"A box set" - so where's the box? There's no box here. "...of rollicking space missions" See? It's that 'rollicking' that turns me right off, but it gets worse. "Aboard the starship Mobius," Oh how cute! "Captain Carl Ramsey and his ragtag crew" See? ragtag. Right there. They're a rollicking ragtag crew. Where did this book blurb writer get their training? The International Retreaded Cliché School (IRCS for short)? Barf. This is a no-no. Black ocean might seem like a cool metaphor for space, but the ocean, as traveled by your everyday pirate ship, is a two-dimensional world. Space is not, and way too many sci-fi writers, especially in the universe of space operas, forget that far too readily. There's no reason whatsoever to think this will be any different - not with that tired and uninventive book blurb.
Monday, November 1, 2021
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Mad Tinker's Daughter by JS Morin
Author: JS Morin
Publisher: Magical Scrivener
Rating: WARTY!
Errata:
p71 "Erefan knew of sunlight, of wind, clouds, and birds, bathe had given all that up..." should be "Erefan knew of sunlight, of wind, clouds, and birds, but he had given all that up..."
"...think fingers..." should be "...thick fingers..." (I forget the page number)
This is yet another author who doesn’t know the difference between 'stanch' and 'staunch' (21% in). I'm finding an increasing number of such authors. Are we undergoing a language change or are some authors not quite as literate as perhaps they ought to be? I know we all screw-up at times, but to see so many make the same mistake is as notable as it's lamentable. It’s the 'bicep' phenomenon again!
Mad Tinker's Daughter (not to be confused with The Tinkerer's Daughter by Jamie Sedgwick) is a steam-punk novel with emphasis on character rather than gadgets. This makes for a refreshing change, but it also came with other problems. The main character is Madlin. Or it’s Rynn. Or it’s Chipmunk. They're all the same character - at least that's what I thought initially, but it's actually not quite that simple. It was unnecessarily confusing.
This was like reading the second novel in a series without having read the first, and there was a good reason for that, but it's not something with which the author will help. I've run into this problem before, but never quite like this. This novel is very misleadingly listed as book 1 in the 'Mad Tinker Chronicles' (anything with 'Chronicles' in the title is very nearly guaranteed to turn me off, as this one proved!). This description is effectively dishonest, because it’s really book four of the "Firehurler trilogy"!
By that I mean that it’s set in the same universe as the original trilogy, but the author doesn't lift a finger to help a reader to find their feet and feel at home if they haven't read the original trilogy. I wasn't even aware that you really have to have read the first three books to be clued in to what’s going on here. Take it from me: this really isn't book one. It's book four.
I resent that immensely, but it is how authors and Big Publishing™ seem to operate in "YA world" these days, isn’t it? Why write one book and then move onto something new and different when you can trap readers like bugs by sucking them into a series where even readers who rate the first or second book as a 'one star', end up gushing that they simply have to buy the second or third to find out what happens?!
It’s like PT Barnum supposedly said, but instead of one born every minute, it’s more like dozens born every volume in the case of YA fiction. It's effectively a license to write bad books and it’s shameful. It’s even more sad in this case for me, because I really was enjoying this book, but instead of becoming less confused the more I read, it was just the opposite. I finally reached the point where I really thought I'd missed something, because I simply could not figure out what the heck was going on!
I'd read the first 25% of this novel under the now evident delusion that there was only one character, Madlin, who had two other aliases. In her primary persona as Madlin, she was working for her father, the mad tinker, in a secondary one, she moonlighted as a maid in a university under the name of Rynn, so she can read books and steal supplies on the sly for her own tinkering, and her third identity was simply a code name for Rynn, 'Chipmunk' under which she conducted night-time acts of terrorism.
Frankly this seemed bizarre to me because the author would write something like the following (note that this isn't a direct quote, merely an example of my own, based on an event in the book, to show what I mean): Chipmunk went down into the basement with the others. Rynn sat down and said, "I don't believe you. What happened to the rest of the money?". It's annoying at best, but once you understand the two are the same, it’s readable, if still profoundly stupid.
I thought the three character names all applied to the same person, but I had no idea what 'twinborn' meant, since it was never explained. I was forced into the assumption that the names were simply a device intended to portray different aspects of Madlin's life. They are not. Madlin is a completely different character on a different planet! Chipmunk/Rynn is evidently her 'twinborn', but even having finished the novel, I still have no idea what that really means beyond guesswork.
I had to go read some reviews to try and figure out if I was just being way more dense than usual, or if something was really odd here. That's how I found out about the two-worlds concept: not from the author, whose job it is to tell me the story, but from a fellow reviewer. That's sad!
The author will neither tell you nor give you any hints. The author's position is evidently that you’re a moron for not reading the first three volumes before you began this new trilogy, even though the two are not connected (as far as I know) other than being set in the same universe. The publisher isn't going to tell you. No one but a reviewer is going to tell you that you really need to fork out more cash for the first three volumes in order to maximize your return on this one. No excuses, just do it. That's the Big Publishing™ ethic.
It was irritating and frankly, I think it's patent dumb-assery to put this over on readers without giving them SOME kind of indication as to what’s really going on here. Would it have been so hard to actually advise readers on the cover or in the blurb that they really need to have read the first trilogy in order to properly understand this one? Would it have been so hard to offer a few hints and a bit of a recap sprinkled into the text for someone coming into this not knowing that it’s really book 4, and not book 1, as we're dishonestly expected to believe? Evidently neither the author nor the publisher cares.
That said, and as I indicated, I really liked this book to begin with, not because of the obfuscated world-building, but because the story in general, and the main two or three characters appealed to me - again, to begin with. I was really confused about the aliens and how they managed to traverse space yet still be in a steam-punk era! Of course, it occurred to me that they haven't actually traversed space, but are simply three sentient (and by that I mean human-like sentience) species, of which humans are the underdogs, all resident on the same planet - rather like Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. It was only later that I started to realize that this series may indeed be a bit of a rip-off of his series, that is if it wasn't a bit of a rip-off of Planet of the Apes.
I finally grasped that when Madlin sleeps, she experiences Rynn's life - or vice-versa (even that is unclear), but nowhere does the author actually make this clear in this novel until it's almost over. Again, this was initially revealed to me via a review. Maybe how that works - without the brain being overworked, and psychoses setting in - is explained in the first trilogy, but given how vague this volume is, I honestly cannot trust that it's so!
So, not only is the main character an enigma, the entire world is. Is this is set on another planet or in an alternate universe. Who knows? There are two varieties of what appear to be aliens on this planet, although nothing is said about them other than to identify that they're different. Apart from that, I can't tell you a thing about them because the author has literally not described a thing about them save for one vague reference to the zuduks' bulk and solidity. The zuduk are the ruling class on Rynn's home world, but how this happened is a mystery. The author sure as hell won't tell you!
Why steam-punk novels insist upon labeling certain skilled people as tinkers is a mystery as well as being an insult to engineers, but Rynn and Madlin are "tinkers". Rynn's proudest invention is a long-barreled inductor gun which fires ball bearings accurately over long distances with great power. She routinely carries a revolver with a foot-long barrel which can fire eight shots, but she's so incompetent that she frequently loses her inventions.
I should have realized at the beginning that she was not a nice person, but for the longest time I rooted for her. it wasn't until the very end - the cliff-hanger end, be warned - that she shows her true blood-thirsty and extremely selfish colors. That's when I completely stopped liking her, and finally lost my last vetige of interest in pursuing this mindless, nonsensical series.
