Reminiscent of SAGA, this issue begins from Mila’s point-of-view.  Mila, Telsa, Mizard, Bandit, and the rest of the crew that escaped Sampson are bound for Phages which is also known as the ghost planet. During their travels, Mizard attempts to teach Mila magic, but she’s more interested in playing with Driller and Bandit. Meanwhile, Andy and Iffy have survived the vampire attack with the help of a farmer turned warrior of God; his mission is to destroy the monsters that killed his family.  On Amun, Mother - under the control of her sister - lays the groundwork to eradicate the UGC.

Next up on the review list from the Hugo Awards is N.K. Jemison’s Emergency Skin, the winner for best novelette for 2020. For those of you unfamiliar with Ms. Jemisin, she is a multiple Hugo Award winner for her Broken Earth novels, as well as other accolades too numerous to mention.  Emergency Skin is part of the Forward Collection (Amazon Original Stories) which contains a total of six stories from Veronica Roth, Andy Weir, and four others.  The editor, Blake Crouch, came up with the idea of asking some of his favorite authors to write about emerging technologies and how they may affect the earth, our society, and who we are.

I’m so glad I took the time to read the prequel series, Descender, because it seriously pays off in this latest issue of Ascender.  I’m not going to ruin it for you, but if you started to read this series without reading the previous one, then I highly suggest you dive into it before reading issue #12. Now, on to the show…

When I started reviewing this series, I had a feeling my husband would like it, so I ordered the prequel Descender series. (I was right. He did enjoy it.)  It also gave me a chance to catch up on the background story of this epic tale.  I’m so glad that I did, as in issue #11, the story merges a past storyline into the current one, bringing back a few important characters from the previous series: the old creepy wizard from Planet Woch along with Driller the Killer.

As I plow through the list of the 2020 Nebula Winners, I was very happy to see that Cat Rambo had won for Carpe Glitter.  I hadn’t read it yet, but I had met her at the Nebula Conference last year and had taken a couple of her online courses, which I recommend.  Carpe Glitter was the winner of the novelette category, and now that I’ve read it, I understand why.

It is the late 1800s, and Creeper is a thirteen-year-old orphan girl who lives on the streets of New Orleans and gets by stealing in this alternate history of America.  Through a hard-fought battle at the end of the American Civil War, New Orleans is the only place where people of color are free, and Confederate and Union soldiers can socialize without coming to blows. Creeper hopes to escape her hand-to-mouth existence with the help of an airship captain, but life becomes more complicated when she overhears that the Rebels plan to kidnap an important Haitian scientist whose knowledge might destroy her beloved city. But Creeper has a secret. Deep inside her lies the old African God, Oya, who can be a bit capricious.  Will Oya and the airship captain help her stop the Rebels, or do they have an agenda of their own?

In an alternate near future, the United States has walled itself off from the rest of the world. Known as the “Sealing,” no one outside the walls had heard a word from inside the USA until thirty years later when a pandemic called Sky rages across the globe. Two political entities, Alliance Euro-Afrique (AEA) and the Pan-Asian Prosperity Zone, pick up a message from a Dr. Sam Elgin, inviting them to America to help them deal with the plague. A team is assembled consisting of two diplomats, a journalist (Valentina Sadoval), an epidemiologist (Charlotte Graves), her brother, Major Graves, a Col. Bukowski, and an American History specialist (Dr. Kenyatta).  Their mission is to fly a pre-approved path to Colorado to meet with Dr. Elgin who was once part of a project called Aurora.

I have to admit that I bought the first Murderbot novella because Amazon’s algorithms kept forcing it in my face every time I got on the site. It had a bunch of Hugo Awards attached to it. Plus, it sounded pretty cool, so I bought the audio book for when I was at the gym. (Yes, that was the time when we could all go to the gym.) It was funny, irreverent, and had me hooked. It also helped that the actor doing the narration was awesome, so I bought the rest for when I traveled to comic cons. (Miss those, too.)  Soon, my husband couldn’t get enough. It was a no-brainer to pick up the novel when it came out.

Heart is at the center of this story: the loss, the meaning, and the quest to find both.   It is a journey many of us are taking right now which makes it even more important to find something we can hold on to our stories.

Ready for some wackiness? Those Damn Tourists are back in full force to turn your life upside down (in a good way).  With the stresses of today’s world, silliness and absurdity are even more important, and the continuing saga of the most obnoxious elderly tourists in the world is here for you.