Jamie Marriage

Jamie Marriage is an internationally published Australian cyberpunk author with a taste for the dangerous and obscene aspects of life. His work ranges from the sarcastic to the satirical. Links to his work can be found at https://jamiemarriage.wordpress.com/

Distant space. A single lonely spaceship. A hope for a new world to revive a fractured humanity. A commander with too much to hide. Something was bound to go wrong.

The Tau Ceti Diversion is the latest work by Brisbane-based Aurealis short-listed author Chris McMahon; and it’s a cunningly written example of survival against odds of an inhuman scale, written against a masterfully-crafted space opera backdrop.

Awakened from his long hibernation in stasis by the Starburst’s artificial intelligence, Karic Zand is quickly brought into a situation where he needs to make a choice: risk the life of the thirty something crew under his care by waking them prematurely on their long trip to a new world, or let them sleep through what could be a lethal radiation surge. His choice leads to further troubles, as those he once looked to for command, prove to have more important things in mind than the survival of the crew.

Drawing close to the Tau Ceti system, the Starburst finds itself in an a place far too alien for its crew to comprehend. This hostile and uncompromising area of space that they spent so many years sleeping to discover, could be the death of them all, or the source of their very salvation. However, there are forces at work here who see these strange invaders as a threat to a life they have known for millennia.

The Tau Ceti Diversion harks back to a golden age of science fiction exploration. The setting quickly shifts from familiar to extra-terrestrial, the characters from friendly and direct to conniving and alien, even the pace is reminiscent of the glory days of space and the unknown, with life and death struggle a real and present challenge at every turn.

This is a great novel from an talented novelist of our age. McMahon has written a book that will not only take you out of this world, but draw you into something far greater than what has come before.

Marianne will be launching Chris McMahon’s SF novel Tau Ceti Diversion on September 22nd at Books@Stones in Stones Corner. It’s open to the public and you can find it as a FaceBook event.

Marianne has known Chris for many, many years and is thrilled that Severed Press are publishing it. Register for the Facebook event and join their In Conversation.

From Helen at Blogloving

My Review: Virgin Jackson is back in the second instalment of Marianne De Pierres’ Peacemaker series. This one’s just as action packed as the first, as gun-toting ranger, Virgin, aided by the taciturn US cowboy Nate Sixkiller, her spirit animal and her possibly psychotic self-appointed bodyguard, Hamish, set out to discover the truth about the Mythos. She’s got a mystery to solve and her name to clear, and a bounty and a murder rap both hang over her head. Beautifully written and tightly paced, De Pierres’ novel takes us from wild, open spaces to cramped city slums and back again. Urban Fantasy meets sci-fi, meets western, this is a book that will grip you from start to finish. Yee-haa!

Grab it here (Amazon) or support local Australian bookshops, and grab it here (Booktopia)

You can read a stellar review of its predecessor, Peacemaker here.

Jamie Marriage

Jamie Marriage is an internationally published Australian cyberpunk author with a taste for the dangerous and obscene aspects of life. His work ranges from the sarcastic to the satirical. Links to his work can be found atwww.JamieMarriage.com

Australia and New Zealand are home to some of the greatest dark fiction writers the world has to offer — disturbed minds firing out shots of madness into the night. Maybe it’s our isolation from the rest of the world: island nations so far removed from the rest of society; mountainous landscapes; bone-dry deserts; and endless oceans the perfect breeding ground for horrors and monstrosities unknown.

Comprising of two dozen twisted tales, ranging from emotionally haunting pieces such as Martin Livings’ Boxing Day (a story that examines one Australian household’s traditional form of ensuring the hierarchy) to the purely creepy Carlington Black’s The Urge, where changes in the atmosphere start changing people, either physically, mentally, or both, At The Edge has something for every lover of the dark and macabre.

Every author in this collection has their own voice, their own story to tell, their own fright or ghast to let loose upon the reader. Some such as Jodi Cleghorn’s The Leaves No Longer Fall and AC Buchanan’s And Still The Forests Grow Though We Are Gone predict environmental catastrophes that we may already be facing, making these stories much harder to bear.

Others simply hold up a mirror, demonstrating that the things in our own heads are the things we should fear the most. The most eloquent of these is Joanne Anderton’s Labyrinth inspired tale of goblins and misplaced wishes, Street Furniture, and AJ Ponder’s corrupted story of the demons that hide within the stories we read, BlightSight.

At The Edge is an anthology that is best read in a well lit room, preferably during the day when sleep is far off. Each author has their own way of worming into your subconscious, nesting behind your eyes, and not letting you forget that while the things that scare you might not be real, that doesn’t mean they should be ignored.

At The Edge

Edited by Dan Rabarts & Lee Murray – Published by Paper Road Press