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SPSFC#4 Semifinalist Review: Yours Celestially by Al Hess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: Da Vinci on the Lam by B.D. Booker

This is my fourth 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 Da Vinci on the Lam by B.D. Booker. The book is available from Amazon.

A note on my judging for Peripheral Prospectors: We split up the team’s books between us, because six quarterfinalists was a lot to get through (although one judge did manage to read them all). We made sure each book got a fair shake – all quarterfinalists got at least three full reads and ratings from our six judges. I was not able to get through all six before the deadline as I had hoped, but I intend to read and review the other two quarterfinalists I didn’t get to yet (Whiskey and Warfare and Afterburn) regardless of which of our six progresses to the semifinals.

Blurb

One week. One chance. Earth is dying as a fungal ‘grit’ and dust storms smoother crop lands and destroy the oceans. The rich flee into space, leaving the poor to die off. But if gunslinger Artis Quinn delivers a priceless da Vinci artwork to an offworlder hub on the other side of the country, his family will get tickets off-world. Yet the true end of the world might arrive sooner than expected and Quinn will have to fight his way through the ruthless Onyx Group to succeed.

My Review

This was an exciting, grueling tale, set on a dying Earth, with humanity on the brink of extinction. The near-future mentioned shows a not-too-recognizable America in the midst of a climate collapse, with food supplies failing, technology rusting away, the political system in chaos and corruption, and people living and dying in hardship, although some lucky few have the money to live in domes or still have real food, and a rarefied elite make it off-world to colonies on other planets.

This is the setting. The core of the story, though, is something else, played out across this desolate landscape. At its heart, it’s a very long chase, with our heroes (semiheroes, at least) Artis and Julia trying to spirit away a stolen Da Vinci sketch while the previous owners try to recover it, not because they like art, but because somebody even more important than they are want it.

Plot and Characters

I kind of did the plot above, and there’s actually not too much more to say. The book alternates POV characters from good guys to bad guys to shadowy bosses, but it always returns to showing what the good guys are doing to try to achieve their goals (which turns out to be a huge variety of crafty stuff) and what the bad guys are doing to try to thwart them (which involves a host of spy-ish stuff and advanced tech).

The two leads, Julie and Artis, are a fun pair to follow. They’re both full and realistic (at least in this world) and their backstories get fleshed out as the book progresses. Their motivations are complex and shifting, and they form a bond and partnership together that’s engaging and fun. Artis is an archetype – a world-weary ex-special-forces drifter who’s a complete badass, the kind of character Sylvester Stallone would both act and direct himself in a 1980’s movie that got 2.5 stars. But Artis is deeper than that, with some real charm, some fallibility, and lots of regrets.

Julie’s a little softer focused – she gets less POV time – but her shifting loyalties and her fish-out-of-water experience are interesting and well done. She has crises of conscience that seem real as her basic mission becomes a lot more complicated, and as the costs mount.

The bad guys aren’t as well developed, as they’re kind of locked into being part of the bad guy team, and they don’t have a lot of agency other than to follow orders or die. A couple of them get a lot of POV time, but most of that is them just being fooled or seeing through ruses. We get pretty deep into a kind of middle management bad guy, Big, but to be honest, he’s not that interesting, and he too is basically just doing what he’s told and what he has to. The other baddie we see more of is Aveev, but he gets repetitive rather than deep. There were multiple scenes of him thinking hard, valuing and assessing his soldiers, and regretting that he was lying to them. About the fifth time he has a chapter like that, without much new, it gets a little stale, because his motivations and mission haven’t changed, and he hasn’t developed.

My Thoughts

The big win here is the desolate world, full of people barely hanging on. We gradually learn more about how this happened, but basically the world is covered in “grit,” a fungal dust that ruins crops and foods and infests everything it touches. There are elements of Mad Max and other broken-world futures in here, but this is fresh and told well, with little vignettes and encounters with colorful wasteland folks. I liked this part, seeing how various people were finding work, keeping alive, and dealing with severe hardship. The various adaptations people have made to handle the gritstorms and starvation are interesting, as is the social stratification we sometimes see.

The plot is exciting, too – very action-movie-ish, with escapes and mad dashes and crappy vehicles barely holding together and gun fights and trains and cannibals and cool shenanigans. All of this is good stuff, but the problem I had was that, while this was a cool action movie, it felt like a four-and-a-half-hour action movie, one where the plot didn’t change much at all from start to finish. The characters grew and developed, and some stuff was going on in the world, but the clever-ploy/evil-scheme tennis match went well into extra games, and my neck got tired. There started to be some cheats to increase drama, too – stuff that the characters knew but weren’t telling us, making them unreliable, and cheapening the tension a little when we found out. Also some seemingly uncharacteristic own-goals from the good guys and unrealistic “Aha! I’m here when I couldn’t possibly be” moments frmo the bad guys. But in the end, it was satisfying. The end was maybe a little contrived (and oddly rushed after so much stasis), but I enjoyed the journey, even if I might have preferred a shorter route.

There were occasionally some info-dumpy parts about the world. Booker usually does a good job of revealing these things in the characters’ voices, but sometimes it’s clear he just wants us to know how stuff works and is going to spend a page or two telling us. It’s cool stuff, so that’s forgivable, and it mostly reads fine. There are a few times where an aspect of the world is told over again, even three or four times, when it’s already been detailed earlier, and that can get frustrating, especially in a long book.

In terms of writing, the worldbuilding and the characterization of the leads are great, the dialogue snaps, and the detail is rich and interesting. The editing is a little rough, with more grammar and structure errors than you’d see in a traditionally published book. A fair number of comma splices (though not nearly as many as Transference), some word errors (characters repeatedly pouring over things, riff raft, etc.) and such. Not enough to detract from what is at its heart a good book, but something maybe to work on in a 2nd edition or rerelease.

Summation

I enjoyed my time with this. The fundamental lunacy of two people worrying about a 15th century scrap of art as the world is ending is a lot of fun, and the writing was cinematic in a good way. I really liked the main character throughout – he has a great world-weary badass thing going. I thought it was longer than it should be, and a bit repetitive, but I’ve been known to eat more cake than I should at times, and even where this dragged a bit, it tasted good.

SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: The Transference by Ian Patterson

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.

SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: The Ghost Gun by Gareth Lewis

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.

Movie review: The Gorge

The Gorge on Apple TV was OK, maybe a little better than OK, but not great. Let’s give it a B-, graded on a curve for movies about sinister crevasses.

The Good:

— Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy are good, better than this plot deserves. Their growing interactions and relationship is the best part of the movie (until it moves into verse form, which is painful if you pause the video and read it, which I did. She should have just set fire to it and bailed).

— The setup for the plot and the stark sets are suitably weird, with lots of cool little details and events. Then as the action starts taking strides, things stay tense and exciting, although the plausibility takes a huge hit.

— The creepy visual effects were baller, too. Very neat stuff, and a wide variety of it.

The Bad:

— Sigourney Weaver is criminally underused here, given nothing more to do than stock villainhood, playing the Paul Reiser character from the (much better) Aliens movie but with far stupider lines.

— The premise, as eventually didactically explained, is pretty trite and dumber than most movies like this.

— There is occasional painfully clunky dialogue (e.g. an unearned “this place is pure evil”) that you have to kind of shake off like a bad burrito. There are good lines too, but they are frontloaded, and the last half of the movie is less fun and far less well-written than the first half.

— Miles Teller as a bemused, curious, bored guy is fun, while Miles as a guy in love is 100% Anakin Skywalker. Yes, I went there. Yes, it’s accurate.

— There’s also a lot of questionable physics, plans that don’t make sense, and questionable survival of very old equipment, along with a plethora of the kind of poor choices people make in scary movies, augmented by improbable coincidence.

— Those drones couldn’t possibly carry that many bullets, but that doesn’t matter a whit, because they shoot like stormtroopers. I feel like they were maybe designed as soil aerators rather than machine-gun drones. That would explain it.

— There were also probably six better endings they hinted at during the movie than the groan-worthy one they eventually chose.

The Ugly:

— There’s a wretched maybe two solid minutes of solemn spoken-word voice-over exposition explaining why things in the movie are the way they are. The person speaking the words would have no conceivable knowledge of these events, these initiatives, or how it works. The evidence they’ve found is cryptic and very limited. There’s a neat scene with a movie that’s a primary source and quite affecting – they should have just left it there, but the screenwriters seemed to want you to know their full explanation for everything, which would have been more excusable had it been, like, a good explanation, rather than the plot of five thousand video games and B-movies of yore. Let the mystery steep, dude. Show, don’t tell.

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