The Eighth Day of Christmas

Rating: WARTY!

Today features eight stories from Tales From the North Road, every one of which was warty! This was one of those compendia of short stories designed to showcase the work of several writers who, judged from their names, are Scandal-navians! It so happened that this particular volume had eight stories, every one of which was warty, so it's perfect for today!

This was one of those volumes where a contents list made at least some sort of sense because there were eight different writers and no sequential path through the stories. They could be read in any order. The problem as usual was that once you got to a story, there was no way to get back to the contents by, say, tapping on the chapter heading to return. On the e-reader I was using, you have to tap the screen, then slide the bar back to the left to go to the start, and there's no way to gauge where you are exactly. It's clunky and pathetic in today's world.

Here are the stories:

• Eden by Andreas Christensen is a story of a generation ship that has been zooming through space for two centuries at least. He talks of a "starry nigh sky" - something a spell-checker will not catch, but the thing is, he also says no one alive on the ship had been born when it left on this journey, so the character's 'reminiscences' of blue sky, trees and that starry "nigh" sky were bullshit since he's never seen them himself. But he also talks of being a prisoner of war who was brought aboard more dead than alive, which is utterly ridiculous and flatly contradictory. I gave up on this garbage.
• The Curse of the Elf Prince by Linn Tesli begins with barely intelligible flowery language and opens with this elf who is spying on female elves who are swimming nude, and his only interest is in their bodies. That's not the image you want to present of your main character. I quit reading this one in the second paragraph.
• The Fugitives by Theresa Marie Sanne was first person, so I never even began reading it. First person most often sucks and not in a good way.
• From His Taste in Wine by an author with the stupendous name of Ole Åsli had the word 'hobbling' in the first sentence and 'halfling' in the second which told me exactly what this story would be like. I quit it right there.
• Point of Return by Paul S Land is about the eponymous location being invaded by what sounded like a Viking hoard. As soon as I read "We must send for help from Deephold..." I quit reading this because it was clear right then how uninventive and trope-ly boring it would be.
• Angel in the Snow by Laila Sandvold Macdonald made such a big deal of the 'it' in italics, that was pursuing this guy escaping through a snow-laded pine forest that it became quickly tedious. I know it's a short story, but this farcical laboring of it pissed me off so much that I quit reading after the fourth or fifth mention. It had become a joke - like this was a parody rather than an actual story. Is it hardly surprising then that Macdonald is the one author of these eight whose name is omitted from the contents list?! LOL! The story was also one continuous paragraph because of poor formatting. Even the bolded header for part two was right there inline with the rest of the text. Somebody screwed up royally.
• 2100 by Matts Vederhus was a story I quit reading in the second paragraph when I read: "Suddenly Anne Cathrine [sic] appeared in his side view. She had blonde hair that stretched to her shoulders. Her breasts were the size of small watermelons." Note that this isn't some character saying this, which would be fine because there are guys who reduce women to purely skin-deep. No, this was in the author's own hand in a descriptive passage, so clearly women in this author's world are nothing more than fuck-dolls. That was the end of that story for me. I must confess to some intrigue however, by the employment of the phrase "small watermelons." Why not large grapefruit? Or even just 'grapefruit'? Is it the idea that melons is a sad euphemism for breasts that drove this? That, too, is as informative as it is condemning.
• The Revelation by Alex Tovsen was first person so I didn't even start on that.

One collection, eight stories, all warty to the max. Here endeth the eighth lesson.

Ghost Legion by Andreas Christensen

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is your standard alien invasion deal, and those can be entertaining, but this one seemed so full of clichés and it was badly-written. Plus it’s the first in a series and I was already off-put by this volume, let alone the prospect of reading a whole series like this.

The story is that aliens came 18 years prior to the start of the main story. This ebook had an introduction, and a prologue, both of which I skipped, so chapter one began 'eighteen years later' - that is almost two decades after the birth of the main character. The book blurb claims that " A race of conquerors from deep space had set their eyes on Earth´s riches." I guess these guys are from deep space as opposed to that shallow space we’re always hearing about. But here’s the thing - what riches? What is it that Earth has that some random uninhabited and therefore, ripe for the plucking planet doesn't have?

I liked the 2011 movie Battle: Los Angeles even though it was also clichéd, but one of my problems with that movie was the claim that the aliens liked Earth because of the water - their technology was based on it. The thign is that at least three moons in our solar system have abundant water which they coudla hve had without a fight. Water isn't that rare in space, either. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and oxygen is the third most common. Water is merely oxidized hydrogen. All you need to do is burn hydrogen in oxygen, and hey presto, you have water!

Aside from that, Earth isn't made of anything that doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe, so clearly it wasn’t water that brought the aliens to Earth in this story. Was it physical resources? Earth has nothing that other planets do not have! Was it food? The chances that aliens would be adapted to be suitably nourished by food growing on Earth are a bit on the slim side. You have to evolve with your food, so unless their own planet was pretty much exactly like ours and they had something like parallel evolution to ours, which is a long shot, then what exactly is the attraction of Earth - a planet they would have to fight for in order to garner for themselves these things? That was never made clear. But I have a hard time buying this premise in a story like this unless the author really does some work to specify why Earth is truly the only place that can satisfy their needs. This author didn't do the work.

That wasn’t even the worst issue though. The blurb went on to say that humans chased "them off Earth and most of the Solar System" but it didn't say why they didn't finish the job. Instead, it insists that the "war still rages on, and every year young people are sent out to die, far away from Earth," but why is this? We already have pretty sophisticated robot technology today. This author is saying that in an age where we can fight a winning battle across most of the solar system, we don't have military robots, drones, or other automated weapons to deploy? They don't explain why it was such a battle given that these aliens - admittedly arriving prepared - managed to give the entire population of Earth and its mighty militaries and its considerable manufacturing resources such a hard time. The aliens were necessarily outnumbered and fighting with limited resources. Why was victory so hard won and so incomplete? I don't know and the author evidently doesn't care.

So not only was the plot lacking considerably in oomph, so was the writing. I read at one point early in the novel, "For a millennia." No! The singular is millennium. Millennia is plural. A writer should know this and so should any editors they hire. At another point I read, "... Jews and Muslims, Christians and Atheists, blacks and whites, all united in one single purpose..." so apparently the author believes that 'blacks' and 'whites' are religions, but Hinduism isn't? Atheism is?! Either that or he needs to word his sentences better. Later I read, "Ethan looked at Julian and heaved his eyebrows slightly." I'm frankly not sure how one heaves one's eyebrows slightly. I can see someone lifting them slightly, yeah. I can see them raised slightly, but heaved slightly? It doesn't work, and given how many of these irritations cropped up in the first few pages, neither does the novel. Not for me anyway.

The author apparently thinks we’ll still be using the same weaponry when we have advanced space travel rather than having advanced our weapons at the same rate as our space travel abilities. Worse than this, when Ethan decides for no apparent reason to join the military, the testing is ludicrous. They get some tests on a computer and later their 'decision-making' test consists of whether they choose to go get a soda in the lounge or go down a dark corridor into a room. That's it! That's the entire test and Ethan passed it. The next day they’re led into an area where they have to fight this trained soldier. They all lose of course, and most of them get injured. It was like a direct lift from Divergent, and that's where I quit reading. Divergent sucked, and this story is no better. It's ridiculous, pathetic, and totally unrealistic.