Author: Tony McFadden
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: worthy
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.
Errata in the ebook:
There are some really bad problems with quality control in this novel that a dedicated beta reader and a spell-checker would have fixed.
The biggest gaff is Sabrina's changing age. On page 26, Sabrina tells her dad in so many words that she's twenty one, yet on page 76 she says she's lived in the city for twenty-five years. Someone screwed up their back story!
On p54, there's also a misspelled Pasadena (spelled as 'Pasedna').
There's "Brom" Stoker on p101!
On p117 "Making sure you’re stories match?" should be "Making sure your stories match?"
On p221 "Aurora Australias" should be "Aurora Australis"
here's on oddity: "Callum left the Physice Building…"?! Physics building? I am not sure if this is an error or not. Physice isn't a word (at least as far as dictionary.com and wikipedia are concerned!) but I've found that very word doing Google searches, so who knows? I know I never heard it before, and if it is an error, it's not the kind of error that an effectively employed spell-checker would miss.
I had really mixed feelings about rating this novel and decided, on balance, in the end, after some thought, to rate it just barely a worthy read. Call it the madness of the season, call me 'growing soft in my old age', or whatever, but it only just squeaked by. Hopefully the author will be encouraged to continue to write - and to write much better novels after this one.
Things to love. The title! I also loved that the cover proclaimed 'in Glorious digital 2D', but I did find it a little odd that the sun was shown apparently rising above the North Pole. Maybe it wasn't the sun. Or maybe this novel is much more of a disaster story than I’d thought! Normally I don't get into covers because the author has little to do with them, but self-published novels are different.
Other things. This novel is written rather simplistically, like it’s a first novel. The simplicity is endearing in some ways, and really annoying in others. I just chewed out another novel for its exhausting breathlessness, but in this novel, given the way it’s written, a bit of breathlessness seems to work. I guess that's the difference between YA and mature, huh? McFadden certainly keeps the story moving without it bogging down in reams of exposition, and there's enough technical detail to give it verisimilitude, but nowhere near enough that McFadden traps himself in statements which are provably false. I admire that! On the other hand, the novel is largely conversation, very much like a first time author might write. There's very little description of, well, anything!. If you like to make up your own story, then I guess this will suit you. Me? I like the author to do some of the work at least - otherwise we may as well be writing out own tale! As it is, this novel could have been set pretty much anywhere in the civilized world and the same story could have been told, so why then set it in Sydney, Australia? I don't know! we really got none of "Sydney": no atmosphere, no flavor, no taste. I regretted that.
On the other hand, it is refreshingly set in Australia as opposed to the tediously omnipresent USA, so credit has to be given to any author who both realizes and publicizes that there are interesting and cool places elsewhere in the world and "The World" ≠ "The USA"! In addition: the premise for the novel is interesting, if not exactly original. Aliens are living in secret amongst us, deflecting humanity from finding means by which to short-circuit the massive and prohibitive distances between stars - so that we can't spread out and cause problems with our alien neighbors, you know. Unfortunately, one guy has managed to sneak by the aliens' attention, and is on the verge of doing precisely what it is which they're trying to stop.
Because these aliens live on a planet orbiting a red dwarf star, they're rather averse to bright light and are oxygen-starved, so they like their food bloody in order to benefit from the hemoglobin. Unfortunately, this makes no sense since there's no mechanism which takes O₂ from food and puts it into the blood stream. If there were, we wouldn't need to breathe! OTOH, maybe the alien physiology is different. Like Alice, they use mirrors to move between locations, although they're issued newly developed 'travel sticks' at the start of this novel, meaning that mirrors are no longer requisite for travel. So McFadden has pretty much all of the elements in place to depict these long-lived aliens as the source of vampire myths on Earth. This was a good plot idea, but McFadden really didn't go anywhere with it.
One young woman, Sabrina, is onto the two local aliens, honestly believing them to actually be vampires. Far from being afraid of them, she's actively trying to track them down and contact them, but they're aware of her and are avoiding her like the plague, considering her to be a nut-job.
There are two issues here which typically remain either unexplored by writers, or which are simply glossed over. One is the question of the feasibility of an alien physiology being able to derive nourishment from alien (i.e Earth) food sources. Here again, a decent working knowledge of evolution would serve writers well, since they way we, as organisms, exploit our environment for energy is tightly tied-up with our evolutionary origins, and organisms which evolved in an entirely alien eco-system are unlikely to have much success in reaping their energy (or more accurately, the raw materials which produce energy) from a system in which they never evolved. But it’s possible, I suppose! I’d rather see writers tackle this head-on, though and have the aliens adjusted artificially to be able to use Earth food sources. They certainly have the technology to do this in this novel, it would appear!
The other issue is their apparent physical attraction to humans. Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, and call me naïve, but I don’t know of anyone who is attracted to chimpanzees (in the way I mean), so why would actual aliens find humans attractive? If the aliens resemble us closely, then there does exist this possibility, I admit, but it's such a cliché, and I don’t buy that all aliens will automatically be 'chasing human skirt', which is what's implied here. This isn't helped by the amazingly politically incorrect behaviors on both the aliens' and the humans' parts. Yes, people do behave politically incorrectly, and there's no reason for writers not to portray such people, but I don't see that it contributed a thing here. It did serve as an annoying and juvenile distraction from the story. Indeed, the more I read of this novel - that is, read the alien conversation - the more absurd it sounded to me. I know they've been living amongst humans for 400 years (more on this in a minute!), but something just seems off about their interaction with each other and the language they use.
And Manly beach! I know this is a real place (I looked it up), which I had thought was named after someone (as in Gerard Manly Hopkins, for example), but it turns out it was actually named for the "manly" natives who were initially found there! I couldn’t help thinking of that meaning for this, every time I read it. Like this beach isn't for skinny weaklings who get sand kicked into their faces; no, this is a manly beach! I think I would have been tempted to invent a beach name in place of this one, had I written it!
There are three women in the novel (Jackie, Mandy, & Sabrina) and none of them are distinguishable from one another. Jackie is Sam's boyfriend, and Sam is the guy who has invented the wormhole travel which has so upset the aliens. The other two are really non-entities and fade from the story rather speedily, which was fine, because all three seemed to me to be the same person when you got right down to it. The absolute acceptance of Sabrina's vampire theory by her friend Mandy, and worse, by Jackie, was absurd. This was especially so in Jackie's case, where she swallowed the eventual alien story without a hiccup, but rejected out of hand her boyfriend the physicist's claim to have created a wormhole? Where's the rationale in that?! There is absolutely no skepticism from anyone, and this flew in the face of the skeptical persona which was initially established for Jackie (although she quickly abandoned that).
There is also a huge disconnect between the aliens' stated reason for monitoring and seeking to contain Earth: that humans are a violent race who have a history of muscling in wherever they visit and turfing out the natives, with their final solution: wipe out all humans! Hypocrite much, aliens?! The aliens were a bit sad, actually.
But let's talk about Jackie behind her back! Jackie is a fitness guru who's getting ready to dump Sam and hook up with the alien (at least, let me say, that's was very loudly telegraphed). I saw no real impetus for her attitude or behavior with regard to Sam (or the alien for that matter). Yes, there are hints, but nothing that would precipitate her radical switch of loyalties, unless she's as bad as other elements of the story have led me to believe of her. For example, in pursuit of aliens, she abruptly cancels her fitness class by means of leaving a scrappy, abrupt, and apparently hand-written note on the gym door! What - there's no texting or email in Jackie World™?
That struck me as being dumb, callous, and worse, if it was intentionally (as opposed to thoughtlessly) written this way, it tells me that Jackie is a every bit as much of a jerk as is Sam, and she's a hypocrite to boot, to be wailing about Sam's callous treatment of her when she treats paying customers even worse than Sam treats her. Am I supposed to think this of her? She's certainly not a likable character; she's way too shallow and self-centered to appeal to me. But it gets worse! Jackie not only abandoned her entire day's classes at the drop of a hat, she suddenly felt it crucial on the next day that she get changed and get to her next class on time when Callum wants to talk to her?! Again with the illogical. Is Jackie schizophrenic? Whatever she is, she's certainly not someone I would want to know, so the alien is most welcome to her! I guess the aliens are either less picky or more desperate than I am! Callum wants to talk to her about the guy she just dumped - like she can somehow explain to the guy who talks down to her that there are dangers inherent in the sub-atomic physics he's getting into. Honestly? After 400 years, Callum still evidently knows nothing about humans!
I don’t find this unqualified acceptance that 'there are vampires' (which then switches to 'there are aliens' without a hiccup) to be realistic, but I decided to go with that for the sake of enjoying the story. But the aliens' view of Earth is somewhat bizarre. We learn that the aliens, despite supposedly wanting to stymie humans' development of advanced technologies, have actually given a kick-start to some advances, which strikes me as being counter-productive, from their PoV. OTOH, if they were that advanced, and they wanted to help, then why not help where it matters: by offering alternative means of energy to move humans away from fossil fuels and destructive technologies? Why not teach by generous example instead of by threat?
For that matter, why live in secret (and for four hundred years?!) amongst us? Four hundred years ago there was no way in hell we were any threat to anyone off-planet, so why move in then? It makes no sense whatsoever. Better yet, why not simply come out into the open and share their concerns about where we’re going technology-wise if they’re supposedly so advanced and conscientious? Callum (alien #1) is thoroughly incompetent. Not only has he failed to sabotage Sam's efforts to transmit matter instantaneously from point A to point B, he has very effectively aided him by showing him how to do it with far less energy. That part of this story I honestly couldn’t swallow, and much less could I swallow that Callum is invited to aid Sam in his efforts at a demonstration for university faculty (and military) and Callum doesn’t do a single thing to ruin the demo and discredit Sam! He thinks of this only later, and instead, he expends every thought he has in self-recrimination and whining about how advanced Sam is in his use of this technology!
The story was, as I said, not original, but it was inventive, and it was a rather confused. Normally I wouldn't be happy with a story like this, and I wasn't exactly happy with this one, but I was able to finish it (although I admit I skimmed a bit towards the end) and in doing so, I saw enough in here, speaking in general, overall terms, to give me pause for thought as I was reading it, and I am hoping that McFadden will continue writing, and keep all his best bits in whilst ruthlessly tossing out all of his worst bits. So I hopefully, and optimistically, rate this a worthy read.
