"Top Gun in space!
An alternative history with aliens, an immortal misanthrope and SF tropes aplenty
The year is 1975 - Robert Oppenheimer has invented the Atomic Engine, the first human has walked on the moon, and Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven have sacrificed their lives to stop alien invaders.
Brooklyn, however, just wants to keep his head down, pay his mother's rent, earn a little scratch of his own, and maybe get laid sometime. Simple pleasures! But life is about to get real complicated when a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes sets him up for murder.
So, his choices are limited - rot away in prison or sign up to defend the planet from the assholes who dropped a meteorite on Cleveland. Brooklyn crosses his fingers and picks the Earth Orbital Forces, believing that after a few years in the trenches - assuming he survives - he can get his life back. Unfortunately, the universe has other plans.
Brooklyn is launched into a quest to save humanity, find his true family, and grow as a person - while simultaneously coping with high-stakes space battles, mystery science experiments and the realisation that the true enemies perhaps aren't the tentacled monsters on the recruitment poster… Or are they?
File Under: Science Fiction [ Little Green Men | Injection | Below the Crust | The Truth is out There ]"
"Life goes on for the billions left behind after the humanity-saving colony mission to Proxima Centauri leaves Earth orbit ... but what's the point?
Julie Riley is two years too young to get out from under her mother's thumb, and what does it matter? She's over-educated, under-employed, and kept mostly numb by her pharma emplant. Her best friend, who she's mostly been interacting with via virtual reality for the past decade, is part of the colony mission to Proxima Centauri. Plus, the world is coming to an end. So, there's that.
When Julie's mother decides it's time to let go of the family home in a failing suburb and move to the city to be closer to work and her new beau, Julie decides to take matters into her own hands. She runs, illegally, hoping to find and hide with the Volksgeist, a loose-knit culture of tramps, hoboes, senior citizens, artists, and never-do-wells who have elected to ride out the end of the world in their campers and converted vans, constantly on the move over the back roads of America.
File Under: Science Fiction [ #VanLife | Driving Out and Growing Up | No (wo)man left behind | Cube Route ]"
