Dave Dobson

This is my third review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Transference by Ian Patterson (author site here). The book is available from Amazon and BookShop.org.

Blurb

Nicholas Fiveboroughs is a Sicko, someone that takes on others’ illnesses. In a city where diseases can be transferred, the rich buy longer lives without pain, and the poor get a short life of constant sickness. Maybe it was fate, or maybe someone is looking out for him, but after Nicholas barely survives his latest affliction, he gets the chance to try and change things. To finally stop the whole disease transfer network.

Tensions escalate as Nicholas infiltrates a higher society he doesn’t understand, and starts to fall for the very person he needs to manipulate to be successful. And between run-ins with a talking animal and genetically modified humans, the world around him just keeps getting stranger. Can Nicholas tear down the disease transfer architecture? And can he do it without losing his own humanity along the way?

My Review

This is an exciting, imaginative story about a dystopian society and a man who wants to overturn it. There are some great sci-fi concepts here, including big moral dilemmas, ambiguous choices, and surprisingly, some anime-style fights.

Plot and Characters

I don’t generally want to spoil stuff when I review. The blurb above does a great job setting up the central plot. A man who should be dead assumes the identity of someone of far higher social status, with the goal of undoing the malevolent technology at the heart of this dysfunctional, immoral society.

We stay with Nicholas Fiveboroughs here through the whole book – a single perspective, first person. (Everybody here has a normal first name and then a surname that’s the district in the city where they live.) He should be stuck in the impoverished bottom tier, but through some personal initiative, good friends, and luck, he moves up. He’s on a mission, which is clear from the opening, and most of the book is him trying to accomplish that mission, although he ends up lost at times in the wealthy world he infiltrates and in the identity of the man he’s replaced.

My Thoughts

The initial premise for this story is a great one, worthy of the titans of classic sci fi, or of one of those really cool Star Trek episodes where the crew visits a new planet and realizes their whole society is based on an immoral premise (where then the bridge crew get to judge them and make big speeches). It also invokes memories of some of the recent big dystopian hits, like Hunger Games, Divergent, or Maze Runner, where there’s a horrific society that imposes pain and suffering on some groups for the benefit of others. Like those societies, this one doesn’t always make sense or seem workable, but it’s still a fun concept to explore and provides ample fertile soil for drama and class struggle.

Here, we have a world where the wealthy can avoid sickness and death by paying the poor to take on their diseases – the kind of thing that would be perfectly at home in an Ursula K. LeGuin story (e.g. Omelas) or Philip K. Dick. The more severe the illness, the higher the cost, but if you have the money, you can even pay someone to take on your stage-four cancer and die for you. The poor are willing to do this, because they live a life of extreme deprivation, forced to eat bland food that comes in cubes, held in utter poverty their whole lives. Sometimes, people will volunteer to die of disease to earn money to raise their families out of poverty, something that Nicholas’ dad did for him and his mother, though not very far out of poverty, since they still live in the cube-eating ghetto.

This concept is well described at the book’s opening, and I thought we were in for a thinky, morally thorny book about such a society. We mostly don’t get that, although there are times where it comes back to the fore, especially in a heartbreaking scene involving a servant and his child. Almost immediately, and with little groundwork, we’re launched into a vendetta story, where Nicholas tells us he is enraged by the world he lives in and wants to tear it down. I say “tells us,” because this is all described by Nicholas in the first person present tense in the early chapters. There are references to events he’s seen and poverty and privation he’s witnessed, but they’re all in retrospect, not directly visible to us. I think it would have been better to actually experience more of the deprivation and anguish that motivated Nicholas, which we do in places. Instead, you kind of have to buy into his framing of the society and accept his single-minded rage.

After this short intro, the book does what it will do a couple times – become a different book about a different thing entirely. We leave behind the sickness transfer and focus on another great concept for classic sci fi or a Star Trek episode: this society has the ability, through genetic modification and a kind of biologic reskinning plus memory recordings, to allow one person to take on the appearance, memories, and personality of other people. Nicholas does this to access the life and household of a wealthy socialite, to further his mission to destroy the sickness-transfer process. He’s a little short on details of how he’s going to do this, but it’s fun to see him try.

Again, we have a topic (identity transfer, and a man trapped in another man’s life – very The Return of Martin Guerre) that could have been a whole, cool book on its own, and we spend some time there, but eventually that fades, and we run through another couple book premises, which I won’t detail here to avoid spoilers.

With each change of pace and focus, especially as the book became more action-oriented, I cared less, and by the time we got to the last couple of these shifts, I was confused, not engaged, and sort of shellshocked, particularly by the last few chapters. I think if there were fewer twists and reveals, less action, and more swimming in the discordant life Nicholas was living and the ethical issues he and the society were wrestling with, I might have gravitated more to the story. Those were the parts I liked the most.

From a writing standpoint, this is mostly engaging and moves the plot forward at a breathless pace. To me, a lot of the dialogue, and even Nicholas’ internal monologue, felt like stuff real people wouldn’t say – very emotional, very on point, almost always with high emotion. Of course, this is a different society from ours, and maybe they all just talk like that, at what must be a very high decibel level, but I would have liked some more real-seeming conversations rather than the melodramatic line readings we often got here.

Nicholas also has a tendency to fly into impulsive and kinda stupid actions, which was frustrating, and rather than getting smarter as the book went on, he mostly lost agency, getting swept along by others. The emergence of a ton of weird tech in the second half of the book, much of it weapons-based, was unexpected and a little hard to follow, and a lot of it seemed to appear right when the plot needed it. There’s a stretch where I swear it seemed like I was reading descriptions of anime movie battles, which is not where I thought this was headed.

The present tense first person is immediate and active and engaging, although I personally find it a little harder to read than past tense, and it wavered at a couple points when there was backstory to reveal. The book is mostly edited well except that there are tons of comma splices in here. Probably at least a hundred (literally), maybe more. There were often two on a page, sometimes two in a paragraph. Not something that all readers would notice, but it clanked every time I hit one.

A minor worldbuilding quibble – if everybody has a normal first name and a last name that’s the district they live in, and if everybody has a common, normal English name (as they do here), I would think you’d run out of those names pretty fast, well before you ran out of people to name. Maybe we just didn’t see the folks named stuff like Brphs and Spkrdink, but I didn’t really see how this could work. Also, even in impoverished places, people find wonderful things to do with the limited food resources they have, so I thought the cube-eating masses would have come up with all sorts of casseroles, stews, kebabs, and other dishes. That’s hinted at in a couple spots, but I felt like a lot of the poor here were at times more Dickensian poor, wearing big “I’m a victim” signs, rather than people who loved and lived.

Where the book worked well was in exploring the ethics of a society with extreme economic stratification – how people live with themselves with either privilege or hardship, and what it does to people in those situations. There were also a bunch of moral dilemmas and hazards, where at times people were forced into heroic sacrifices that seemed real. Great stuff there. We only really got a good sense of how two of the social strata live, and really only one in detail (the one Nicholas joins in disguise). As I felt with Hunger Games, I’d have liked to have a better idea how it all came together rather than the broad primary color strokes I got to see that provoked more questions than answers.

Summation

There is no shortage of creativity here, and Patterson dives right into some really neat, thorny ethical issues, the kind of issues which are at the beating heart of some of the best sci fi ever written. Where I might have written a slower book, exploring those deep issues in more detail, Patterson went a different way, with action and excitement and lots of twists. That’s a totally valid path to choose – it’s his book after all! – and the action rips a frenetic pace, but where the story did wrestle with those harder moral things, I think it was at its strongest, at least for me. I’d have liked to see more of that and fewer robot fights with glowy weapons.

This is my second review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is The Ghost Gun by Gareth Lewis (author site here). The book is available from a wide variety of retailers.

Blurb

The Ghost Gun kills what it hits, its ghost bullets ensnaring the victim’s soul to their killer.

Except that nothing is that simple.

Certainly not an apparently simple theft that leads detectives into a war between secret societies over artifacts which have been around for millennia, their origin unknown, their abilities inexplicable.

Demoted to Vice due to departmental politics, Detective Cassie Kinsala sees an opportunity to restore her career path. But what looks like it might offer a decent arrest soon turns into a quagmire the law might not cover, and might not protect her from.

Jimmy Bancroft used to be a cop. Working for the other side lets him avoid paperwork. Investigating rumours of a competitor moving in on his employer’s interests, he becomes entangled in a war between criminals and a secret society. And someone might be trying to set him up.

My Review

This is an engaging book with a fun central concept, some great buddy-cop dialogue, some hard-core criminal intrigue, and three highly memorable characters.

Plot and Characters

I don’t generally want to spoil stuff when I review, but a lot of the plot setup is in the blurb above, and much of it is revealed in the opening few chapters. There’s a Ghost Gun, a weapon that steals souls. There are shadowy groups – criminals, technologists, cults, splinter cults – all pursuing this gun and the other artifacts like it.

Set against or amongst those shadows, there are three hard-boiled cops, one (Cassie) a battered idealist, one (Harry) who’s mostly given up, and one (Jimmy) who’s come unmoored and switched sides. They each have different approaches to the case of the gun stemming from their own moral codes and from their own history of injury or failure or ambition. As they each learn more about the weird situation they’ve been thrust into, or thrust themselves into, they respond in authentic, logical, deductive ways, as befit detectives.

My Thoughts

This is an exciting book. It is one of our shorter ones in our group, and it is paced well, giving new information into plot, characters, and mysteries in nearly every chapter. The plot feels fresh and follows a central mystery – what this gun is, what it does, how it works, and who the weird groups are who are trying to control and exploit it. There are a LOT of cop-show-style gun battles, some exciting, some tragic, some magic. Even where the book wanders into some tropey places, it maintains a newness and an energy that give life and imagination to those tropes.

The big strength of the book for me is the dialogue between cops (or ex-cops). It’s real, grounded, and a lot of fun. These are characters on various stages of the road toward bitterness and resignation, and they talk with intelligence, sass, and mutual admiration laced with sarcasm. That never stops being fun.

“I’m not dumb enough to shoot a cop.”

“I’m unconvinced as to your level of dumbness.”

For me, the setting was indistinct from the start, despite its familiarity, and it didn’t gel even pretty far into the book. I was imagining a near-future world – not quite Neuromancer, but on the way there. I was wrong, I think. There are mentions of Netflix and Google, which anchor it in the present, and there are cell phones with SIM cards. There’s no technology that seems too far out there (although one character seeming to think something was a complex hologram led me to think such things existed in this world).

The location was fuzzy, too. The cops’ language is often British flavored, with plural verbs for corporations or organizations (e.g. sentences like “Coca-Cola have started a new advertising campaign”) and with some Britishisms, although the police ranks and roles seemed American. The character names were suited to either an American or British setting. For a long time, I knew only that it wasn’t Russia, because there was a reference to a Russian district. I thought it might be some indistinct future city. It wasn’t until 85% of the way through the book that somebody mentions this stuff happening “in an American city.” Still unnamed, but at least I knew it was America for sure for the last few chapters.

There was one big piece of fuzziness in the characters, too. One of the detectives was referred to as Black by another about halfway through the book. Her race is never mentioned before or after, and there’s no discussion of how it’s impacted her life or career. There didn’t need to be such discussion, of course, but it was strange not to know, and I think racism might realistically have been a frame for her troubles at the department – not necessarily one she’d personally put blame on, but one she’d likely consider. I had to reread that part to make sure they were talking about the same person and not a new detective. I guess the surname Kinsala might have been a tip, but not one I picked up on.

There were a small number of editing issues. Nothing major (like, maybe ten instances), and certainly no more than you’d see in a traditionally published book, but my author eye sees these in others’ work while somehow remaining tragically blind to them in my own. The perspective was at times a little floaty. Most of the scenes are squarely in the perspective of a single character, one of the major three, but when they get together, it occasionally pans out to omniscient, and we get inner thoughts from multiple characters in the same scene, sometimes alternating by paragraph. It works here, because we’ve spent time in these characters’ heads and they’re familiar, and it’s a valid choice of construction, but it is something we’re often taught to avoid in writing seminars.

There were a small set of moments that felt info-dumpy, especially a conversation with a lore-rich elder, but that’s hard to avoid in a story where the main characters don’t know how things work. I didn’t have a problem with it even as I saw it happening. There was an experimentation scene that seemed natural, and it had an outcome that was pretty funny and lasted for much of the rest of the book.

There’s a clear story arc here that ends within the book, even though this seems to be a series, with the plucky and intrepid Detective Kinsala carrying on the story in future books. Although the central conflict was resolved, I felt like a lot of things were still in motion, including a not-too-subtle teaser for the next book. That’s the nature of series, I guess, but I might have liked to have more of it nailed down – another scene a week later, maybe, to see how the characters are coping, would have been enough.

This being a sci-fi competition, I should acknowledge that there wasn’t a lot of traditional sci-fi here. It is totally (and gloriously) speculative fiction, but there aren’t many strictly sci-fi parts. That quibble is not at all relevant to the book, which does what it is trying to do very well, but it might be relevant to the competition.

I realize I’ve now done a thing I hate in reviews as an author, where I’ve written two positive paragraphs and then five or six nit-picky ones. I absolutely don’t mean to give an impression I didn’t like this book – I did, and the promise I saw in it in the opening slush read in the competition was paid off in the full book. I really enjoyed the characters – I found them real, flawed, struggling, and entertaining to follow. I’d totally be down to follow Cassie Kinsala through further adventures. The ghostly artifacts were neat, and the rules they followed and the unintended impacts they caused were creative and fun.

Summation

In summary, then, this was a good, creative book that kept me entertained throughout. It has a cynical but realistic-seeming view of the police and what challenges people face during a long and grinding career. It has great, snappy dialogue, both in the banter and in the more serious conversations. It tells you what you need in terms of world-building without wading too deep into it to the point of getting dull or pedantic. Lewis is an imaginative, skilled author. He has a ton of books out, starting over fifteen years ago, so there’s a lot there to dig into.

This is my first review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Wakers of the Cryocrypt by Nathan Kuzack (author site here). Nathan is offering this book for free through Google Books here. It’s also available on Amazon and Apple Books.

Blurb

A thought-provoking post-apocalyptic story about an unexpected reunion between humankind and the AIs it created.

In a world full of living machines one man may die… again.

The future. The human race is extinct. Earth is ruled by eltecs, descendants of the AIs humans created before their demise.

While searching for prehistoric cave paintings, two eltec explorers discover a hidden cryogenic crypt containing 23 perfectly preserved human bodies frozen inside crystal columns.

As eltec society argues over who might have built the crypt and what to do with it, one of its occupants is restored to life. Human beings are no longer extinct, but, for reasons of their own, not every eltec wants to see them come back. The only living human on Earth is in terrible danger.

My review

I enjoyed my time with this book. It was creative, exciting, featured a richly-imagined future world, and dealt with moral and ethical issues in an interesting way.

Plot and Characters

The story centers on several main characters, adopting their point of view or an omniscient point of view at various points. The human protagonist is a man given the name Lazarus. He awakes from a mysterious tomb (the cryocrypt) into a far-future, post-human world populated by sentient robots called Eltecs.

The Eltecs, descendants of human robotics and AI technology, live in a low-population utopian society goverened by a set of uber-intelligences. Even in their utopian future, they are factionalists. Some are fans of humanity, adopting human-like form and wearing clothes. Others are anti-humanity, adopting odd and unnatural shapes. All are protected from death by a cloning system that recreates and reloads them if they are destroyed, a la Paranoia.

Humanity has been dead for over ten thousand years, so the discovery of Laz and twenty-two other humans in the crypt, perfectly preserved, is a tremendously significant event. The Eltecs frequently cluck their steely tongues at humanity’s base, self-destructive instincts that led humanity to perish in an environmental and political cataclysm leading to a nuclear war long ago.

Thrust into this odd society, like an 18th-century savage brought back by colonialist explorers, Laz struggles to learn and adjust. He is afflicted by a mysterious amnesia, which prevents him from remembering his past life, although he seems well-versed in 21st century society and customs.

All of the above is established quickly, in the first few chapters, and the rest of the book is a tale, sometimes political, sometimes introspective, sometimes high-octane adventure, of Laz struggling to figure out who he is, why and how he was placed in this crypt, and how he will fit into Eltec society. His Eltec allies are often perspective characters, and their musings on Laz and their own society are interesting and robust. I don’t want to spoil the plot, which is fun, so I will leave the plot summary there.

My thoughts

As I was reading this, I was reminded a great deal of the many original-series Star Trek episodes where Kirk and Bones and Spock discover a planet living with very different social rules, often derived from 20th century America. Our brave Starfleet visitors have to figure out how the society works, and often what is wrong with it, before judging them, punching some people, kissing others, and flying away 43 minutes later. This absolutely isn’t a diss – I loved those episodes – but there’s a parallel there.

I was also reminded of fables or parables, stories told to explore moral issues. There’s a lot of judginess in many of the characters, and moral flaws and collective guilt are frequent concerns. The language of the book fits this style as well, with characters often ruminating about the sins of the past (or present), sometimes in bold declarative sentences.

To me, the main character’s amnesia didn’t seem necessary, although it’s explained and justified as the story progresses. It was a little tropey, and I don’t think the story would have been too different had he known he were a blacksmith or a baker or whatever. It did give him a constant sense of not knowing himself, which worked, but it also made him a limited character. There are books and shows where that trope is used better, The Bourne Identity being a big one, where hidden skills and connections are discovered, but Laz didn’t seem to have any of these. A new TV show I like, Doc, has amnesia as a central theme, and even though it’s a cheesy plot device, they’re deploying it well and capitalizing on the main character’s alienation from her past self as she learns more about it.

The book got more action-packed as it went on, which was fine and exciting, but the main human character lacked agency and control throughout the whole thing, leaving him subject to the manipulations and machinations (get it?) of his tormentors. The ending, in particular, seemed like a place where he and his friends were far more spectators than protagonists, and I wasn’t a big fan of that choice. This was the book’s biggest disappointment for me, although as an author, I certainly know it can be hard to stick the landing. I actually thought the Eltec characters, especially Shulvara, were more both more interesting and more capable characters, and I’d have preferred to spend more time in their chrome crania rather than in Laz’s largely empty one.

One quibble for me was the Eltec society and speech. Despite being robots from the future, they spoke very much like 21st-century humans, even to the point of using “gonna” and “wanna” frequently, which grated. They also used 21st-century idioms frequently (e.g. something up my sleeve) which seemed out of place for sentient robots in the 33rd century. Their culture and personalities were also very human-seeming, which added to the Star Trek/parable feel but which seemed a little jarring to me, who would expect the Eltec society to have evolved into something more different in 12,000 years.

There was also some odd fixation on sex, even from the robots, and some repeated male gaze from Laz towards a fellow crypt resident. Even the robots got into ogling people sometimes, apparently totally on board with a 21st-century standard of Hot-or-Not. I’m not a prude at all, but this seemed out of place. It totally wasn’t a big deal, not frequent, and didn’t detract, but the few mentions of orgasms and cocks and lust and such didn’t (for me) fit the nature or tone of the rest of the story, which was closer to classic sci-fi and focused on other, cooler things.

The POV was not quite fixed, sometimes restricted to one character, sometimes omniscient with thoughts from all of them, sometimes party to observing events none of the main characters could see, and it sometimes floated from one to the other within a paragraph or two. It was a little fuzzy – not bad, but as an author who worries about that stuff, I couldn’t help but take note.

Summation

This was a good book, often exciting, thought-provoking, funny, and emotional, with a creative future world to explore and a lot of moral questions to think about. Kuzack should be proud of what he’s done with it. It well-deserves its quarterfinal spot in the SPSFC. Because it’s the first of our quarterfinalists I’ve read, I don’t have a real sense of how it will stack up against those others, but I recommend it, especially if you liked those old Star Trek morality plays.