Space Station Mir

11. The Circuit: Progeny of Vale by Rhett C. Bruno **Coming from Diversion Books on March 15th** Spoilers for the first book can be found below. You can find my review of the first book here.   The Circuit: Progeny of Vale delivers a welcome continuation of the first book in the series, The Circuit: Executor Rising. As was my first instinct when I started the book , Cassius Vale, who comes off as a cold-hearted You-Know-Who in the first book, begins to seem more human. He cares about at least one individual and actually seems not to desire the wanton destruction of all human life. At first, it seems like his android creation, ADIM, is on a similar redemption track. ADIM starts off the book having just rescued a human child from a massacre he was ordered to commit. However, the rest of the book confirms my instinct from the start--he seems like a time bomb set to go off in a direction his Creator cannot control,  However, neither ADIM nor any other "time bombs" ...

Rhett Bruno, author of The Circuit: Executor Rising , has a short story, "This Long Vigil" , published in the June 12 issue of Perihelion SF online magazine. Click the link to read the story; it's free! Don't want to say too much to spoil it as it's only 11 pages long, but just like The Circuit: Executor Rising , it has a slightly different, gritty-yet-hopeful take on the human race in space. Deals with ethical issues of transporting populations across vast times and distances; reminds me of movies like Interstellar (2014) and Moon (2009).

Last year, I reviewed Rhett Bruno's space opera The Circuit: Executor Rising and I'm still looking forward to the sequel! Read my review here . Bruno contacted me recently to let me know the book is being re-released, and I agreed to spread the word! Release date is this coming Tuesday, May 19. Synopsis from Publisher/Author: Centuries after Earth was rendered an uninhabitable wasteland, humanity was forced from its homeworld and founded the Kepler Circuit, a string of colonies throughout the solar system. These settlements provide resources to the remnants of humankind, the most important resource being the newly discovered element—Gravitum—found only in the Earth’s unstable mantle. But a powerful religious faction known as the New Earth Tribunal has risen to preside over most of the Circuit. Though there is barely a faction left to challenge them, a string of attacks on the Tribunal’s freighters causes them to suspect their mortal enemies, the Ceresians, of foul play....

30. The Circuit: Executor Rising by Rhett C. Bruno *Published in June 2014, available now from Mundania Press * The dream of human life after Earth has been realized-within a bedrock of crippling limitations. Humanity cannot travel beyond the solar system, which is replete with dead, lifeless rocks. Impressive, inventive structures allow people to eke out an existence in the barren wastelands of the Moon, Mars, Titan, and an asteroid called Ceres, but only a small elite enjoy anything resembling luxury. There is no Star Trek style terraforming, no warp speed. Yet neither is there an oppressive Central Planet structure, or an evil dictator (yet). Bruno’s tempered vision of life after Earth is interesting because it manages to be pessimistic, but not quite dystopian. The Circuit 's political and economic forces draw on familiar narratives from Herbert and Asimov, but reflect more contemporary sensibilities. The Circuit's economic transports of the necessary Gravitum elem...