Hello friend. Happy Thursday! Today’s Indie Recommends Indie post features author N Joseph Glass and he shares his favorite indie reads. His spotlight book, Overlap: The Lives of a Former Time Jumper, is a unique Science Fiction that I am excited to pick up as part of my Backlist Bingo. Learn more about the book at the end of the post after you hear all of Neil’s SciFi favorites. 🙂
Neil, welcome to Armed with A Book! Please tell me and my readers about yourself!
I am New York born and raised, lived in New Jersey and Georgia for a time, and now live in Milan, Italy. Writing as N Joseph Glass for a few years now, my imagination found its outlet, taking stories and idea from my mind to my keyboard to published books. The pandemic lockdowns spurred on my love of reading, which sparked my desire for writing. Primarily I ingest science fiction through books, television, and films, though I also enjoy a good crime drama and other genres.
Do you primarily read indie books or big publishers books as well?
As an indie author, I love to read creative works by other lesser-known writers. Recently I’ve read and reviewed The Challenger and The Planetwalker by Anders Aaslund and look forward to the third book on this trilogy. Of course, I also read some of the published and more recognized authors. I thoroughly enjoyed the Expanse series and the Silo trilogy, for example.
Neil’s Indie Recommendations
The Challenger by Anders Aaslund
Science fiction
2022
The Planetwalker Trilogy # 1
Imogen Hart is an AI geek and star arial gymnastics player who is training to be a pioneer, or planet walker. Enroute to a new home on Alemea, she is of the last generation to live aboard the Conestoga as it nears the end of its thousand-year journey. As a pioneer, Imgen, or Gen, will be among the first humans to explore their new planet and help make it their home.
Nearing this momentous event, Gen—struggling to deal with her best friend’s recent suicide—discovers conspiracies and lies that may alter the future she and everyone onboard the Conestoga await.
A 4+ out of 5.
An engaging story with a fantastically developed MC.
I just finished reading The Challenger by Anders Aaslund and really enjoyed it. It’s a fun read with detailed, but not overdone, world building and an engaging story. The author intertwines elements of life on the Conestoga through the eyes in the MC very well, providing a well-rounded and “visual” depiction of the setting.
The choice to present the narrative in first person with Imogen relating the story to her deceased friend works beautifully to provide grounded depth to the MC and real, believable, supporting characters seen through her POV.
To me, the choice of ending this book, part one of a trilogy, where the author did was a good one. It provided a satisfying and flushed-out story while setting up book two and making me want to see what happens next. I’m looking forward to the second instalment.
I recommend this book to reader who love a good character-driven science fiction trilogy with action sequences, elements of conspiracy, and some mystery. While the MC is a teenager and this book may appeal to YA audiences, I think a wide range of readers will love it.
The Planetwalker by Anders Aaslund
Science fiction
2023
The Planetwalker Trilogy # 2
Marooned on the planet Alamea, Pioneer Imogen Hart and her team must find a way back aboard the spaceship Conestoga—the only home they’ve known. But their arrival on the planet has not gone unnoticed. Humans had developed interplanetary travel and settled on Alamea long before the slow generation ship arrived. The wild beasts of the jungle are watching, and war is brewing between the two nations already inhabiting the planet.
Imogen, Gen, must assume command of her rag-tag group of pioneers, beaten and bruises by their crash landing, to survive and get a message back to the Conestoga. In so doing, these unwelcome visitors could quickly become the spark that lights the fuse of all-out war. Could Gen be the key to starting or stopping it?
A 4 out of 5.
An action-packed follow-up to The Challenger, Aaslund drives the story to fascinating places and revelations on the surface. In The Planetwalker, Imogen reluctantly takes on a new role leading her friends through an unknown and sometimes inhospitable new world. They find themselves on Alamea, a planet full of strife and on the verge of war.
New characters are interesting, relatable, and developed. Aaslund handles the language barrier between the team from the Conestoga and the surface-dwellers in a practical and realistic way. (No, everyone doesn’t automatically speak English.) Gen’s growth, her losses, and her overcoming her inhibitions to rise to maturity in her desperation to prevent the fervour on the planet from ending her friends and loved one on the orbiting Conestoga kept me turning pages.
I especially appreciated how Gen’s weaknesses are developed and her journey of growth and maturity are followed in a natural and realistic way. Sometimes her ideas and actions fail and she has to deal with the feelings and repercussions. When she succeeds, it is believable to the character’s abilities and personality.
The Planetwalker is a fast-paced and enjoyable read and I cannot wait for the next volume in the series. If you enjoyed the first book, you’ll want to read this. If you haven’t read The Challenger, I recommend you read that and The Planetwalker for a fresh story with relatable characters, fun action sequences, and good old-fashioned conspiracies.
The Long Dark by Ian S. Bott
Science fiction
2020
Standalone
Trapped in the lengthening nights of Elysium and abandoned by the last convoy south, Anna is alone with her teenage son. Everyone in town packed up and moved out ahead of the long dark winter season, the years of which they wouldn’t survive. Scouring the darkened town for anything to help them make the long trek to re-join their clan, Anna must scrounge resources and use all her ingenuity to cobble together a usable vehicle.
A chance of escape is almost in reach when Anna finds they are not as alone as she thought. But the unexpected visitors are on a mission they will kill to keep secret. Whatever these off-world intruders want, it can’t be good for Anna’s world, and a fight to save herself and her son becomes a battle for the future of the entire colony.
A 4 for the story and excitement. Although some plot points and sequences could have been tightened up, it is fun and decent read with some exciting action scenes. The characters are fairly well flushed out, especially the MC, Anna. We get a relatable feeling of the loss of her husband and how she deals with her son’s unique personality. Mikey took a while for me to understand. He is mute and displays some autistic traits, but no direct mention is made to any medical condition. How his mother deals with it adds an interesting and realistic aspect to her character.
The world building in The Long Dark is clear and vivid. The author has created an immersive colonized world in which a fascinating culture has developed over time. As we near the conclusion, some wild twists take the story to unexpected and interesting places. Some of those did feel a little rushed at times, but not too much. Overall, I enjoyed the read and think readers who enjoy colonization stories with intrigue and a great lead character will enjoy it as well.
Donate by Emma Ellis
Dystopian science fiction
2023
Eyes Forward # 1
Mae finds herself pregnant in a world where the global population has hit twenty billion, and governments decree that no child may be born without a life being sacrificed in return.
With growing unrest and violence towards pregnant women, Mae must navigate a hostile world to secure a future for her unborn child — no matter the cost. When the stakes are so high, how far would you go to protect your family?
As an imaginative take on a dystopia in the making, I give this a strong 3 to a 4. The main character of Mae is fairly well-developed, complex, yet relatable. While she could have been flushed out a little further, she and her partner, Pasha, will make you want to root for them. We follow them through an unexpected pregnancy in an overpopulated world growing ever more dystopian as the weeks pass and Mae gets closer to her due date – the birth of an ‘illegal’ baby.
They take us on some nail-biting adventures as we learn how ‘the Society’ Britain has become is devolving into chaos, activist groups escalating to murderous mobs, and laws making it ever harder for Mae and Pasha to be safe. While they make some poor, almost unbelievable, choices at times, don’t we all?
Along the way we see them wrestle their moral dilemmas as the world has slipped into more than questionable justifications and previously unthinkable rationalizations for managing the population crisis. While it was sometimes hard for me to fathom the plausibility of some of the events and actions, I suppose that’s the point of the chaotic ‘dystopian’ setting.
Overall, the two lead characters make this an enjoyable read. If you like dystopian stories and think seeing that dystopia develop in a setting of love, doubt, and loyalty sounds interesting, you will enjoy this book.
Pearl Fields and the Oregon Meltdown by Drew Faraday
Post-apocalyptic
2022
Standalone
For most survivors sheltering in the wilderness along the Upper Alsea River, Pearl’s raspy voice announcing her arrival was music to their ears. Little wonder since she was the only outlier with enough nerve to trade goods out of a drift boat upriver and down through a dystopian landscape, patch up the wounded, bury the dead, and share the latest news about the Meltdown dragging on into its fourth year.
But a few months ago, her luck went from bad to worse. Bounty hunters tracked her down. Jailers locked her away in a single cell with the well-worn gallows in her line of sight. A military court found her guilty of gunrunning during a declared disaster.
Now Pearl faces her toughest challenge yet—confronting her own part in the chaos while talking her way out of being the next inmate hauled up those rickety stairs to take the long drop.
While I gave this book a generous 3 out of 5, I did like many things about it and think other readers will as well. I enjoyed the storytelling style of the character speaking into the recorder and telling the story. We meet Pearl on trial and pretending to be someone else, not the notorious gun runner they believed her to be. The entire book is related as the MC dictating her story from her cell. If that format sounds interesting, it was, and added an interesting element that a straight narrative would have lacked.
Some bits were interesting while others rambled together. The basic love story lends to making certain choices and moments in the story more impactful. Pearl herself is a strong woman whose determination to survive is clear and memorable. It was hard to follow some of the timeline of her story as she went up and down the same river to stay alive and avoid the infected as well as desperate survivors. Overall, an interesting story.
Neil’s Book Spotlight
Overlap: The Lives of a Former Time Jumper
Speculative Science Fiction
Published 2023
Recipient of the Readers’ Favorite Five Star seal, this interview with Marcus Hollister, the man who ‘sort of’ invented time travel, is a touching story of love, regret, loss, and the hope for redemption.
Nearing the end of his life, wealthy recluse and long-time widower Marcus Hollister—famously known for creating the technology behind Vacations in Time—wished to tell his story to a hopeful young reporter, Jessica Matthews.
Why did he choose her? Why now?
She was most interested in his motivations for creating a means of what Marcus called time jumping and his explanation of the ‘overlap’ it produced. Probing questions steered the conversation toward how his time travel invention came to be nothing more than a recreational tool, and why he shut down the multi-trillion-dollar business it spawned.
Their one-hour meeting stretched into three days, in which they discovered some secrets were best kept buried.
Readers who enjoyed A Time Traveler’s Journal and The Time Traveler’s Wife would like this book.
Did you add any books to your TBR today based on this post or did you see any you have already read? Tell us in the comments!
Thanks for hanging out with us today! Connect with Neil on his website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Amazon.
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If you are an indie or small press author who is an avid reader and wants to be featured, connect with me social media or express your interest through my contact form. This is a fantastic way to bring attention to fellow indie authors as well as your own book. 🙂
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