Post-Human Omnibus Edition by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a collection of four books in what the author calls the 'Post Human Series' which runs to over a thousand pages in the print edition. I gave up after reading only a hundred or so. It was boring and ponderous, with thoroughly unappealing characters.

It started out bad, with a doctor, married to a woman with whom he has a somewhat awkward relationship, getting fitted with some sort of nanotechnology that enables him to hold his breath underwater for considerably longer than is practical for the rest of us. Why he got this is not explained, and how it works is glossed over, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the doctor who had given him this treatment started hitting on him! Talk about unprofessional. It just felt wrong, and I hoped this was not the tone for the whole novel.

The good news is that it wasn't. The bad news is that it got worse, but in a different way. This nano'd doctor gets put onto a special forces mission to go investigate a Chinese AI that has been nuked. Why people go there rather than robots I do not know. I mean aren't robots the ultimate post human? LOL! And are they not much better situated to explore a radioactive area than people? And if the technology is at such a level that they have nanos that can aid breathing, why not nanos that can fight radioactivity? Wouldn't that have been a wiser upgrade?! I got the impression that this novel had not really been thought through.

There are robots and drones in existence now. They've been around for a while, so why do so many sci-fi writers pretend they don't exist in the future? It's a genuine mystery to me. And yeah, I get that they're trying to include the human connection, but to me it just says that they're poor writers if they can't include robots and still have a human connection. Hell if even those wooden assholes at Disney can do it with Wall-E, and if by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples can do it with their movie script for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, your average sci-fi writer ought to be able to manage it.

There's actually a robot that goes with them, but it seems that was for no other purpose other than to go rogue and wipe out the entire team except of course for this one doctor, who is apparently put into hibernation because of his injuries and during the ensuing years, his wife marries this guy's rival. How that works given that he's still alive and they both know it is rather glossed over, too, yet this guy never once thinks what a callous bitch she was. Instead, he pines for her and wants to kill the other guy.

Consequently they put him back into hibernation and no one seems to think there's anything wrong with him being treated like that. He wakes up later right before the facility he's in is attacked by the powers that be, because it's deemed to be an illegal technology center. This guy, having had all these enhancements against his express consent, is now shipped-off to a parallel universe where he can fly like superman. I'm sorry, but I gave up right there because this was too stupid for words, and so boring as to be sleep-inducing. I cannot commend this trash which is wrong in so many ways, and so poorly-written.

Sub-Human by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't like series. The first book can only ever be a prologue and I don't do prologues, but sometimes a book description makes it sound interesting enough that I bite and taste the sour when I was expecting sweet. I have to confess to my own part in this inexcusable crime because even the description had warnings in it that I chose not to heed.

The story is about Craig Emilson who is "a young doctor" why his age is important to the blurb-writer I have no idea, but it goes on to say that he's "sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III" when in fact he volunteers. He enlisting to become a "Special Forces suborbital paratrooper", but why a doctor would do that is completely glossed over.

He's "selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history-a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong Artificial Intelligence." Why him again is glossed over. Why not drop a bomb on it? Why send a doctor when one isn't needed? Why make your main character a doctor instead of a computer scientist? The feeling I got, the further I read into this, was that it was very much fan fiction, and not well thought through - the author going for melodrama instead of realism. That's never a good thing in my book.

My first inkling that this was not for me was right at the beginning where the doctor is being injected with some sort of nano-bobs. Those are like thingumabobs, but they infest sci-fi stories. These are supposed to help maintain his respiratory system when there's no oxygen. Why this was necessary goes unexplained so obviously it was to get the main character and this nubile doctor together. Telegraph much? That wasn't the problem though. The problem was the inappropriate behavior of the young (naturally), attractive (of course) female doctor who hits on him. I'm like "What?!" Here's the exchange:

"You're married, huh?" the doctor asked, apparently rhetorically. Craig nodded anyway. "That's a shame. You're way too handsome to be married. Handsome young doctors like you should be single. Then single doctors like me could marry you instead."

From that point it was obvious that those two would end-up together, so his present wife needed to be dealt with, and that conveniently happens when she thinks he's dead after the mission (or at least brain-dead, which she got right), and so she happily married a sixty-year-old guy (ie twice her age) with whom she's been working and of whom she denies having any sort of relationship when her husband got jealous in an earlier chapter!

That phone call was a joke. At one point she warbles sickeningly, "I never miss a call when we schedule it, baby, and I never will," and then very shortly afterwards says, "Don't 'baby' me, Craig! I'm not a child!" Excuse me? Isn't that precisely the same thing that you just did to him? Like I said, the writing is amateurish and thoughtless.

Another example came in that same section. He says, "I'm not brilliant like you." And she responds, "Not brilliant? Craig, you're a doctor!" I'm sorry but that doesn't necessarily follow. There are doctors who are brilliant, but there are also doctors who are idiots. On top of that he uses stock phrases like "In this brave new world of ours..." which about made me barf, and there's a robot which is named Robbie. And not after Margot, I'm sure.

In short, this was pathetic and a waste of my time. I couldn't stand to read more than about five chapters, let alone a whole series, because it was so sickening to read. I can't commend it. It was pathetic.