When I first started editing the Opinion Guy, I came across the writing of Bruce Golden. His short stories always fascinated me with their strange and intuitive perspectives. His ideas were good and he was creative in the way he got them onto paper. His books are just as good. I consider him a thinking man’s writer, but his books are also wildly entertaining. Be sure to check out his website and hear what others are saying. -SC

Evergreen.The planet Evergreen is ripe for exploitation, and corporate Earth is only to happy to harvest the lush timber and mining resources to provide luxury goods for a world whose own resources were long ago eradicated.

Like the frontier towns of early America, Evergreen draws the misfits, the outcasts, the unwanted of Earth, who exist as little more than slaves to pay off the huge costs of their trip to this magnificent wilderness. But others have come as well–a priest obsessed with finding God, an exobiologist convinced she has found what may be the next species capable of reaching true sentience, an archaeologist whose young wife is torn between her love for him and her lust for her stepson.

There is one other player in this game of greed and desire, however. And that player has grown more and more certain that the creatures that have infected it must be destroyed.

Better Than Chocolate. Noah Dane is a mid-21st Century San Francisco police inspector who, while hunting his partner’s killer and investigating a pair of seemingly unrelated murders, stumbles onto a conspiracy that threatens all humanity. Noah is driven by the guilt over his partner’s death. That guilt begins to eat at him, eventually rendering him impotent.

Much to his dismay, someone in the city’s bureaucracy has a warped sense of humor. Noah’s new crime-fighting partner is a celebudroid created to look and act like Marilyn Monroe. Comic juxtaposition ensues when her original programming seeps into her police work.

Chastity Blume is a celebrity talk show host known as “America’s Favorite Virgin.” Her father forced a sheltered childhood on her, and now she’s a vocal opponent of what she refers to as society’s “rampant sexuality.” Her quest to find the mother she’s never known uncovers family secrets she would rather not have learned, along with a sinister plot that involves her father.

Together they lead a cast of quirky characters through this science fiction mystery towards a climax of comically sexy proportions that’s Better Than Chocolate.