Astral Fall by Jessica Mae Stover

SPSFC 2022

A hundred-year interplanetary war receives little attention from the military’s greatest warriors. Until five of them devise a secret plan to end it. From Midwest Book Review:
"Without providing spoilers, suffice it to say that Astral Fall attempts to identify, address, and turn upside down reader preconceptions of [...] the nature of military sci-fi as a genre. And, it succeeds. Think the classic Ender's Game, but without any attempt to mimic Orson Scott Card's scenarios or success. Think a military battle structure holding the epic confrontations of Lord of the Rings, complete with its promise of multiple series books; yet with an attention to intricate detail that belays the (too-often) hasty series production. There is no artificial division of action felt in Astral Fall.

Impress of the Seventh Surge by Jessica Mae Stover

In an outbreak everyone must make choices. What will yours be? With the definitive American pandemic accounting still pending, it’s trailblazing scifi author Jessica Mae Stover who brings the receipts and then sets them aflame in Impress of the Seventh Surge, a novella about a conscientious pandemic evacuee working to free the next victims of a mysterious virus. Familiar and otherworldly, explosive with originality and utterly unconventional, coated in the residue of rage and the red tinge of fever dreams, Impress of the Seventh Surge is a plunge into near-future social bonds, technology, law, love and fascism; a profound story about justice, psychic AIs, and rising body counts that demolishes the borders between literature and technology. In these electric pages Stover ingeniously devises the next evolution in cyberpunk fiction. With her trademark “deep point-of-view” that pierces the veil between reader and character, impressionistic and startling prose, and the surreality of a video game, every twist of phrase in Seventh Surge is a knifing reminder that Stover’s experimental framing is, in fact, all too real. Impress of the Seventh Surge is an astounding work of gravity and furious speculative fiction — a scifi “what if” that doesn’t ask what would you do? but instead demands to know what you will do.