Re: "Junkyard Cats" by Faith Hunter

On 8/26/2024 4:02 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:

"Junkyard Cats" by Faith Hunter
    https://www.amazon.com/Junkyard-Cats-Faith-Hunter/dp/1622681754/
 Book number one of a four book novella science fiction series.  I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback published by Lore Seekers Press in 2023 that I bought on Amazon.  I have ordered the other three books in the series.
 The book is set in the not so distant future, probably 2060 or so.  In 2043, thousands of Chinese Mama bots advanced into Seattle in 2043, creating and deploying Warbots to kill the population.  The Mama bots self replicate and spread across the USA, killing off most of the population with their warbots, starting "The Final War".
 Shining Smith has just bought an old scrapped Tesla warplane for her West Virgina junkyard but she finds an old friend dead in the cockpit when she broke the military seals.  And, the plane is infected with bicolor ants, a nanobot enhanced ant that a crazy person introduced to the USA to eat all of the dead bodies.  Shining is one of the few known survivors of a bicolor ant swarm, who infected her with their nanobots. And she is a survivor of The Final War that started when she was 12. But her old friend is a warning that danger is coming.
 The author has a website at:
    https://www.faithhunter.net
 My rating:  5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating:  4.5 out of 5 stars (4,587 reviews)
 Lynn

 From another board: "The “Junkyard Cats” book is WEIRD.   I think I like it but I’m not sure yet.  Are all romance writers working off the same basic plot?  I guess that’s sort of the definition of “genre” writing.   They have to go to pretty extreme lengths to make their story stick out…. it kept me up an extra hour last night anyway…"
Yes, “Junkyard Cats” is weird.  I did not mention the dark matter WIMP engines for the space ships.  Or the Bug aliens that forced The Final War to stop.  Or the fact that Russia used WIMP bombs on Germany and tore a hole in the stratosphere, losing much of the water from Earth to outer space.  Or that Shining has a crashed Bug space ship.
BTW, the nanobots are freaking me out.  The fact that Shining Smith is infected and shedding nanobots all over the place is a horrifying concept.  And she has infected her junkyard cats who use the nanobots to communicate to each other and her.
So to me, this is a science fiction book, not a science fiction romance book.  I am reading book #2 in the series now.
Lynn