Misty Presents: The Jaume Rumeu Collection by Bill Harrington, Jaume Rumeu

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I didn't realize when I selected this to review that it's an antique, and I was not impressed with it. If you like old film noire type stories, or cheesy fifties horror movies, then this might resonate, but to me it was out of date, overly melodramatic, lackluster, and asinine in parts. Aimed at a female audience, it was originally published in 1978, in a comic book named Misty, which was short-lived, but quite ground-breaking for its time. I would have been more impressed if instead of recycling the old stories, they had written new ones that had the same focus.

The story I read, which I DNF'd about 50% through, consisted of a woman with the uninventive name of Black Widow - and she wasn't even black. Her real name is, of course, Webb, so it was like watching an episode of that corny sixties Batman TV show - but the story is set in Britain. The idea is that she's taken this title because her husband died in a "military scientific" experiment, and she's out for revenge against those people who were responsible, by concocting lame and labyrinthine schemes. Her widowhood explains the 'widow' part of the title, but there's no explanation at all for the 'black' portion of it.

She's apparently obsessed with spiders and has a bunch of them that are venomous (not poisonous as the text has it) and deadly. They aren't black widow spiders, so again this makes nonsense of the title. To do her bidding, she recruits two students from a local school (why? Who knows?!). One of these two she hypnotizes, the other she does not. The hypnotized one does whatever she's bidden to do when the phrase 'you creep' is included in the instructions - even if accidentally. Yeah, the language is that antiquated.

Black Widow is supposed to have the ability to determine where each of her little spiders is at any time so it makes no sense when for two issues, she spends an awfully large portion of her time bemoaning the fact that 'one of our spiders is missing'! It was amusing to me because it was so ridiculous - about as amusing, in fact, as having a guy named Roach writing an introduction to a comic book about spiders!

The comic is subtitled "The Jaume Rumeu Collection" but he's the artist. The guy who gets top billing, Bill Harrington, is the writer. Normally I'd rail at this because the artist has by far the greater portion of the work to do. In this 'collection' though, the artwork was poor to middling, and consisted entirely of black and white line drawings, so I didn't have any problem with Rumeu taking second place in the billing, but in that case, why was it not called the Bill Harrington collection? None of this made any sense to me.

But for the reasons listed, I cannot commend this as a worthy read. It was disappointing and unintentionally amusing in parts, and the art wasn't really worth the trouble.

Symbiont Seeking Symbiont by Jennifer Foehner Wells

Rating: WARTY!

Allus Jenson is part of a pirate crew in a spacecraft that is forced to land on a barren planet for repairs. While this is in progress, Jensen, like a moron, wanders off and encounters a species of sentient bacterium which effectively gang-rapes her in the sense that this group of them take over her body without her permission. That's it. That's the entire story! Barf. I'm not sure how much the author actually undertsands about bacteria, and this was not a worthy read.

Deus Ex Mechanic by Ryann Fletcher

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known this book had the word 'chronicles' associated with it, I would never had considered reading it, but the interesting cover illustration distracted me and the plot sounded engaging, so I missed that somehow, and launched into it, getting to about two-turds the way through it before I fully realized it was going nowhere - precisely because it's a series. Book one is a prolog and I don't do prologs because they're boring and don't tell you shit. I wish I had back the time I wasted on this one. The book description is completely misleading.

The concept is ridiculous to begin with - steampunk in space? The spaceship has boilers which is the stupidest thing I ever heard. I even put up with that in hopes I would get a good story. More fool me. Having loved the character of Kaylee in Firefly, I was primed for the character of Alice - a mechanic. In fact this whole story is a Firefly rip-off in many ways. Violet is the captain of a pirate vessel which operates on the run from coalition vessels, raiding them and distributing food to rebel bases and selling-off what they can to make some money.

On one such raid, they kidnap Alice to get her to fix the ship's boilers(!) intending to release her later, but eventually she ends up - as we knew she would - on the ship as a crew member, and so starts the relationship with Violet. This is the dumbest relationship ever, with them getting it on and getting off and it falling off so metronomically that it became tedious to read it. They were like 13 year olds, and to pretend non-violent Violet was a pirate captain was stupid.

The story wasn't god-awful, except when I read of one character Violet met:

"Hiya. I'm Jhanvi," she said with a thick southern drawl

This is on an alien planet, and she has "a thick southern drawl"?! Ridiculous!

Of course everyone on the crew is the best there is. Alice is the best mechanic; Hyun is the best doctor; Kady is the best engineer; Violet the best captain. Barf. They should have named the spacecaft the Mary Sue. I reached a point, not quickly enough unfortuantely, where I could not stand to read any more of this, and I ditched it. Can't commend it.

Legacy Marines by Jonathan P Brazee

Rating: WARTY!

This attempt at a Tom Clancy military manual is doomed. It's a dual PoV - fortunately not first person or I wouldn't be reading it at all more than likely - but almost as annoying. This means of course that every chapter has one of the two main characters names as a chapter title, alternating in tedious tick-tock fashion like a military march. Barf! It’s boring and it results in unintentionally amusing chapter openings such as this one:

Chapter 4 Noah Esther...

That's the dumb stupidity of two person POV. There's probably another chapter in there, starting in just the opposite fashion. That, on top of the mil-speak with endless, tedious acronyms, was simply annoying. Some - but not all - of the acronyms have a superscript number attached to them, but this is useless because it’s not link, and even if it were, they often appear so close to the edge of the screen that if you were to try and tap on it to go see the reference, you would instead swipe the screen. Stupid and ill-conceived. The description should be right there in the text unless this is written only for soldiers.

The author makes the David Weber mistake of assuming the military in 3-D space will conduct itself exactly as it does in 2-D surface warfare, and it’s all naval speak. It’s like the author took Horatio Hornblower and just moved him into space with no other changes, and it’s stupid. Also, once again, despite the marines supposedly being international, it’s really all American all the time, because as you know, the rest of the world can go hornblow itself.

One again in a futuristic (co-called) military drama, there are no robots and zero AI. There's a nod and a wink to it, but it’s never used. In fact there's a distinct aversion using it! At one point, we learn that the 'AI chip' in their battle helmets has been updated for their new location, but this idiot one of the 'twins' refuses to use it to find her way because it's perceived as a weakness! That's about the equivalent of a marine facing off on the battlefield with an enemy soldier and refusing to use their firearm, but pulling out a knife instead. Stupid. Is it because the author is a male writer and there's the cliché that men won't ask for directions, and this is being projected onto the female character? Whatever is the reason, it's not a good one.

But it gets worse. Despite having some majorly advanced technology - and apparently FTL travel, since they're located much closer to the center of the galaxy than Earth is, there are zero robots. Everything is done by humans despite the fact that now, in 2021, we have very effective robots galore, including military drones, and quite advanced AIs. It's the Star Trek stupidity all over again. The only thing more stupid than Star Trek is Star Wars which does have robots, but they're appallingly stupid and annoying. But here we have the marines training in 'PICS' which has no explanation that I recall for the acronym, but which I assume is something like Personal Integrated Combat Suit.

I read, with regard to enemy being able to track the suits and zero in on them for targeting, "But the fractured-array made it difficult to focus on an individual PICS, whether from eyesight or sensors. In his father’s day, a fractured-array merely 'bent' the lights waves. Now, not only were the waves distorted, but fifty times a second, the array shifted, which sent spoofing images randomly...." The thing is, once again, the author is focused only on the visual sense. Yes, he mentions 'sensors', but there’s nothing on how the suit supposedly fools those.

The thing is that a mechanical suit will put out a radar reflection, it will put out a heat signature, it will put out electronic frequencies (especially if the soldiers are communicating with one another as they would have to be). And even if it put out none of this at detectable levels, it would not matter to an enemy because they would simply blanket the ground with high explosive rounds and kill every last one of a bunch of marines trundling up on bulky mech suits! This whole thing made no sense; it sounded like the kind of simplistic idea a writer would put into a children's story, and that was another problem with this: the story seemed to be adult, but the writing was aimed much lower down the age range.

The story is of a pair of twins - so called. They're drawn to look identical on the cover; in fact, I’d wager it’s the same drawing with a few tweaks - but twins of different genders are not monozygotic and they would not look like identical twins. They may look completely different. One of them is the go-getter gung-ho female who is given such a 'man-with-tits' aura that she's really a caricature, and of course her brother is the polar opposite. Both were a bit of a joke.

The 'futuristic' weapons were a bit of a laugh, too. I read this at one point when the girl gets her firearm: "The M99 was a dart thrower, firing a hypervelocity 8mm dart that was accelerated with mag rings and capable of reaching 2,010 meters per second past the muzzle. The body of the dart was nowhere near 8mm across, but once it was fired, fins popped out for stability, and it was the fins that stretched 8mm." The thing is that some 2k m/s is almost twice the fastest muzzle velocity of anything available today and even if it was achieved, should anything 'pop' out of the projectile, even fins, it would more than likely ruin the trajectory at such hyper-speeds. It made no sense.

The female main charcater comes off a a complete jerk who thinks nothing of using her father's famous name to get privileges. I read thsi at one point:

"OK, I’m forwarding it now, Mz Lysand—" he started before looking up in surprise. "Esther Lysander? As in Ryck Lysander?"

So obviously, she thinks nothing of fucking with people to get get her own privileged way and it's not a good idea to render one of your main characters - your heroic ones that is - as completely unlikeable right from the off. I certainly did not like her, and her brother was no better, so I saw no reason to get interested in either of them. This was especially true since the author seemed hell-bent upon setting the sotry up to be utterly predictable, having the gung-ho "against type" (not!) female soldier get schooled and the 'sensitive guy' male soldier become heroic. Barf.

I quit reading this because it offered nothing new and nothing interesting to me. I don't think the author knows how to write a realistic female character for a situation like this. The characters felt flat. One of them was too boring and the other too ridiculous. It was as though the author had decided to write the man as the woman and vice-versa - from a traditional PoV, that is - and it really didn't work. The only character that even remotely intrigued me was the one who went by 'Princess Mayhem', but she was barely in the book - in the first 50% anyway. The story was terribly lethargic, too. You could honestly have skipped the entire first thirteen chapters, which were tiresomely like a prologue, and come in when the first mission started, and not have missed anything important, useful, or entertaining. I ditched it at just past 50%, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

City of Shattered Light by Claire Winn

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had high hopes for this story which seemed to promise two strong female leads, but once again, as they so often do, the book blurb failed to give an honest description of the story, so it was more of a lose than a Winn for me. It was slow to start and seemed very repetitive. I was ready to ditch it after chapter one, and I would have, except this was a review book, so I felt I had to give it a chance. It did pick up somewhat in chapter two, but even so, it never got going. It was such a long, repetitive slog that I grew bored with it.

It was a very pedantic 2-Person PoV story tick-tocking tediously like a metronome between the two main female characters' perspectives that it was putting me to sleep. At least it wasn't first person PoV, but the tedium was strong with this one and by 52% I'd had enough of the repetitive antics of supposed hero "Riven" and her hi-tech non-love-interest "Asa" that I could stand to read no more. I cared nothing for either of the characters or for their fate, and their supposed love story was dead in the water from the very start.

Asa Almeida is the 17-year-old heir to a hi-tech empire. Riven Hawthorne - which is a thoroughly stupid name, is a lowlife street crook who talks big, but consistently achieves nothing. She's supposed to be a no-nonsense girl who is a dead-shot with her antique pistols, but despite having two clear-cut chances to kill her arch-rival (in the half that I read) she fails both times and one failure leads to another. Riven is thoroughly incompetent: all talk and no traction, and she has no spine. Asa, who is supposed to be smart, is a complete dumb-ass and she persistently proves it.

The 'winterdark' MacGuffin in the story appeared to be a direct rip-off of William Gibson's 'wintermute' which is an artificial intelligence character in his novel Neuromancer but since in this story it really is just a name without, apparently, anything behind it (not in the part I read anyway), I guess it doesn't matter what it was. The other side of this coin is tha tthe auhtor evidently hasnlt ehard of a farady cage whcih woudl ahve made her little device undetectable at dradiofrwuencies

The writing had issues, too. I read, for example, at one point: "No doubt the rumor mill would love to grate her to a pulp. A mill grinds, it doesn't grate. Unless of course it hasn't been oiled in a while.... At another point I read, "The phoenix ruffled its wings." Nah! I’m guessing it ruffled its feathers! Then again: "Riven willed herself to be impassable," was used when the author needed 'impassive'.

Some of the technology wasn't very well thought-through. For example, Asa has a suit that she can use to make herself invisible, but this author - as do many sci-fi writers, sci-fi movies, and TV shows - conflates invisible with undetectable. Visible light is only one minuscule portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and trapping that doesn't trap everything else, from gamma rays at one end to Am radio at the other. The suit wouldn't have worked, and the author even seems to admit this at one point where one of the guardbots stops and scans her. Clearly it detected something. The author also seems to forget that Asa's body is in motion, and emitting heat. Both of these things can be detected. The suit itself by its very use is emitting electronic frequencies.

A smock was actually developed that used tiny cameras to transmit an image of the scenery to the opposite side, so it made the smock close to invisible, but not quite. The thing is that even something like this is still actually there. If a bright light shone on it, it would cast a shadow of sorts, and any radar pulse aimed at it would bounce back faster and with a different 'feel' to it from her body than, say, the wall in front of which Asa was standing, so there was so much wrong with this that it was laughable. For a young kids' story it would have been fine, but not for grown-ups, not unless you're going to say it has magical powers (like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak) rather than hi-tech powers.

For me, the worst part was that the story quickly became bogged down in Riven's tedious, endless, and leaden-footed non-attempts to escape the absurdly one-dimensional criminal city, where every single thing is rotten to the core, and every single person is evil and amazingly good at finding and defeating Riven. It made this story truly boring. I can't commend this at all.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another diversion into the classics. I find the author's name amusing for some reason. In conjunction with reading this, I also watched the Disney movie John Carter which was loosely derived from the novel and was a huge loss for the studio, despite making some 300 million. That's bad business right there: your movie makes THREE HUNDRED MILLION and you still lose money on it? I am not a fan of Disney, but despite the movie being mildly entertaining and the novel being mildly readable, I have no intention of pursuing this series.

I don't know if George Lucas, in creating his Star Wars empire ever acknowledged how much he borrowed from Burroughs, but in my opinion he took a lot. Special snowflake super-powered savior guy and a princess to win? Telepathy? A desert planet? Sword fighting? Multiple alien species? Epic battles on land and in the air? Strange alien animals? Weird flying craft? It's all there. The leaders in the story are known as Jeds and Jeddaks. Is it a coincidence how close this is to Jedi?

I understand that this novel was written in a different era, and long before we knew a lot about Mars, but the story itself doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense even within its own fictional framework, and the hero of it, John Carter (it's convenient that his initials are JC, for a white savior, huh?!), really ought to have been named Mary Sue for all the luck he has going his way and the lack of effort he puts in to get the consistently sterling results he obrains. It's like everything he does, he becomes expert at, and everything that happens to him quickly facilitates his meeting whatever goal it was he had been hoping to reach.

As was the wont back then, this work was serialized in early 1912 before appearing as a 66,000 word novel. For this reason it has all of the prevailing white male privilege of that era, including all of the viewpoints that you'd expect. There is no enlightenment here, so you have to take it as you find it, or avoid it. Carter is a veteran of the US civil war (on the side of the South of course!) and shortly after that ended, he took to prospecting in the southwest USA. He gets to Mars accidentally through a portal hidden in a cave he happens upon. There is no explanation offered for the presence of this portal on Earth, much less its specific location.

Burroughs buys into the antique notion of Martian canals, born of a misunderstanding. Astronomer Schiaparelli described features (that were very likely optical artifacts) as 'channels' which in his native Italian was 'canali'. This was misunderstood as 'canals' - an artificial construction by intelligent beings on a planet that was drying-out, aimed at channeling water from the icy poles to support the rest of the planet. Burroughs uses this idea, just as did HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury. Burroughs also invents a huge river - no doubt based on the River Styx, along which people at the end of their lives were borne.

Mars is known to the natives as 'Barsoom', and it's been suggested that this is based on numbering the known heavenly bodies, starting with the sun and including the moons, 'bar' being the Martian word for eight. This makes no sense within the story, but I guess it could have been Burroughs 'rationale'. The five named planets are these: Rasoom (Mercury), Cosoom (Venus), Jasoom (Earth), Barsoom (Mars), and Sasoom (Jupiter), but since the word for 'one' in Barsoomian is 'ay' and not 'ra', this numbering theory would seem to be a non-starter!

People seem to praise Burroughs for such inventive world-building, but it really isn't. In fact, it's extremely derivative, and scientifically makes little to no sense. It's just a jumble of random ideas that apparently caught his imagination. Martians are green and with six arms? The equivalent of a dog has ten legs and is super-fast? There are wonderful flying machines in one part of the planet, and wagon trains in another? Mars is dry? None of this is really very imaginative. Some of it's plain dumb.

Anyway, Carter discovers, due to the weaker gravity on Mars, that he is very strong and can leap to great heights because his bones and muscles developed under Earth's gravity. The thing is that there are humans (or very like humans) on Mars - called red humans because of their tan - and any one of them ought to have been able to develop Carter's ability if they had only worked-out, yet in thousands of years, no one ever did? There's also a race of green Martians who are fifteen feet tall and have six limbs, but Carter can easily vanquish them because of his superior strength and agility. There are other races, but none that we meet in this volume.

Carter takes up with the green Martians who hatch from eggs after a five year 'gestation' period. He rapidly rises to a position of power despite being a curiosity, a non-native, and something of a prisoner. He learns their language quickly, but here's the weird thing: we're told that they say very few words aloud, and have only the simplest of spoken languages; they communicate a lot by telepathy, so he develops his telepathic skills just like that. Yet repeatedly throughout the story, these simple people, lacking a significant language, physically speak great volumes of complex words and sentences to him and there's never any more mention of communicating telepathically! So Burroughs is inconsistent at best.

The lack of air on Mars is overcome as the author reveals that there is (one!) atmospheric generation facility to keep the oxygen levels renewed, but this is part of the problem (especially at the end of the story), since the technology levels on Mars are wildly variable, particularly between the greens and the reds, although no reason is given for this.

Development of hand weapons seem to have halted at a late medieval level with simple guns and swords, yet the red society's power is derived from nuclear sources! The divide is, admittedly, largely between the greens and the reds, but the greens pilfer hugely from red airships that they shoot down with their long range rifles, so why their technology is so backward I have no idea.

The rifles are a problem. We're told that they can theoretically hit a target three hundred miles away, and reliably nail one that's two hundred miles away, but on Mars, the horizon is only two miles away, so how that weapon is supposed to work at a hundred times that distance, I have no idea! There's a vague allusion to wireless guidance technology, but this is completely out of line with the greens technology level, so none of this made any sense. His misuse of 'staunch' perhaps did back then: "I endeavored to staunch the flow of blood" This is really supposed to be 'stanch'.

The red humans have flying machines which employ an 'eighth ray' for propulsion, which is bullshit and nonsense, but hey, this is fiction! There are supposedly nine 'rays' and the eighth and ninth are talked about in this volume, but none of the others are discussed, so I have no idea what those are supposed to be.

The problem with this is that at one point, when JC is being suitably heroic once more and Mary-Sue-ing his way into yet another plum position, he encounters another human with a flying machine that has been downed due to a mechanical problem. Again this is highly convenient because we later learn that the stranded guy is a relative of a high-level official and thus provides yet another easy access point for Carter - which he promptly wastes.

We're informed that JC can't rescue this guy on his own flyer because they're fragile, but earlier we were told the eighth ray is so powerful that it accidentally launched an unsuspecting airship crew into orbit. How is this fragile? Did Burroughs mean that the ship's construction is fragile? There was no suggestion of that earlier, and these 'single occupant' airships are sixteen feet long so there seemed to be no reason why it could not have lifted two people if they sat on it carefully. I'm just saying!

Naturally, Carter meets a princess of the red humans and they almost immediately fall in love. They always use both names, so she's always Dejah Thoris and he's always John Carter, never John or Carter, and the both speak of themselves in third person at times. It's annoying. Everyone is quite warlike - whether that's because Mars is the god of war or the author just chose to make his story that way for dramatic purposes, I don't know, but despite this belligerence, no one invented a machine gun. Go figure! Even the red humans can't get along because there's a war between different factions of those, and the princess is supposed to marry her enemy against her will in order to secure peace, but you know that ain't happening.

So Carter gets into a position of palace guard at his enemy's stronghold, giving him freedom to roam the palace and search for the princess who is conveniently being held there. He is always - I mean always - hiding in the right place at the right time to discover key pieces of information. At one point he deserts his guard post to go look for the princess, and becomes hopelessly lost. He rests his back against a wall for a minute to catch his breath since he's apparently exhausted from roaming the hallways in search of her, and this wall just happens to be the one to the princess's quarters!

Instead of biding his time and making a plan, he bursts in there and slaughters the four guards who are berthed inside her room(!) She informs him that she has to go through with this wedding and that he cannot kill her intended because it is forbidden for her to marry the murderer of her intended. Dejah Thoris isn't actually a person, she's a tool, a lure, a trophy, a possession, a MacGuffin who is constantly in need of rescue, a bargaining chip. She's never an agent of her own, and is nothing if not a perennially half-naked eye-candy prize to be bartered and won.

Carter is equally lucky in fleeing the palace. Despite there being an uproar over the four guards he slaughtered, he manages to accidentally find his way to a truly convenient escape point from the palace. Unable to jump out of a high window in daylight (people apparently look up on Mars) he chooses to hide inside an elaborate lighting fixture, which happens to be hanging above the precise point where a group of people gather to explain everything that's going on.

Again with the luck: I read later of another of his adventures, "The building was an enormous one, rearing its lofty head fully a thousand feet into the air...The fact that Barsoomian architecture is extremely ornate made...a perfect ladder for me all the way to the eaves of the building" A thousand feet up! This is the guy who is so out of shape that he gets breathless searching the palace and yet he climbs a thousand feet with no trouble?

This kind of thing happens again and again, tediously so. For example, at one point, Carter is flying one of the little aircraft to Helium, a major Martian city which is a thousand miles away (I guess fuel running out is never a problem on Mars). Now this is the single most distinctive city on Mars, but he can't find it because his speedometer and compass are damaged, and he gets lost. Despite flying over several cities where he could have stopped and asked for directions, the idiot doesn't stop until he espies a massive battle going on between green Martians. Despite knowing how deadly a shot these people are, instead of avoiding the battle, he flies right over it like a moron, and gets shot down.

Why these fighting Martians even care about shooting him down when amidst a massive battle, is left unexplained, but he happens to land, in a field of ten thousands fighting Martians, precisely at the point where his friend is engaged in combat, and ends up saving his friend's life! This results in his becoming even more highly elevated in their society. Note that since Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, a compass would be useless there, but Burroughs could not have known that.

When Carter is trying to find an associate in the dark dungeons, I read, "Fortunately among the first I examined I found his jailer, and soon we had Kantos Kan with us in the throne room." Yep, he goes right to the jailer who has the very keys he needs to free the guy. He rallies a force of a hundred thousand green Martians who come with him to attack the enemy red Martian city and this takes no effort at all to talk them into joining his personal crusade. Despite needing three days to gather all the help he requires, he arrives at the enemy city right at the precise moment his precious princess is about to be wed, just in time to stop the proceedings!

There's an air battle which I imagine would have been rather thrilling to readers in 1912 when air travel was in its infancy, but the author utterly fails to think through the fight. He has the airships drawn up (like David Weber does in more modern sci-fi battles) as though the space in which they fight is two dimensional, so they're organized like ships of the line, static, and firing cannon at one another in broadsides! Eventually some ships' captains think it through and manage to rise above the others and drop bombs on them, but when it comes to taking on the million man enemy army, instead of flying over and dropping bombs on them, these idiots quit the ships and deposit their 100,000 men on the ground and fight it out with the million man enemy army - and they still win!

Carter is the most lucky klutz ever to blunder into a situation where he can't lose. So like I said, it's interesting enough to read purely from a historical perspective to see how people viewed both themselves and Mars (and non-whites and women) back in Burroughs's day. It's not something I was remotely interested in continuing on into other volumes. It is a free read - you can find it online, at places like Project Gutenberg, There might even be an audiobook version of it there - I dunno. For me though, like Carter's bride, it laid an egg.

Solatium by GS Jennsen

Rating: WARTY!

This seems to have been my month for reading novels which have a title starting with 'S'! This was your standard short teaser introduction to a series which left me unmoved and unimpressed.

The book description for this is dishonest. It says, "Though humanity conquered the very stars, it remained unable to conquer the darkness within." So we’re conquering stars, but "He’d intercepted her as she pilfered a stack of disks from a merchant kiosk" we’re still using disks?

That struck a sour note right there, but I read on because it was so short, and discovered that the next bit of the description, "a young woman who's lost everything but her soul fights to reclaim her life from a violent, sadistic criminal despot" is bullshit too. She does nothing. She's a maiden in distress rescued by a couple of white knights who want to take down her cruel overlord for their own purposes! All she does, essentially, is to get out of their way! They ostensibly use her to get the layout of the building for their assault, but what, they're conquering stars and yet they have no miniature spy drones they can send in there? The telegraphing of the relationship between the girl and one of her saviors is pathetic and I lost all interest in having anything to do with such an unimaginative and predictable series in short order.

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I really dislike pretentious novels and this one was up there. It was also mixed voice in the sense that most of it was third person, but on occasion there was first person. I'm not a fan of mixed voice novels, and even less a fan of first person. I liked that the story hit the ground running, but there was a narrative and a dialogue that was not only obtuse, but was also larded with the kind of language that would make Deadpool blush. This is not a compliment, since I have no interest in reading either of these writers, but the novel is like the unfortunate bastard child of William Gibson and Bret Easton Ellis. I never liked Ellis. I used to like Gibson, but he quickly went downhill for me.

The story is futuristic cyber-punk, and it's one of these over-baked, aggressive books about tough-as-nails characters (in this case, female) who are so hardened and foul-mouthed that it's like a parody. I don't care about four-letter words here and there in a story, but this thing is so thickly-larded with them that it's hard to read. On top of that, the author seemed like she couldn't write a sentence without pulling out the thesaurus, so the text is dense and impenetrable in many places. I'm pretty well-educated, but this made for a really tough read, and not so much because the words were beyond my reading range, but because there was so much of this hyperbolic stuff that it really made it nightmarish to go through. How about this for a random sentence: "The only question is which sentential declension carried that nugget." It's all like that, and it's too much - especially so for a novel in this genre.

The plot was simple, but it was all-but obliterated by the writing style. I ended up not so much reading it, as reading bits and skimming chunks. There was a team of female cyber-enhanced and cloned warrior women who had a sorry end to their last mission. Now some of them want to find out why it went so badly wrong and to figure out what happened to the team member who didn't die, but went missing. My problem with this premise is that this is a world where AI is advanced and in charge of everything and has little regard for humans. If this is the case, why are humans, slow of thought, and uninventive, sent to fight it? Why not robots? Why not hackers?

I thought of this particularly when the two characters from the first chapter, who are trying to persuade a resentful set of ex-team members to regroup, try to recruit the one who was their driver. Why do they have a human driver? Or pilot, or whatever she is? Even now we're having road vehicles enhanced by the use of computer-made decisions. Airplanes have had a lot of this technology for years. Now these people, purportedly in the future, want to take a backward step and have a slower-thinking human as their getaway driver? It made no sense and betrayed the whole world that the author had built. Naturally you want the human element in this, but these women really didn't feel human to me, and they weren't anyone I was interested in reading any more about. I didn't care about them, what they did, or what happened to them. But if you're going that route, you can write a better story about them and why they're needed instead of AIs. This story didn't do that.

The story of the girls was interleaved with another story, about this AI machine which was interested in working for a larger AI. I may be completely wrong about this, but it seemed obvious to me that this little AI was actually the missing team member who the others were searching for. Again, it didn't stir my interest, and if this is what turned out to the be case (I have no idea if it was), it was not interesting to me, since it had been telegraphed leaving no surprises. These assorted problems I perceived in the plot and the writing style were why I DNF'd this one. I can't commend it based on the fifty percent or so that I skimmed/read.

Cyber's Change by Jamie Davis

Rating: WARTY!

This is a sci-fi novel set in 2055 in, of course, the USA, because why else would anyone ever consider reading it?! It was over the top and had some issues, and while I had initially intended to give this a positive rating, the more I wrote of this review, the more I realized how sadly lacking the story was, and despite my having read it all and enjoyed parts of it, I really cannot in good faith rate this positively. Maybe I'd considered doing that because I'm just getting too sentimental. Or maybe I've read so many really bad books that even a middling novel sounds like it's worthy? Or maybe I just like LGBTQIA stories, even if they're less than stellar? I dunno! But to be fair to other reviews, I cannot honestly rate this positively given all the problems it exhibited.

On the good side, this story is made more believable by the inane excesses of intolerance generated over the last four years and the dire consequences those years have scarred the USA with. It shows that there are almost as many assholes in this country as there are decent people and it's a toss-up who will actually make the biggest impression on life here. Much like the nation, in the story, the main two characters are diametrically opposed at least ostensibly in this novel. One of them, Cass, was raised in a cult known as the Sapiens Movement, which believes that any cybernetic enhancement of humans, even for medical reasons, and regardless of how little or much it is invasive, makes a person less than human and not worthy of equal treatment.

Rather than go to a sapiens-approved college, Cass elects to go to a regular school, explaining to her family that if she's to help them in the movement, she must understand what they're up against. For reasons which are left unexplored, much less explained, her parents go along with this. Cass hasn't been honest with her roomie about her extreme beliefs and when she learns of Shelby's enhancements, she's dishonest with her parents about those, too. Cass is also a lesbian, and this is a problem in the sense that, if her parents are so dead set against anything unnatural, how is it they're so accepting of her being queer? Why do they not consider that unnatural? There's no consideration, let alone explanation, offered for this apparent contradiction in their beliefs.

Cass has been video-conferencing with her roommate to be, who she hasn't met in person. When they do meet, Cass discovers that Shelby, on a whim, has had one of her perfectly good arms removed and replaced by a mechanical one which has enhanced features (essentially it's a cybernetic Swiss army knife with a storage compartment). There never was any really compelling reason offered for her to make this choice, and no accounting for the fact that this major surgery was not done in a hospital, but in a cut-rate dive where unqualified or disqualified people do these surgeries and there's no government regulation!

This would be a major point in the favor of the Sapiens's position, yet never once is it used, nor is Cass appalled by how slapdash and dangerous this work is, not to say illegal! Shelby also has brain implants that allow her to access the internet without a terminal. The Internet - for reasons unexplained - is renamed the 'mantle' here. I doubt that will ever happen! It didn't feel organic and felt much more like the author had changed it solely for the purpose to trying to sound cool. Rather than cool, to me a mantle sounds vaguely threatening, like something an octopus traps its prey under before eating it!

The 'romance' between the two main characters was skirted around rather than plunged into. As important as it was, it deserved better than this. The author skips several weeks of their interactions, and after that unexplored period, we're just told they're an item - so all the magic and charm of their falling for each other is lost and this negatively and severely impacts the believability of their relationship. It makes it feel like it happened overnight although technically it did not.

I got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the author is squeamish (or something) when it comes to depicting lesbian interaction. Why he would be, I don't know, but he offers virtually zero physical contact between the two of them at any point in the story; there's barely any hugging, touching, or kissing, let alone actual sex. Instead, he leaves us to infer it from a line here and a word there. This was less than satisfactory and made their relationship seem truly inauthentic, which in turn spoiled all of their subsequent actions.

On a trip to the Caribbean, Cass has a serious jet ski accident that almost kills her. Here's where another problem arises. Shelby supposedly has strong feelings for Cass, and knows perfectly well how anti-enhancement she is, yet she dishonestly lies to the medical staff about how tight their relationship is, and speaks for Cass as though they're married - or at least engaged. They're not! But Shelby overrides any considerations Cass might have had and while the latter is unconscious, Shelby supports and urges the doctors to save her life with enhancements. This is part of a push this novel exhibited from the start: that Cass's feelings and position are wrong and Shelby is right. No consideration, not even token, is given to Cass's position.

Cass is over eighteen and technically an adult, but she can't speak for herself after her injury, and never once does Shelby contact Cass's parents to let them know her daughter was at death's door. This felt like truly shifty behavior on Shelby's part , but the worst aspect of this is that Cass is pretty much completely accepting of it when she recovers consciousness. Despite her horror of enhancement and her upbringing, she doesn't fly off the handle at Shelby. There is no rift in their relationship! Again it felt completely unnatural. It's almost like Cass is "Oh, now I'm cyber! How awful! But okay, moving right along...." Honestly, it's that bad. Again, it's like the author had this agenda to push and nothing would trip it up. A fight between the roomies over this would have added so much more to the story, but the author evidently never considered it.

One of the biggest problems with this story is that we're in the future. Even now, a generation before this story begins, we're out there in terms of interconnectedness. Everyone has a platform and everyone is taking video and streaming it. How much more is that going to be the case in the future? Yet time and time again in this story, the author forgets how connected his world is. Of Shelby's ultra-cyber-ized brother Eric, I read, "He doesn't know you the way I do and he doesn't understand what I've learned since we've been together." Yet this is her brother who she's constantly sending messages back and forth to, directly from her own brain. It's inconceivable that she wouldn't have given him information about Cass, even if only in snippets in all those weeks they were sharing a room. Eric even mentions that he's heard a lot about Cass when they finally meet, yet Shelby apparently thinks he knows nothing? It made no sense.

Eric tells his sister: "I'll send you the final details on the time and place we're meeting in the morning Saturday as soon as we iron out our permits." Yet they're constantly in touch in the cyber-sphere. This lack of knowledge made no sense. During a protest, Shelby again isn't communicating so we're led to believe: "We have to get up to the front and help my brother. He doesn't know we're surrounded." How could he not know when everyone is connected? She can't text him? Can't send him an image? Can't send him a video? No-one else can? Once again, the author forgets his premise.

Even in 2021, scores upon scores of people shop online and get meals and groceries delivered more routinely than ever, yet I read, "She rode the elevator down to the ground floor and headed out to the street. It was time to get some shopping in." This was to buy food. Apparently a generation from now there's no more delivery? The author hasn't thought it through. With regard to test-taking we learned, "the professor can turn off access locally. The classrooms utilize a sort of virtual Faraday cage to shut down my implant's access during tests and quizzes. That ensures I actually learn the material." Yet they can't shut down local storage. Shelby could have entire textbooks stored in her implant and cheat up the wazoo, yet the author apparently never considers this.

Naturally 'dad of Cass' discovers his daughter's implants despite her efforts to lie to him and despite the fact that never once does she consider trying to ease her dad into her new way of life. Never once does she try to present an opposing view to his. Never once does she offer the argument that, "dad, if you don't want his stuff, that's fine! No-one' forcing you, but neither do you have the right to force others to live their lives like you want them to!"

There were so many ways that Cass could have eased the passage and been the very bridge she claims she wants to be if she'd had even half a spine, but she repeatedly fails. Predictably this results in dad finding out accidentally because he comes back to her dorm room after they think he's left and their door is open. The question is though - since he'd left the building, how did he manage to get into a secure building when he has no pass? This is quietly glossed over.

Psycho father flies off the handle and swears Cass is done with this school, but inexplicably, he doesn't try to drag her out of there! Instead he's talking about her finishing out the semester, so later, Cass tells Shelby, "No, you go and talk to Eric. That's important too." Why does she need to 'go and talk to Eric' about this when she can video-conference him right out of her brain? Again, the author hasn't thought his own world through.

Talking of which - in passing - there are no robots or drones mentioned at all in this world despite the fact that we have them ubiquitously even now. No robots helping the police quell a mob? No news drones filming from above? Again the sparsity of technology and the lack of foresight in this world was sad.

When Eric is injured during a protest rally, he's told, "Eric, we have to do something about what they did to you. We have to tell someone and take them to court or something." And we're apparently expected to believe that with all these cyber-enhanced people, and all the news media, and all the private citizens who have cell phones, not a single one of them recorded or live-streamed any of this?

This is a constant theme in the novel - of how utterly-connected the enhanced people are, but how appallingly sparse is the video coverage, even of activity like this. It made zero sense and constantly betrayed the author's prime position. And on top of this, we're expected to believe every police officer hates the enhanced, despite the fact that there would doubtlessly be enhanced officers and officers with enhanced children or spouses. Given the crime-fighting advantages a connected officer would have, there would more than likely have been an enhanced squad of police, just like there's a bomb squad and a SWAT team. Again, the author hasn't thought his world through, and it suffers for it.

It was for all of these serious writing problems and plot holes that I cannot consider this a worthy read.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Rating: WARTY!

This wasn't at all what I expected. Often that's a good thing, but in this case it made zero sense, and I have only myself to blame for making such a bad decision. I had read the description, so I have no excuse. I thought it might be amusing or engaging, but it was boring and silly.

The first problem is first person as usual. The story is told by a sociopath if not a psychopath, who is one of the misfit crew describing his experience of being sent as humanity's joint ambassadors to aliens who apparently don't want to meet us. Why send anyone instead of a drone or two is unexplained and apparently went unconsidered by the author in plotting this, as did the point of sending these people as opposed to trained experts.

What really got me though was the tone of the narrator - the sociopath - which is full of understanding of emotion and which simply could not be there in a sociopath, hence the story was completely unrealistic from the outset, regardless of the characters involved.

This is yet another problem (like it needs any more) with first person - a voice which really ought to come with an 'unrealistic' warning on the book cover. Had I known that this would be first person before I bought it, I would never have spent a penny on it. I gave up on it quickly because it simply wasn't doing it and seemed obsessed with trying to gross out the reader. I can't commend it based on the small portion of it to which I listened.

The Green Door by Heather Kindt

Rating: WARTY!

That tile is suspiciously close to the title of a very old, but famous porn movie starring Marilyn Chambers who was previously the face of a wholseome detergent. The novel itself is nowhere near as inventive as that movie was. Unfortunately, it's your typical YA love-triangle featuring a disaffected high-schooler slash impoverished under-achiever with at least one parent dead, who has a lifelong male friend that she has no interest in, and has a rich kid new acquaintance that she flips off, but becomes fascinated with. Yep, it's your usual unoriginal, braindead YA story that you've already read to death a score of times.

On the face of it, the actual plot sounded interesting. The idea is that there's this game which the main character is interested in, because it could net her a monetary prize which she and her widowered dad badly need. You have to solve one or more puzzles in this creepy old mansion to earn the cash, so she naturally picks her best friend to take up the challenge with.

Completely out of the blue, the high-school quarterback suddenly asks her to be his partner in this same game - which is when she flips him off. The problem is that this guy has shown zero interest in her until now, and suddenly he's calling her on her phone because he can't think of anyone better than her to solve puzzles with? It made zero sense. Where did he get her phone number? Why does he think someone he doesn't even know will make the best partner?! Why is he remotely interested in this whiny brat of a person who is technically an adult, but who behaves like a juvenile?

The story went downhill even from there. It appears to be written for an age group that's younger than the ages of the main characters - like middle grade instead of YA. The main character, Megan Covington isn't even a nice person. I didn't like her. She was cruel, and whiny and dishonest. At one point she tells us that her best friend Brekken is doing their geometry homework, which she will copy afterwards, but later she says he's always been a good friend to her by doing things "like keeping me from cheating throughout school and helping me study." So in short, she's both a cheat and a liar!

So the two of them go to this mansion where the quest is being held and like the imbeciles that they are, they tell no one where they're going. They're both over eighteen so they can sign the quest contract, but neither of them reads the small print and the frosty woman who takes them down to the basement offers them no details or warnings. Frosty lets them into the game area by opening a solid metal door with three bolts and a lock on the outside. None of this even remotely bothers the two shit-for-brains main characters. Beyond that door there is a glaring white corridor with colored doors along it (guess which one they pick!). The doors are these:

• Blue with a nautical theme featuring a pearl - worth $5,000
• Brown with underground carvings and featuring gemstone - worth $10,000
• Green with a tree carving and featuring a seed - worth $10,000
• Red featuring a ruby heart in a crown - worth $25,000
• Orange with flames pictured on it that are actually hot - worth $30,000
• White with a dove and feathers - worth $500,000
• Black metal with carvings - worth one million

Without asking any more questions, they let themselves be locked in. They have to choose a door to begin, and unsurprisingly, given the novel's title, they settle on the green door. They slap on these bracelets that allow them to pass through the force-field at the door that prevents other things from escaping (none of which puts these two idiots off), and they find themselves in a forest where they're almost immediately attacked by large wolves, but they're rescued by other animals who proceed on two legs and speak vernacular English. At first this struck me as silly, but there's actually an explanation for it. They chase off the wolves, but they arrest the two high-schoolers since they're illegally in a non-human part of the forest. None of this even remotely boggles the mind of these two fuckwits.

Naturally in this same environment is the rich jock, with the unimaginative name of Carter, who completes the inevitable triangle. He tells them he came in there with a girl named Courtney and they were attacked by those same wolves. Courtney was killed. Instead of immediately leaving the quest to report this girl's death, these frigging morons decide to continue with the quest! Carter is supposed to be the unexpectedly nice guy. He talks Courtney into playing this dangerous and deadly game with him, and when his partner dies, the very last thing he thinks of doing, is taking responsibility and reporting her death to the authorities or to her parents. He's an asshole, period.

That's when I quit reading. It's too stupid to live and should be burned with fire. These people are idiots. They're irresponsible. They're boringly predictable, and there's no way in hell I was going to continue reading this dumbass novel let alone continue on the "The Red Door" or "The Black Door" or any other stupid volume in this series. I condemn it.

When You Had Power by Susan Kaye Quinn

Rating: WARTY!

I've had some success with this author, notably with the first daughter series, but I didn't like her Open Minds which was a lousy, trope, clichéd garbage can of a YA novel. Sadly, it turned out that this really wasn't really a novel, but a disappointingly short introduction to a series. I thought it was just about okay for what it was, but I felt cheated that I didn't get a real story out of it. I didn't get into any of the characters and I sure didn't want to get into an open-ended series about it.

The plot is set in a dystopian climate-challenged future where the power engineers are considered rather heroic in that they provide electricity to homes, the residents of which are being ravaged by rolling blackouts and regular disease outbreaks and therefore paranoid about letting strangers near them. Ironically, there's nothing in this theoretically introductory volume to explain how the world got that way. Yes, it's on the fast track to a future that could conceivably be like that, but we're already using RNA vaccines and talking of gene therapy cures for viral and bacterial diseases. Where did that go? Why did the efforts governments are starting to put into place fail to save the planet?

There seem to be unaccountable and unexplained lapses in technology. For example, homes are expected to make use of rechargeable batteries during power outages, but nowhere do we read of these same homes having any sort of solar or wind power independently of the grid. We already have that today, so what happened to it? There's no explanation to be found here. Worse, Lucia discovers that the batteries in her new home have been discharged to the point of being irreparably damaged, but apparently there was no sort of warning device built into the batteries to alert the owners of this problem! We already have warnings in our electric and hybrid vehicles, on our laptops, and even on our phones that the battery is mostly discharged so we know to recharge, so what happened to that warning on a critical home system? Again, no explanation.

We already have drones and robots, but they seem to feature poorly, too, so there are holes in the story that the author seems to have no interest in filling, which in turn makes her world-building poor and which kept jolting me out of suspension of disbelief. I didn't expect her to have detailed explanations for everything, nor would such a thing have made for good reading, but to have some sort of story that covered the obvious is expected, and she unapologetically fell short of this requirement.

The 'energy islands' seem to be in the ocean, and it's while doing a preliminary inspection of the underwater portion of her new island that Lucia discovers some weird damage. When she reports this up the chain of command, she's essentially accused of hallucinating, and the images she shot of the damage have curiously disappeared. When she returns to take more photos only a day later, there's suddenly no sign of the damage. It's all been repaired. That's a bit of a stretch

When investigating why power seems to be getting tapped from the generator, and looking for a potential target using all that power, she discovers that the area she wanted to investigate has been burned causing so much damage as to leave it unrecognizable and herself without evidence again. She tries to take more photos under the island, and she almost dies because of a sabotaged oxygen tank. The thing is that Lucia is a seasoned diver. Air has weight, especially when compressed, and you can tell the difference between an empty and a full tank, especially if it's aluminum. If her tank was seriously light on air, she would have known as soon as she picked it up regardless of what the tank gauge said, and for her to never check the gauge while she's diving is not a sign of a seasoned diver. It's the sign of a dumbass.

Clearly someone is hiding something, but even when Lucia gets photos that cannot be deleted since the next camera she uses is old tech and not hooked up to any network, she doesn't think for a minute of publishing this evidence out on the net, and thereby protecting herself and the family she has started lodging with, and this in turn makes her look like an idiot. The worst part of the story though is that there's no resolution to anything. We have no questions answered, and are expected to buy more volumes of the novel to get beyond this prologue. That doesn't work for me, not when it's so average. I don't even like prologues and normally skip them, so I can't commend this one at all, and I sure as hell don't want to read any mroe poorly-written pap like this.

The Concordia Deception by JJ Green

Rating: WARTY!

This novel held my interest long enough to finish it, but I skipped bits here and there and wasn't really very happy with it overall since it made little sense far too often to let it slide.

It's a sci-fi story about a colony ship that takes almost 200 years to reach another planet. They're sent there because Earth is so trashed and they don't think it can support any more humans. They fear humanity will die out, but given how much it had to have cost to build the ship, I don't get how people couldn't have improved conditions on Earth dramatically with all those resources, thereby avoiding the need to go elsewhere, but again, and foolishly as it happened(!), I let that slide.

The idea is that there are genetically generated farmers who have hardiness and skills for farming, as well as a smaller crew of scientists who support them. Again this made no sense: if their genetic engineering is so advanced on Earth, how come they had such trouble surviving there? Later in the story, it comes out that people on Earth have been largely wiped out by a new flu strain (this was written before Covid), yet they have advanced genetic engineers? They couldn't fix the flu? We're on the verge of doing that now, but these future people couldn't do it? Once again, it made no sense!

So these colonists are exploring this planet, but they seem to have no advanced technology: no satellites that can do a decent survey from space. No drones to survey the place at near ground level; no robots to help on the ground? Again, it made no sense. We have all of those things now. Why would they not have them in the future?

On top of this, there's a rebel movement which has people embedded in the colony who are trying to sabotage it. They're apparently up in arms against the unnatural aspects of this genetic engineering, but then why go on the ship? Why not just let 'em go, and say good riddance, and stay on Earth to enjoy their natural life? This was not a religious order, so there was none of that fanaticism; just the 'natural' PoV, and it wasn't enough to account for the behavior.

The book description is all about this Cariad character who is one of the scientists and who plays a relatively minor role in the colonization. The main character who gets no mention in the description is Ethan, who is a 'gen' - genetically developed 'farmer' - who is a respected leader in the farming community. The thing is that the farming community never actually does any farming! Farming is a full-time job, but though Ethan has his own farm, he never goes there. He's never shown working. In fact he gets so distracted that he neglects his farm to the point where it could well be failing - he doesn't know. He hasn't been there in a while.

The gens decide to quietly abandon the colony to start their own independent colony on the coast, where they occupy a series of caves and tunnels in the cliff face by the ocean. They have to explore these caves on foot with torches because they apparently never heard of drones. It made no sense. One of the gens is the saboteur, but that made no sense either because this person had no training in explosives and no clue as to where to put them since there had been no extensive survey of the caves to find the weak spots, yet the caves are effectively destroyed and many lives are risked!

This goes to my point, which I think I've demonstrated conclusively by now, that if the story isn't getting it done, you need to quit gamely plodding on to the end and ditch it for something that will entertain. It's not worth wasting your time on something that's failing you. I can't commend this as a worthy read because it was so badly-written.

ExtraOrdinary by Danielle K Girl

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "Jack text them around ten to say it was going to be a long night." Texted is the word!

"From above comes a drawn out scrapping sound, like someone is hauling a piece of furniture across the room." 'scraping', not 'scrapping'!

"sweeping view of the properties carefully maintained gardens." 'property's' not 'properties'

" 'You can fly.' Ryder cringes at the high pitch of her voice" This is after Ryder has already seen Olessia float down from an upper storey, clearly demonstrating that she can fly.

"I’m going to have a shower and catch an hours sleep before we start thinking about getting you into town, okay?" Hour’s sleep!

This novel was a true disappointment because it began by pressing all the right buttons for me: faking like it was a ghost story and then slyly morphing into something much more interesting, but it quickly pissed me off by having such a limp main character in Ryder, who was a squealy, idiotic, spineless, unappealing, and uninteresting little shit. On top of that, it brought in such a trope manly male character for her that I laughed out loud.

IRL, this guy would have zero interest in a little wet rag of a wuss like Ryder, but you know from the way the author describes him and Ryder's reaction to him that the telegraph message of the day is: these two will be all over each other like white on the Republican party. Barf. I quit reading at that point because I knew exactly where this novel was going and I had no intention of being its traveling companion. I knew just how it would turn out, too. It wasn't going to be sci-fi story I'd begun to root for; it was about to be taken over by a dumb-ass romance between these two jackasses. No thanks!

I found, as unfortunately happens all-too-often in these stories, that Ryder's best friend Sophie was far more enagaging and interesting than Ryder ever could be, and I knew with equal certainty that the author never would give Sophie a fair shake. When that happens in one of my own stories, the main character gets downgraded and I shift the weight of the tale over to this more interesting character from the less engaging one. I don't plan it that way, but my characters are smarter than I am, and I happen to be smart enough to know when to listen to them instead of trying to force my own original idea onto them when they're trying hard to go off in an unexpected, and much more interesting, direction.

Letting them decide how the story goes makes for a much more realistic, original, and natural story than if I'd forced anything on them, or been stubborn about clinging to my original line of thinking. In one story I released not long ago, I even killed-off the person who was to have been one of the two main characters and promoted her best friend into the role, because she was a far more appealing character. I'm sorry this author didn't have the same willingness to toss some things out of the window, but this is what happens when you're hidebound by tradition and dedicatedly writing to trope. I can't commend this at all.

The Untethered by SW Southwick

Rating: WARTY!

This story was crap almost from the off, and in some ways it seemed more like authorial wish fulfillment than anything else. The story begins with Roble Santos whose only ambition, it seems, is to build a private jet that can fly supersonic speeds. The seemingly impossible and illegal task he has to face is that it's purportedly illegal to fly such a jet. In which case why not move to a country where it is legal and build it there? It was a completely false challenge and had zero resonance.

None of these characters made sense, but the only other one I got any sort of an introduction to was Stock Brant who was an out and out criminal who I had zero interest in, and when, at 10% in, this third character, essentially threw herself at him, all the while convincing herself that she didn't want him - in essence, raping herself with him, I gave up on the book in complete disgust. It sucked, it was badly written, it was all over the place and it was trashier than a badly-written romance. I condemn it and I sure as hell wasn't about to read 600-plus pages of this shit.

Starshine by GS Jennson

Rating: WARTY!

Read disappointingly by someone with the highly improbable name of Pyper Down, this book was already displeasing me to an extent, with its sluggish, meandering pace, endless introduction of minor characters, and my difficulty of tracking exactly what was going on while driving, with its metronomic switching between scenes and characters, and with unwanted flashbacks, but it really turned me off when I got about a third of the way in and the two main characters, female Alexis, and male Caleb met for the first time in a trope antagonistic encounter which resulted in the guy ending up physically restrained on a chair.

The restraints were DNA coded and idiot Alexis managed to drop a single strand of hair onto her prisoner, so he escaped. There was a half-hearted fight and Alexis ended up pinned with her back against Caleb, him holding her own gun to her head, and all she could think about was how hot he was. Seriously? What's the next volume going to feature? Alexis gets raped and enjoys it? I honestly don't get how female authors can so disrespect their characters (and by extension women in general), and be so pathetically tied to cliché and trope.

That wasn't the only problem. Even were that scene excluded, I doubt I would have traveled much further with this author. There was far too much going on swapping in and out characters who were often indistiguishable, making it hard to track, especially when driving, and there were flashbacks, too, which might well have been set-off in a print or ebook with a silcrow, or highlighted with italics or indentation, but in an audiobook you don't see that. It's all down to the reader and I was already far from thrilled with with her performance.

The voice and main character were at odds and this distracted from the narration. Thankfully this was not a first eprson PoV story so it did have that going for it. Technically it could have had either a male or female reader; it could anyway even if it were told from Alexis's PoV, but I prefer it if the narration voice matches the main character's voice, even if it's third person. The problem is that Pyper Down didn't match the Alexis character at all, not remotely.

Down's voice is more like a society lady or a spoiled rich woman's tone and it had, for me, a really annoying and somewhat tedious cadence. Again, this was not first person, but for me the voice didn't fit a rough-and ready-rebel pilot and mechanic that was Alexis - supposedly. it did not fit her at all, and it sure as hell didn't fit a Caleba, whose name was all wrong. He should really have been called Mary Sue.

The story is set in 2322 when humans have somehow managed to spread to "over 100 worlds across a third of the galaxy." It's unclear how they did this. The author talks about going at many times the speed of light, but this is impossible and it will still be impossible even in 2322. The reason for this is that the closer something approaches the speed of light, the more mass it takes on, and therefore the more energy it takes to accelerate that mass. At the speed of light mass becomes infinite and the only way to move that is with an infinite amount of energy: ergo: ain't gonna happen.

Later, the author talks about warping space, which is a totally different thing, but which also takes an enormous amount of energy and has nothing to do with foolhardy and pointless attempts to exceed the speed of light. It's like having adjoining hotel rooms. In order to move from one to the other, you have to exit the first room, go down the hallway, and enter the second room. However, if you have a connecting door between the rooms, you can simply step directly through. You can say, "I ran at ten miles an hour from this room to the next," but no matter what your speed, you will never beat someone who uses that connecting door! That, much simplified as it is, is the difference between traveling at hyper speeds and warping space.

Another issue was that this author seems more intent on telling than showing, especially when the two main charcters finally meet up and start entertaining thoughts like they're fifteen year old boys rather than a mature man and woman. I don't mind an occasional stray thought of that nature - all people have them - but it was like these were the only thoughts either of them had after they met, and it was pathetic. It was like reading a badly-written YA novel. But I repeat myself.

So I ditched this after the 'Alex with a gun to her head' scene and I am done with this author. I cannot commend this except to the trash bin.

Beta Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book represented a prime reason why I do not like series. I loved Alpha Bots - the first in this series - and quickly I glommed onto the sequel thinking it would be as much fun as the original was, but the sorry truth is that it was the polar opposite, and I DNF'd it due to the complete lack of humor and the appalling violence which hit hard and was totally unnecessary, and it came right up front. It was such a contrast to what I'd experienced in the first volume that it felt like a whole different story. I quickly decided that this was not for me. I guess I should have known that a series titled "The Womanoid Diaries" couldn't be good - not all the way through.

In the words of Chrissie Hynde, who was no pretender: don't get me wrong! One of the reasons I dislike series is that they're essentially cookie-cutter repeats of the original, which often is merely a prologue. I don't do prologues. Where is a series to go? It's the same characters often facing the same issues and it's boring, and it's lazy writing.

I like very few series and the ones I tend to like are ones that maintain a freshness throughout: enough of what I liked in volume one to keep my interest, but a different sort of story. Very few writers can nail that consistently. Thus you might think I'd go for this sequel here because it is so different from the original, but for me it was too different and not in any good way.

Yes, there was violence in the first volume too, but the story eased into it and it felt natural in the context of the fiction: the victims were 'deserving' and main character Cookie was completely adorable throughout - even heroic. I did not like her one bit in this second volume. She was a different person altogether. I decided I did not want to read any more about someone who had essentially changed from being an original, engrossing, assertive, and fun character, and morphed into a psychotic serial murder. No thanks.

The writing seemed lacking, too. It didn't have the same 'oomph' in this volume. It felt tired and clichéd and had lost its sparkle. One thing I noticed just in my relatively short read was this: "With Tabitha's knife in hand, I hid in his blind spot and waited on the gunnel for him." The author doesn't seem to grasp that the gunwale (pronounced 'gunnel') isn't the deck - it's the part of the ship's hull that surrounds the deck - the part that the passengers traditionally lean on when the ship is departing and they're waving to those on the dock. If Cookie were standing on the gunwale she'd be particularly visible, not hiding! It's not a story killer, but that wasn't the problem.

The violence in the second volume was not remotely defensible, not even in the context of this fiction. So what if these were Russian SWAT team? That makes them acceptable victims of the Mansonian violence that Cookie perpetrates, none of which was actually necessary? Cookie had been quite happily avoiding surveillance under the river, but somehow, I guess, these people had tracked her. How, I do not know, but instead of simply going back underwater and avoiding them, Cookie decides to single-handedly take out the entire squad. And not to dinner.

Where she hoped to go with that approach, I don't know. What - these were the only police in the entire city of Moscow and after she kills them she's scot-free?! It felt like the author was trying to emulate a male writer instead of being herself as she was in volume one. There's a reason I read more female writers than male and for me, this author undermined that reason with this writing. Being a strong female character doesn't mean you're a hard-bitten man with tits. I'm sorry for those who've been misinformed on this score, but it doesn't.

The other problem with this 'opening scene' was Cookie's sexual attraction to the lone woman on the boat that she eventually climbed onto, out of the river. It felt predatory - like badly-written male-authored exploitation novel. Cookie is supposedly pining for the fact that her one true love, Wayne, from the first novel, has been taken prisoner. She's mentally tired and down, and is now facing the threat posed by the encroaching SWAT team, yet Cookie is thinking only of how hot the 'chick' on the boat looks. No. Just no.

And what about that with Wayne being captured? Cookie abandoned him! Yes, he told her to go, but is Cookie no longer a strong, independent character? Has she no agency? Can she no longer make her own tactical decisions like she did in volume one? Is she now enslaved to Wayne like she had been to 'Normie' at the beginning of the original novel? This approach cheapens and demeans her. It's a backward step that undermines everything she achieved in the first volume.

The macho slant in this novel made for truly unattractive, unnecessary, and sadly unpleasant reading and seemed to me to betray the whole raison d'être of the first novel. It turned me right off Cookie and by extension, the story she was telling, and I couldn't bring myself to even finish that one part, let alone read further. I can't commend this based on what I read, because it's the very antithesis of what I expected and not in any good way.

Alpha Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is one of the most original, entertaining, and amusing stories I've not read in a long time. By that I mean it was an audiobook, so I didn't even have to read it - I just sat back and listened - and laughed my ass off. There were some minor issues with it, but nothing to take away from the brilliance of the story and the hectic way it was told.

On top of this, the reader, Laci Powers, was awesome in the role and really put soul into the story and life into Cookie, the main charcter. I'm not a series fan, but I did secure the sequel to this before I even finished the first volume which is highly unusual for me. I remain nervous about sequels, and rightly so, because I did not enjoy the sequel at all. I'll review that next.

Be warned that this first volume pulls no punches, and is as explicit with language as it is with sex talk, which is to say there's a lot! That was one of the most amusing parts for me: to hear the naïve and softly-spoken Cookie talking so frankly and cussing like a sailor as she became liberated from her servitude, but this may bother other readers. I enjoyed her liberation, and I think it was made all the more amusing by Laci Powers's take on the character, too. The subtle snipes the author frequently took at male chauvinism and the genderist world order were wonderful.

Cookie Rifkin is a life-like AI robot designed to emulate a woman and to be servile and submissive to men, specifically her husband Norman. She's a gynoid if you will, but in the books they're referred to as womanoids. The thing is that, in New Stepford (get the reference?!), there are no human women, just human men. There are no children either. None of the womanoids think this is odd, that is until Cookie starts a book club with four other womanoids (Chrissy, Isabel, Paula, and Rita, all of whom have their own stories to tell), meets Wayne, finds her freedom, and becomes a startling rebel. Frankly, I think the story would have been even more powerful without Wayne. To me he was an annoyance, but this is what we have here.

The story begins innocently enough in a small homage to The Stepford Wives (and note to some ignorant reviewers: that was a novel from the same author who wrote Rosemary's Baby long before it was ever a movie!) where Cookie is wakened - and eventually woke - by the bed shaking and realizes that her husband is masturbating. This inexplicable and unexpected event in Cookie's life is what sets her off on her trail of discovery and eventual insurgency.

After meeting Wayne, Cookie encounters Maggie, who appears to be some sort of slacker police officer, but the more Cookie learns, the more she realizes that not everything in New Stepford is as it seems at first sight, and her encounters with Wayne and Maggie are not accidental. There is much more going on here, and over time, Cookie and her friends learn what real networking is, and they're not so much going to eat the forbidden fruit as overturn the entire apple cart. But it's not going to be a smooth ride by any means.

As far as problems are concerned, I said they were minor. There are times when Cookie's 'functionality' is described in ways that make her seem fully human, and at other times makes her seem very robotic, so this to me was a paradox; like for example she seems to eat and drink and breathe although she seems not to need to do any of that. The author never really went into any of the details of how she worked which was fine to begin with, but later, when Cookie learns how to upgrade herself, she seems much more robotic than she did when the story began, so it felt a bit like the rules of the world were changing, and this was a bit confusing, but it wasn't enough of a problem to detract from the story for me.

Also the upgrading is a bit problematic in another way. I don't want to give away spoilers, but in a way it's reminiscent of a time travel story where something goes wrong in the past and it would seem perfectly simple to just go back before that time and nip the problem in the bud, but the author makes up some arbitrary rule why that's not possible and it spoils the story for me. In the same way in this story (which involves no time-travel let me be clear!) Cookie's upgrades seem endless, but when she could have used a relatively minor upgrade to get her out of a tricky situation, she seems not to think of doing the very thing that could solve her problem. This rather demeans Cookie's agency and her inventiveness.

It made for a bit of a deus ex machina situation at some points and a 'Cookie has to be dumb not to think of that' at others, with problems being very easily solved at times, whereas at other times, they seemed insoluble by using the same convenient means. It was a bit inconsistent. I was enjoying the story enough that I let that slide, but this may bother some readers. Additionally, there is no real LGBTQIA angle to this story. There's a tease here and there, like the author is intrigued by Sapphic stories, but is too afraid to explore one for herself; so this is essentially hetero all the way

Overall though, I highly commend this story as beautifully done, entertaining, amusing, and even educational. I'm just sorry the sequel was a different thing altogether.

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book read competently by Emily Woo Zeller. The story is of two childhood friends, one of whom, Aveda Jupiter (note that this is her superhero name), grew up to be a renowned - if spoiled rotten - San Francisco super hero, whereas the other, Evie Tanaka, who also has a power, had such a traumatic experience with it when younger that she tamped it down and is happy - so she thinks - to play sidekick to her friend. On the one hand Asian superheroes is a good thing, but on the other, Asian stereotypes is a godawful thing.

I don't know if the author did this on purpose, but Aveda backwards is 'a diva' (near enough!), and it suits the character perfectly. Other parts of this story were amusing too, to begin with, and I liked that the 'super villain' approach here was something off the beaten track, but I DNF'd this about halfway through because I grew sick and tired of the ham-fisted and telegraphed from ten miles away 'romance' between Evie and the macho-muscled guy who also worked on Aveda's team. Their codependent relationship was the exact opposite of romantic and once again we get a novel where sexual diseases seem not to exist - at least they don't with regard to people talking about them before diving into sex. Also I didn't like the 'Jupiter' part of the hero's name. What was that all about ? Rip off Watchmen much?

There was another problem with this, too, and arguably it was the biggest one. Evie was far too weak and servile for my taste. She just annoyed the hell out of me. She did begin to rebel, but it took her half of the novel before she even remotely started to get pissed-off with the truly shitty way she was treated by Aveda. This is a toxic relationship and Evie needed to get out of it, yet no one is advising her along those lines.

I know these guys a have a long history together, but that made it harder to understand how Evie had been so subjugated for so long. Plus Evie's oft stated desire is to be normal - no superpower - but if she's that into it, why the hell doesn't she get out of the superhero life and find a "normal" job where she's not stressed, and get that life for herself? Her show and tell are completely at odds with one another.

Also we're told like fifty million times that Evie is shut-down with regard to sex (again due to her traumatic experience), and despite it being entirely possible that she is in fact asexual, this is never addressed. Instead, people are all along essentially telling her that she needs to get laid. Do I actually have to say this is the wrong approach? Not only that, it's entirely insensitive to anyone who actually is asexual.

This shut-down of Evie's inexplicably turns to rampant explicit (be warned) passion with almost no overture. The book is very mature (or immature depending on how you view it!) in a lot of language use and explicit situations, so it's not your usual PG-13 YA book The characters are all in their twenties, but appear much younger if judged from their behavior and speech patterns. It's like they're a bunch of stalled frat boys instead of super hero team. Evie also has a kid sister who is thoroughly obnoxious and pays no price for her attitude or her behavior. It's wrong. Worse though is that this teenage kid has a drinking problem that no one takes seriously.

Starting early in the story Evie is forced to step-up from side-kick to hero - or rather, hero impersonator - since (aided by a glamor from another guy whose super power is magic) she has to stand in for Aveda when the hero is injured and doesn't want to show weakness in front of her fans. It's all about fans and rather than care about what TV or news media might say, everything in this story inexplicably hinges on some chick who writes a blog and is so two-faced about it that it's not even a secret, yet no one ever calls her on her manic approach to blogging about Aveda, not even Evie, who is supposedly so protective of Aveda and her reputation.

No matter what the blogger "prints," the team continues to suck up to her and give her exclusive interviews. It was just stupid, and ridiculous to present her as the only voice in town worth listening to. Her big blog story (as this kicks off) is the zit on Aveda's face. Yeah, if this were really a young teen book, I could see that flying, maybe, but no, this is a grown-up book (supposedly), and it just felt stupid and thoroughly inauthentic, especially since it just went on and on, entirely ignoring what she'd just done to save the city. If that had been used as an example to show shallow, but mixed with other reports, that would be one thing, but it would seem that shallow is all this novel has on offer. Despite my really wanting to read this initially, I was about ready to kiss-off the story right there when finally the zit meme was done with, so I kept reading. More fool me.

Naturally Evie's latent power starts surfacing as her impersonation of Aveda drags on long past it's sell-by date, and there's a conflict, but by this point I was so tired of the poor writing and Evie's complete lack of a backbone that I couldn't stand to read any more. I moved on to a middle-grade audio book, and liked that significantly more even though it too, had problems. I guess I should have realized from the title 'heroine' as opposed to 'hero' that this novel would be all wrong for me. Not that I'd prefer to read a book about guys, but it bugs me that women have to be heroines, whereas the guys are heroes. Why not all heroes? Why does the female have to have a specially reserved title? She can't be a hero? And before you jump on that, the word 'hero' has no gender, or if it does and we go by the earliest use, it was the name of a priestess!

So in short, this is a big no: it isn't ready for prime time, it tells the wrong story, misleadingly so given the book description, and it's poorly written.