Ken Newquist 
Space is a big and lonely place, and that isolation can do strange and terrible things to people’s minds. In S.A. Barnes’ Ghost Station (Amazon), it can lead to a mental disorder known as Eckhart-Reiser Syndrome (ERS). The syndrome leads to mental decline, ultimately leading to a catastrophic break with reality … as well as murder … Read more
Geek Tree 2024 returns to the Star Trek universe, adding one long-wished for ornament: the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701B. The Geek Tree is a long-running tradition in my house. It dates back to the late 1990s, when my wife and I realized my geeky ornaments threatened to overwhelm the family tree. We exiled them to their own, smaller … Read more
Terminus by Peter Cline (Amazon) is the fourth book in his Threshold series. It ups the stacks by shipwrecking its characters on a seemingly deserted island, as a deadly storm approaches. The rain, winds, and high seas are the very least of that storm’s dangers. The Threshold series started with a book called 14. The novel took place in an apartment … Read more
Dune Messiah is the follow-up to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. The first book saw Paul Atreides (Muad’dib) conquering of Arrakis, defeating the Emperor, taking the Emperor’s daughter as his political wife, and unleashing his Freman on a holy jihad to conquer the galaxy. The sequel takes place 12 years later and features a galaxy cowed by … Read more
Age of Ash (Amazon) by Daniel Abraham (half of The Expanse writing team James S. A. Corey) takes place almost entirely in a medieval city, on a world that is not our own. Magic exists, but it is old, powerful, and dangerous. Most people living on the streets and within the walls of Kithamar never experience it. The … Read more
Chaos Terminal is Mur Lafferty’s follow-up to Station Eternity. Like the previous book in the Midsolar Murders series, Chaos Terminal features Mallory Viridian, a human with a penchant for solving murders. Like a sci-fi Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, murders tend to happen around Mallory. Or she tends to be attracted to where murders will happen. Or both. Once … Read more
On this episode of Radio Active … well, it’s been a while. So let’s look back and where we’ve been and take a look at where we’re going. It’s a mix of bad news, good news, and geeky news, so get ready for the info dump. Nuketown News Geek On Contact Us
Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising (Amazon) takes us back to the mid 1980s. America and the Soviet Union are the world’s only superpowers. Their respective alliances – NATO and the Warsaw Pact – have been engaged in a Cold War for decades. Neither is quite crazy enough to launch an all out nuclear war (at … Read more
Developed at MIT between 1977 and 1979, Zork is the quintessential interactive fiction adventure game. Descended from the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure (the game I’m actually much more familiar with), it started players at a simple White House in the woods and invited them to explore an expansive underground empire. I played the M.I.T. release for this … Read more
The Expanse novels and novellas were part of my summer reading list for years. The nine book series initially takes place our own star system, with a focus on the stellar political situation. Earth rules the star system, but martial-oriented (and slowly terraforming) Mars is a powerful countervaling force that seeks to usurp Earth’s position. … Read more