First up is Ted Begley with his first full length novel- Race to Arcturus
As always, click on the cover for the Amazon link to the novel!
The blurb-
Three friends. One scrap-heap starship. And a jump no one has ever made.
Jack, Kyle, and Adwin have spent two years turning a decommissioned mining scout into something that looks like it belongs in the stars. All they need is a working FTL drive. Then Uncle Duncan offers them a summer internship that is anything but ordinary—and a secret prototype that could rewrite the rules of hyperspace.
The catch? The patents have to be filed on Arcturus, thirty-nine light-years away. And they are not the only ones who know what the new drive can do.
Some races are won in the workshop. This one starts the moment they leave Earth. Race to Arcturus—where the only thing faster than light is three boys who refuse to stay grounded.
Next up is J Kenton Pierce with his Prometheus award winning novel- A Kiss for Damocles
The blurb-
The enemy is dead. Their guns still aim.
The Mutual Prosperity invaded Hesperides Colony centuries ago–dropped asteroids on the oceans, triggered a volcanic winter, killed millions. The invaders eventually died fighting. Their orbital artillery AI, Damocles, did not. It has spent three hundred years killing anything that looks like a threat: radio signals, powered vehicles, anything that might let humanity rebuild fast enough to strike back.
Seventeen-year-old Shaifennen “Shai” Roehe grew up in a mineshaft, scrounging salvage from the ruins of a dead civilization. Then she finds a crashed military shuttle from the Long Night buried in a highland ravine. It’s the biggest salvage find in living memory–and it comes with secrets. Traitors from the original war. A murdered alien marine who died fighting for humanity’s future. And enough battlesteel and fabrication equipment to turn her struggling homestead into something that scares the right people.
From there, Shai has to navigate a volatile trade mission to the nearest town, untangle a conspiracy that runs generations deep, survive assassination attempts, and figure out why every faction on Hesperides–the Riders, the Archive, the alien Imps, the new Trade Association that smells a lot like the old tyranny with better hair–seems to already know about a project she has only just stumbled into.
Shai’s universe is one filled with fallen empires, implacable war machines, lost civilizations, hostile xenos, the occasional ancient unspeakable horror, and she’s going to bring the ruckus to every corner of it.
Winner the 2026 Prometheus Award for Best Novel, A Kiss for Damocles is the first book in the Tales From the Long Night series. Post-apocalyptic science fiction with a ferocious protagonist, deep world-building, earned political stakes, and a genuine belief that humanity can take back what it lost — if it can stop fighting itself long enough to try.
J Kenton will be a guest today on our livestream at 1600 CST on the OldNFO YouTube channel.
And last but not least, two anthologies from Raconteur Press- Pogue One and Pogue Two
The blurbs-
The purpose of this anthology is not to denigrate pogues. On the contrary, we felt their representation in fiction (military SF or otherwise) a bit lacking. What about the kid with the thirty-pound brain locked away in the vault, like in Gene Rowley’s tale of a lance corporal in the Cyber Corps? The medical ninjas who’re willing to move heaven and earth to save one more life feature prominently in K. Anders’s story. Chris DiNote shows us there are worse things lurking within the depths of the military machine than mere pogues. In “The Troll,” Jim Curtis reminds us that the hardest working folks in the military just may be the apes whose job is to keep aircraft in the sky. Wrapping up our ensemble of storytelling is Liska McCabe, who reminds us that no matter the MOS, we all endure check-out in the end.
Most military fiction regales the reader with fast-paced tales of strong men with sexy weapons who close with, engage, and destroy the enemy with lethal precision. What it tends to ignore, though, is the supply clerk who issues him the body armor that protects him in the fight, the intelligence shop that arms him with information, or the maintenance troops who keep the vehicles running (ideally). Because there are so many ways in which POGs (I served in the early 2000’s) support the fight, one anthology was simply not enough to convey it all, so we had to do another one.
This time, Ted Begley takes us along for the ride with a shuttle driver who has an eye for a bargain. Addison Reid shows us that sometimes a logistics officer knows what troops on the frontline really need, even better than they do, however inexplicable it may seem. An FNG (Freakin’ New Guy) and his first-line leader learn a valuable lesson about an ancient tradition in Jason Hobbs’ “Snipe Hunt.” B. K. Gibson reminds us that even if you don’t expect the unexpected, you’d better be prepared to adapt to it. Rounding out the collection, Malory demonstrates that a POG’s most underappreciated, yet critical skills are, as always, ingenuity and resourcefulness.
The authors all do a fantastic job of capturing different facets of a POG’s life, from the professionalism to the competence to the humor and everything in between. As a former Air Defense Artillery officer, many of the stories in the following pages remind me of my own troops at different times, and I sincerely hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
Strike Hard – Strike Deep,
Liska McCabe
Captain, ARNG/USAR
Yes, I have a story in the first one, actually built around a couple of guys that I served with…
