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Accelerated Growth Environment
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Book Review: Accelerated Growth Environment by Lauren C. Teffeau

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Accelerated Growth Environment is the newest SF climate fiction novella from Lauren C. Teffeau. Accelerated Growth Environment is the story of Dr. Jorna Benton. In a near- to mid-future, she is the principal scientist aboard the Climasphere, a mobile ecosphere that grows a variety of plants from different biomes. Its goal is to be a mobile nursery and a special, rapid growth environment, for plants being developed to try and help restore biomes all over the Earth. From the arctic to the desert, there is a wide variety of plants that are being developed and made ready for transplant into the world, all around the world.  It’s a big job with a big responsibility. But when things start happening to Jorna’s work, her slowly-revealed past appears to be catching up with her.

Cover of The Geomagician, by Jennifer Mandula, featuring trilobites, ammonites, a pterodactyl, a skeleton of an ichthyosaur, and various plants, with a cameo brooch of a woman.
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Book Review: The Geomagician, by Jennifer Mandula

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Mary Anning was a real-life professional fossil collector and dealer in the first half of the 19th century; given the breadth and depth of her knowledge, she was also a paleontologist, but that wasn’t officially acknowledged until after her death, since she was a woman and therefore ineligible to join the Geological Society of London. In her excellent debut novel The Geomagician (coming March 31), Jennifer Mandula reimagines Mary as a woman living in a world with magic, in which fossils are the best medium for storing magical power. Hunting for freshly exposed fossils after a landslide, she is thrilled to discover a pterodactyl skeleton — and then one of the fossilized eggs comes to life and hatches in her hands! Mary is suddenly faced with new opportunities in her life, and new challenges.

Cover of It Came from the Floodwaters by Seann Barbour, featuring a blue skull against a black background, with red lettering.
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Book Review: It Came from the Floodwaters, by Seann Barbour

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If you’re looking for an entertaining, tightly focused horror tale with interesting, diverse characters and a strong arc for the protagonist, you should consider Seann Barbour’s new novella, It Came from the Floodwaters, coming March 13. It starts out with people trapped in their Savannah apartment building by rising floodwaters, throws in some spooky notes, and then quickly escalates to pulse-pounding action with a high body count. But because the Big Bad is particularly interested in one special person, there’s also lot of creepiness woven throughout the story, along with the adrenaline rushes.

Cover of Jitterbug by Gareth L. Powell, featuring a silhouetted black rocketship against a red background with white grid planetoids, with tethered astronaut being dragged behind it against a black wake behind it.
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Review: Jitterbug by Gareth Powell

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Gareth Powell’s Jitterbug takes Powell’s talents for Space Opera and sets them into a Baxterian-like story of Big Dumb Objects, a starship crew, and the fate of humanity.  The fate of humanity and the universe is nothing new for Gareth Powell. He’s written plenty of large scale science fiction, be it Future’s Edge, with a destroyed Earth and alien artifacts, or Stars and Bones, with humanity on arks, or the Embers of Wars novels, full of Big Dumb Objects. But always, going back earlier to his Ack-Ack Macaque novels, it’s in the end about the characters, not all of them human, that really is the center of the story. In Jitterbug, however, Powell keeps his character focused style of novel and story, and enlarges the outside scale even more this time.

Cover of Hell's Heart, by Alexis Hall, featuring a great eye surrounding by squirming pink tentacles, against a black background.
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Book Review: Hell’s Heart, by Alexis Hall

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It did take me just a little work at the beginning of the book to get into it. If you hated Moby-Dick for its pacing, or lack thereof, and for all its digressions, you’ll almost certainly hate Hell’s Heart too. If you hate disaster characters, you’ll cringe at many decisions made by “I.” But there’s much more than enough in here to keep an attentive reader thoroughly engaged and entertained. I thought it was great!

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