Well, I'm as busy as ever. Still teaching my full timetable, albeit via video conference. Still keeping on top of the garden. And still working on Fraternity.
But in a light-hearted moment, I decided to put together this short spoof mountaineering documentary.

But enough about me. Here are the books you want...

Struggling with newfound sentience and desperately trying to repair itself, The Indescribable Joy of Destruction is a ship trying to find a new home. In a galaxy torn apart by generations of civil war, that isn't an easy task. Tired of being used as a killing machine, it has a huge decision to make: hide and save itself, or help other artificial intelligences achieve freedom. Unable to make the decision alone, it revives the sole human aboard - the enemy officer who crippled it.
Commander Olivia Johnson wakes to find herself in the infirmary of a strange vessel. Her nightmares deepen when she discovers it is the ship that attacked her destroyer. Even as she recovers from her physical injuries, she can't get past her survivor's guilt. She might have failed to protect her crew, but she vows to take revenge on their killer.
When the ship uncovers a genocidal plot by the commander's own admirals, Johnson realises just what is at stake. Together, the AI ship and the human officer must recruit outsiders from both sides. Training the misfits in battle to prevent the atrocity may be an impossible task, but running and hiding is no longer an option.

Valencia always knew that she'd captain her own ship one day.
She just needs experience. The only problem? No one is looking to hire an inexperienced runaway errand girl from Ranchero Station. Destiny waits for no one, so with a bag full of clothes and old books Valencia stows away on Captain Deuce DeLonghi's ship, the Aristocrat.
Their mission? Running illegal guns to the alien planet of Endigo.
Thrust right into the fire Valencia must show the captain and grouchy sergeant that she not only belongs with the crew but that she can be the captain of her own crew some day.

Rookie archaeological agent Jonathan Jarl is on his first mission to retrieve a stolen, priceless artifact but a megalomaniac corporate leader does everything in his power to stop him. At the same time, something alien is found in space and it is heading for Earth.
In orbit around the moon, a discovery is made that has potential implications for the entire human race. In a lab within Tabula Rasa, a mega-complex inhabited by over a million people, an idealistic scientist decides to share the discovery with the world. She takes a fateful decision that puts her life on the line.
Jonathan is pushed to the edge in this first contact science fiction adventure thriller about Jonathan Jarl and the Amber group.

In the deepest goldmine in Africa, Thato stumbles upon something unique, an entity more extraordinary than golden ore buried in layers of the earth so deep that no light penetrates the darkness. Wrenching it from the rock, he inadvertently unleashes something monstrous into the world. From a township in South Africa, a microscopic virulence sweeps across the globe, finding its way into the US, where one doctor comes face-to-face with the reality of a pandemic in small-town America.

Death is just the beginning.
Earl Anderson takes a wrong turn and is shot dead in a mugging gone bad. The next thing he knows he is on a foreign world and has been conscripted into an intergalactic army.
He fears for his wife and baby son back on earth. He will do anything to find them, even go along with his captors as he awaits an opportunity to escape. Events outpace him as he tries to figure out what happened and how to escape.
He courts death at every turn as he fights his way forward in a situation that makes no sense.
Unable to discern truth from fiction, Earl works to subvert his captors in a struggle for his life, not knowing how things hang in the balance for humanity or even if his family still lives. If you like space opera and military science fiction, this book is for you. Pick up your copy today!

The past is gone. The future is invasion. One rogue captain battles for the fate of humanity...
Thomas Halloran barely endured the loss of his wife and child. But the nuclear submarine Captain’s world explodes with rage when he and his crew somehow plunge headlong into Earth’s distant future. Far beyond the 21st Century, Halloran must navigate his seething hate and a frenzied alien ambush.
Forced to hide aboard an enemy transport, Halloran and his refugees hurtle through space toward an uncertain destiny. In a world with shifting alliances and technology they don’t comprehend, the Captain and his crew must quickly learn to adapt their strategies from the past or risk extinction.
Fighting his own fury, will Halloran’s obsession with revenge turn this alien battle into their last?

Earth, 50,000 years ago before the magic vanished. Invaded by aliens posing as gods, advanced civilisations crumbled. Now, these powerful off-worlders war for control of the planet, and the people who remain no longer remember what they once were. Seduced then enslaved, humanity has fallen.
Beneath the destroyed remains of an ancient temple, Thaya discovers a relic and a scroll written by the last of an advanced civilisation. The scroll contains a message and a vision of a forgotten world. The relic unlocks a memory about her own past that she should not have forgotten. The truth sets her free but it comes at a great cost, and now she must flee.
In the ashes of her ancestors, Thaya fights to stay alive, but hers is not the only race beleaguered, and her survival is inextricably tied to the fate of an other-worldly being. In a journey that takes her to different times, alien worlds and across dimensions, Thaya must lose everything to find her own salvation.

It's 2096, sixty years after ninety percent died from a man-made Bioplague. Humanity has splintered into four unequal subspecies: immortals, cyborgs, enhancers, and subservient half-human, half-animal hybrids.
The world is anything but equal. Hybrids everywhere are suffering, but sixteen-year-old Raek Mekorian, a wolfish with a nose for trouble, doesn’t see an alternative. Except the Resistance, who don’t stand a chance against the world government. His mom always said, "Keep your head down."
And he does, until his sister is murdered by a pair of cyborgs. Overnight, his simple life is shattered, fracturing the rigid governmental caste as he is thrust into the dangerous world of superhuman hit squads, Resistance uprisings, and secrets better left unsaid.
With only built-in blasters and the advice of a mysterious professor, Raek must navigate crushing betrayal, self-doubt, and a limitless enemy whose evil knows no bounds.
Can Raek unify his people and free them from tyranny? The fate of mankind may rest in his hands.

Captain Patrick Knox, war hero and a man who has seen too many dead soldiers, is on his final journey. His task? To take an aging ship full of colonists to a backwater farm planet, with a short stop at a prison planet to offload a cargo of serial killers.
After that, he’s done. He’ll sit with the ghosts of his dead and drink himself to oblivion.
Then an act of sabotage causes the colony ship to crash onto an unmapped and eerie alien planet, the majority of their supplies lost and their tech destroyed. There is little chance of rescue. Somehow, Knox must find his ragged band of survivors safe harbor on a primeval planet where murderers roam free, even the plants are carnivorous…and the only surviving doctor is a convicted serial killer...

When a stable wormhole opens in Sol-controlled space, Vengeance and her crew wake from stasis to deal with the new threat.
Admiral Stansfield needs a team to investigate. The SBS has plenty of skilled operatives, but only Marine X is old enough to use the antiquated equipment they’ll need to complete the mission.
Redeployed from half a galaxy away, Ten just wants to get back to fighting the Deathless. He has unfinished business.
Stansfield is no fan of penal Marines, and Ten is pretty sure he’s hiding the truth about their mission. His teammates Conway, Kearney, Mason and Davies are still smarting over the loss of a comrade and aren’t welcoming either.
Can this ragtag squad unite to complete the mission at hand and save Earth from a conflict that could make the Deathless War look like a minor skirmish?

Fifty-three years after it vanished, Earth's only Super-Devastator warship, the ESS Crimson sends out a distress signal...
Humanity is fighting against an implacable foe. The Ghasts – a ruthless alien race - seem hell-bent on wiping out mankind. They have a vast warfleet and their technology is advancing at a terrible rate.
Captain John Nathan Duggan and his crew are given a mission – find the missing ESS Crimson and bring it home. Little does Duggan realise, this is no ordinary mission. As he struggles against enemies both within and without, he desperately tries to unlock the mystery surrounding the Crimson’s disappearance and the unknown weapons it carries. He soon discovers the missing warship might be the only hope for salvation that mankind has left.
When everything is veiled in secrecy nothing is easy, as Duggan is about to find out.

A powerful battlecruiser adrift in space. Can a bold pirate steal it from under everyone’s nose?
Indy Jackson longs to blast her father’s killer to ashes. But when her latest shady interplanetary deal goes bad, the plucky pirate is forced to go on the run, framed for an alien massacre. And to clear her name, her brutal blackmailer demands she enter dangerous territory to salvage a fabled warship.
Desperate to return to her black market trades and hunt down her father’s murderer, Indy finds herself burdened with a ragtag crew of mercenaries. But the determined woman soon discovers finding the wreck no one has returned from could be an impossible task, with a galactic sector on the edge of anarchy and factions vying for power.
Can Indy successfully play the sector’s fragile combat politics before she’s vaporized in a hail of laserfire?

Stranded on an alien planet and left for dead. They've never felt so alive.
The attempt to colonize a system on the other side of a gateway to the stars led to serious problems. Massive storms, sandworms, and strange beings that threaten to end any chance our team has for survival.
Espinoza and his fellow Marines struggle to reconnect with Earth while battling the environment and those who attacked their ship on the way through the gateway. Shrina searches for her sister and answers to where the strange beings on Earth came from. Trent forms new bonds as he learns about powers beyond our comprehension.

Humanity is within months of losing an interstellar war to a species of aliens known as Fangrin. Giving up isn’t an option. Victory doesn’t seem like an option either.
When assault craft pilot Commander Jake Griffin is sent out with the Eternity carrier group to hunt down and destroy enemy facilities, he has no idea what’s coming to him. The planet Graxol-4 out in the middle of nowhere hides a critical enemy base with vital resources just waiting to be stolen.
The only problem is, it’s guarded by a war fleet and surface troops, while the planet itself is toxic and gripped by constant storms.
The coming fight will be relentless. It will test Griffin’s combat skills to the limit against a vastly superior foe. In a way, he’s got it easy – the troops on the ground will have to beat the Fangrin in the most challenging circumstances imaginable.
That job falls to Lieutenant Tanner Conway, a man who just wants to go home to his family.
Victory on Graxol-4 may not win the war, but it will buy time for humanity to regroup, toughen up and come back harder.
However, a third - unknown - player has an interest in this game and their involvement will turn everything on its head.

All her life Cariad had one dream: to participate in humanity’s colonization of deep space. After topping her field as a geneticist, and then spending 184 years in cryonic suspension, she’s achieved her goal.
But the new planet is not the paradise the scientists predicted. Alien predators come out at night, ready to feast on the new arrivals. What’s more, saboteurs have stowed away aboard the ship and are determined to destroy the new colony.
To defeat the settlers’ enemies, Cariad must enlist the help of the disgruntled Gens, last in the line of generational colonists who lived and died on the long journey to the stars, and who hate the Woken scientists.
Infighting and strife plague Cariad’s efforts. If the colony’s factions don’t pull together, the flame of hope for humanity will be snuffed out.

A Resource as Precious as Life
Ether. It revolutionized human technology. Made faster than light travel possible. With this new form of energy, people expanded beyond Earth to distant stars in other galaxies across the cosmos. After years of conflicts, a rebellion, and countless skirmishes, the Human Confederacy is a thriving government, a beacon of civilization. Until an ether facility is destroyed out of the blue with no one taking credit for the destruction.
Enter the Morrigan, a state of the art ship with a brilliant but inexperienced crew. Their captain Noah Markel is no stranger to battle and he believes this may not be as simple as an act of terrorism but rather an incursion. Their first contact with an alien race. One bent on crippling human space travel in preparation for something far worse than a border dispute.

The Marines of Ghost Squadron are humanity’s foremost black ops specialists who strike without warning and vanish without a trace. They will do whatever is necessary to protect humanity anywhere in the known galaxy. With the Commonwealth increasingly unstable thanks to venal politicians, greedy financiers, and power-hungry revolutionaries, they don’t lack for missions.
When an undercover Constabulary officer vanishes after uncovering a massive cartel-run human trafficking operation, the Commonwealth’s interstellar police force calls for help from Naval Intelligence. Because the cartel’s operations could upend the delicate political balance between the older core worlds and the more recently colonized outer star systems, Ghost Squadron gets the job. Its mission: find the missing Constabulary officer and choke off the growing slave trade bedeviling humanity’s perilous galactic frontier.
Ghost Squadron’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Thomas Decker, spent the last ten years as a Naval Intelligence agent. His job was thwarting plots and terminating the Commonwealth’s internal enemies alongside his partner, a trained assassin. Now, with several hundred of the deadliest Marines ever fielded at his back, Zack Decker will change the course of history and usher in a new era.

Security Lieutenant Dave is looking forward to some simple cases and patching things up with his wife. His handling of a terrorist attack has gained him acclaim and some new friends in high places, but he is still closely involved with Arancha Station's mob boss.
When the space station manager is killed in a new and worrying way, Dave realises that he's got possibly the biggest case of his career. Unfortunately, as soon as his new boss arrives with reinforcements, he is relegated to monitoring data and assigned a rookie partner to babysit. Dave needs to find something that will crack the case open before the killer can strike again.