Batey Ascending

Human life has a second chance to live after Earth's destruction. Only a few made it to the spaceship. Nico, a young man with nothing to lose chose to reset his life and joined space migrants. Desperate to have an Earth-like life in this need-based environment, humans took their yearning and this new technology to get themselves into an entertainment renaissance. That’s how Batey became the sport of the new times. This futuristic take on the ancient Taino game gave Nico the chance to make new friends, to have the family he deserved, and even reunite with who he never thought to see again. In his way to trying to make a name for himself in this sport, adversity knocks on his door. But heart and willpower are not enough to combat enhanced cyborgs and genetically modified humans. What does it take for Nico and his friends to win the match? Does he stand a chance to create his newfound dreams into reality? Or will he crumble at the hands of his nemesis, Fred.RTG? NicoPengin.com

Based on periodic ethnographic fieldwork over a span of fifteen years, Martinez shows how impoverished plantation dwellers find ways of coping with the alienation that would be expected while laboring to produce goods for the richer countries. Despite living in dire poverty, these workers live in a thoroughly commodified social environment. Ritual, eroticism, electronic media, household adornment, payday-weekend "binging" are ways even chronically poor plantation residents dream beyond reality. Yet plantation residents' efforts to live decently and escape from the dead hand of necessity also deepen existing divisions of ethnic identity and status. As the divide between "haves" and "have-nots" worsens as a result of neoliberal reform and the decline of sugar in international markets, this book reveals on an intensely human scale the coarsening of the social fabric of this and other communities of the world's poorer nations.

Book 4 of the Auralia Thread series The king is missing. His people are trapped as the woods turn deadly. Underground, the boy called Rescue has found an escape. Hopes are failing across The Expanse. The forests, once beautiful, are now haunted and bloodthirsty. House Abascar's persecuted people risk their lives to journey through those predatory trees. They seek a mythic city - Abascar's last, best hope for refuge - where they might find the source of Auralia's colors. They journey without their king. During a calamitous attempt to rescue some of his subjects from slavery, Cal-raven vanished. But his helper, the ale boy, falling through a crack in the earth, has discovered a slender thread of hope in the dark. He will dare to lead a desperate company up the secret river. Meanwhile, with a dragon's help, the wandering mage Scharr ben Fray is uncovering history's biggest lie - a deception that only a miracle can repair. Time is running out for all those entangled in The Auralia Thread. But hope and miracles flicker wherever Auralia’s colors are found.

Follow our heroine on her quest to perpetuate the future of her people and continuity of her culture. Based on real historical events.

From the creator of Batey Ascending, this adaptation of an ebook, audiobook and paperback has now been adapted to a comic! This comic takes the story to a new visually pleasing level. See the characters like never before! Inspired by Alita: Battle Angel, Harry Potter's Quidditch game and the Tainos of the Caribbean. Human life has a second chance to live after Earth's destruction. Only a few made it to the spaceship. Nico, a young man with nothing to lose chose to reset his life and joined space migrants. Desperate to have an Earth-like life in this need-based environment, humans took their yearning and this new technology to get themselves into an entertainment renaissance. That's how Batey became the sport of the new times. This futuristic take on the ancient Taino game gave Nico the chance to make new friends, to have the family he deserved, and even reunite with who he never thought to see again. In his way to trying to make a name for himself in this sport, adversity knocks on his door. But heart and willpower are not enough to combat enhanced cyborgs and genetically modified humans. What does it take for Nico and his friends to win the match? Does he stand a chance to create his newfound dreams into reality? Or will he crumble at the hands of his nemesis, Fred.RTG?