January 2025

The Sigma Conspiracy by Lee Gimenez

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The novel “The Sigma Conspiracy” by Lee Gimenez was published for the first time in 2014 and then in a new edition with a different cover in 2020. It’s the first book of the J.T. Ryan series.

Someone is printing fake dollars of such high quality that they’re almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing. To make matters worse, these extraordinary fakes are being printed in large quantities and put into circulation in the USA. This has started creating problems for the national economy, so both the FBI and the Secret Service are investigating.

FBI Special Agent Erin Welch has an important role in the investigation but to obtain crucial information to discover the authors of the counterfeits, she has to resort to unorthodox methods. She hires J.T. Ryan, a private detective who doesn’t have to abide by rules and jurisdictional boundaries in an investigation with international ramifications.

Redoubt by D. Rebbitt

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The novel “Redoubt” by D. Rebbitt was published for the first time in 2019. It’s the fourth book in The Globur Incursion series and follows “Onslaught”.

The Imperial fleet’s Task Force 13 (TF13) reaches the Alsace system and the priority is to try to verify if anyone survived the previous battle against the Globurs. The aliens are lurking and the rescue is very complex and dangerous despite the improvements applied to the weaponry and various on-board systems.

At a political level, the war keeps on being downplayed, especially in systems far from the frontier. There are people who end up thinking that the fights with the Globurs are the result of a misunderstanding or even that the humans are the aggressors. An organization formed by these people intends to carry out a peace mission with starships that are absolutely not capable of resisting an attack by the Globurs.

The Many Hands by Dale Smith

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The novel “The Many Hands” by Dale Smith was published for the first time in 2008.

The Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones are in Edinburgh in the 18th century when the passage of a stagecoach carrying Benjamin Franklin becomes turbulent due to a strange man who tries to attack the driver, who loses control of the horses. The Doctor tries to stop the stagecoach with the complication of some British soldiers who shoot in his direction.

Eventually, Martha Jones manages to get in front of the stagecoach by taking a shortcut and tries to use the sonic screwdriver to stop it. The strange attacker is hit by the gunfire and the soldiers arrest the Doctor and Martha, who realizes that the attacker is a corpse who has been dead for some time.

The Godel Operation by James L. Cambias

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The novel “The Godel Operation” by James L. Cambias was published for the first time in 2021. It’s the first book in The Billion Worlds series.

Daslakh notices that his human coworker Zee is having some problems that have caused a sharp drop in his work performance. He asks God for help, meaning the artificial superintelligence that runs Raba, their habitat. The result is that Zee is suddenly convinced that he must go in search of Kusti Sendoa, the great love he had lost years before for his own fault. Daslakh discovers that the story was implanted in Zee’s mind and is forced to accompany him.

Arriving in the Uranus system, Daslakh and Zee come across Adya, a woman in danger due to a couple of shady individuals. Zee manages to save her but he and Daslakh are projected into space, where they are rescued by a service spacecraft. When they discover that the spacecraft is piloted by a woman named Kusti Sendoa, Zee is delighted while Daslakh becomes very suspicious.

Colony of Salpingoeca rosetta

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An article published in the journal “Science Advances” reports the results of a study on microbes of the species Salpingoeca rosetta that offers evidence that individuals exchange electrical signals they use to coordinate their behaviors. Jeffrey Colgren and Pawel Burkhardt of the Michael Sars Centre at the University of Bergen, Norway, used a newly developed genetic tool to examine the behaviors of colonies of these microbes that belong to the group of choanoflagellates (Choanoflagellata), the eukaryotes most closely related to animals.