Category: Reviews (Page 1 of 3)

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.

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.

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.

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.