I really enjoyed the experiment last month with the book recommendations. It seemed to go over fairly well, so now that it’s December let’s do it again!

Don’t be fooled by the painfully self-published cover on this one. Captain Cosette is a light, clean, and really fun book. Imagine if Cinderella got a blaster rifle instead of a glass slipper, and became an ace starship pilot instead of going to the ball. I picked this one up a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it, and I think my readers will too!

Michael Bunker is a really fascinating guy. He lives off-grid, writes off-grid, grows most of his own food, and is prepared for pretty much any apocalypse scenario you can think of. Not surprisingly, that’s also what he writes about. As a student of Russian history and literature, though, he puts a great deal of thoughtfulness into everything he writes. His stories are great, but I read him just as much for his insights into humanity, society, and the unsustainability of modern life.

Wick is an alternate history, where Hurricane Sandy in 2012 set off a series of cascading events leading up to the big SHTF. Just as Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Bezmenov warned us, the global communist movement did not die in 1989, and Sandy is exactly the sort of crisis that the Soviet sleeper cells within the United States have been waiting for. The modern world as we know it is gone, and something truly terrifying is rising to take its place.

“Redoubt” takes place in the same universe as Wick, but out in the Rockies. Three ex-special forces guys and an artist get holed up in a summer home high in the mountains when the big SHTF happens, and have to fight for their lives. Again, the thing about this story that really shines is Michael Bunker’s insights into modern society and how people deal (or fail to deal) with the end of the world.

Eric James Stone is a friend of mine, and his novelette “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” is my favorite work of his that I’ve read. It’s about an alien race of intelligent beings that live in the sun, and the human colonist who serves as the ecclesiastical leader to a small group of them who have converted to Mormonism. Theological hilarity ensues. It’s a fascinating story, and one of the most well-done treatments of religion in science fiction that I’ve ever read. I can see why it won a Nebula.

That pretty much does it for this month. Take care, and until next time, thanks for reading!