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The Lampworks Lamplighter SF & Fantasy News & Reviews
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In this issue
Game Review
Stellar Horizons — Dan
I get much enjoyment playing a game that I can walk away from with a great story to tell. It’s not about the time I drew the perfect set of cards or got incredibly lucky rolling dice. It’s the story those activities generate that keeps me coming back for more. In Stellar Horizons, you build your own space program and advance out into the solar system, first tentatively with fragile robotic orbiters and rovers. With each success or failure you slowly gather scientific data and technical experience and move to more and more sophisticated crewed ships, and then bases, perhaps first on the moon, and then other planets. As the decades pass, bases grow, resources are generated, colonies appear that can trade with each other. Threats and opportunities abound, and perhaps one day you may even be able to build a starship and leave the solar system.
Stellar Horizons, by Compass Games, was designed by real-life long-duration spaceflight engineer Andrew Rader. It is firmly rooted in real life science and technology, but abstracts enough of the details that players are left with an intense feeling and understanding of the difficulty and complexity of interplanetary spaceflight, without any special knowledge needed.
Eight very different scenarios are included, ranging from an hour or so in length, building settlements on Mars or deflecting an asteroid headed toward Earth, to the full 11-hour campaign that stretches across the years from 2030 to 2169. The full campaign can support 1-7 players, each playing a different geopolitical consortium, across dozens of locations on planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc. Both competitive and cooperative scenarios are included, and a fan-made scenario is also available. I even had a great time making up my own scenario.
One of the few detractors from the game is the rulebook. For all its options and scope, the game is not overly complicated, but the rulebook is not as well laid out as it could be, and is vague on a number of points. I think that to truly enjoy the game and avoid frustration, you must be ready to watch a couple videos on YouTube to learn the details of play, and also to download player aids and errata from the game’s active community on Boardgamegeek.com. It’s also an expensive game, at $149, but I was able to find a copy used that had a damaged box for a substantial discount through Noble Knight Games.
Find it on Boardgamegeek.com.
Our Books
Sellenria: The Starship and the Citadel
Chuck Boeheim, Daniel Elswit
… this story bolstered my faith that someone can still write decent sci-fi.
Sellenria brings you back to a timeless quest on an alien world. Archaeologist Stenn Gremm was following the trail of an ancestor who had vanished hundreds of years ago. It lead to a world where legends came to life and ancient evils threatened everyone who lived there.
This book delighted on so many levels. It‘s smart, insightful, and wise. The many passages I highlighted are to remind myself how to be a better person.
Stenn came to realize that he had more strength than he knew, and that he still needed his friends to succeed.
This story contains all you expect from SciFi: alien creatures, epic battles, and strange worlds; but even more it‘s a story about the best in people, whether human or otherwise.
Join Stenn‘s trek to the Citadel in the desert and find out for yourself what it takes.
Do you have Kindle Unlimited? You can read it for free on Amazon!
Buy on amazon Bookshop.org
What We‘re Reading
Visit our archive of reviews and recommendations on the Books We Like page of our website. You‘ll find over one hundred recommendations in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Non Fiction.
Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
Kote is an innkeeper in a remote village. He was once someone quite different, but here his identity is a secret known to only one other, a situation much to his liking. But these lands are not safe and when Kote saves a stranger from a demon attack, the man recognizes him as the great and powerful hero he once was. As events transpire, it becomes necessary for him to agree to tell the story of his life, an event that, in the telling, will change his life yet again.
Buy on Bookshop.org amazon
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Dennis Taylor
The protagonist dies in chapter one. This is not a spoiler, since he is frozen and resurrected more than a century later as the intelligence controlling one of the first interstellar probes. His mandate is to explore the stars and make clones of himself to expand the search. He has to come to grips with his new existence, with Earth trying to control him, with hostile aliens, and eventually with an exodus from Earth.
This is unabashedly geeky, with tons of nerd culture references. It’s also a great tour of the current ideas for spacefaring explorers, terraforming, advanced weaponry and more. It’s a quick read, in a breezy style and short snippet chapters that jump viewpoint between all the various incarnations of Bob.
I had a lot of fun reading this book and the two sequels.
Buy on Bookshop.org amazon
You may also enjoy…
Zedger: Edge of Zion
Elysia Lumen Strife
In a post-war, irradiated, future Earth, Marci is the only one of the test subjects strong enough to escape the experiments of Project Zedger—the Astrals’ bioenhanced military designed to protect what’s left of humanity in the Free Territories of Zion. Zedger soldiers are their main weapons: mutated, spliced, and cybernetically restructured to do the most damage, without objection.
The Genesis hub controls everyone. Marci knows she must take it out if she is to free her people.
Zedger must fall.
Buy via StoryOrigin
The Parallels
Keyla Damaer
A militia officer on the hunt for a murderer. A scientist with the key to humanity’s future. A girl in a glass tank with no memory. One seeking justice. One seeking fame. One seeking answers. With the galaxy on the brink of war, time is not on their side.
Buy via StoryOrigin
Long Paradise
James Murdo
An ancient, unsolved mystery. Everyone wants to survive. Everyone wants answers.
Free via StoryOrigin
The Razvak Hunter
Arel B. Grant
Bartholomew Roberts is retiring, leaving his son in command of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. It is his first command, and it may be his last. The Alliance will do everything in their power to ensure that he fails.
Failure in the Alliance is not tolerated. If Doc Roberts is lucky, they will hang him. If not, he will be sent to a reeducation center, mind-wiped, and a control collar will be placed around his neck, then he will be paraded in the streets of Avalon’s capital city, as an example of what happens to people who fail in their missions.
He can’t afford to fail!
Buy via StoryOrigin
First Command
Jay Toney
Bartholomew Roberts is retiring, leaving his son in command of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. It is his first command, and it may be his last. The Alliance will do everything in their power to ensure that he fails.
Free via StoryOrigin
Maki the Superhero
Rayner Ye
Maki’s upset when he’s sent to a boarding school in the sky, but furious when a stranger signs him out and states his mother died and he’s his true father. When the boy discovers this man’s a time traveller, he wants to visit his mother in the past. Instead, he stumbles into a future alien invasion.
Free via StoryOrigin
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