Cat Pollock Writes

Happy Thursday! Ready for a different take on time travel, aliens, and alternate histories? Because the book I'll be discussing in this month's review takes us to a different period of history, a different planet, and a different means of time travel. Disclaimer Tag/Image Permissions: The book for this month's review was provided to me for free by the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review of the story. I've also received permission to use the cover art as part of the review. Big Red Damien Larkin, 2019, Dancing Lemur Press Summary: The last thing Irish military veteran Darren Loughlin expected from a quick and easy job recommended by an old military buddy was travel to another planet or being thrown into an interplanetary conflict. He comes back traumatized and with fractured memories of the events that took place. The general in charge of the operation is demanding answers, and Darren is left struggling to piece together memories that po...

Happy Thursday! Welcome to the early 19th century. You know, that period of time where: morphine, the accordion, Scotch tape and the lawn mower were all invented, and sewing machines were patented John Dalton put out a theory about matter consisting of atoms, which each have their own distinct weight Mount Tamobra erupted, putting so much debris in the stratosphere as to make 1816 forever known as "the year without a summer" Beethoven died It's also the period of time where science fiction started to take off as a genre. Let's settle in and look at what was published during that time period, shall we? Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville - Le dernier homme (The Last Man) - (1805) Written by French author Jean-Baptiste François Xavier Cousin De Grainville and published posthumously, this novel is considered to be the start of the Dying Earth subgenre of science fiction. It depicts the story of Omegarus (the last man born) and Syderia (the las...

Happy Thursday! Last week, the first part of this post went live. Today I'm back with a look at the science fiction box sets of books that Amazon/Kindle recommended. Plan to spend a little extra time reading this part, friends. It's a longer section of the list than the last and (because we're talking about boxed sets) the descriptions are a little bit longer. A quick recap/overview of how this is going to work. In this post: I'll tell you the name of the book/box set How well the book/box set is rated on the platform I'm examining A quick summary of the book/box set based on its description A few extra notes that are pertinent to this examination/half of the post: In case you did not pick up on it in the title, this is the second of a two part post. I took a look at the top 25 recommendations total and there were a ton of box sets on the list, so I decided to split it in half. For my examination of all Kindle recommendations, I will be noting wh...

Happy Thursday! Back in January, I did a quick dive into whether or not the Goodreads recommendations feature would recommend any science fiction I was interested in. So far, it's the most popular post on the blog this year. Which tells me two things: People are interested in how well these recommendation features actually work. I should probably make this "Dear ___________" into a series. So - for this round, I'm looking at the recommendations my Kindle gave me in the science fiction realm. The way this works is fairly simple. I'll tell you:  the name of the book how well it's rated on the platform I'm examining a quick summary based on its description whether or not I would add it to my TBR  A couple of notes that are pertinent to this examination: In case you didn't pick up on it in the title of this post, this is a two part post. I took a look at the top 25 recommendations total and there were a ton of box sets on the list, s...