not much space between our ratings (including ties, as shown). Our team ratings were averaged with the team ratings of other teams to generate an overall semifinal rating, which was then used to promote the top six semifinalist books to the finals. Of the six semifinalists we read, three moved on to the final round:

ab initio
Time Traitors
Generations

Obviously different judging teams responded quite differently to different semifinalist books, which is common and expected in this kind of competition. Our ratings for these books will carry on into the final round, and we will have no more input on the ones we’ve already rated. Our job is now to read and rate the other three finalists that we have not yet read, and the other teams are doing the same thing. The six finalists will thus have a team rating from each of the five judging teams, and the book with the highest average team rating will be our champion.

Watch our team page for more updates and reviews as we continue with the finals!

Allison reviews semifinalist Generations by Noam Josephides

August 8, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

Allison’s original review on Goodreads is here. This is a copy of that post.

There is some fascinating worldbuilding in this book. I love that the story takes place on a generation ship many years before the ship will get to its destination, so characters have to deal with existential questions as well as make practical decisions that will impact their ancestors’ futures. The birthing rules and society that has formed aboard the ship are also fascinating.

I also liked the protagonist, who is an archivist uncovering a conspiracy aboard the ship; her introversion, obsession with following the rules, and drive to discover the truth was relatable.

Unfortunately, the pacing is very slow, and as someone who prefers medium- to fast-paced books, that impacted my enjoyment of the story. It is largely character-driven, more interested in exploring ideas, philosophical questions, and futuristic science than action or drama. The dialogue drags and the mystery takes too long to unravel for my taste. The science is neat, though. People who enjoy slow-paced novels with interesting worldbuilding might like this.

I read this as a judge for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC5). This review is my personal opinion and doesn’t reflect the novel’s place in the contest. Thank you to the author for the e-copy!

Newsletter August 1 2026

August 2, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

SPSFC#5 Semifinalist Review: Cold Blooded by Rohan O’Duill

August 1, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Cold Blooded by Rohan O’Duill. The book is available from Amazon (and, as of this writing, on sale for $0.99).

Blurb

“Don’t mistake my silence for weakness. No one plans a murder out loud.”

Veteran Marine Mint only worries about one thing—herself. But after being ordered back to the front lines, she has a decision to make—stand up and do the right thing, or finally get what she always wanted.

Fifteen-year-old Frida lives in deep space on a pirate vessel. Her father is a dissident warrior who fights the corporations running the system. When a corporation battle cruiser catches up to the ageing pirate vessel, death appears to be the only escape.

A gripping tale of war, survival, and corporate exploitation in the depths of space. Filled with bone-crunching action and unexpected twists, ‘Cold Blooded’ will keep you on the edge of your seat until the bloody end. Melding the best of ‘The Expanse’ style deep-space battles and corporate greed with the class struggle of ‘Red Rising’, fans will love this riveting sci-fi adventure. Grab your copy now.

My Review

This is a lean, action-packed military sci-fi book with bigger-than-life characters who jump off the page. Plenty of action, mayhem, gore, and surprises throughout. A space marine story with plenty of battlesuit combat, there’s also a goodly chunk of politics and worldbuilding as well.

Plot and Characters

There are two main POV characters with a bunch of others who get varying amounts of play. The main one is a grizzled, sarcastic space marine, Mint, who’s a long way past believing in anything. She’s my favorite, and definitely the most realistic and the most nuanced. The other main POV character is almost more of a superhuman comic-book hero guy, although he has a little more internal complexity at first. By the end, he’s mostly just muscles, without as much introspection, although with ever more ass-kicking. We also spend some time with Bjorn’s daughter, Frida, is another interesting take, an enigma of sorts, but also by far the easiest character to cheer for – headstrong, capable, caring, and fun.

I found most of the characters painted in bright colors, many of them with extreme quirks or big personalities. There are precious few normal folks in the Cold, which gives the book a comic-book or anime feel at times. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does strain credulity a little bit to have everybody live their emotions this large and loud and have such extreme proclivities and personalities. I suspect your response to this book will hinge on your comfort with this part of how it is written.

My Thoughts

If you’re looking for a gritty, action-packed, often hyperviolent and gory joyride through a chaotic future replete with mech suit combat, evil corps, and shadowy figures (and really, who isn’t?) you’ll find it here. The book does have some quiet moments, and they’re well-written and fun and sometimes even really moving, but the point here is humans riding tons of metal screaming across the outer solar system and blowing each other to bits.

The book is novella length, so easily digestible, and there is another book in the series and I think another one on the way. There’s enough world-building to give you a framework for the action, although not all of it seems realistic, especially the bloody televised contests between armed mechs sponsored by corporations who have a sporting-event-like battle to take over new asteroids that enter the allowed mining zones. But the point of that setup is to allow there to be cool battles, so you have to spot the author that bit of setup – a book with fierce space marines will always win out over a book with mild space real estate contract attorneys.

The main character, Mint, is really well done and far less cartoony (again, not in a bad way) than Bjorn and the ancillary characters. You feel the weight of her trauma, her situation, her frustrations, and her bad decisions, and she’s relatable as she tries to adapt to bad situations turning worse. She has a moral core, but it’s a flexible, patchy one, and she’ll often do things that surprise you. Other than a bit of a cheat at the close of the first chapter, I found her sections uniformly the strongest of the book, and I cared about her and what she was going through. Likewise, Frida had similar depth and evoked a similar response, although we got to spend less time with her.

I enjoyed my time with the book, and while I personally would have preferred a different direction with the plot than the book took towards the end, one that allowed the delicious tension and uncertainty of the second half to continue, it’s not my book, and I can understand the narrative choices O’Duill made.

One special note – the tactics in the battles (both mech suit and hand-to-hand) were fun, and that always gets me going – I love understanding what people are up against in the moment, what they’re thinking, and why they’re trying the strategies they choose. I really think this is one where if you like the genre (and I do) you’ll like the book, because it’s doing the genre well, but if you’re not a fan of the genre, you might struggle a little. Also, if you get squeamish, the book moves deeper and deeper into gore as it goes, so be warned.

Summation

This is a strong entry in its genre, complete with cool jargon, big heroes, well-paced action and fights, and a big heart. It seems from O’Duill’s recent social posts that the book is doing well, and I’m glad to hear it. I enjoyed my time in the Cold, and I’m glad I got to meet the funky bunch of heroes and villains who live there.

SPSFC#5 Semifinalist Review: Time Traitors by Eli Donovan

July 24, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Time Traitors by Eli Donovan. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Jurassic Park meets Romancing the Stone

Dr. Grace Carson is one of the lucky few scientists cleared for time travel. Years ago, her husband nearly destroyed her career by poaching dinosaurs. Grace turned him in, divorced the deadbeat, and two years later she’s ready to return to the work she loves: studying dinosaurs in their natural habitat. She has no interest in the new time agent, Ben Nakamura, assigned to her research station. No matter how charming or clever he is.

Unfortunately, her team isn’t alone. Poachers are trapping dinosaurs for the black market again. Another scandal like this could kill her research if it comes out, and Grace’s boss wants her to look the other way until the thieves are gone. But Grace can’t bring herself to let the criminals get away.

When the poachers discover Grace’s plans to blow the whistle, they attack her research station. Nakamura and Grace flee into the forest with her time machine, but it’s broken in the process. Nakamura knows a secret cache where they can hopefully fix the time machine, but it means a perilous trek through the wilderness.

Braving prehistoric dangers together shows Grace she can trust Nakamura with her life, but she’s still not sure she can ever trust him with her heart.

My Review

This is a fun romp, full of romance, time travel, action, betrayal, secrets, quickening heartbeats, and even some kissing. You don’t have to work very hard to get me interested in a humans-in-the-Campanian story, and this delivered on the premise and played really well with the concept and the space it provides.

Plot and Characters

There are two POV characters who mostly alternate between chapters but sometimes alternate within chapters. One is Grace, a paleontologist (and technically field biologist, which paleontologists usually don’t get the chance to be), who’s working herself back from a previous betrayal and disgrace to get to run a second research mission into the Late Cretaceous. Her disgrace was at the hands of her (now ex) husband, who went with her on the time travel research trip and ended up poaching materials and dinosaurs to sell to shadowy present-day figures, something expressly forbidden by the Time Guard, a law enforcement agency who controls time travel with a less tight fist than it first appears.

The second POV character is Julia, another paleontologist, but she’s turned poacher, helping a team of baddies operating in the same timeframe as the research group. It’s Mesozoic madness! There was a detail with Julia I should have picked up on much, much sooner than I did, i.e. before it was revealed, and I may have to turn in my plot perception card now in shame.

The research team comes with a gaggle of scientists and Time Guards, and the baddies come with a gaggle of thugs and criminals, so there’s a big cast of time travelers to keep track of. The plot centers around these two groups operating independently and at cross purposes, eventually moving more and more into each others’ spaces. I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it’s a satisfying story with the two perspectives and the different motivations and conflicts pulled off well.

My Thoughts

So, this book is about a lot of things, and it does almost all of them well. For example, this is a book about paleontology and field research, and it nails the species names, the concerns that scientists might have in this weird situation, the wonder they would feel at having this unique opportunity, and the nuts and bolts of research. It’s really remarkable for a book like this to be this good with that stuff, and I applaud Donovan for what must have been a lot of research and a commitment to portraying made-up impossible research in as realistic a way as possible, complete with imagining how technological shortcomings in the distant past might impact research methods.

This is also a book about time travel, and it handles that really well too, and with increasing complexity as the book goes on. With any such book, you need to have a method to violate the laws of the universe, and here we have “time tubes,” which have limitations but are wisely not explained much – they’re the magic you need to make the book work, and that’s fine. The political structure that’s grown up around managing time travel is interesting and seems realistic, and the attitudes toward paradox and changing the past seem reasonable. The story discusses paradox early on and plays with it more as it goes on, as any time travel story absolutely should, and it’s done in a satisfying way, making a fun set of choices as to how the rules might apply. I particularly like the idea that time and destiny have momentum, and that it’s hard to alter the history we’ve come to know. The concern about leaving behind artifacts and bodies seemed maybe a little over-the-top at times, since such things have almost no chance of surviving in identifiable form to the present day, and since such concerns seemed to be ignored by the Time Guard itself at times, leaving shuttered research stations around to decay, but that was a minor quibble.

This is also an action story, including some elements of horror (the big-animal-wants-to-eat-us kind) and some of sci-fi shoot-em-up. Once we shift more into action mode, it’s very exciting, and the challenges keep coming for both groups we’re following in unpredictable and harrowing ways. The one thing I’ll say here is that there are some head-scratcher decisions that I had a hard time accepting, such as the semi-complacency of one group upon learning there was a traitor in their group, which was explored but then kind of stalled out, leading to an entirely predictable outcome. The attempts to throw suspicion around to different parties seemed a little too much to me, too, and I found myself thinking, well, it can’t be that person because they’re pointing too hard at them. There was also one groaner moment for me when one party incapacitated a guy who’d been hell-bent on murdering them, including stating his homicidal intentions and acting on them convincingly, and then the aforementioned party DIDN’T SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD or even tie him up. I hate that, as does Scott from Austin Powers.

The stupid impetuousness of some parties also seemed a little forced, and it often caused predictable bad results. I can’t speak to poacher rings, but I have to think that, just like with high-stakes space missions, Antarctic research, and other small-group scientific work, that there’d be a good deal of psychological profiling to avoid having conflict-laden hotheads join the scientific team. You also don’t meet your grad students for the first time in the Campanian – you recruit them and you work with them for a while before you take them on a huge undertaking like this. But those are nitpicks.

This is also a romance, although that’s only one of the book’s many flavors. I don’t read a ton of romance, although I’ve now written one with a friend (see Best,), so I may not be the audience for or the most knowledgeable reviewer about such things. The longing and the lust-slash-romance elements here work and seem to hit the beats and tropes that such stories demand, and you feel for the people going through it and cheer for them as they go. The primary romance on the science side is particularly satisfying and interesting because of its connection to time travel. One thing I tend to find a little frustrating in romance novels is that characters tend to go around in a high emotional state all the time, triggered by all kinds of stimuli, which leads to lots of conflict, bickering, impetuousness, yelling, and swooning, which sometimes seems unrealistic to me, who lives life with the emotion dial set much lower. Nothing wrong with that, though, and who am I to question a $1.4 billion romance novel industry?

Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution

Sorry to have to issue a IPW for the second straight review, but my tendency toward pedantry cannot be denied, and this is the second book in a row that’s at least partly about paleontology, which I’ve taught many times in my geology professor career. Although the paleontology portrayed was pretty darn good, I did take issue with one aspect of of it. That was that the paleontologists had a family-level and often genus-level name ready for every dinosaur they found, almost all of them matching dinosaurs that are currently known from the fossil record. However, the fossil record is super-duper incomplete, because fossilization after death and survival of the fossils for 70 million years is unlikely as hell. Some estimates suggest we only know of maybe 5% of dinosaur genera from the fossil record, while other estimates are higher, but none I’ve seen more than maybe 25% or 30%. That means that even the absolute best paleontologist who knew everything there was to know would be completely surprised by anywhere by 70% to 95% of the species they see around the Campanian, and that would even higher for fragile or rare organisms that don’t make it into the fossil record, like forest dwellers. Therefore, there should have been many more “wow, I have no idea what that thing is, but it’s very neat” moments than there were, and in fact a good deal more of those moments than there were proper identifications. You could explain some of this away by them having visited the past before and identified some of the newbies (although then the taxonomic names would generally then be new rather than ones we currently know in the real world). But the various dinosaur spottings also allow our favorites to have cameos in the story, and that’s definitely a noble cause.

OK, rant over. Sorry.☺

Summation

This is a fun book, one that feels lighter weight at first but which still has a lot of complexity, both human and sci-fi, and explores that with gusto and with thoughtfulness. Definitely worthy of a semifinal spot, and we’ll see how it does making it into the finals – I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in the final ten. I enjoyed my time with it, and if you’re up for some mildly spicy dinosaur scientist action/romance (and who isn’t?) this is a great choice.

Young Washington (2026)

July 23, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

I saw Young Washington. I thought the previews for this looked good, and it’s gotten pretty good reviews, so I gave it a try. It was exciting and stirring in a harmlessly jingoistic way, and it was an interesting look at a time and a man we only generally know from what came after. They do a creditable job of showing Washington struggling with his role in society, facing barriers because of his colonial birth rather than English, and some class challenges, and they show him adapting to failure and hardship in interesting ways, pointing to the road he’d take towards leading a revolution. I would have preferred a little more day-to-day life and less war, but he was a general after all. Battle scenes are violent but only at the tamer end of PG-13.

I read up on the historical accuracy after seeing it, and like most historical biopics, it sounds like it’s hit-or-miss, but with most of it being largely true, and some of the misses only adjusted to make for a movie that made a little more sense and covered a little less time. I usually prefer when they alter less, but there seem to be no great sins here (unlike, say, The Patriot or Inglorious Basterds).

Slavery is not entirely glossed over, but coverage is very, very thin. There are a handful of scenes with enslaved people and a couple lines from their mouths, but that’s it. This omission and the lack of judgment passed upon the mortal sin staining America’s birth speak volumes, and not good volumes, about what the filmmakers were willing to ignore to make a feel-good July 4th movie.

Interaction with what I think were the Iroquois Confederacy is a more major part of it, although there’s a very weird clunky spiritual scene late on (think how Indians were portrayed in movies and TV the ’70s, and you’re pretty much there for this scene, except I think at least these are all actual native actors in authentic period dress). Other than this scene, the rest of the movie did a better job with portraying the Indians as independent, knowledgeable, effective, and screwed.

I did not know going in that this was from Utah-based crowd-run studio Angel, which sometimes does faith-ey movies, a genre that’s decidedly not for me, but this didn’t have much of that other than in a couple places, and religious language and professions of faith were pervasive in that era anyway, so perfectly ok.

So, a qualified thumbs up. I liked it, and I would see more like it.

Three SPSFC#5 Semifinalist reviews from Wick Welker

July 21, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

Here are three quarterfinalist reviews for full reads for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5 by team judge Wick Welker. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

Cold Blooded by Rohan O’Duill

Mech corporate warfare.

This is a military sci-fi action story that takes place at the rim of the solar system where the social structure has degenerated into corporate rivalry over scarce resources. The economic interests of the corporate entities are defended by mech warriors. This book is full of war games, raiding parties and salty characters. The narrative is tight and the writing was fun. It’s a story that doesn’t take itself too seriously and because of that, the serious parts work really well. While the settings and elements were a tad derivative, the crown jewel of the book are the characters and their relationships. Mint is a middle aged mech marine with plenty of attitude but of course an endearing heart of gold that comes out later in the story with a surprising gesture she makes to someone with whom she has a complicated past. The action was solid and the violence gratuitous. If you’re a fan of military sci-fi, this is a home run.

Time Traitors by Eli Donovan

Time Traitors is a fun adventure book focusing on a team of scientists that go into the past to study dinosaurs, their rival poachers, and the history between them. The writing is clean and economical and the story doesn’t get lost in the weeds of exposition or over-explaining. When we’re talking about a time traveling industry that gets almost on the same level as civilian air travel, I don’t really need too much explaining about how this works because I’m already showing up with my disbelief suspended and the author does a good job of laying down the necessary but scarce details. All I needed is that “time tubes” are doing the time traveling heavy lifting and that’s what I got. The author moves along quickly with two POVs: one a PhD who is trying her best to study dinosaurs and a poacher. These two characters are deeply connected and their relationship is one of the main drivers of the story. There is a dash of budding romance which is welcomed alongside the action that bursts out about halfway through the book. The storytelling is tight and no energy is wasted. The tension, characterization and pacing were all very well done and I was never bored. This is a thriller that I found worthwhile to read although I don’t think it offers much profundity beyond the action. At any rate, I recommend it for fans of thrillers and romance and a dash of dinosaurs.

ab initio by Jacob Terracina

A brilliant book about the humanity and morality of AI

I’ve got a lot to say about this book but my take home is that this is an impressive science fiction novel by any standard. The fact that it is self-pub and a debut novel only adds the accomplishment of Ab Initio. If you had told me Neal Stephenson wrote this book I wouldn’t have doubted it for a moment. This book does everything right and I immensely enjoyed it. Make no mistake: Jacob Terracina is a talented author and knows exactly what he’s doing.

This book is about a group of tech researchers who develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the social and philosophical implications. So what? Aren’t books like that a dime a dozen? Yes, but rarely do they succeed with such engrossing story telling, characterization, tension and impact on not only the reader but that real life implications of such a technology being unleashed. The story is told through several POVs but only two timelines: the events leading up to AGI being developed and the inevitable court aftermath of the social implications of the AGI, namely the AGI’s question of civil liberties. These two timelines were a great choice to explore AGI from two ends of this spectrum.

The characters are the crowning achievement of the book. Every character matters, has depth, personality and actually drives the plot. Raz, the evolutionary biologist turned engineer, is an endearing and inviting character and I loved his relationship with Mei—there was some serious and thoughtful development that went into the complex relationship between these two characters. Getting to know Mei and Markus (wow what a character) through the eyes of Raz was also a delight. The dynamic developed between these developers, their achievements and neurosis was all masterfully done. And then the other POVs—the dueling lawyers of the prosecution and defence—were also such a treat to read. A lazier author would’ve made these characters little more than plot devices. But not Terracina. He fleshed out the lawyers and even more—he made their personalities and struggles a major factor in the climax and resolution of the book. I can’t stress it enough: this is a character driven plot.

This book is also funny.

Work Chat was for communication. Speaking was apparently just an audio alert signal for the chat.

Chemistry existed well before you Plancks and your Bohrs and your Heisenbergs and you Schrodinger’s dropped a heavy quantum turd on the party.

Every page seethes with a dry and self-deprecating humor. The humor brings the characters to life and makes the reader sympathetic. This is particularly well done with Raz who steals the show with his neurosis.

The plot is compelling. You want to know how the AGI is being developed and it’s just so cool how quantum computing paired with the ab initio development of a real simulated brain is laid out here. The suspension of disbelief was very well done and the thrust of the book is always moving with wit, tragedy and complexity on every page. Not only do you get great science fiction writing from someone who understands science and engineering but you get great storytelling as well. If all of that weren’t satisfying enough, the climax and ending were profound

SPOILIES:

The main conflict of the book is if the AGI, a little girl named Abbi, should have autonomous rights. The matter is handled in a trial of the century. The prosecution is about to win at the end but the lawyer grows a conscience and realizes that if the AGI loses civil rights, it will be subsumed but a tech overlord company and she will be copied and enslaved for eternity.

Immortality minus the protections we seek here today will be a living, truly inescapable hell.

The dubious solution? The AGI must have mortality. Programmed death is the only way for the AGI to obtain the same rights as a human being and I got to say: WOW. What an incredible conclusion. It was a great resolution that also felt right. How could a sentient being expect the same human rights when they live forever? So the trade off is the AGI is either an eternal slave or lives a fleeting but free existence. Really awesome stuff. The thought that went into the morality of AGI is astounding. Bravo.

Like the author says in his afterward: It takes guts to read a self-published debut from some no-name dipshit I would say the gamble here paid off. I highly recommend this book.

These reviews are also all posted on Wick’s Goodreads profile. Wick’s website is here.

SPSFC#5 Semifinalist Review: ab initio by Jacob Terracina

July 16, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

This is my first review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is ab initio by Jacob Terracina. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Raza Mugabi, a biologist turned software engineer, is not sure why this particular tech startup hired him. His track record is far from stellar. In fact, he’s not certain what the company ultimately even does. Sometimes it’s better to keep your head down and your mouth shut, he figures. At least, until his curiosity gets the better of him.

Eight years later, Raza finds himself as a defendant and key technical witness in a high-profile court case. A world-class prosecutor and a woefully inexperienced defense attorney go head-to-head against each other, their clients, and their consciences in an effort to answer the question on everyone’s mind:
Is the startup’s invention, legally speaking, human?

The arguments leap between the technical, political, ethical, and philosophical consequences of the decision, and as the trial progresses, the many, many secrets of the startup are laid bare in this hilarious cross-genre thrill-ride.

My Review

This is a great, great book, all the more impressive as a debut novel. At its heart is a common trope in sci fi, the personhood of artificial beings, but the book soars far, far beyond that foundation, with courtroom drama, an interesting back-and-forth narrative structure, imaginative tech, a future semi-dystopian society, and the best part by far, a bunch of richly imagined and delightful characters.

Plot and Characters

The book centers around a company, jinwha (lower-case j sic) that has found a unique way to develop an artificial human brain, through a recapitulation of the evolution of humans on Earth. I’m talking a full recapitulation, too, from the earliest single-celled organisms to modern humans. The plot has two threads that it swaps between as the story unfolds. One thread is a present-day courtroom showdown between a prosecutor backed by a shadowy luddite non-profit who is pushing to categorize this new kind of parahuman as artificial, not deserving of any rights or protections. On the other side is a legendary Icelandic defense attorney and his adopted daughter and partner, working to defend jinwha and its creation, and to establish a precedent that this particular kind of artificial human is deserving of the rights and protections of law and of personhood.

The second thread is a series of progressive flashbacks, showing Raza, a biologist turned coder, from his very first days at jinwha through his deeper engagement with the project as it proceeds. Raza’s jangling, perceptive, funny, neurospicy voice is a delight – at times, he is a genius, at other times, a fool, and his passion for the work despite barely hanging on most of the time gives the book a richness and a tension I’ve seldom seen anywhere.

We see the story through three main characters. Each is different, deep, and well-drawn, with a unique voice and perspective, and each is a delight. I’ve already mentioned Raza, from whose perspective we see nearly all of the flashback plot, although there are occasional forays into other very cool characters’ heads. The other two are Javinta Puri, the prosecuting attorney, who is ice cold and professional but also aware that there’s more going on in the case than there seems at first glance, and Sovhi Egilsdottir, who is there to assist her brilliant foster parent but who ends up taking on far more of the defense than intended.

My Thoughts

What a ride. In a book that alternates plotlines, you run the risk of one plot being less interesting than the other, or of cutting away when a reader might rather read more. I never felt that way here – I was always excited to see how the other plot was doing, and I enjoyed the characters so much it was always a joy to return to them and see what they were up to in the other storyline. Raza, especially, has this comic, tortured, idiosyncratic, unsure journey through the world, and seeing him bumble, then react, then self-critique, all with wisdom and humor, is a treat. His coworkers, including a friendship-turned-love interest that’s handled with so much care, subtlety and realism, and a hard-driving boss, and an only partially sane tech guy, are absolutely terrific. The sci fi here is interesting and thought-provoking, but it’s really the characters that make the story, and you care about all of them.

Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution

As a guy with a Ph.D. in geology who’s taught paleontology a lot of times, I will admit to being a little confused/bemused by the impossibly unlikely premise of trying to recapitulate all of evolution in a model in order to reproduce each exact step and branch on the way to perfectly simulated humans. This is a conceit, for sure, and Terracina wisely doesn’t go too deep in trying to make it make absolute technical sense, instead leaving it to some fun discussions, a little bit of computational arm-waving, and some fundamental principles which, despite not making a ton of sense, provide a reasonable framework for where the book wants to go. Real evolution is full of randomness, of course. One of Stephen Jay Gould’s favorite words, serendipity, governs a lot of evolution, so any model trying to reproduce it would be full of luck and random chance, not something that a computer could easily model, and not something that would lead to the same result that we happened to arrive at in the real world. jinwha’s model is very highly deterministic, with an exact copy of human intelligence as the goal, which is not at all how biological evolution actually worked, and which falls prey to the common fallacy that humans are somehow special and somehow the end-state of all evolutionary processes, neither of which is true, at all. Still, if I can let that go, surely most everybody else will be able to, and it didn’t really hinder my very great enjoyment of the story.

Despite my nitpicking, the mechanism of the evolution scheme and the technology weren’t that important. Buy into them, and you’ve got a great story to follow. I had a little bit of an issue with the court proceeding also, which seemed to have no real rules of evidence and some questionable strategies on both sides, strategies that seemed more geared to increasing narrative tension than to winning the case, but the story is so damn good you just let that stuff go. The high-stakes ending is perfect, and I found my breath literally catching in my throat as the final courtroom scenes played out. Just wonderful writing, and a perfect payoff for everything you’ve invested in the story.

Summation

This is a great book. I still have quite a few semifinalists and finalists to read, and I know the books get better the farther you go in one of these competitions, but this is the book to beat for me so far. I really loved my time with it, and I would gladly follow wherever Terracina goes next. Wherever that is, it’s sure to be populated by amazing characters that you won’t want to let go of when you’re done.

July 15 Newsletter: What Grows from the Dead free next week

July 16, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

Welcome, new folks!

Hi, there. I’ve had a number of people join the mailing list recently. I want to make sure everybody gets their free Frosthelm book, Traitors Unseen. If you haven’t gotten it, you can get it free from many sources here.

Get What Grows From the Dead free starting Monday!

As a bonus for you active newsletter subscribers, here’s a bargain on the way: my most popular mystery, What Grows From the Dead, will be free to download from Amazon from July 20th (my dad’s birthday!) to July 24th. Mark your calendar and grab the free book here.

Here’s the blurb:

Morris Drummond is not at his best. Well, he hasn’t been at his best for a while now. But having just suffered two crushing losses, he’s almost at rock bottom, which for him means driving ride-share in his mom’s beat up Chevy, drowning his sorrows in tacos and spray cheese, and avoiding anything related to ambition, self-care, or laundry.

Morris is about to learn that he didn’t even know what rock bottom looked like, and it’s all thanks to his mom. A secret she left behind comes to light, and that brings down a lot of unwanted attention on Morris, the kind that looks likely to send him either to prison or to the hereafter. Blood and treachery from long ago rise to the surface, and Morris has only his lawyer Annie, who’s an old high school friend, and a few unexpected allies to call on as he tries to figure out what his mom was up to and why so many people want him out of the picture.

A humorous mystery with elements of suspense and thrillers, What Grows From the Dead is set in present-day small-town North Carolina, not far from the mysterious Uwharrie Forest.

Content warnings: Coarse language throughout; some gun violence (not graphic).

Enjoy a copy on me! I hope you have fun with it.

Convention appearance, plus Scalzi!

I’ll be at ConGregate in Greensboro this weekend, Friday to Sunday. This is a sci-fi and fantasy convention that happens every year, and this will be my second year. I’m on several panels throughout the weekend, and I’m also doing an improv comedy show with friends from The Idiot Box on Friday right after the opening ceremony.

One of the coolest things to come of this is that one of the panels I’m on is with two big-name authors who are guests of honor at the convention. One is Richard Kadrey, who writes the Sandman Slim series of supernatural noir books. The other is John Scalzi, a multi-Hugo-award winning author with a huge following. I’ve enjoyed every book of his I’ve read, including the Hugo-winning Redshirts. I feel a little like a ball kid at Wimbledon, running around between famous people trying not to get in their way, but I am so excited to be on the panel. Here’s the description:

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Best, is off to a good start!

I’m happy to report that Best, is off to a great start. We’ve sold 44 copies on Amazon plus another seven from my home shop. We’ve had another set of readers read 4373 pages in Kindle Unlimited, an equivalent of another ten copies. Reviews and ratings are starting to come in, and we’re at an average of about 4.5 out of 5 on both Amazon and Goodreads.

One reader had an especially kind review:

Another interested party (my wife) wanted people to know that she laughed out loud at the Mark sections, too. There’s a tiny chance she’s geared towards my humor, though. 🙂

If you’d like to read Best, it’s available on Amazon in ebook and paperback here (free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers) and in paperback through my shop (where you can get a signed copy!) here.

Here’s a picture of the paperbacks on my shelf (with a view of my cool family heirloom Oz books).

Writing update

I haven’t gotten a ton of writing done since I last wrote you all. I had a cross-country (or cross-half-country) trip with my oldest kid from Colorado to Minneapolis in a giant white van, helping them move to a new post-doc position. That was really fun, and I got to see my dad on the way. Once I got back, I had some other life stuff to handle, and I had to do some reading for the SPSFC, which I’m judging this year. I also got a little distracted working on a new boardgame design, which is always fun for me. Once I’m done with ConGregate, I’ll dive back into my sci-fi novel, and I hope to get a first draft done by the end of August.

The upcoming Rings of Adventure anthology (in which I have a story) in is taking shape, and we’re getting ready to launch the Kickstarter at the end of August. All the stories are fantasy and sci-fi, and they’ll be delivered in book form and also advent-calendar style by email, one story a day, during December. If you’d like to keep up with updates and the launch, you can follow the Kickstarter project here.

Some stories to try

I’m part of several author collectives, and we share each other’s work to try to help all of us reach more readers. In many cases, the books we share are are free or discounted. Sometimes, they ask that you sign up for a newsletter like this one. Here are some new books I have to share this month:

First up, I have Slice of Sin by J.W. Weld. This is a free prequel story to Weld’s Last Sin series. It’s a villain’s-eye-view of a hunt for an important boy who should be dead.

Next, I have Burning Oath by Rowan Ashborne. This epic fantasy adventure has so much awesome stuff – prophecy, a capital E Empire, rebels, commanders, some place called the Wildlands, dying magic, and even some kind of demon cat. It’s earned a 4.6 average on 38 ratings at Amazon. Check it out!

Next, I have Freak Forward by C.G. Harris. This is a young adult cyberpunk thriller, with neon, hackers, big corps, a city’s underbelly, and all kinds of delicious tropey stuff. Only $0.99! Have a look.

Next, I have The Control Room by Miriam Khan. This is a romance with some sci-fi and mafia elements, and there’s stuff on a train, which is one of my favorite settings. Khan is offering it for free to people willing to consider posting a review. Now that I’m a romance author I’ll have some more of these to share, although I’ll try to stay away from the naked man torso ones where possible.

Finally, I have The Dead Lands by Cheryl Mackey, the second book in her Destiny series. A wasteland, a war, a necromancer, a quest, immortals and a mysterious book – this has all kinds of cool chewy epic fantasy stuff. Not to mention a flaming volcano axe, which everyone needs.

Thanks

Thanks so much for being a part of my newsletter. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for upcoming books! I love hearing from people. As always, if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or book ideas, I’m all ears, especially if you want to talk about one of mine that you’ve read. Don’t forget to grab your free copy of What Grows From the Dead next week starting Monday!

May the Bloodmother watch over you –

Dave

Dave Dobson Books 417 Scott Avenue Greensboro, NC 27403 USA

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July 1 Newsletter: A new romantic comedy!

July 1, 2026 / Dave / 0 Comments

Best is here!

Welcome, new folks!

Best, is here!

It’s release day! I’m so excited to share Best, our new novel. It’s a romantic comedy (my first!) starring two quirky, flawed protagonists, Flora and Mark, who need to set aside years of enmity to solve a mystery at the small college where they both work. Along the way, they start to realize that they can actually stand being around each other. At least, some of the time.

I co-wrote this with a good friend and academic colleague in alternating chapters, with her writing Flora and me writing Mark. It was one of the most fun, most rewarding writing experiences I’ve had, and I think that’s reflected on the pages. If you’ve ever worked at a university or attended a liberal arts college, you’ll find many of the quirks, indignities, joys, ironies, and frustrations of that environment mixed throughout the story.

It’s not a bodice-ripper or steamy/spicy at all, although a love story is at the heart of it. That story is an enemies-to-lovers slow burn romance that stays clean throughout, although there’s a lot of swearing by both main characters. If you want to see behind closed doors, you’ll need to write your own Mark and Flora fanfic. 🙂

The book is available in ebook and paperback, and free to read for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. If you’re willing to post a review to Amazon, Goodreads, or elsewhere, you can get a free review copy through StoryOrigin. I will have paperback copies to sell through my home shop starting next week, so if you’d like to get one of those, let me know!

Writing update

I’ve been busy getting Best, up and running with the release, and I’ve also been working on a prototype for a deckbuilding card game idea I had about a month ago, which is fun but a lot of work. Think blue underground fantasy people with goat horns riding a boat around building stuff, recruiting allies, and buying and enchanting stuff.

I’ve also been writing! I’ve added over 10,000 words to my new sci-fi novel since June 15, and it’s coming along. I’m still in the throes of a sticky plot point, but I think I’m navigating a satisfying way through. I will be helping my oldest move cross country for the next 4-5 days, but hopefully I’ll still get a little more done while on the road, and I hope to be able to come back refreshed and ready to do more in July. I really love the main character – a resourceful ship’s engineer in the Patrol who’s caught up in a mystery, a betrayal, and a situation spinning well out of her control. It’s set in the same far-future universe as Daros and Kenai, where humanity has spread to the stars but suffered a massive war, leaving only a small set of worlds on the fringes inhabited and communicating with each other. In this book, a pair of deep-space exploration vessels have been sent back to where humanity used to be, before the war destroyed most human worlds.

I had the first 15 pages of my play, A Light Reign, read at the most recent meeting of the Greensboro Playwrights Forum, and I got some useful advice from my fellow playwrights there, along with the joy of hearing people speak the lines. Not sure where to go next with the play, but I’ve got it in the hands of some readers and submitted to some competitions and festivals, so hopefully something will come of that. I’d love to see it produced, or before that, do a staged reading and hear how it sounds all the way through. If you know any theatre folks willing to have a look at a silly medieval farce, send them my way!

Some stories to try

The first is Defiant Space by Richard Rimington. This is the first book in his Infinite Void series. It’s about a planet facing an alien invasion which launches a desperate mission into deep space. The ship, carrying the hopes of the entire planet along with its crew, faces a host of enemies and hazards as it works towards completing its mission. It’s free as a review copy, so click the cover or the link and give it a try if you’re interested and willing to review.

Next, I have Cave of Time by Luna Fox and F. Lowberry. This 100% free fantasy story is about a village drained of its magic, beset now by mysterious enemies, and one boy trying to save it. My OG “Cave of Time” is of course the Choose Your Own Adventure one from my youth, but this looks cool too!

Finally, in honor of the release of Best, I have a set of 21 closed-door (i.e. no naughty bits) romance books and series that are free on Kindle Unlimited. Not all of them have laughing people standing in weeds.

Thank you!

Thanks so much for being a part of my little writing community. I’m so excited to share Best, with the world, and I hope you’ll give it a try if it sounds like your kind of story. As always, if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or book ideas, I’m all ears, especially if you want to talk about one of mine that you’ve read.

May the Bloodmother watch over you –

Dave

Dave Dobson Books 417 Scott Avenue Greensboro, NC 27403 USA