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fussyspace · 4 months

Text

Word count: ~70,300

Cover: A neat cover with a pretty palette, this one gives the right vibes while staying quite simple. It has something to do with planets, it has a colonisation attempt (possibly failed) and it's probably funny. Did I completely blank the fact that it was part of a series until I got to the end and wondered? Why yes, yes I did.

Blurb: 'They needed some help. They woke up the wrong guy. 'The colony ship, Odyssey Earth, is on a 17-year voyage across the galaxy to a new home. And Jordan Booth is exactly where he wanted to be – tucked up in hypersleep, with nothing to worry about until planetfall. 'However, Captain Juno Washington has other ideas. She’s got a quirky ship’s AI, Reeves, and a crew of loners and oddballs, but what she doesn’t have is anyone to look out for the Odyssey Earth’s six ship-born teenagers. 'When Jordan is revived and given the job, he’s far from happy about it. Then again, nor are the kids. Tight-knit, whip-smart, resilient – the last thing they need is a chaperone, and they make sure he knows it. 'After an unexpected change of course, everyone needs to join forces if they’re going to survive. But Jordan is out of his comfort zone – and the teenagers are in no mood to listen. Still, if they pull together and stop squabbling, they might all just make it. 'Yeah, right. Good luck with that.'

I do love the premise of Orphan Planet, and had I come across its blurb in the wild, I may have been tempted to give it a read for the novelty. (I'll be honest, the only thing putting me off would have been the prospect of encountering teenage drama, which I avoid like the plague, but thankfully the usual cringe was not present here.)

Vote to continue at 30%: Yes

Content: In my reviews, I often commit the sin of forgetting to note down all the things I like about a book and ending up with an embarrassingly long list of complaints even when I liked it. The fact that this review is quite short, then, should serve as an indication of how much I enjoyed it (or perhaps more accurately, how inoffensive I found it).

This was a pretty easy read, with light humour here and there and an interesting opening with the main character preparing to go on a colony ship. I found the fact that it switched back and forth between times at the beginning of chapters annoying at first, but settled into it. It was sometimes a bit reminiscent of William Shatner in its use of commas, and missed a few semi-colons, but was otherwise well written.

I was very amused, when it reached the part where the teacher got defrosted, to find out that the shipborn kids he would be looking after existed because the birth control didn't work and none of the mission-essential crew had the time (or necessarily skills) to look after them. The situation tickled me. And the series of videos from their old teacher that introduced them was quite poignant. It was one of those things that, on the surface, look like they should be an info dump, and probably are, but they work well.

Those videos formed a sort of primer for getting to know the kids, both for the teacher and for me as a reader. Admittedly it could be difficult at times. There were a lot of conversations where many people spoke without speech tags. Giving the benefit of the doubt, I think it was to show that the teacher didn't yet know which kid was which, or to consolidate all their speech into 'the noise of the group in general'. I found it a little annoying. I was also confused in places where question marks got used for rhetorical questions and I had to do a double take.

Spoilers for the last part of the book below.

When they accidentally landed on the wrong planet and had to trek across its surface in search of rescue, everything really came alive. The character interactions were great, and I loved seeing the little family (sarcastic AI included) forming. I did find it a little sad, as well, though, with no prospect of a rescue in sight, and therefore only the outlook of drawn-out deaths. I found myself wishing there had been some last-minute glimmer of hope in the final lines. When I discovered there was a sequel, I found my wish answered, of course, and the ending wasn't quite so sad. But on its own, it certainly gave that bittersweet impression.

Overall, Orphan Planet is an enjoyable read with great characters. While it doesn't do anything wildly out-there or leave a massive impression, I definitely recommend it.

#science fiction #self publishing #sff #spsfc #sci fi #spsfc3 #spsfc3 round 1

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fussyspace · 4 months

Text

Word count: ~65,600

Cover: This seems to have gone through a few different covers, so I'll comment on the one we were sent, which appears to be the latest. It definitely gets across everything it needs to: the noir detective vibe, the fact there are humanoid aliens, and the fact at least one bloke gets abducted. It gives the impression the detective and the alien are working together, too, which tracks. And it looks good. A solid cover.

Blurb: 'Brent Bolster doesn't give a damn.

'Overlords, invaders, the Earth Upgrade Committee: they can all go to hell.

'But abduct him? He'd like to see them try.

'Like any good PI, Brent has a snub-nosed pulse pistol hidden under his pillow. But he's just met his worst nightmare, an alien with an attitude that just won’t quit, and things are about to get...complicated.

'Join Brent as he tackles Earth’s new overlords and uncovers a deadly plan.

'With the help of a mysterious dame, an assistant with serious muscle, a neurotic scientist, and a fish called Algernon, he might make it through.It's a tough job, but Brent can handle it. Just as soon as he's had his third cup of coffee……and found that damned pulse pistol.

'You’ll get a kick out of this comedy because all scifi fans love a tongue-in-cheek reference.

'Dial G for Gravity takes the world of an old-fashioned gumshoe and propels it into the future. But like all good scifi, it has something to say about where we’re headed and the way we live now.

'So grab a pot of joe, fill your favorite Star Fleet mug, and start reading.'

Whew. Bit of a long blurb. Much like the cover, it gets that detective vibe across pretty well, and it imparts a dash of the humour that will follow it the book. I might have left it a bit long between reading and writing my notes up into a review, but I can't remember it having much to say about where we're headed and the way we live now, so I feel like that bit may have been a bit redundant. In any case, it's a fun one. Let's dive in.

Vote to continue at 30%: Yes

This book was hard to review without spoilers, so please be aware that there are probably many below – mostly to do with characters rather than the plot.

Content: This was an enjoyable and easy read from the outset, with a decent dash of humour and an interesting if slightly cheesy setting including an obvious but entertaining Spock stand-in. We had a detective getting abducted even though he should have been exempt, an alien getting pranked by his co-workers, and not-android-Spock falling mortally foul of their captain's temper. A lot of these colourful characters got thrown together for much of the book, with plenty of opportunity to bounce off each other. It was a promising setup.

However, with several different plot lines moving along at once, it didn't go as far as I expected by what I thought was the 30% mark (it had a pesky sample of the sequel at the end, which skewed my perception of how long the actual book was), beyond presenting the mystery of why the detective was mistakenly abducted and revealing a ship of aliens heading for Earth. By halfway, the main characters had teamed up and started working through the problem, but I felt a general lack of 'spark' that I struggled to put my finger on. Perhaps it was just the pacing, but I think it may have been the number of PoV characters, each knowing their bit of the story and thus removing some of the suspense. The prose was entertaining enough, but the plot failed to deliver and I found the eventual resolution so sudden that it was disappointing.

While I did have a few chuckles as I read, the humour did often fall back on something that always falls flat for me: characters constantly being rude or just plain mean to each other. (Also references to some TV shows I assumed were either before my time or American, or both.) I'm never quite sure if it's meant to be funny or not, but I just find it makes me retreat from the characters. In this case I don't think Brent is meant to be particularly likeable, but his behaviour got more grating for me as the book went on. I held out some hope of him changing and becoming nicer, but he didn't, and was particularly keen on trying to get with Maisie even after she made it perfectly clear she wasn't interested.

In fact, all the men seemed to make jokes at the expense of the women. This would have been less of a problem if the women were actually strong characters. I expected Maisie to constantly cut through Brent's nonsense, but by the end she was practically simpering at the thought of a man protecting her. I thought Tsumper would be an intelligent investigator, but she didn't reappear and was written off as stupid. I thought Breamell would be sharper than Rawlgeeb gave her credit but, but she was just all over him and did nothing but get captured. Individually, perhaps nothing of note. Together, they paint a frustrating picture. Maybe I'm just being stupid here and it's deliberately embracing a trope of noir stories, but it didn't come across as a result of unreliable or rose-tinted narration, and it didn't sit right.

In the end, while I enjoyed the book's writing style and its quirky setting, the plot and characters left me feeling a bit more ambivalent. It was a quick and reasonably entertaining read, but I wasn't itching to dive into the sequel.

#science fiction #self publishing #sff #spsfc #sci fi #spsfc3 #spsfc3 round 1

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fussyspace · 5 months

Text

Those not finished, part 2

At this stage of the competition, we're just meant to read 10-30% of a book and vote yes or no on whether we want to continue/the book should advance. The team's votes are then added together to find the top 10-12, which we then read in full and score.

These are the books I gave a no vote to and didn't finish reading. There are some I finished reading and still voted no to (usually when they were short enough that it wouldn't take long to get to the end).

A no vote doesn't necessarily mean a book is bad. Please also remember that these views are my own and may not reflect the rest of the team.

Arter, Sylas Seabrook

Word count: ~88,100

Cover: It definitely screams 'space'! I can't really tell much about what it will be about from the combination of the title and cover, but I at least get the genre, and it doesn't look like Earth, so that in itself is interesting.

Blurb: 'For a hundred thousand years, Sumatta has reigned as the source of all life on the planet Arter. Arter is a pangean continent whose skies are filled by a constant aurora and whose science is based off of aten, small bits of energy captured by nature which harness the fundamental forces of nature.

'Unel seeks to use aten to connect Arterians through their dreams in hopes of one day allowing Arterians to communicate through the mind directly. Finding the right aten and the right design for his device, the draumr, proves frustrating, and he finds himself relying on the support of his bonded (wife) to complete the project.

'As he discovers the necessary formula and they begin a family, Sumatta brings a message. Sumatta, Guardian of Ages, brings a message of a new age which will change Arter forever and give new meaning to Unel’s hopes for the draumr device.

'This story was 6 years in the making and is the first in a series of books which will take us deeper into the world-building of a universe of universes filled with characters who seek to better themselves, save the worlds the know, and the gods who play amongst them.'

There's a fair amount of information being dropped in the blurb, and while it sounds interesting enough I do wonder if it could have focussed more on the plot without getting bogged down by terminology or explanations. The thought of inventing telepathic/dream communication is intriguing enough to interest me.

Vote to continue at 30%: No

Content: I admit that when I read Arter's blurb, I saw '6 years in the making' and was immediately concerned that this would be a little book with a lot of worldbuilding shoved into it. This was either an irrational fear or, I suspect, brought on by the slightly info-dumpy feeling I got from the blurb itself. In any case, the first chapter played into my fears. While the main character Unel conducted experiments into some kind of telepathy, terminology dropped left, right and centre, and I found myself swimming, with increasing disinterest, through name soup. Nothing hooked me until his 'bonded' came in trying to 'distract' him. More on that later.

I was confused by the fact that atoms appeared to be solid and visible in this world, which led to a question that I never really had answered to any degree of satisfaction – were the Arterians aliens who just saw things differently to humans? Their appearance was described as human-like, with no features distinguishing them. It often felt like they were just humans on another planet, but because I knew they weren't meant to be, my mind kept substituting the aliens from Strange Planet, but with hair. And boobs. We'll circle back to the boobs later. This was a consistent question that really annoyed me, especially when I encountered suggestions that there were other planets and non-Arterians, but I never got enough information to be able to tell the difference between the two. I even have a sneaking suspicion that one of the characters that appeared later was non-Arterian, but I just didn't know for sure.

I found the next chapter more interesting, as it drifted over to their religion and introduced a pretty neat four-dimensional tree along with its Readers, trained to read the patterns of the (later somewhat phallically described) god that visited via the tree. Still, not much happened, and I found the fact that 'it' was used as the Reader's pronoun incredibly off-putting compared to 'they'. This was coupled with a more widespread issue that sometimes occurred with typos and odd sentence construction.

Now let's circle back to the bonded and the boobs. A significant chunk of early chapters focusses on the relationship between Unel and his bonded (i.e. wife), which hooked into a pretty interesting worldbuilding aspect whereby fertility is controlled by expensive eggs that have to be collected from a certain species on the rare occasion the god rocks up to activate them. It was a brilliant hook for a dystopia, but the book didn't seem to be going in that direction. What we did get to read was a rather cringe-inducing slice of the couple's life, including Unel licking cream of his bonded's nipples and them saying they love each other many, many times.

The women, in general, felt rather sexualised and universally occupied rubbish positions in society. I found this very unusual, given the complete control they have over their own reproduction, which I felt would have improved their lot over human women. I also found it interesting how easy it was to reverse the polarity of the magic sex eggs and make them deadly, which I feel should probably have had more impact on their society.

The book began to get slightly more interesting when stuff started to explode, but at that point it immediately put me in another PoV with a new character I didn't care about, followed by yet another. And what should have felt like a big reveal relating to their god's true nature and intentions was told in two sentences rather nonchalantly when it could have had a much more impactful reveal.

All in all, Arter's setting had a lot of promise, but it didn't have much to hook me and was let down by its vagueness around species, its pacing, and the weakness of its women. As such, I did not keep reading past 30%.

Replika: Sky's Mission, Hugo Bernard

Word count: ~82,200

Cover: Bright and shiny, it suggests something code/tech-related, so that's pretty on brand for what the blurb suggests.

Blurb: 'Reality is an illusion worth fighting for...

'Earth’s ecological collapse is avoided when most of the world population agrees to permanently upload into Replika, a simulated reality maintained by the AI. But the stability of this world is threatened when a group of neuroscientists hack their own brains to interact with Replika in unforeseen and dangerous ways.

'Sky devotes her life to rebuilding the real world left dysfunctional from the massive exodus into Replika. But when she learns her brother, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, is in danger, she must choose which world needs her most. All she wants is to find the brother she loves, but she will unwittingly get entangled in an attempt to redefine the reality of humanity’s future.

'With a strong cast of characters, REPLIKA is a wildly inventive and fast-paced sci-fi adventure that raises profound existential questions about the role of simulated reality in our foreseeable future.'

This comes across a little clunky to me for some reason, but the thought of neuroscientists hacking their brains to cause havoc within a simulated reality sounds pretty cool. I also like the emotional stakes of Sky having to choose whether to go after her brother in there or not.

Vote to continue at 30%: No

Content: This kicked off with an interesting prologue where a fourteen-year-old kid is preparing to go into a different reality – a task for which he must lose all his memories. I was intrigued, and I was miffed on his behalf at this seemingly unfair stipulation, but I was destined not to hear much about that for the next 30% of the book I read.

That 30% kicked of by introducing a bunch of new characters – mostly a woman being tortured for information and a guy working in a virtual pizzeria. It was there that we got our first taste of 'the virt', which isn't the same as Replika, as you can keep your memories and dip in and out of the virt. It seemed like some kind of digital twin/augmented reality/Second Life arrangement. A terrorist attack happened in Paris that was relatively interesting to hear about but brought me no closer to the titular Replika, which felt like it would have featured more heavily in the book from the outset. At this point I wasn't sure what was going on and was fairly certain I was going to forget who all the characters were.

A good part of why I found the going tough and got a bit bored was the fact that I never really got any sense of emotion from the characters. The point mentioned in the blurb – Sky needing to go into Replika to find her brother – sounded like it should have been emotionally huge, and while the text gave me the reasons why it should be huge, I never got the emotional impact of that. The text relies heavily on having the characters' inner monologues tell us stuff, even when that stuff is repeated in dialogue a paragraph later. This is coupled with relatively passive narration that keeps some distance from its third-person perspectives. Technically, there are also a fair few commas that should have been semi-colons or new sentences, and the dialogue sometimes felt a bit stiff.

I stopped reading at 30% because Replika itself still hadn't made an appearance (beyond, if I remember correctly, a brief conversation with its avatar) and I was bored of being told everything. I had formed so little emotional connection to the characters that I didn't even care when one of them got kidnapped. It's a shame, really, because the premise in the blurb sounded great, but it took too long to get to the point and got bogged down in its characters' heads.

Zero Gravity, Elizabeth Pridgen

Word count: ~83,500

Cover: The cover suggests storms, that's for sure, and 'Zero Gravity' is a pretty descriptive title for the plot, so it's clear what you're getting into. It's quite simple, but I like it, and the linear artefacts are interesting. It's a fun font, too, but I have always been a big fan of those Dymo embossing machines, so I am biased. I'm not quite sure what the tagline 'Onward with the future' refers to with regard to the plot, though, as it makes me think of either time travel or forwards progress at a civilisation level.

Blurb: 'The world is in a crisis. Almost all power is lost, the U.S. government has collapsed by a terrorist organization known as The Ravagers and there are unexplained, brief episodes of gravity loss which leads to numerous accidents, casualties and little to no arcas for shelter. Marlowe Benson is one of the few living Americans left in the United States, but has been separated from her partner, Jayden. After being rescued by other remaining survivors, they struggle to not only fight back The Ravagers but to find safety from the horrific gravity loss episodes known as "zero gravity attacks".'

A bit of a clunky blurb, really (after writing this impression, I did find a more up-to-date version on Amazon, so I assume the Goodreads page needs updating), but it sets the initial scene. If there's a whole terrorist organisation, it seems weird that the main character can be one of the few living Americans, unless the terrorists a) aren't American or b) were mostly wiped out by the storms. I'm probably nitpicking, but to me 'few' suggests you'd struggle to bump into people most days, let alone see enough people to have to fight back at anyone. In any case, the titular zero-gravity attacks seem to be a bit of a sidenote here, but the thought of them is interesting.

Vote to continue: No

Content: I would like to say that most of the issues I had with this book were due to the fact that it was submitted as a Word document and I had to reformat the whole thing manually. Unfortunately, they were not. (I would remind authors to please read the rules when submitting. This wasn't the only book we had to convert to the epub stipulated in the rules.)

Before I get into those issues, let's briefly cover the book itself. I admit I didn't get far, so can't comment much on this, but we alternated through a past and present with a few encounters, including the main character being hit by a zero-gravity storm. Here, the name didn't seem to fit – it was enough to make me doubtful, though writing in hindsight and having not noted it down, I can't remember if the storms were caused by zero gravity or simply named such. In any case, the first storm saw the main character able to kick things without pushing off in the opposite direction with equal force and also flipped a car seemingly at random. There didn't seem much logic to it. I didn't find the alternating times worked in this case, and the whole thing felt quite disjointed. While the blurb held some potential for an interesting story, my quibbles with the premise continued. It didn't seem at all believable that the US government had somehow been bumped off with no prior warning or fanfare, not a peep from the army, and with no one having noticed a terrorist threat powerful enough to pull that off to begin with.

What were the book's main issues? Editing. It needed it. Speech tags were incorrectly capitalised, many sentences made little or no sense, characters' body parts were described as doing things rather than the characters themselves, it failed to use the pluperfect when necessary, was overly passive and overused sentence fragments. It also seemed to jump in time, with characters being there one second and gone the next, though I couldn't tell if this was just a formatting issue that had stripped out the scene breaks. And a bizarre one: at one point it called a subway crash genocidal, which seemed a flagrant misuse of the word (unless someone had specifically shoved people from an ethic group on the train and then crashed it, which didn't seem to be the case).

All in all, I couldn't get past the 5% mark before I had to put it down.

#science fiction #self publishing #sff #spsfc #sci fi #spsfc3 #spsfc3 round 1

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fussyspace · 5 months

Text

Word count: ~164,200

Cover: Another great cover here, and it's such a fun manipulation of the Martian surface to turn a crater into a pizza (don't worry, no such irresponsible acts of geoengineering take place in the book). If you look closer at the ingredients, you can see bits of DNA and molecules going in as well, which is a nod to some of the genetic modification that goes on. All in all, a fun and colourful cover.

Blurb: 'Mars is a strange place these days. Corporate overlords, capitalism, and even aging are things of the past on a planet increasingly brimming with biodiversity - yet pizzerias are in short supply!

'Siblings Hett and San set out to change that. But a roboticist and a bureaucrat can't run a restaurant alone, so they bring on some help - a bioengineer, a communications scientist, and an unlikely grad student from Earth. Together, this gang of geeks will brave the fires of small business.

'But work is just a small part of life. People are complicated. Different brains, different wounds, different values, and one questionably tame wildcat will all collide as they try to grow and succeed together. What comes out of the oven, in the end, is anyone's guess.'

It's certainly an interesting premise, and I was intrigued by the thought of something smaller-scale than the usual conflict, if a little worried I would find it dull (I've not read much cosy fiction, if any that I remember).

Vote: I voted yes to continue at the 30% mark and carried on to finish the whole book.

Content: A Slice of Mars felt like a breath of fresh air between books with heavier topics or shakier editing. Incredibly well written and with a great diversity of fleshed-out characters, I have been recommending it to pretty much everyone I know ever since, and possibly plugged it more than my own books at a recent convention. Whoops.

Anyway, it built much of the Martian setting through interviewing each of the characters that would eventually become employees for the brand-new pizzeria, which I thought was a pretty neat way of introducing us to the world. Throughout, there was an interesting commentary on the current state of the internet/social media, what the internet is shaping up to be, and what the internet could be if handled differently. That's not to say it was perfect, though – the characters had their own opinions of which parts worked and which didn't, and it was nice to see Dhapree's perspective of this from the autistic side of things.

Of course, it wasn't my usual pace, and by 30% they still hadn't opened the pizza parlour yet, but I was enjoying the characters and setting so much that I didn't really care.

It did slow down a bit around the 70% mark during an action scene, which was described via a monologue on biology that left me unsure which bits were hypothetical and which bits had happened. Perhaps it was a deliberate ploy to reduce urgency and keep things cosy, either on the character's part or the author's, but it was only a little annoying.

I haven't even mentioned the whole fact that aging isn't really a thing here, but that's I surprise I'll leave to you to find out. Suffice to say, it's an interesting solution.

Overall, this was a lovely book (with a lovely ending), making me salivate over fictional pizza and desperately wish to live in this near-utopic Martian society.

#science fiction #self publishing #sff #spsfc #sci fi #spsfc3 #spsfc3 round 1

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fussyspace · 5 months

Text

Siren's Call, T.J.J. Klamvik

Word count: ~256,000

Cover: You've got to love an illustrated cover, and this one's gorgeous. It seems like a pretty aurora at first, but then you peer closer and you have that spooky arm coming out between the run-down apartment buildings. The little bit of graffiti in the bottom right is less obvious, but highlights the words that echo through the story.

Blurb: 'In the Doomsday Cycle there are no heroes. The future could have looked different, but the path has been corrupted and only the inevitable awaits. Something lurks in the darkness of space, and it cares little for humanity’s petty squabbles. The apocalypse is here, but will anyone hear its call?

'Councilor Justynia Freid – an ambitious politician of Earth’s most prominent colony – never saw it coming. A scheme by her own Chancellor to restart a war that they themselves had a hand in ending? All without her knowledge? Tossed into a harsh world of intrigue and backstabbing, Justynia has to discover what led to the drastic decision that is going to send humanity into chaos. Only with all the answers can she decide whether to listen to her own conscience or follow the path to power.

'Detective Adelia Duarte does not care for politics – it only ever made her job harder. Tasked with investigating a series of murders that plague Capital City, Adelia has to confront her own past in order to understand the methods and motivations of the serial killer that seems impervious to the security systems that track each citizen down to the centimeter. As the bodies keep piling up, it is difficult to maintain faith. Would someone with a less troubled history be a better fit for the investigation? For now, all the city has is Adelia, and the bodies keep coming.

'Sergeant Jones is also haunted by his past – decisions taken in a war he never truly understood. His only refuge is more fighting. Recruited to join Special Operations, and reunited with old comrades to escort a scientist to an abandoned colony, he quickly learns all is not what it seems. Surrounded by mystery and an unknown enemy, he needs to warn mankind of what is coming. But will they truly listen?'

There's a great spooky theme running through the blurb, and it gives a good introduction to each of the characters. I stupidly forgot to read it before I started reading, as I may have had a better idea of how many characters to expect and who they were in the first few chapters had I done so.

Vote: I voted yes to continue at the 30% mark and continued to read 100% (which took some time).

Content: Siren's Call began with an interesting prologue, the relevance of which didn't become clear until right at the end of the book. As the blurb implied, it switched between three PoVs, which was initially quite a lot of characters to keep track of but got easier over time, especially later as these storylines began to reference each other.

I didn’t always connect to the characters or get a great feel of their emotions, although this may only have been a problem with one character, the councillor. She had an argument with her partner at one point and I honestly couldn’t tell it was meant to be heated until one of them walked out. I'm not sure why, but it was possibly due to some language quirks throughout the book that make sentences quite passive and create distance from the characters.

The writing also had a reliance on adverbs and made some word-choice mistakes like ‘here here’ instead of ‘hear hear’. It lacked contractions in dialogue, often making it feel stilted and unnatural. But its most noticeable habit was using ‘as [they were doing something]’ too often, sometimes twice in a sentence, which became very noticeable by virtue of repetition. A good bunch of editing would have tightened it up, likely making it shorter in the process.

Generally, though, the setting was interesting and I liked the murder mystery aspect, though it didn’t get as much screentime as I would have liked at the beginning, especially when spooky/alien stuff looked like it was getting involved. Because of the scope, the background spookiness and the bits of story focussing on politics, it reminded me of The Expanse a bit. Having read to the end, I feel it definitely could have been shorter, but I did think the ending was cool, wrapping the prologue up in a neat bow while still leaving hooks for the sequel.

#SPSFC #SPSFC3 #SPSFC3 round 1 #self publishing #science fiction #sci fi #SFF

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fussyspace · 5 months

Text

The Arrow of Time, B.T. Lamprey

Word count: ~43,600

Cover: This is an excellent cover – clean and striking, with great font choices. You can definitely tell that it's going to be something about time (if the title didn't give it away), and the different outfits the characters are wearing make for a curious mix.

Blurb: 'Only minutes after his tragic murder—and a hundred million years before he’ll be born—Aloysius Cook gets the offer of a lifetime.

'Joining a team of time-traveling commandos may not sound like a cushy gig, but at the moment Al’s only alternative involves a closed casket. If he hopes to survive working for The Institute at the Beginning of Time, he’ll need a crash course on temporal paradoxes, recursive causal loops, and the very real possibility of the multiverse folding in on itself like a poorly made origami giraffe.

'Luckily for Al, every new recruit receives a copy of The Everyday Timekeeper’s Almanac, the only guide to spacetime a time traveler will ever need. Compiled by an infinite number of researchers from across all possible realities, it contains every fact and every theory that might prove useful to a time traveler, plus helpful tips on how to avoid obliterating the multiverse.

'Armed only with his Almanac, Al must dive into the time stream alongside a short-tempered saint, a self-centered cyborg, and an embittered survivor of the climate apocalypse. To prevent a cataclysm that threatens The Institute itself, they’ll need to outwit a deadly cadre of rival time travelers—hopefully without stepping on any butterflies or becoming romantically involved with someone’s grandmother.'

The blurb definitely makes this sound like something I'd like to jump into, with an immediate hook in Aloysius' death, the outline of an interesting setting and a good smattering of light humour to seal the deal.

Vote: I voted No to continue at the 30% mark, but continued reading to the end given it was a short book.

Content: The Arrow of Time was a rather odd book to judge, featuring an entertaining writing style with a narrator distant enough to somewhat get away with omniscience, but a plot that moved at what felt like a glacial pace (relative to the book's short length). By the 30% mark, it hadn't really got anywhere besides introducing two characters and the time-travelling group. The mission they had received didn't particularly stand out from anything you might find in other time-travel stories – not that a lack of novelty is always a bad thing.

I think I may have enjoyed this book more had the main character – or, indeed, any of the other characters – had been a little more likeable. To my mind, Aloysius proved to be an absolute irredeemable idiot and rude to all his new colleagues to boot. Not only that, but the characters spent a lot of time joking with each other, and the book spent a significant amount of time focussing on these attempts at humour, which just weren't funny at all.

By 50%, the characters still hadn't actually done much, and by the end it became apparent that this book exists simply to lay out the setting and origin stories of the main characters before the rest of the series continues, rather than being its own thing. (Each team member got a part of the book that showed their life before joining the Institute.) The ending itself seemed a little rushed, with the sudden and relatively casual introduction of another group of time travellers.

#SPSFC #SPSFC3 #SPSFC3 round 1 #self publishing #science fiction #sci fi #SFF #time travel

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fussyspace · 5 months

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Those not finished, part 1

A no vote doesn't necessarily mean a book is bad. Please also remember that these views are my own and may not reflect the rest of the team.

Star Language, Charon Dunn

Word count: ~59,000

Cover: It's, uh... it's a vibe. I'm not sure if it's purposefully leaning into the MS Paint/Word Art aesthetic, but it's definitely there. I certainly wouldn't want to pick it up based on the cover – even improving the typography and leaving the rest alone would do wonders. It does have a certain charm to it, in the same way that the Star Wars Holiday Special does.

Blurb: 'Melina is super unlucky when it comes to mothers; hers is an abusive greedy drugged-up nightmare who sells her to traffickers. She’s a lot luckier when it comes to boyfriends – her big strong alien bae makes everyone thirst. The one department where her luck is absolutely on point has to do with her talent – a flair for learning languages that makes her the only one capable of performing translation duty once the aliens reach Earth. Trigger warning: SA, ultraviolence, 18+, explicit badness.'

I didn't really know what to make of this, beyond cringing at 'big strong alien bae' and figuring that plus the trigger warnings must mean it was erotica. It wasn't (and I admit to be a little disappointed even though that's not my thing). I'm still not sure if 'explicit badness' is meant to mean badassery or something else.

Content: I wasn’t thrilled when the book opened with the main character’s entire life story. It was, admittedly, a fairly interesting life, and I could see it was leading up to her translating for the aliens when they arrived, but there was nothing sci-fi to it for a massive whack of book. My main issue was the writing style, however, which never varied from being very simplistic and telling rather than showing. It was good that it stuck quite clearly to the narrator’s voice, but I still found it made everything feel bland and reported. It only really started getting a little more varied and interesting by the 30% mark.

When the aliens eventually arrived, they were quite uninteresting – just grey humans with a culture that’s meant to be slightly different but fundamentally isn’t, and they somehow have dinosaurs. The main character also said she loved one of the aliens at one point, but felt nothing when she was reassigned to a different alien. This might make sense on account of her backstory, but it seemed weird to me, and I was sort of interested to see what happened next but also very bored of it. I stopped reading for this reason. Given it's short, I still might read the rest of it later.

Vote to continue at 30%: No

The Rat's Nest, Adam Crookston

Word count: ~46,300

Cover: I appreciate the stylised battery diagram here. I think it's pretty neat, and works well with the text. I don't think it gives me much idea what the book's about, though, and I'm not sure I need to know that it's the first edition.

Blurb: 'In the Year 3022, the people of earth have migrated planets over 82 times, saving ones that provide useful resources and storage. After a woman goes missing on the infamous planet 28. It's up to a gifted soldier to return her to safety. A story about Self Belief, Belonging, and pushing through the worst.Will Tom survive the trails and tribulations, or will Cain take over the minds of everyone.

'Tom - An Electrician Solider with the ability to manipulate minds to his liking through the 82 government protocol. He follows the rules and still gets the bad end of the stick, but with every fight he keeps going.

'Cain - The mysterious figure with an ability to control millions through manipulation and control, his mass army of millions takes over cities on planet 28 to his liking. An ability to control desires.

'Alma - A warrior on the planet 28, she's made a world that is her own, geared with anything to be prepared for a fight. a fighter for the 82 until she was exposed to the realities of who they are.'

This is a blurb of decent enough length to get what might be inside, unlike a few others that were quite short. Unfortunately this is also where I got a glimpse of the overall quality, with sentences fragmented at random, incorrect punctuation and haphazard capitalisation. If I were looking for a book to read and read this blurb, I would give it a hard pass. It's a shame, as it sounded like it could otherwise be interesting.

Content: As hinted by the blurb, the writing quality was poor – much worse than the blurb, in fact. Full of sentence fragments, inconsistent tenses and incorrect word choices, I couldn't read more than a few pages before I had to put it down.

Vote to continue: No

Escalation, Itzhak Begerano

Word count: ~90,300

Cover: It has the feeling of some text slapped over a stock image, and it's not a stock image that tells me anything about what's inside. The author actually submitted some cartoons for the cover contest, and I believe this was adapted from an animated piece, so it would have been nice to see some of that instead.

Blurb: 'Bizarre politicians are dragging the world into a hallucinatory war.

'Two conflicted presidents, each driven by delusion and greed, dream of ruling the globe. To meet their goals, they resort to fraud, bribery, and corruption. Alexander Monroe - the president of the Democratic Organization, and Suleiman Assad - the president of the Free Islamic Forces, find themselves dragged into an inevitable war. Barney Chaplin the entertainer, the nerdy minister of education who opposes the idiotic war. He became Monroe's deputy and was sent to the front lines in the Fata Morgana desert to entertain his troops while risking his own life. The performance of President Monroe and the members of his government are examined by the government psychiatrist Professor Cheers, and everyone understands that it is better that someone supervises her as well… During the illusory war, well-known Hollywood actors who have passed their time are forced to function as deadly commandos and go beyond enemy lines.

youtube

'story possibilities

'· '

Yes, the YouTube link is included in the blurb. The rest of the blurb is all one chunk of text that starts out pretty interesting, but then keeps dropping names and keeps getting weirder. By the end I'm not really sure what direction the book's trying to take. I'm afraid I also didn't (and still don't) understand enough about the political situations mentioned to comment, and given this a political satire, that's a fairly crucial aspect for me to lack.

Content: The first few pages of this book were completely nonsensical and a real struggle to read. Absolutely cluttered with adjectives, I couldn't tell what was going on and couldn't bring myself to read any more.

Vote to continue: No

#SPSFC #SPSFC3 #SPSFC3 round 1 #self publishing #science fiction #sci fi #SFF

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fussyspace · 7 months

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Halfway there

You may have noticed I've been slow to put reviews up. That's because for the time being, I'm focussing on just getting through the books. While I only need to finish 30% of each by the end of November, I want to read all of them (besides those I DNF) to completion before November so I have the month completely clear for NaNoWriMo. This will also have the side effect of being completely free until the next stage of the competition.

I am on track. If I slip over a little, it's no big deal, as I'll still have some time to read.

In fact, I recently crossed the halfway point in terms of wordcount. I have now read:

12 out of 25 books

1.343 million out of 2.604 million words

This works out to be about 52% of the way through, having started 29 days ago. I have 36 days to go until my self-imposed deadline and 66 days to go until my team deadline for 30% of all books.

Once I'm done, I'll start translating the notes in my Excel sheet into reviews and posting them up here.

#SPSFC #SPSFC3 #self publishing #science fiction #sci fi #SFF

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fussyspace · 8 months

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Explorers of Rinth, John L. Simons Jr

Word count: ~208,000

Cover: It's an interesting cover, and the kid on the front (Isuelte, I think) suggests it's not aimed at adults. In hindsight, she does look perhaps a bit too young for YA, which is what this book was marked as, but I'll get into how this is relevant to the content later. There's a nice big tree in the background, which wouldn't mean much on its own, but the little wibbly light artefacts around it suggest something vaguely digital or spacey. All in all, a pretty neat cover.

Blurb: Relatively short, but it covers the two main threads of this story and keeps an air of mystery about whatever the strange secret is that binds the two groups together. I'd definitely take a nosey at the sample if I was seeing it for the first tine,

Vote: I voted yes to continue at the 30% mark (my personal vote, not necessarily team vote) and carried on to read the full book.

Content: Explorers of Rinth is a surprisingly long read for something marketed as YA, but when you see just how extensive its setting is, that becomes more understandable. Rinth's setting is wild and wacky, and it was probably the part I enjoyed the most.

However, it is also a book of contradictions. While it says it's YA, the general advice is that characters in books for teenagers should be a year or two older than the intended audience so that it's aspirational. There are many PoV characters in this book, but the main group are between 11 and 16 and they certainly act towards the lower end of that scale. The writing also feels more geared towards younger readers, but every now and then you get an f-bomb or a kid smashing someone's face in with a hammer that might not fly with a younger audience. Because the characters were young teenagers, they immediately irritated me. Thankfully, this improved about as soon as they stopped playing netball and got thrust into danger.

Our netball-loving teens, after all, live on a space station in a hollowed-out asteroid. They've made their own little group called The Explorers and like to snoop around bits of the station that they shouldn't, including the mysterious black staircase that leads to a labyrinthine network of tunnels. But what begins as a neat place to hold secret girly gatherings becomes a vital escape route when their slightly dystopian world comes crashing down on them. The Greys, soldiers under the command of the mysterious Grey Lady, come to shut the kids' school down and a riot erupts, which is what prompts the kids' escape.

There had been some interesting bits of information dropped about collaborators – people who sided with the Grey Lady and got special privileges because of it – and the exact circumstances were explained later, but at this point I thought they were about to embark on a colonisation mission because of things mentioned in Indira's chapters. So at this point I was confused – the events that prompted the riot seemed very childish and dumb, and I didn't get why the Greys didn't just explain the situation. Even the more senior Greys seemed abysmally trained. My confusion was explained away some time after the 55% mark, but that was still an odd moment for me, and that was a long time spent confused.

It's not just the girls we follow, however. At first we have Aristotle (who bags the first chapter, in fact), a man who wakes up with amnesia on top of a pile of corpses and gets taken in by a tribe. We have Indira, a doctor who gets woken from cryosleep only to discover most of her fellow travellers won't survive being woken – the ship's AI has made them oversleep by several decades. These are the core three at the beginning, although they are joined by many more later. I quite liked how Aristotle and Indira's chapters tended to answer each other's questions despite being separate for a while, and I enjoyed the adults' chapters more than the kids' chapters for the most part.

Slight spoilers follow from here, but it's only for one paragraph if you want to skip over it.

It turns out that the asteroid is a set of superimposed realities, a multiverse, with many of our characters existing in different ones. Throughout the course of the book, the girls visit many of these, coming face to face with minotaurs, gun-toting cowboy robots, six-legged bears and much, much more. By 55%, I was very confused, as I had the conflicting goals of 'go on a suicide mission to fight some aliens' and 'act as an ark for the remnants of humanity' rattling around in my head for the girls' original reality. Despite the multiverse having been introduced by this point, the two ideas were similar enough that I thought they must be the same timeline until it was explicitly mentioned after. Thankfully, all those weird bits of multiverse floating around made my confusion worth it.

The writing was a little harder to get on with, but more as an accumulation of little annoyances. It likes to repeat words and has some punctuation issues. Dialogue lacks natural contractions. Despite naming its chapters after their respective PoV characters, it seems to slip into omniscient or at least drift away from the PoV sometimes, which made it difficult to connect with them emotionally. (While they weren't the PoV at the time, I found the fact that the girl who smashed someone's face in with a hammer had no emotional or physical response unlikely, to say the least.) It also seemed allergic to using the past perfect tense where it should have been. Given it had an annoying habit of having characters show up somewhere, saying something had happened to them, then skipping back in time to show how, this made things confusing.

Towards the end, PoV characters starting rolling in in their droves, and not all of them seemed to advance the plot that much. I also got confused by what seemed to be a continuity error where a character was in prison in one chapter, then mysteriously free in the next. I might have forgotten him being freed because there was so much going on, but I don't think so. I definitely lost track of what was going on a little bit because of all the time and PoV jumps.

Still, I was looking forwards to seeing these many storylines tie neatly to a close, so you can imagine how disappointed I was when it set itself up for an obvious sequel and resolved almost nothing.

Overall, Explorers of Rinth is a solid slab of a book full to the brim of imagination and interesting characters, even if it can't work out what its audience is. It just doesn't quite manage to pull off its multiverse setting in a way that isn't confusing, and its proliferation of plotlines never get resolved in a satisfying way. I'm at risk of sounding like a stuck record with my reviews so far, but I see so much potential for this to have been made into several shorter books. There would have been more space to explore the amazing setting and to resolve some of the many plotlines towards the end of each book. As it is, the lacklustre ending after 200,000 words would put me off reading a sequel.

#SPSFC #SPSFC3 #SPSFC3 round 1 #self publishing #science fiction #sci fi #SFF #young adult

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fussyspace · 8 months

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As this is my first review for the SPSFC, I'll explain my process before diving in. I'm going to try to give my thoughts on the covers and blurbs as well as the content of the books, as some people seemed to be interested in this. I'm trying to be as objective as possible in both my ratings and my reviews, but of course some personal variation is bound to creep in somewhere. This is why we have multiple people in our judging team – my views won't necessarily reflect the whole.

I'm reading these all as ebooks to ensure a level playing field, though some are available as audiobooks. It would be particularly difficult to tell how well edited a book is without seeing the words, after all.

Anyway, on to the review.

To Climates Unknown, Arturo Serrano

I'd actually had this one on my wishlist for a while after seeing it (I think) in last year's SPSFC, my eyes immediately caught by 'a world without America'. (Look, I'm sorry guys, it's nothing personal.)

Word count: ~ 93,600

Cover: Nice and professional, does what it needs to do. Makes me curious about these unknown climates. I find the composition satisfying for some reason. The ship also seems reasonably accurate to the Mayflower, to my Plymothian eyes. Having read the book, the tagline doesn't really fit, but I'll explain why when I get to the content.

Blurb: This starts off by saying that the United States were destroyed in 1620. For reasons I'll go into in the content section, that's probably not the best way of phrasing it. The following paragraph clarifies that it was just the Mayflower that went missing, but by this point we've had the idea of 'world without America' cemented twice in our heads. The rest of it sets the stage for some interesting happenings far removed from the events of our timeline.

Vote: I voted Yes to continue at the 30% mark (my personal vote, not necessarily team vote) and carried on to read the full book.

Note: The following review does contain some spoilers. A lot of things happen in the book, so there are many things that remain unspoiled, and I believe I've only mentioned events in detail from the first half of the book, but my memory is patchy enough that I could be wrong. So if you're planning to read the book yourself, be aware before reading on.

Content: There is nothing that stands out more in To Climates Unknown than the fact that it has been meticulously historically researched. The narrative takes us from one relatively minor inflection point through multiple facets of history before reaching its conclusion. Historical figures, events, philosophies, religions... they're scattered in bucketfuls throughout the story.

Unfortunately, committing such a wealth of information to the page doesn't make it any easier to read. The writing style already boasts incredibly long paragraphs and sentences that can be difficult to get on with. At first I thought this might be a deliberate attempt to emulate the style of the period, but given this book stretches almost to the present day, I'm less certain. In any case, coupled with all the historical name dropping, it feels like a bit of a chore to get through, with a nagging feeling you need to google something every time you come across a new name.

The book splits its narrative into several parts, each focussing on a different set of events in its altered timeline and a different collection of characters. This was an incredibly large and diverse collection, from stubborn Mayflower descendants to ambassadors, from teachers to women disguised as eunuchs. I found a character from the ojibwe tribe quite interesting, though explaining they were two-spirit (or words to that effect) felt a little anachronistic given the term was only coined in 1990 with no historical precedent as far as I can tell. Given the use of the wiin pronoun taken from their language, it would have been neat to see the tribe's own terminology used here. But this is more a suggestion than a complaint, about something I have absolutely no expertise in.

The problem, character-wise, is that there are just so many of them, presented in a third-person omniscient point of view that can leave you feeling a little confused when it dips into other characters' brains. (With a more defined narrative voice, perhaps it might have avoided this problem.) By the time you're starting to enjoy their story and appreciate a character, they're gone. It's the next character's turn. It's obvious the book's focus is on the long, overarching story, but this problem also translates to events. Because of the length and scale of the narrative, no event or character is really focussed on long enough to care about. Some events that feel massive are resolved in a single sentence i.e. 'we won the war'. I would have very much liked to spend more time there and see how they won it.

Now we get to what is really the core of an alternative history book: the plausibility of the inflection point and all the events spilling over after it.

This is where To Climates Unknown fell down for me – or at least left me feeling ambivalent. I admit that as I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief, it's possible I found more things implausible than actually are.

At the beginning, it was quite difficult to work out what exactly had changed. The Mayflower hadn't reached its destination, sure. Of course, there were still colonies in America from other countries, but in the first few chapters I didn't spot a clear reference to what had happened over there. I didn't actually notice until several paragraphs into one chapter that the characters were now in America. This came as quite a surprise, given the tagline of 'a world without America'. (The chapter did begin with a location of New Amsterdam, I think, but not everyone knows that's what New York used to be called. This follows a trend of location tags not including a country, which can make it difficult to follow where things are if you don't immediately recognise the name.) 'A world without the United States' might have been more specific to the theme, and 'The United States as we know it never came to be' (or similar) would have been more accurate in the blurb, if less punchy.

The fact that the English pretty much gave up on settling America after the Mayflower disappeared seemed odd to me. It was still a land rich with resources. They still had ships (for a while). But they just let it sit there while everyone else took pieces of it rather than diving back into the race.

The true inflection point – the death of William Adams – had somehow led to no one developing the shipbuilding techniques to easily travel long distances. This supposedly explains the colonisation difficulties. I find it difficult to believe that no one else would have filled the gap. Instead, one empire ends up with submarines (seemingly well enough insulated/heated to travel beneath the arctic sea ice and not freeze everyone). One empire ends up with steam carriages. One empire ends up with airships. Most implausibly of all: at no point in hundreds of years do any of the other empires acquire their opponents' technology. It's like the setup for a game: each empire has their own special unit. In reality, that technology would have spread. Sure, one empire might have better submarines. One might have better airships. But they wouldn't have sole control.

This 'one technology' pony extends to another problem: warfare. Early in the book, one of the empires forms by knocking Britain out of the game... with submarines. But you can't occupy land with submarines. For that, you need troops. The empire had the Scots on board, but it would have been a much more protracted civil war than what seemed to happen, which was waltzing into London and taking out everyone important. I got the same sort of 'rock up with special technology and capture stuff' feel for the rest of the book – a sort of wishful-thinking picture of technology and warfare that extended all the way through to the end. I can't say all the decisions made sense, either. One of the empires wanted to melt both ice caps simply to make travel easier and gain more land by keeping constant fires burning nearby. That's such an incredibly stupid idea that I might put it past a ruler from, say, the 11th century at a (very big) push, but certainly not the 17th. They wouldn't even have needed to if they'd pinched the airship technology. And it's one of those plot lines that feels like it should be huge but just sort of peters out and pops up every now and then later.

Overall, I did find To Climates Unknown interesting and its individual events and characters compelling. I appreciate the sheer amount of research that went into it (including visiting some of the locations, according to the acknowledgements) and I liked the point it ended up making about America to bring the thing full circle. I just didn't find the route it took to get there particularly engaging or believable. Perhaps if it had spent more time in the sunset of the empires rather than their foundation, or split each of its parts into separate books where we could spend more time with the characters and events surrounding them, it would have been more cohesive.

#SPSFC #SPSFC3 #SPSFC3 round 1 #self publishing #science fiction #sci fi #SFF #alternate history

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