To nobody's surprise, when your stuck on a backwater planet, you can't afford to buy fuel when the only thing of value you have are some fancy geese. To be fair, Mal never intended to do a job in exchange for some supposedly rare geese, but that's how things worked out, and that's actually quite a problem. Serenity does not have enough fuel to leave the moon, which means they can't get to a location when they can cash out the unwanted geese, and the locals are not about to sell them fuel in exchange for the geese. The only way out of this predicament is, of course, to take another job. Luckily the owner of the fuel refinery is a former acquaintance of Shepherd Book, and he is willing to hire Mal and the crew to help him out of a labor dispute. But in typical Firefly fashion, this new job is not about to go to plan either, especially with Jayne out of commission due to a goose-related injury...

In honor of the 10th Anniversary of his first book, Starship's Mage, Glynn Stewart has gone through and updated the earlier titles according to all he's learned as a writer. The stories are unchanged but he's smoothed out the rough edges so the writing style matches the great storytelling. Since I originally reviewed this series, the focus has almost fully shifted to Roslyn Chambers, the young mage whose career took off during the battle with the UnArcana worlds. Mage Queen Kiera has entrusted Roslyn with hunting down Nemesis, the shadowy organization that has working to destabilize the Martian Protectorate in order to force them into better arming themselves against the aliens that first bred mages into humanity to harvest their brains. Now the leader of Nemesis is set out to find the aliens and prove that their terrorism and massacres were justified, but Roslyn fears that if he succeeds they will return their attention to humanity.

Although sad, there are occasionally small dragon eggs that fail to hatch, but Lord Jaxom of Ruatha Hold manages to save one after sneaking into the Hatching Grounds. He assists this small dragonet as it tries to break open the shell and Impression is made. Ruth is small and the only white dragon ever seen, but both Ruth and Jaxom are convinced they should be able to fight thread together. While they're sneaking around practicing flying and breathing fire, the situation with the Oldtimers finally hits the breaking point. They do the unthinkable in a desperate bid to regain power; they steal a queen egg. Can Jaxom and Ruth find and return the egg before the dragonriders go to war when everyone else has failed? They make some amazing discoveries along the way that will reveal Pern's past and change its future.

You can always count on Nicholas Sansbury Smith to write a good apocalyptic tale, and he has quiet a variety of those to choose from: Hell Divers, Orbs, The Extinction Cycle, and Trackers to name a few. So I was excited to see a sci-fi series written by him, and The Last Steward is the first book in that series. This is a battle heavy series that follows a few different PoV characters, Axel Finn, the captain of a diverse crew of misfits that make a living running salvage missions, a young sergeant, Jax, who finds out quickly that doing the right thing in the military isn't always appreciated, and a paranoid bounty hunter, Rangnar, who collects ancient artifacts. This series has a rich universe inhabited by many different species, multiple factions vying for power, and a brewing war that puts the main characters right in the center of things. But, is it on par with the rest of Sansbury's work?

F'lar and Lessa were vindicated when the deadly Thread returned as the records predicted and Lessa used her discovery that dragons could move between time to go back four hundred years and persuade the dragonriders of the past to come to her time. F'lar was mostly relieved to have someone experienced at fighting Thread step forward and help with the crisis, but the solution came with a lot of new problems. A few months later and the disagreements between the "Oldtimer" dragonriders and civilian holders are growing, and F'lar himself is losing patience with their arrogance. This means that for the first time ever, dragonriders are threatening to use the dragons as weapons against civilians, and the Lords Holder of Pern are looking to F'lar for another miracle.

Pern was world poor in metals so the colonists were prepared to abandon most technology and focus on an agrarian society. What the survey probes failed to report was that a planet with an erratic elliptical orbit would pass close enough for the it's voracious "threads" to cross over to Pern where they would devour any organic life they fell on. The colonists were too far from Earth for a message to summon help in time and the ships that brought them to Pern lacked enough fuel to take them somewhere else so they had to improvise. They began carving out massive caves for shelter while their geneticists worked with the native flying fire-breathing lizards to enlarge them and enhance their telepathic ability. The dragonriders of Pern were born and their lives revolved around burning the threads from the sky before they could reach the ground and caring for the dragons they bonded with. Every few hundred years the planet they called the Red Star would be out of range for four hundred years. During one of these long breaks the people hoped the Red Star wouldn't return and they neglected the tithes of necessary goods that supported the dragonriders and Holds warred with each other. Where there had once been several volcanic weyrs of dragonriders there was only one and it's only queen dragon died after laying her last clutch of eggs. The only hope for those who remembered their duty was the golden egg of a queen and the hope that they could find a strong willed woman worthy of bonding that queen. Without a queen there would be no more dragons and the Red Star is growing brighter in the morning sky.

Mal and crew decide to take on a job on the remote moon of Abel, where a rich young woman seeks justice for the killing of her father. She hires the crew of Serenity to track down the man who killed her father in broad daylight in front of many witnesses, yet remains unpunished. Local law enforcement claims to be stretched too thin to bring the killer to justice, but as one would expect with a Firefly story, there is more to the situation than meets the eye. Mal's gut tells him to walk away from the job and he decides to do just that, but of course that would make for a short book, so things don't go according to plan and we are taken on yet another adventure with our favorite crew in the Verse.

As the sun advances into it's next stage the Earth has grown hotter. Plants and animals are evolving rapidly to survive, and as far as the the city of Shadripar knows, it's the last vestige of human civilization surrounded by a hostile jungle. Stefan Advani is an academic turned rebel against the corrupt government of a dying civilization. We meet Stefan as he's being transported to a prison in the jungle where it's expected he will spend a short miserable life, but thanks to his education and tentative friendship with a new guard, he has the opportunity to translate the last work of a famous scholar who died in the prison. Everyone knows there's no point attempting to escape because the jungle outside is deadlier than inside, but Stefan is determined to turn his new knowledge into not just an opportunity to live, but to live a better life.

I really enjoyed the Frontlines military sci-fi series and I was a bit sad when it came to a close. I commented in my review of the series finale that I hoped that the main story arc would be picked back up with a new generation of characters, since it was not resolved to my satisfaction. This book doesn't exactly extend the main story arc, but it does take place in the same universe and perhaps it sets the stage for exactly that. This is a story about Alex Archer, a dog handler on the planet Scorpio, which was taken over by the Lankies 8 years ago. Since then, the few remaining humans have lived underground, venturing out of their bunker only for scavenging runs to pick up supplies. These runs are extremely dangerous and their numbers continue to dwindle. Alex, and her dog Ash, accompany the military patrols on these runs because Ash is an early warning system capable of detecting Lankies before they can be seen. This book tells the tale of what might be the final scavenging run ever after it all goes catastrophically wrong...

This one is a compilation of original short stories about everyone's favorite ex-cop, Joe Ledger, written by some of Jonathan Maberry’s "friends in the industry." Anthologies like this are never a good place to start a series and are mostly for fans that just want to spend more time with their favorite characters, and that certainly applies to me and Joe Ledger. This collection of authors is extensive and a few of them offer up crossover stories with Joe interacting with characters from their own series, which is extra fun if you already know those other characters. These authors are all clearly fans of Joe Ledger, but as expected, some of them bring Joe to life better than others. While each story is not a winner, overall I feel this was a good pick up and certainly worth a read, or a listen, while we wait on the next official story from Jonathan Maberry.