Dan Moren

The Aleph Extraction is a covert ops caper story that in bygone days could have been an Alfred Hitchcock movie about spies on the Orient Express. The undercover team here roams around a luxury starliner making its way through a wormhole. The McGuffin is an ancient gold tablet that is meant to do I am not quite sure what. And, because it is the McGuffin, I am not obliged to care. The action involves good drinks in the bar and a nifty EVA to break into the ship’s vault. There are stun guns, old-fashioned projectile weapons, and on-again-off-again gravity boots. So, not many new sci-fi wrinkles but readable all the same.… (meer)

Moren, Dan. The Bayern Agenda. Galactic Cold War No. 1. Angry Robot, 2019.
In a good spy story, there is usually an element of melancholy, because the agents often discover their own complicity in the evil they oppose. John le Carré is the master of this genre, and as several reviewers have noted, Dan Moren uses le Carré’s model to create his interstellar special-ops espionage team. If anything, the story is a bit too old school for its setting. There is an empire opposing a commonwealth, and even cold war is not an idea that fits well in a plausible interstellar future. Helicopters and other military gear also seem more near future than deep time. Even the medicine is not far from what we have now. But on a certain level, the story of the sadder-but-wiser agent still works, so the story is readable if you can suspend your disbelief.… (meer)