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A Hunt for Interstellar Portals
Gregory Roarke and his Kadolian partner Selene are back. They are still crockets, exploring uninhabited worlds for new resources, but they are no longer freelancing.
“The Icarus Twin,” a science fiction novel by Timothy Zahn, picks up from where the previous book in the series “The Icarus Plot,” left off. They are now on salary with the Icarus Project. They are still seeking valuable undiscovered planetary resources, but that is now a cover story. Their real mission is to discover Icarus portals.
Glenn Larson was a 19-year-old North Dakota farm boy when the United States entered World War II. He volunteered for the U.S. Navy in December 1942. He could have gotten an agricultural deferment, but wanted to serve. Later, he was aboard the USS Guadalcanal when it captured the U-505 German submarine.
When World War II started newspapers and magazines were at a zenith in American culture. US military leaders, including George C. Marshall, decided the Army needed its own newspapers and magazines to inform troops. Surprisingly, they gave the GIs running the publications a remarkable freedom to report as they saw fit.
Philippe Kermorvant is an officer of the Marine Nationale, the navy of Revolutionary France. He is an aristocrat but a French patriot first. Captured by the British, he refuses parole, making a daring escape from a prison hulk to return to France.
Chase Collis was a street rat in the Solarian Empire’s capital city. He is an orphan, a bastard. His mother died when he was twelve. He lived on the streets since then. At 20 he is a lieutenant in the city’s biggest gang. To move up he needs cred from a stretch in an Imperial prison. The trial judge, his father, an Imperial prince, intervened. He sentenced Chase to ten years in the Imperial Navy instead.
Before reality television, people satisfied the urge to see new places and do new things by reading about the exploits of risk-takers, including explorers. Before the internet or radio, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the way to do that was through the newspaper.
In April 1906 San Francisco was “the Queen City of the Pacific,” the largest city in California and the busiest port on North America’s Pacific Coast. It was a city of superlatives, most banks, best entertainment, richest rich, and greatest ethnic diversity. Then the earth moved and San Francisco lay in ruins.
When Vaghese Mathai first began teaching, his college asked student volunteers to open the class with a devotional, a brief statement to set the stage for the class. Because the students were reluctant to volunteer, Professor Mathai began giving it. His version was a short narrative. His openings were so fascinating students began taking his classes because of his opening statement.
Chloe Mendoza hunts monsters for a living. She is one, too, a nagualli – a creature of pre-Columbian Central American myth. When she lets her inner monster loose, on direct orders from her superior, the results force her to leave Israel and the monster-hunting team she was a member of.
During his reign, the Emperor Caligula built two massive barges on Lake Nemi. Almost immediately after his assassination, they sank. The boats fascinated posterity. Starting in the 15th century, efforts began to refloat them. Four centuries later, Mussolini succeeded. A museum by the lake displayed them. In 1944, the retreating Nazis burned both the museum and ships.
In 1918 the British Army was at a peak. In a hundred-day campaign, it shoved the German Army almost back to the German border – not through German exhaustion, but by outfighting and outmaneuvering them. By 1940, it abandoned World War I’s hard-earned lessons, deteriorating into the worst army of any major power.
Dr. Raj Mondal works for the Landing’s Genetic Hygiene Board. He sentences people to death. He does not see it that way. He sees his job as making the genetic classification system fairer. He counsels those carrying an excess error load (EEL) of genetic flaws to register.
In 1978, NASA selected 35 new astronauts. Among them were the first six women picked as astronaut candidates: Sally Ride, Judith Resnick, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.
Spin: it is not just for politicians anymore. It dominates all aspects of our lives.
It has been 80 years since the Royal Air Force launched an airstrike against three dams in the German Ruhr. Flown at low level, it was one of the most daring, and successful, air raids of World War II
Nearly 250 years into the future, the United States has collapsed and was replaced by Lantua, a thousand-mile-long city-state that was the United States’s urban east. Maelin Kivela is a counselor for Lantua’s Population Management Department.
Texas and whiskey go back to the state’s beginnings. The Cherokee name of the Republic of Texas’s first President, Sam Houston, was “Big Drunk.” He did not get drunk on Chablis. He drank whiskey.
Ernie Pyle was the most beloved war correspondent of World War II. He covered the war from North Africa to Northern France in the European Theater before going to the Pacific to report on the Okinawa invasion.
Georgette “Dickey” Meyer Chappelle was a trailblazer. She was one of the first women to report on aviation. Later she became a pioneering photojournalist; the first woman war correspondent in the Pacific during World War II. She covered a slew of conflicts between 1946 and 1965.
In 2013 John Ringo wrote “Under a Graveyard Sky,” a novel about a zombie apocalypse. While zombie apocalypse stories are almost as done to death as vampire stories, Ringo put an original spin on it. The book caught fire. There are now four novels in the mainline series, four spin-off novels, and three collections of short stories in what is known as the Black Tide Rising series.