Category: Reviews (Page 1 of 4)

Review of Red Eye (limited series, BBC)

August 25, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

Red Eye (from the BBC, on Hulu) was a bit of a mess. I’m always a sucker for airplane action shows, but they work better as movies, because there’s just no way to sustain tension on a plane for more than a couple hours. Last year’s Hijack (AppleTV) was OK, but it dragged, and it depended on a ton of flashbacks and super-powerful international conspiracies that for some reason chose to mess with a plane flight rather than just use their super-powers for world domination in more convenient ways.

Red Eye does something similar, with flashbacks, ground-based drama, and family entanglements. Nearly all of that it does worse than Hijack, but it’s still kind of entertaining. The thing that really broke the show for me was how breathtakingly stupid everyone was. When a highly-trained MI5 officer needed to miss a detail she wouldn’t miss, she did. She also openly called her CIA boyfriend on a protected line from within MI5, which has to be against about seventy rules. The plane had an increasing number of unexplained gruesome murders, but rather than land the plane, or even search it, they just dithered and made up reasons why they had to keep going to China. The Prime Minister listened only to an obvious skin-crawl-inducing toady rather than listening to any other person who could have told her what was going on. A headstrong reporter with no apparent journalistic training made it her mission to headstrong into danger at every turn, never once pausing to think about how utterly stupid she was being. Sadly, she escaped all the murders and abductions her behavior warranted.

The worst was accused murderer Matthew Nolan (portrayed by Richard Armitage, whom you can see in every other British suspense series playing exactly this character with no nuance or variation). Despite being an accused murder with a proven flight risk, and despite the promo shots showing him handcuffed, he was almost never handcuffed in the show, despite being escorted by an otherwise very competent DC Li. He was also left alone uncuffed, presumably because if he had been cuffed, the show couldn’t happen. Because of this, he was able to run from a terminal gate, through security, out into ticketing. He was able to accost the captain and make an impassioned statement about his innocence. He was able to infiltrate highly secure parts of the plane uncontested. He was seated in first class and was able to order muItiple expensive alcoholic drinks. It was as confusing as if Tim McVeigh had won a $10,000 vacation package to a Chinese prison on The Price is Right.

The various bad-guy plots and the ending were likewise silly and nonsensical. However, I didn’t hate it while watching – only while I thought about what the writers were insisting I accept. Jing Lusi was really great when her character wasn’t forced to be mindnumbingly foolish.

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin

July 31, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

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

The book is Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin. The book is available from many retailers.

With this review, I’ve now reviewed five of the six finalists. Here are the other four reviews.

The sixth finalist, Whiskey and Warfare, I will review in the coming weeks. It was named as a semifinalist from our judging group back in March and made it to the finals. I missed reading it back then because we divided our allocation among our team members. That meant that once it was named a semifinalist, our team’s rating for it was fixed, and I couldn’t add a score to it. So, I focused on the semifinalists and finalists where my reviews would count in the competition. But, I want to read it – I hear it’s cool! – and now I am done with the other SPSFC reviewing and have some time. There are a couple books from our quarterfinals I also want to get to now, especially Afterburn by D. Andrews.

Blurb

Private detective Mason Truman is being yanked around by invisible strings, and it’s an AI doing the yanking. Miranda. She’s subtle. Crazy. And she thinks she can see the future. It’s enough to drive Mason nuts. Miranda believes her fellow AIs are up to some kind of grand conspiracy against the Terran Republic, and she wants Mason’s help proving it. Conspiracies are above Mason’s pay grade, though, the kind of time-sink that can put a crimp in more serious pursuits. Like drinking coffee. And staying alive.

But Miranda won’t take no for an answer. Mason can help or Miranda will make sure he becomes intimately acquainted with the finer conversational techniques of the secret police. So Mason digs until he uncovers a cache of stolen communications between a cabal of rogue AIs. They’re planning what they call Eschaton—the divinely ordained end of humanity. Unless Mason and Miranda stop the arrogant pricks, the conspirators will destroy Earth.

Mason and Miranda have one chance, a way of bottling up the rogue AIs. All Mason has to do is lure the conspirators to the right spot in a sim world. That’s how Mason learns that when Miranda said she needed help, what she meant was bait.

My Review

I quite enjoyed my time with this book. To me, it was reminiscent of cyberpunk books like William Gibson’s Neuromancer that I read back in college, with a richly imagined near-future world, in this case the mid-2100’s, extrapolated from what’s going on in our world today, and with a sometimes dizzying array of concepts, terminology, subcultures, and tech. The world Chaffin builds here is fascinating, dystopian, and complex, and it will be interesting to see (as it was with William Gibson) how prescient he is about our actual future.

Plot and Characters

The book meshes a bunch of tropes in fun an interesting ways. The main character, Mason Truman, is an old-school private eye who wouldn’t be out of place in a 1930’s noir setting. The world he lives in is filled with technology, some of it really useful, like food generators, robotic doctors, and factotums – smart, connected electronic assistants, kind of like what Apple and Amazon wish Siri and Alexa could be. The fascist-flavored society, which now spans a number of worlds and colonies within the solar system, is governed by an uneasy alliance of human plutocrats and AI personalities. Each of the AIs originated as non-sentient software designed for a purpose and then gained sentience on its own, but they’re now blocking any effort that might lead to more AIs being born. There’s a military also, but it’s largely a pawn of the two major political forces. There’s a rich online virtual reality, the Omninet, which includes games, sims, tourism, socializing, and porn.

Mason is a fun character to follow, with a strong personality, a big mouth, and a fun relationship with his factotum, Sam. He’s got some friends and family who pop in from time to time and help him, and he befriends (fairly involuntarily) a kind of psychic outsider AI, Miranda, that the some of other AIs (a little rebel group) have created as a kind of experiment in reproduction and design. There’s an uberhacker named Peanut, a malicious ex-fiancé, and a military hero cousin who all also get involved.

What starts as a routine missing persons case become ever more complex, and the stakes get higher and higher, and the pace more frenetic, but I’ll leave off talking about plot to avoid spoilers.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. The world Chaffin has created has tons of detail, and it’s mostly introduced to us through action and dialogue, not through big info dumps, although sometimes Mason goes off on a topic in his head. That focus on the story is refreshing, although as a reader, you have to be on top of your game to take it all in and get up to speed. I really meant it in a good way when I said this reminds me of Neuromancer – there’s some wonderful extrapolation from what present-day LLMs can do to how they’d behave in a world where they’ve become sentient, and there’s some wonderfully clever thinking and speculation about what society might become when our virtual worlds become ever more of our focus. What’s even better, Chaffin gives us little hints of how we got from 2025 to 2139, with pieces of future history referenced throughout, but also from characters running into older technology which reveals the stepping stones Chaffin imagines humanity might use to get to the future where the book happens. This is great stuff. I wouldn’t say that all of it seemed 100% likely or workable to me, but that doesn’t matter. It was great fun to read about, and it was brilliantly deep and complex. This is the first novel I’ve read about future AI that seems to tie in closely to our current cloud computing and newly-LLM-filled lives, which I found really cool – just like Gibson took a limited Internet and imagined much of what cyberspace would come to be.

The pace of the book gets faster and faster as Mason caroms from clue to clue and plan to plan, facing sinister interference, threats, and calamity. There’s a kind of sci-fi action movie feel to the plot, with much of the last third of the book being a big chase climax spanning the real world and many cyberspace locations. That’s good for keeping up excitement, but it does mean some story elements get dropped or minimized as we go, with major characters sometimes just disappearing from the story with no further explanation or description, and occasionally with big plot elements not fully explained or resolved, at least to my reading.

That focus on pace and plot means the things we were learning about the characters become less relevant, and their actions become more and more constrained by outside forces. I liked the structure of the big plot showdown at the end – the parties involved, some big twists, the threats – but the execution left me a little dissatisfied, with an ambiguity to the ending and epilogue, and with a lack of clarity (at least to me) as to what actually happened in the world or even to the major characters. Despite a lot of scenery chewing from a couple of major villains, the ending felt a little rushed, and it seemed to me that Mason lacked agency for much of the climax and conclusion, merely bouncing like a pinball between various plot targets, aided or hindered by forces he couldn’t control. In the midst of that, though, there was a wonderful scene where he’s multitasking brilliantly – using his factotum to do research, talking an ally through a difficult task, and also trying to accomplish a task on his own, all while the world is falling apart, and it’s just a great image of a distracted, tech-heavy future, all condensed into a single scene.

VAGUE SEMI-SPOILERY BITS HERE: At the end, despite enjoying the book and having a lot of fun with it, I had a lot of questions, like: what is Sam becoming? what happened to Andrew? where does all this leave the AIs? does Mason get to his oft-stated goal of a normal life with abundant expensive coffee? what happens to Miranda, and what was she playing at? did Meredith get what was coming to her? Answering these would have made the book longer and more boring, for sure, so it makes sense that Chaffin wrapped things up. But I felt like I’d missed out on some promises made, and that some interesting and important threads were not tied off. The rush at the end also meant that Mason’s arc wasn’t resolved, at least for me. At times during the story, he felt more like a mouthy gumshoe archetype than a real person, and the ending, which didn’t really share where he’d arrived at or who he had become, didn’t help that feeling. A lot of the other characters seem to start to go on personal journeys, too, but again, many of these don’t really get very far, and we never see where they might lead. I also 100% did not understand what the epilogue was getting at, which may be a me problem.

Summation

If you’re up for a vivid near-future sci-fi story with a strong and capable cyberpunk feel, Accidental Intelligence delivers beautifully. For me, the worldbuilding was the strongest part, and the wide-ranging plot and colorful characters do a great job of painting a luminous, seedy picture of where we might be headed as a species.

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: Bisection by Sheila Jenné

July 27, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

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

The book is Bisection by Sheila Jenné. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

Tria and Resa have shared the same body since they were born. Like everyone on their home planet of Kinaru, their mind and body are divided down the middle: the logical right and the emotional left. Tria, the right, has a budding career as a biologist, while Resa dreams of more freedom than their home planet grants her.

When aliens land on Kinaru, Tria and Resa seize the opportunity to be the first of their people to travel to the stars. Karnath, the alien scientist assigned to study them, is convinced there is more to the Kinaru than meets the eye. But only days into the trip, crew members start turning up dead, and a mutiny redirects the ship toward a forbidden, war-torn planet—Earth.

To solve a conspiracy that threatens three planets, Tria must find out the truth of who her people really are, and Resa needs to finally tell Tria the dark secrets she’s been hiding all their lives.

My Review

I quite enjoyed my time with this book. It’s a space opera at heart, but it has some of the big concept what-if pieces central to, say, a classic Star Trek episode, where there’s an alien race who’s like us but different in one or two key ways. There are actually two such races here, and we get to explore both. Where I felt the book really shined was with the unique nature of the Kinaru species, brought to wonderful and touching life by the main character.

Plot and Characters

The book has an ongoing plot that alternates between first-contact, mystery, and thriller, but the real heart of the book are the central characters, Tria il Resa, who are two personalities who share a single body, with Tria being logical, coldly analytical, and a bit aloof, while Resa is emotional, artistic, impulsive, and romantic. It’s a little like if Kirk and Spock were forced to inhabit the same body, except that these two have always been together and are mutually respectful, caring friends.

Most of the first-person narrative is from Tria, who is accustomed to running things, as is tradition on Kinaru. The “rights” – the right-brained analytical types – are dominant over the “lefts,” who have a history of being subjugated, although it is a weird sort of beloved subjugation. We do get some chapters from Resa’s perspective, too, and it’s a real joy to see their different mindsets, motivations, and thought processes. This is the coolest part of the book – an awesome high-concept foundation, where it almost doesn’t matter what storyline you put on top of it – it’s going to be interesting to explore.

There is a storyline, though, and it crosses the galaxy to bring about conflict, betrayal, discovery, action, and even a little romance. Tria and Resa boldly stow away aboard an alien ship visiting their world, Kinaru, and after some initial consternation, they are adopted as guests of a scientific exploration ship sent to their world by the Shatakazans. The Kinaru are highly advanced socially, but they are probably somewhere near early 20th-century Earth levels of technology, so the advanced tech and space travel of the Shatakazans is something very new to Tria and Resa. The Shatakazans are reptillian and have a number of significant biological and social differences to humans, but they breathe the same air and act a lot like humans in a lot of ways, particularly personality-wise and with their wants and desires all feeling pretty human. Each Shatakazan chooses a faction tied to a philosophy, which is a neat concept to explore. Their planet is nominally democratic, or at least parliamentary, but it is more like a one-party democracy as existed in Mexico and Japan for many years, with minor factions not having much power.

We meet a bunch of Shatakazans, but the one who’s most developed is Karnath, a scientist and free soul. I had a little trouble keeping the rest of them straight, as they are numerous and have weird names, but that’s probably a me thing. To avoid spoilers, I’ll probably leave it there, but suffice it to say, there are a bunch of adventures Tria and Resa and their lizard buddies go on as the book winds its way to its conclusion, and we learn a lot more about their two societies as we go.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. It’s well-written and engaging, with some great big sci-fi concepts to explore, which it does in interesting and entertaining ways. The two-people-in-one-body concept is done really, really well. I was reminded a little bit of Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, in which an old man and a young woman share a body, but this book has more to say, and the split between right-brain and left-brain identities, with the social structures that bifurcation forces on Kinaru society, makes it all the more powerful. This elevates this over some of the other books I’ve read for the competition which were simpler space adventures (although some of these are admittedly great space adventures). Bisection is thinky, in a good way, which is really great.

Where the book was a little weaker for me was in the nuts and bolts of the plot. A lot of it was admirably solid and well crafted, but there were a number of head-scratcher moments for me. Many of these surrounded plans, either by the protagonists or their enemies. These plans (both major and minor) often seemed very half-baked, where I felt like real people with the information they had might have chosen better strategies, or where the strategies they chose could well have been completely unworkable. In these moments, the people in the story became less real to me. In some cases, these questionable plans just work because the plot needs them to. In other cases, the questionable plans fail in completely predictable ways. As a repeated example, nobody in this book is any good at all at holding onto prisoners. Like, zero good jailers here. Major failures of basic jailing. There’s also a bad-guy plan at the heart of the adventure plot that is something that seems both ill-fated and poorly conceived, and yet it functions far better than it seems like it should, with the help of a local government acting in in a way I thought was not at all how it would act (or could act) in the situation presented.

There are a couple other minor bits that itched at me while I read. There’s a huge, huge mysterious coincidence the characters discover early on which cannot be anything but deliberate and engineered, but the explanations they float for how it could be (a weird intersystem comet, mostly) are not something serious scientists would entertain, or at least not phrase that way. Another thing that bugged me a little was the communication. Like Star Trek, there’s some universal translation going on here, but once it’s established, it’s basically perfect and almost never commented on, even when I wondered how certain parties would have gotten one of the translators. Of course, Star Trek does this shamelessly, even having the latex lips of the aliens form English words, so it’s not a big deal, and it would make any space opera a lot harder to read. Finally, there’s at one point a pretty major revelation which felt a little like a Greek god interfering in the mortal realm. For me, this took a good bit of agency away from the main characters, but it’s explained pretty well and leads to a few of the book’s absolute best moments, one of them completely, gloriously unexpected, so it’s forgiven.

All of these are minor nitpicks and easily ignored. The story is really about what happens when a race of people has one key difference from our own society, and the beauty of the book is how that plays out in their lives, their relationships, their culture, and their thoughts. The dawning realization of Tria that she has fundamentally misunderstood Resa, her closest friend, and in fact fundamentally misunderstood personhood, society, and basic humanity, is A-plus, gold-medal stuff, written beautifully. I loved it, and while I wished there was a little more of that and a little less of the action plot, I’ll happily take what I was given, and what Jenné chose to write.

Summation

If you’re up for a big-concept sci-fi story, hearkening back to those big concepts that Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick explored in sci-fi’s classical heyday, Bisection delivers. The beautiful, evolving, respectful conflict between the two main characters, one out of place in the galaxy, one out of place in her own society and her own body, is great, great stuff.

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: On Impulse by Heather Texle

July 16, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

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

The book is On Impulse by Heather Texle. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

When the Department trained me to catch criminals, I never dreamed I’d become one.

Agent. Suspect. Intergalactic fugitive.

I was one of them until I shot my partner in self-defense. Even though the Department cleared me of wrongdoing, my co-workers didn’t agree. They turned their backs on me, so I turned my back on them.

My partner’s actions never made sense. After ignoring my gut for a year, I asked my tech-genius best friend to dig into it. Now Jarrett’s gone dark, and I soon discover he’d been brutally murdered. An officer finds me standing over the body, blaster in hand. Even I admit it looks bad.

There’s no way I can trust the Department to investigate further—not if I’m already the prime suspect. My only option is to run. Is it impulsive? Sure. Will having law enforcement dog me across the galaxy make life difficult? Most certainly. I’ll have to stay one step ahead of them if I want to solve Jarrett’s murder and clear my name.

Doing that will require every trick the Department taught me—and a few I learned on my own.

My Review

I really enjoyed my time with this book. It’s a fun space opera romp with elements of police procedural, spy thriller, heist, and corporate villainy. There’s a plucky, engaging heroine (with the badass name of Reliance Sinclair) and a deep cast of secondary characters, even including a bionic guinea pig and a ship AI masquerading as a robotic cat. The AI designer has given the ship the temperament of an actual cat, which is a hoot.

The story is constantly in motion, with Reliance outwitting and evading or falling prey to many factions of enemies on her personal quest to figure out who killed her friend. The setting is some time in the future after Earthlings have spread out and terraformed and colonized many other worlds, although there are still people on Earth and Mars. There are no aliens or alien tech in the story – just a variety of human worlds, sometimes with interesting quirks like gravitational or climate differences or interesting (and violent) planetary histories. The worlds are more Earthlike than in some space operas, with regular Earth foods, animals, and plants.

Plot and Characters

The book happens in several phases, each with a different plot focus, but the first big chunk of the story is Reliance investigating the death of a friend, a fellow officer when she used to be a space cop. It’s an intriguing mystery which quickly gets her deep in the middle of danger from a bunch of directions, and Reliance sneaks and fights and wheedles and lies her way across multiple worlds.

The story is always interesting as Reliance unpacks more of the story and then gets herself emmeshed in what is going on. It’s interesting when she reflects back on her past as a space cop and when she uses skills or contacts from that time to advance her current objectives. She’s a fun character – resourceful, snarky, ass-kicking, and just a good time. The book is entirely within her first-person perspective. The other characters get less screen time, although we do meet a few criminals and spend more time with a set of cops who pursue Reliance through most of the book. I particularly liked a tech specialist cop named DeAjamae when she was hacking things – her constant patter of anger and expletives at the computers and systems she was using was really fun.

The inclusion of migraines in Reliance’s character is an interesting choice that gives her depth, and they play into later developments in a neat way. It was interesting to see a character having to deal with a chronic medical problem, and her coping mechanisms sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. It’s well-written, fun, action-packed, and a good read, the kind you feel happy about when you’re finished. There’s fighting, action, some sad bits, and a really strong main character. The worlds Reliance visits aren’t always described in detail, but you get a sense of how many of them work and how the human society works overall.

If I were to pick at something, it would probably be some plot developments where characters interacting with Reliance make decisions that seem foolish or out of character but without which either Reliance wouldn’t survive or the plot wouldn’t progress. There were a few moments that reminded me of Scott Evil from Austin Powers lamenting, “Why don’t you just shoot him?” In particular, a decision by a certain bad guy as Reliance starts to figure everything out seems terribly risky and foolish.

It wasn’t just the big decisions – there were also small head-scratcher opponent decisions that let Reliance escape or avoid detection or wiggle out of tight spots. All of these let the story continue, and it’s a fun enough story that it’s not a big deal at all, but I found some of them pulled me out of the story while I thought about smarter things Reliance’s opponents could or should have done. There were also a couple of times where Reliance instantly has a unique answer to a problem, or a contact who can help that we didn’t know about before, and I think it would have helped credulity if those were hinted at earlier rather than popping into the narrative just as they are needed.

One other minor quibble was some lack of clarity on how advanced various technologies are and how they work. Tech seems quite advanced in some ways (terraforming, space travel), while in others it seemed more 21st century than 25th or whatever (e.g. physical drives and servers). Some of the tech didn’t quite seem consistent, either – I was never really sure how stuff like interplanetary communications and networking functioned, or how the blasters worked, or how injured somebody got when they were stunned, or how long the stunning was supposed to last. But those are problems every Star Trek series has run into also and mostly failed at, and only uber-nerds probably care.

All of those are minor nitpicks and easily ignored. The story achieves its main goal very ably, which is to tell an exciting, kick-ass, funny story with a charismatic heroine and a gallery of heroic and/or hilarious sidekicks and vile villains.

Summation

If you’re up for a fun romp with a lot of great futuristic plot elements and a main character who’s really easy to cheer for, then On Impulse is definitely for you. Because of my schedule, I actually ended up listening to this one via a text-to-speech app while driving to DC and back (11 hours or so round trip), and it made the miles fly by (even when the algorithm insisted on saying “spacedock” as “spacey dock”). A good time, and a book I’m glad I had a chance to read.

SPSFC#4 Semifinalist Review: Yours Celestially by Al Hess

May 31, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

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

The book is Yours Celestially by Al Hess. It is available from Itch.Io. Al also wrote Mazarin Blues, which was a semifinalist in SPSFC #1.

Blurb

From the author: Yours Celestially is a cozy, gay, and extra weird sci-fi that I hope you fall madly in love with. There’s a biblically accurate A.I., completely bonkers visuals, and bionic penis jokes. It’s set in a hopeful, queernorm, and diverse city full of plants, cute bakeries, cob houses, and found families.

My Review

This is a warm, funny sci fi story about a few people with challenges, both external and self-imposed, who lean on each other and their friends for help and for hope. Some interesting sci-fi concepts are mixed with heartfelt romance. This was without a doubt the most feel-good book of any I’ve read for this competition, and it is well worth a look.

Plot and Characters

There are two POV characters in the book. One is Sasha, a man who’s recently gone through a paid resurrection. This service, provided by a high-tech company, is pretty readily available, and many people make use of it. For most, it is an insurance policy against an accident death or fatal illness, but in some interesting cases, people with self-destructive habits or behaviors die and come back too. Sasha is one of these, an addict whose life fell apart well before his death. As the book opens, he’s recently back from the dead and trying to do better by his friends and family, but he’s not doing great despite their support.

The other POV character is Metatron, an AI construct created by the resurrection company. Metatron helps people going through the resurrection process. Their minds and personalities are digitally recorded, and when they die, they spend a little time in Limbo, an artificial reality, before new bodies can be grown for them and their psyches can be reimplanted.

The wall between Limbo and the real world should be impregnable, but Metatron is a caring protector and helper, and they sometimes connect the deceased with the real world in special cases. In Sasha’s case, though, he is awash in Metatron’s emotions despite having completed his resurrection. This shouldn’t happen, and it’s significantly affecting his health, both physical and mental, in the real world.

There are a host of other characters, some with major roles, others more secondary, and the little communities each of the main characters inhabits are the real joy of the book.

My Thoughts

The sci fi in this book follows a common trope – a world much like our modern one but with one additional mysterious bit beyond our reality. In this case, that’s resurrection, and the book explores the process, the outcomes, a little of the social controversy, and some of the technology Hess imagines for such a world. The weird futurism isn’t the point here, though. The point is following both of these protagonists as they make parallel journeys towards courage, self-acceptance, and love. The journey for each is different, but both are well-described and made meaningful both by the characters themselves and by the reactions of the people they interact with.

That’s not to say there isn’t tension or setback or betrayal or machinations – there’s some of each – but the focus is really on the two leads becoming whole. In Sasha’s case, that’s fixing what was broken, and in Metatron’s case, that’s discovery of how much more is possible than constraints would seem to allow.

There is real joy here, as both of these people, one damaged, one a victim of circustance, find ways to get to the love they want and need. And the feel-good part of the book comes from the people rooting for each of them to succeed. Both have wonderful found families, and the richness of their relationships with those others is what leaves you smiling when the book is done. Much of the story arc wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie, but the characterization is deliciously rich and deep here, and of course you don’t see Hallmark movies featuring AI angels or spare bodies grown in vats.

My only criticism of the book isn’t a big one at all – I just found the opening 30% or so to be a little slow, with both characters spending a lot of time wallowing in their problems and not taking much action to resolve them. Not a big deal, and the payoff when they both stepped up was well worth it. Some big twists revealed in the second half keep the story hopping and make you fear for these people you come easily to care about.

There’s some woo-woo stuff here that’s plot-convenient and never really explained. It’s kind of written off as “we don’t really understand the full mechanics of the resurrection process,” but to me, it seemed like you still needed some magic to produce the effects described. Again, no big deal, and explaining it would have diminished the magic of the story, so I think it was a good choice.

Summation

A delightful, well-written, unabashedly feel-good story about love, redemption, and found family. Highly recommended.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

May 24, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

I saw the latest (and last) Mission Impossible today. I think the guy snoring three rows behind me for most of the length of the movie probably got more out of it.

There were a few cool fights, although they were generally in quick cuts close up rather than long takes from far away, which always makes fight scenes better. The first major one played out entirely offscreen with Hayley Atwell’s reactions the only clue – an odd choice. Much of the first 30 minutes of the movie was sneering white dudes proclaiming stuff in Dr. Evil-style speeches, so it kind of needed a shot in the arm.

When we got to the stunts, which wasn’t really until about a full normal movie length into the nearly 3-hour running time, the movie got better. I don’t think there’s anything about deep-sea diving or submarines that actually works the way they depict, and Ethan is dead many times over here, but it was still exciting. There’s a biplane thing that was pretty great too. Those were my favorite parts.

What I hated, hated, hated, was the plot and the bad guys. The last movie set up The Entity, a rogue sentient AI that (as happens only in movies) infiltrates everything, including top-secret military systems, existing nowhere but controlling everything. This turns any movie into a superhero movie, where the bad guy is as powerful as it needs to be for the plot, and you have no sense of limits or constraints. The humans dealing with this were completely stupid, too, with some wanting to control it through technobabble to gain unlimited power(TM), and others wanting to worship it (for real? did a significant number of people worship COVID?), and still others wanting to destroy it, but constantly intoning that doing so would “utterly destroy cyberspace,” something that was given no practical definition, but which everyone acted like would be the worst thing ever, and definitely worse than a limited nuclear exchange. Like, I guess my smart fridge might stop giving out water, and my photos would be deleted? I don’t think anybody serious has called the Internet cyberspace since the 1980s.

This movie also reveled in the awful Bond-movie thing where the bad guys can travel everywhere and show up at any time with 20+ minions and know exactly what’s going on down to what the good guys ordered for lunch. Not only that, the villains develop stupid-ass plans that hinge on capturing other people and offering them Faustian bargains, i.e. moral decisions they couldn’t really predict. They are utterly brilliant until they become dead stupid. The “trick” they supposedly fooled the Russians with (Russians who knew the general area where the sub went down, no less) is probably the most ridiculous movie thing ever.

I know you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief for these things, but you have to meet me halfway, and this was all preposterous. The good guys kept making stupid decisions that went counter to their interests, and the bad guys know everything and have infinite resources, but instead of just, you know, killing people and taking their stuff, they decide to put the good guy in a moral quandary and threaten his friends and gleefully start up nuclear weapons they might not get away from, but only with long timers and simple defusal mechanisms.

Side note: If I’m ever President or Secretary of Defense, I will not have a Times Square-size Robinson projection map wall display of the world where the nuclear powers slowly blink red as they succumb. I will also not install (or need) a high-school-gym scoreboard to count down to Armageddon, complete with stylized red plastic light-up elements for whatever DefCon we’re at.

Sinners

May 21, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

Sinners is a great movie, with terrific music, acting, dancing, and camera work. I suspect it will get a bunch of Oscar nominations, which would be somewhat unusual for a movie released early in the year. It’s one of those interesting horror movies where the setting and the characters are far more interesting than the horror part. Prey (2022) is like this – a wonderful sketch of native plains life in the 1800s, painstakingly researched with extensive consultation with tribal experts, and then the alien predator shows up. Don’t get me wrong, Prey is the best predator movie ever made, and the predator parts are awesome, and Sinners is a great vampire movie with awesome vampire parts, but I found myself almost wishing I could see this without vampires and just keep going in 1930’s Mississippi with all these wonderfully drawn people. That movie would no doubt be even massiver Oscar bait.

One kind of embarrassing note – I was sure that Smoke was Michael B. Jordan, but then I started thinking that Stack looked really familiar, and then I started wondering if I wasn’t remembering what Michael B. Jordan looked like and if Stack wasn’t Michael B. Jordan, but if that was true, then who the hell was Smoke? Turns out he played both roles, and both performances were different, emotive, and noteworthy.

Definitely worth seeing on the big screen if you still do that – visually striking, from sets to costumes to cotton fields, and it just feels like a big movie.

SPSFC#4 Semifinalist Review: Eat by Jesse Brown

May 14, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

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

The book is Eat by Jesse Brown, sometimes subtitled Sigma: The Sum or ΣΔΤ Book One. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Welcome back to the food chain…

A chunk of white rested inside the dip of her collarbone. She fished it out and flicked it away, its rattle echoing as it bounced under a display table, alerting her to the silence. The ringing in her ears had finally stopped. The mask and goggles were long gone; fallen off in her haste. Pointless to wear them now, anyway…

Caede wants to complete her master’s degree, refresh her dating profile, and finally join the land of the living. Instead, she wakes up on a cold, wet pavement, surrounded by dead bodies and ferocious monsters. Kai waits anxiously for his sister to return from the world’s longest night shift. Ravi hides under a desk in his office, and Efia lays unconscious in a garage.

Jonathan, recently dumped and drinking himself to death in an empty flat, is waiting for the end to come… until a grizzly attack sends him stumbling into the path of Caede, and all the horrors of an apocalyptic London.

My Review

Note: There are some minor spoilers about the nature of this particular apocalypse in the review below – it’s something that you find out at least in basic terms in the opening chapters, but if you want a clean read, you should probably stop here.

This is a tight, tense story set in a peri-apocalyptic London, covering only a handful of days as survivors struggle to deal with the new, shattered world created by a rogue military virus that has killed most of London’s population. The danger and the action run almost non-stop, with violent animal-human hybrids roaming the streets along with a few other survivors. The small group at the heart of the story often has to fight or flee to stay alive.

Plot and Characters

We see this world through several perspectives, including Jon, a graphic designer who was about ready to give up even before the world went to hell, Caede, a waitress and student trying to take care of her brother Kai, a nurse, a doctor, and a virologist/geneticist. We spend the most time with Jon, but we get chapters or sections from the perspective some of the other characters as well.

For me, the characters were among the strongest parts of the book. Each is different, and each has a distinct attitude and voice and manner of speaking. All are dealing with the trauma of the world ending in different ways – some with despair, some with competence, some with violence. They were an interesting group to spend the apocalypse with. There are a few spots where there’s a little bit of head-hopping or floaty perspective, but those are minor and easily followed.

Because the book is set so close to when the world ends, the characters are all reeling, trying to cope and survive (or not trying very hard), some of them clinging to what they’ve lost, others (like Luna, a side character I’d have liked to get to know a little better) seizing the opportunity to make some big changes and take initiative. In that respect, the book reminded me a little of A Quiet Place: Day One, where you see things fall apart, and there’s plenty of action and drama, but where you’re not going to get much of a sense of what new world will arise from the ashes. This was in contrast to the other post-apocalyptic SPSFC finalist I just read, St. Elspeth, which happens years after the fall, and where the workings of the new world are the point of the story.

This timing and setting means the plot, like the Quiet Place prequel, is mostly jumping from danger to danger, with the main characters having only immediate survival goals and not much of a longer perspective. That’s exciting, with plenty of gory battles and narrow escapes, but also a little limiting – I would have liked to have the characters zoom out for a little bit at least to try to figure out their new context and do some bigger-picture thinking.

My Thoughts

There’s a lot to like here, especially with the characters, who are richly drawn and interesting (although sometimes frustrating – I’m looking at you, Jon). Their relationships and banter are fun and give the story heart. Some of the characters get pushed to the side some as the story progresses – they’re present, because the protagonists wouldn’t abandon them, but they don’t really have much to do, and we stop hearing from their perspectives much. I might have preferred to hear more from them as we went, particularly Luna and Efi. Efi gets more stage time in the middle, but it would have been cool to spend some time in her head towards the end as she starts to cope with what her life has become. There’s also something really interesting going on with Caede and her mind that’s never fully explained. I was curious if that was just her psyche or if she’s been affected by the virus somehow, but it fades away after a big fight she has.

There were some parts of this that strained credulity for me a little, but that could just be me being picky, which I tend to do. The source of the human-animal hybrids is explained, including in a fair bit of detail in an epilogue-like chapter, and the rapidity of the genetic alterations required is addressed, but it still seemed like this is not something that could ever actually happen, particularly with the variety of animals incorporated and the specific traits expressed. Why are there no plant people? I know I should just accept the horror-movie premise and enjoy monstrous animal people, but I took enough biology to make me think about the details.

In addition to the science, I had a little trouble with some of the human nature bits. Nearly all of the animal-human hybrid people we meet are sadistic sociopaths. Some are mute and apparently non-sentient, so that fits, but others have descended into cannibalism and depravity within a week or two of the world ending and have abandoned all semblance of morality despite retaining their minds. Maybe that’s something the virus does to you, but it made the monsters kind of one-note. If they’re smart enough to carry on conversations and strategize, it seems like they might be thinking bigger picture rather than just picking off survivors in the rubble. Also, they don’t seem to fight each other much (with some exceptions), instead banding together on Team Chimera for reasons that aren’t really clear.

The human team we follow, too, never really has any discussion about the long term, except for a little bit on one page about laying in supplies for winter. They also have almost no discussion of the extent of the damage to the world. I know they’re focused on the immediate dangers, but I think it would be human nature to wonder if the whole world has collapsed, or if it’s just London that’s affected. Is the whole planet reduced to savagery, or is it just around the Thames? Can you find a satellite phone anywhere and call somebody? Will the British Army be rolling in once the dust settles? Are there outsiders who can help? How will we feed ourselves sustainably once the shops are looted?

One other quibble, not a big one, is that the rag-tag human survivors seem really, really competent at monster fighting and weapon-improvising, which is not a skill set I’d expect them to have (except maybe Jon, whose rugby background at least includes some physicality). Either that, or the chimeras are vastly overconfident and their danger overrated.

But all of those are nitpicks. The core of the story is a fun one, definitely reminiscent of a scary Saturday afternoon at the movies, with action, romance, loss, heroism, and emotion. There’s no shortage of excitement and drama, and Brown does a great job of providing a steady stream of action and banter and character development.

Summation

If you’re up for a bloody apocalypse book with weird creatures, human struggles, and characters you’ll care about, Eat has got you covered. Just be careful about what you inject, and don’t trust those government blokes.

SPSFC#4 Semifinalist Review: Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

May 8, 2025 / Dave / 2 Comments

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

The book is Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

When they appeared across the sky, speculation wheeled around the world—the aliens were from heaven, the invaders were from hell… or they were proof that neither existed. But when they landed, curiosity gave way to suspicion and the nations reacted with nuclear force, setting off a chain reaction that left the world in ruins.

Twenty years later, instead of nearing her retirement, Dr. Elspeth Darrow struggles to forget the loss of her child and husband by plunging herself into the work of operating the last remaining hospital in San Francisco. With medical supplies running out and working herself to exhaustion, Elspeth must embark on a risky salvage mission into the heart of the Neo California danger zone. Here, she discovers the disturbing truth: the aliens have returned.

As the mystery of the aliens’ purpose on Earth unravels before her, Elspeth must hide what she discovers from reactionary despots, all vying to bring Neo California under their control. Aided by a band of pre-war scientists and new-world medical students, Elspeth races against astronomical odds to reveal the terrifying truth that might save the world—or finally destroy it for good.

My Review

This was a really engaging read for me. It wades deep into fertile sci-fi waters, with elements of post-apocalyptic fiction, alien invasion, and first contact. There are deep mysteries to figure out, but there’s also the unrelenting struggle and pressure of humans trying to survive in the wreckage of 21st century society, greatly diminished.

Plot and Characters

I can’t say much about the plot here, because a lot of what I might get into would be spoilers. The setup, though, is that we’re following a jaded, broken woman, the Elspeth of the title, who runs an understaffed and undersupplied clinic in the ruins of San Francisco. After the appearance of organic alien pod ships in the skies, there was a fairly extensive nuclear exchange as humanity struggled with how to respond and fell to fractious wars. Small groups of humans hunkered down in bunkers until it was safe to emerge, and now they are back above ground trying to make a go of it. The aliens, the Hilamen, never took action against the humans, and nobody can really figure out what their purpose was.

Elspeth has a great voice, and her weariness and cynicism combine with perseverance and compassion to create an engaging and conflicted character, one who you can certainly cheer for. She occasionally drifts towards somewhat frustrating maudlin spells, but those are understandable, even if they don’t necessarily move the story forward. She’s got a past (and present) full of loss, and she thinks she’s going through the motions in her clinic just because she doesn’t have anything better to do.

There are a host of side characters, good and evil (or both), venal and noble (or both), heroic and dissipated (or both). Almost everybody in the book is complex and rich, which is a real treat.

My Thoughts

I mused about halfway through that reading this felt like I was playing Fallout or The Last of Us, which was funny, because Welker says in the author’s note that he was playing The Last of Us while writing. There are some great post-apocalyptic tropes here, with ruined buildings, nature taking over, and people succumbing to bravado and militarism, hoarding salvaged resources, and facing hardships now that society and its laws and comforts have vanished. There are even giraffes from the zoo, which must be a TLoU homage. All of this part works well and seems gritty and believable.

There’s the additional dimension of the mystery of the Hilamen, who initially seem not to be doing anything. They just arrived, inadvertently triggered humanity to tear itself to pieces, landed, and vanished. That mystery is a really fun one, and it has a satisfying answer that’s pieced together as the story unfolds.

There is a ton of very real-sounding medical procedure in here, which makes sense, as Welker is an ICU doctor. There’s also some very interesting xenobiology. That part is left a little mysterious, although it’s partially explained in the plot through scientific observation by people making reasonable guesses based on the information they have. I couldn’t tell you at the end exactly how the Hilamen work in terms of physics and biochemistry, but there’s enough there to be satisfying.

Where I had more questions was with the climate and environment and politics of this post apocalyptic world. The social structure of the various California colonies is well-described, and the future history makes sense. There are occasional references to other parts of the world, but the geoscientist in me wanted to know a little more about the extent and distribution of the fallout, not to mention the climate change that seems to have engulfed parts of California and caused sinkholes and flooding and formation of significant new rivers. The sci-fi fan in me wanted to know better how the rest of the world was functioning too. But what we get is engaging and real enough, and those parts aren’t the focus of the story, and going into more detail wouldn’t really have added anything useful to what’s already a pretty long narrative.

The pace of discovery, the use of the scientific method, the victories and losses, the questions of morality and human nature, and the odd but satisfying way many characters had of changing their own goals and mindset in response to their experiences all contributed to a rip-roaring narrative full of interesting pieces.

The book is very well-written and well edited, with only a handful of typos in what would be a 400-page large-size paperback. Welker’s use of metaphor and imagery is really neat – not overwhelming or flowery, just fun and a little magical when it shows up.

Summation

I greatly enjoyed my time with this. Elspeth is a really engaging character, and her voice and attitude are refreshing even in a world that is mostly going to hell. Amidst the ruin and brutishness, there is some hope (mixed with despair and ambition, to be sure), and the story takes you along a number of unexpected but rewarding turns along a road to a satisfying conclusion. This is a really good book, tightly crafted, full of adventure and humanity, and quite worthy of the SPSFC semifinals.

Book ratings – what my data show

March 26, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

I posted the following graphs earlier but realized I hadn’t collected them here. I compared the number of ratings and reviews my nine books have received to the number of total downloads those books have received. Because most of my books are available exclusively on Amazon (in order to access the Kindle Unlimited program, which represents between 60%-80% of my revenue), it’s pretty easy to assemble sales and downloads numbers.

Here’s the strongest correlation I found. Roughly 1.7% of my book sales turn into reviews on Amazon, 1.1% of sales on Goodreads. Correlation is strong (R² = 0.95). “Sales” include giveaway events (95% of my total downloads, because I do a lot of free promos). I left out my three-book box set, because its reviews often accrue to the individual books rather than the set.

Here’s a look at reviews and ratings compared to publication date. You might expect the books that have been out for longer to have more ratings and reviews, but that trend isn’t visible here. Therefore, I think it’s safe to say that marketing success is much more important to number of ratings/reviews than time since publication. The most effective marketing I’ve had is BookBub Featured Deals, and all the books that have the highest numbers of reviews/ratings have had featured deals except Flames Over Frosthelm (my book that’s been out the longest, and for which I’ve run the most non-BookBub free promos).

Here’s a comparison of written reviews vs. star ratings for all nine books on GoodReads and Amazon, sorted by total ratings. Written reviews are always fewer than ratings (that’s obvious – writing a review takes more effort than clicking a star), but the ratio doesn’t seem to be consistent over all my books.

You could potentially argue from this chart and its rough upward trend to the right that my less popular books have a higher percentage of written reviews. That may mean they’re getting those written reviews from fans or eager readers. The outlier to the upward trend is Flames Over Frosthelm, but that book has been out the longest, so it may just have had more time to accumulate written reviews. It also hasn’t had a BookBub featured deal, while the other three on the left have, and one interpretation of that is that BookBub readers are less likely to write reviews.