Stephen Moss (2)
Author of Fear the Sky
For other authors named Stephen Moss, see the disambiguation page.
Series
Works by Stephen Moss
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Wilesmith, Stephen
- Occupations
- consultant
author - Short biography
- Stephen Moss was born in England, but spent time as a child in wildly diverse places, including several years in Brazil, Belgium, and Malaysia.
He eventually settled in New York, but still travels avidly, something he uses as inspiration and input to his writing. Stephen is a fan of Hard SF by masters such as Iain M. Banks, Peter F. Hamilton and Orson Scott Card and the many fantastic writers creating masterpieces every year.
His first series, The Fear Saga, combines his passion for Hard Science Fiction with his passion for travel. The three-part series takes place across the globe, from London to Brussels, Africa to Antarctica, the Hindu Kush mountains to the back streets of Tel Aviv. The few places in the books which Stephen hasn't been to in person he researches avidly, wanting to put his characters into the reality of their surroundings, and knowing that the settings for a story are as important as the individuals you then paint into them. - Birthplace
- Britain
- Places of residence
- Britain
USA
Malaysia
Belgium
Brazil
Members
Reviews
FEAR THE SKIES bills itself as science fiction, but as you read it you’ll see that it has a lot more in common with a techno-military thriller by Tom Clancy, Steven Coonts, or an author of that ilk. The premise starts simply enough: an alien advance force, disguised as comets, is speeding toward the Earth. Once there, it deploys four stealthy satellites around the globe to begin sucking up and analyzing our communications, spying on us visually, and to serve as platforms for fearsome laser show more weapons. In the meantime, eight “agents” have been deployed to infiltrate the Earth’s nuclear powers: the USA, Russia, Britain, France, Pakistan, India, Russia, and China. The agents, who are advanced robots imbued with an actual personality from the invading planet, have some fearsome weapons of their own. A small band of humans begin to suspect something is up and must work in compete secrecy (due to the pervasive surveillance by the alien satellites) to devise a plan to defend the earth.
I don’t want to spoil the pleasures of this book by revealing too much more, but I can say that if you like action, you’ll get it here. While the overall narrative is compelling, it is the individual scenes that stand out, from a fight between two agents, to aerial combat, to the firing of anti-ballistic missiles. The book has a lot of characters, but the main ones are quite memorable and you won’t get them confused. A few scenes seem to include characters who have little or no role in this book—but I’m sure they’ll prove their importance in the final two volumes of the saga. That’s right—this isn’t the whole thing. I always hesitate to start reading the first book of a series. Too often, the author has just padded things out and turned what could have been a riveting 400 page book into a plodding 1200 page mess. That isn’t the case here. Author Stephen Moss is incredibly ambitious in the scope of this book. As I said, it isn’t just science fiction. It has military, political, and human aspects as well. It deftly skips around the world as it follows its characters, and while Volume 1 comes to a satisfying conclusion, clearly there is a lot more work to be done before Earth is safe. After all, this was just the advance force of the invasion!
Highly recommended. show less
I don’t want to spoil the pleasures of this book by revealing too much more, but I can say that if you like action, you’ll get it here. While the overall narrative is compelling, it is the individual scenes that stand out, from a fight between two agents, to aerial combat, to the firing of anti-ballistic missiles. The book has a lot of characters, but the main ones are quite memorable and you won’t get them confused. A few scenes seem to include characters who have little or no role in this book—but I’m sure they’ll prove their importance in the final two volumes of the saga. That’s right—this isn’t the whole thing. I always hesitate to start reading the first book of a series. Too often, the author has just padded things out and turned what could have been a riveting 400 page book into a plodding 1200 page mess. That isn’t the case here. Author Stephen Moss is incredibly ambitious in the scope of this book. As I said, it isn’t just science fiction. It has military, political, and human aspects as well. It deftly skips around the world as it follows its characters, and while Volume 1 comes to a satisfying conclusion, clearly there is a lot more work to be done before Earth is safe. After all, this was just the advance force of the invasion!
Highly recommended. show less
An odd comet is visible through telescopes and scientist Neal Danielson is intrigued. His calculated predictions of how the comet will break up turn out correct. However, there are pieces that enter the atmosphere, each one crashing into an ocean at different points around the globe. With a small covert US government team, they try to locate one of these objects. Their efforts start a chain of events that is just the beginning in what may very well be the endgame for humanity.
This is going show more to be one of my favorite books of the year, I can just tell. Even though this book comes in at just over a nice hefty 20 hours listening time, it did not feel like that. I was sucked in early and caught up in the plot and the characters. It was hard to put this book away in order to tend to real life. Fear the Sky is an excellent mix of military fiction, hard scifi, artificial intelligence, and invading aliens.
An alien race is hunting for new planets to colonize and Earth is one of the closest viable planets. The aliens have planned long and hard and have pretty advanced tech. They monitored us and came up with a pretty darn good plan. Us humans should tremble at this plan. They sent an advance team to infiltrate the top military organizations of the planet so that they would have some control once the battle ships arrived. After all, they don’t want things too messy – they want to live here (without humans) instead of having the surface of the planet destroyed in world-wide battle.
The advance alien team consists of a small group of very advanced AIs. These guys are pretty scary. They carry disguised, built-in weapons and have incredible strength and speed. They know all about us and we know nothing about them. They each have a personality overlay that allows them to mimic any emotion. They come off as pretty friendly. In some regards, they reminded me a bit of the cylons in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series (a show I thoroughly enjoyed). My favorite characters among these AIs were John Hunt, Lana Wilson, and Shaheem. Granted, we get to see more of them than of the other AIs, but I still enjoyed loving or hating them. Since they are sprinkled around the globe, we have several nationalities represented, which was great. I love multi-ethnic fiction. Through one of them, we learn a little about the alien culture. I would have enjoyed more of this but what we got was pretty intriguing. At the end of this book, the aliens are no longer some faceless monstrous enemy – we know in general what they look like, their motivations, and their power structure.
The human characters are no slouches either. Neal is one of the first to follow his curiosity, but he is not the last. Pretty soon we have a rather eclectic group of military personnel and scientists trying to figure out what these oddities mean and then trying to give humanity a fighting chance. Dr. Lori West contributes her expertise in an attempt to counteract a possible biothreat. Ayala, a Mossad counter-intelligence agent, provides all sorts of equipment, contacts, and useful advice to the group. Others are involved but these three stuck out the most to me. They have to work in secret as to avoid tipping their hand to the AIs so there is plenty of sneaking about and wonderful tension to the plot.
The ladies in this book are very well written. Each one is different and totally believable in her personality. I have been reading scifi my whole life and we need more stories like this where the both male and female characters contribute to the plot and are realistically gifted and flawed. My hat’s off to author on this point. He got it right and it makes the story that much more awesome.
The fancy tech, both of Earth’s military forces and of the advance team, is great. I do love me some fancy tech! I don’t keep up with military tech, but it all sounded believable and good to me. The AI tech was freaking awesome! There’s also some biotech Dr. West gets to work with that my inner biologist would love to get my hands on. The advanced technology was one of the main driving points of the plot; it wasn’t simply tucked in here and there as window dressing. Earth faces a vastly superior opponent and we need to advance our tech on many fronts in order to have a fighting chance. I loved this aspect to the book.
This was my first Stephen Moss book but will not be my last. This book wrapped up the first big hurdle and I was satisfied with how things were left. Yet there is still plenty to explore in the rest of the series. I greatly look forward to the rest of the series becoming available as audiobooks.
Narration: R. C. Bray did a fantastic job. He had plenty of accents from around the world to perform, and he did them all believably. He also had plenty of female characters which he did quite well – each was distinct and believably female. I really liked his voice for John Hunt and his voice for Ayala. show less
This is going show more to be one of my favorite books of the year, I can just tell. Even though this book comes in at just over a nice hefty 20 hours listening time, it did not feel like that. I was sucked in early and caught up in the plot and the characters. It was hard to put this book away in order to tend to real life. Fear the Sky is an excellent mix of military fiction, hard scifi, artificial intelligence, and invading aliens.
An alien race is hunting for new planets to colonize and Earth is one of the closest viable planets. The aliens have planned long and hard and have pretty advanced tech. They monitored us and came up with a pretty darn good plan. Us humans should tremble at this plan. They sent an advance team to infiltrate the top military organizations of the planet so that they would have some control once the battle ships arrived. After all, they don’t want things too messy – they want to live here (without humans) instead of having the surface of the planet destroyed in world-wide battle.
The advance alien team consists of a small group of very advanced AIs. These guys are pretty scary. They carry disguised, built-in weapons and have incredible strength and speed. They know all about us and we know nothing about them. They each have a personality overlay that allows them to mimic any emotion. They come off as pretty friendly. In some regards, they reminded me a bit of the cylons in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series (a show I thoroughly enjoyed). My favorite characters among these AIs were John Hunt, Lana Wilson, and Shaheem. Granted, we get to see more of them than of the other AIs, but I still enjoyed loving or hating them. Since they are sprinkled around the globe, we have several nationalities represented, which was great. I love multi-ethnic fiction. Through one of them, we learn a little about the alien culture. I would have enjoyed more of this but what we got was pretty intriguing. At the end of this book, the aliens are no longer some faceless monstrous enemy – we know in general what they look like, their motivations, and their power structure.
The human characters are no slouches either. Neal is one of the first to follow his curiosity, but he is not the last. Pretty soon we have a rather eclectic group of military personnel and scientists trying to figure out what these oddities mean and then trying to give humanity a fighting chance. Dr. Lori West contributes her expertise in an attempt to counteract a possible biothreat. Ayala, a Mossad counter-intelligence agent, provides all sorts of equipment, contacts, and useful advice to the group. Others are involved but these three stuck out the most to me. They have to work in secret as to avoid tipping their hand to the AIs so there is plenty of sneaking about and wonderful tension to the plot.
The ladies in this book are very well written. Each one is different and totally believable in her personality. I have been reading scifi my whole life and we need more stories like this where the both male and female characters contribute to the plot and are realistically gifted and flawed. My hat’s off to author on this point. He got it right and it makes the story that much more awesome.
The fancy tech, both of Earth’s military forces and of the advance team, is great. I do love me some fancy tech! I don’t keep up with military tech, but it all sounded believable and good to me. The AI tech was freaking awesome! There’s also some biotech Dr. West gets to work with that my inner biologist would love to get my hands on. The advanced technology was one of the main driving points of the plot; it wasn’t simply tucked in here and there as window dressing. Earth faces a vastly superior opponent and we need to advance our tech on many fronts in order to have a fighting chance. I loved this aspect to the book.
This was my first Stephen Moss book but will not be my last. This book wrapped up the first big hurdle and I was satisfied with how things were left. Yet there is still plenty to explore in the rest of the series. I greatly look forward to the rest of the series becoming available as audiobooks.
Narration: R. C. Bray did a fantastic job. He had plenty of accents from around the world to perform, and he did them all believably. He also had plenty of female characters which he did quite well – each was distinct and believably female. I really liked his voice for John Hunt and his voice for Ayala. show less
5 star read until the pew-pew 4-star ending. Loved the speed of the plot, enigmatic scifi concepts, and characters. That end just unraveled the magic though, sadly.
My original Fear the Future audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.
This is the third and final volume of the Fear Saga. The Earth must somehow increase its defenses, all while crushing its own internal power struggles. Neil, now de facto dictator of the world, has focused the world on building great weapons for the coming battle. He may have also lost his humanity and will ultimately pay a great price for it, but doesn’t see any another option to saving the show more Earth.
The story switches back and forth between the coming Mobili armada and the Earth. The alien political struggles mirror our own in many ways. Indeed the struggle for power is the main theme of this series. We are introduced to many new Mobili characters, some sympathetic to the plight of humanity. The question is, will they be willing to sacrifice their own people to help an alien race.
Moss stretches his imagination here, introducing many intriguing ideas: can artificial intelligences, through logic and experience, actually become more human than their creators? How far does a species go for survival, when do the ends not justify the means? If a reality construct in the mind is real to the participant, can we simply call it reality? When is the body a hindrance to be discarded, would you? Can technology and humanity coexist? And many more.
It is a long and thoughtful novel, full of ideas and political intrigue. The action, as in the previous novels, is brief and somewhat anticlimactic. There is much more attention paid to the events leading up to the battles, than the battles themselves. The characters are well developed by now and the listener will have his or her own favorites, flaws and all. There are a handful of loose ends, but life is kind of like that too, people we get to know, but disappear from our lives. It is not a neatly wrapped bundle, but concludes well enough. Don’t skip the short story at the end. It is really a second epilogue.
R.C. Bray continues with his outstanding performance. It needs to be said again just how enjoyable he is to listen to, one of the best audio performers working today.
You’ve read or listened to volume one and two of the Fear Saga, you can’t possibly stop now. Find out if the Earth prevails, or if humanity is wiped clean from its own world for an alien race so similar to our own. Is it possible to go too far to survive, giving up our own humanity in the process? You’ll just have to listen to this highly entertaining conclusion of the Fear Saga to find out.
Audiobook was provided for review by the publisher show less
This is the third and final volume of the Fear Saga. The Earth must somehow increase its defenses, all while crushing its own internal power struggles. Neil, now de facto dictator of the world, has focused the world on building great weapons for the coming battle. He may have also lost his humanity and will ultimately pay a great price for it, but doesn’t see any another option to saving the show more Earth.
The story switches back and forth between the coming Mobili armada and the Earth. The alien political struggles mirror our own in many ways. Indeed the struggle for power is the main theme of this series. We are introduced to many new Mobili characters, some sympathetic to the plight of humanity. The question is, will they be willing to sacrifice their own people to help an alien race.
Moss stretches his imagination here, introducing many intriguing ideas: can artificial intelligences, through logic and experience, actually become more human than their creators? How far does a species go for survival, when do the ends not justify the means? If a reality construct in the mind is real to the participant, can we simply call it reality? When is the body a hindrance to be discarded, would you? Can technology and humanity coexist? And many more.
It is a long and thoughtful novel, full of ideas and political intrigue. The action, as in the previous novels, is brief and somewhat anticlimactic. There is much more attention paid to the events leading up to the battles, than the battles themselves. The characters are well developed by now and the listener will have his or her own favorites, flaws and all. There are a handful of loose ends, but life is kind of like that too, people we get to know, but disappear from our lives. It is not a neatly wrapped bundle, but concludes well enough. Don’t skip the short story at the end. It is really a second epilogue.
R.C. Bray continues with his outstanding performance. It needs to be said again just how enjoyable he is to listen to, one of the best audio performers working today.
You’ve read or listened to volume one and two of the Fear Saga, you can’t possibly stop now. Find out if the Earth prevails, or if humanity is wiped clean from its own world for an alien race so similar to our own. Is it possible to go too far to survive, giving up our own humanity in the process? You’ll just have to listen to this highly entertaining conclusion of the Fear Saga to find out.
Audiobook was provided for review by the publisher show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 3
- Members
- 311
- Popularity
- #75,819
- Rating
- 3.6
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- 16
- ISBNs
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