Kris Longknife: Deserter by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WORTHY!

This author has a series of (as of this writing) fourteen novels with titles just like these - the main character's name, along with a single dramatic word which usually doesn't apply until late in the novel, and is never as bad as it seems. it's a series which, to read and enjoy, you need to turn off certain analytical parts of your brain, and take a very large grain of salt, and if you're willing to do that, you can enjoy some pretty good mindless entertainment from these.

In volume one Kris didn't become a mutineer until the last three dozen or so pages, and even then it was to prevent an illegal war being fomented by her captain. In this volume, she's on a week's leave, but is trapped on a planet by a quarantine and a communications blackout, so she isn't really deserting. She also gets an entourage and becomes a princess. How that works is a bit of a mystery. I guess the author didn't think an heroic naval lieutenant was quite special enough to write about.

Kristine Anne Longknife is the descendant of aged war heroes who are still alive because about four hundred years from now there will be longevity treatments (which probably explains why humanity has been forced to farm itself out to some six hundred planets, which are, of course, at odds with each other and forming shifting alliances). One of her 'grampas', named Ray, is promoted to king. I have no idea how that's supposed to work or why anyone in this society in this universe would do that, except of course to make Kris a princess and give her even more powers and privileges than she already has, being the trust-funded daughter of massive wealth.

It was in order to get out from under this yoke, so we're told, that she joined the navy, but nowhere did she ever eschew her money or family privilege, so her motives are rather suspect if not downright hypocritical. That said, however, the stories do make for a fast, fun read. I think the author set out to write movies in book form, evidently hoping that Hollywood would take notice, because that's how this series reads, and in this volume he even goes so far as to parody himself by having his characters remark, on more than one occasion, as to what would be happening if this were a movie. Chances are that you're either going to like this or hate it. I tend to pass over the annoying bits (such as the overly smart movie style wise-cracking in which the team indulges itself) without paying much attention, and slide right on by to the more entertaining pieces, which are common enough for me to be able to enjoy these volumes despite issues.

In this particular one, Kris gets a 'body servant' (named Abby) added to her entourage inexplicably by her mother! Please note that none of this seems intended to make any real sense. Prior to this, her only regular companion was her bodyguard, named predictably (and irritatingly) Jack, who is all but perfect. Fortunately, he does very little except pose and talk tough. He's not really there to guard her body, but for Kris to have someone to lust after secretly, and flirt with openly. While I flatly refuse to read any more novels which have name the lead character 'Jack', I do make occasional exceptions when there's a Jack who isn't the main character.

Abby has some sort of a secret agent background which is revealed later in the series, although it's obvious something oddball is going on pretty much as soon as she shows up. Jack doesn't follow Kris on her navy duties, but when she's off duty and at home. In this volume, her best friend Tommy, a weird amalgam of Chinese and Irish, who is actually neither in practice and who seems to be there solely in the role of maiden in distress, disappears and it's evident he's been kidnapped. It's also evident that this is a trap set up to get Kris, so naturally she goes anyway, and gets trapped when the planet is quarantined for Ebola(!) and the entire off-planet communications network breaks down so the planet is also isolated in that regard. The weird thing is that not a single spacecraft shows up to try and find out why this planet suddenly went dead! Despite how important Kris is, not a single person comes after her from her home planet, which is nonsensical.

Kris and her team rescue Tommy and hook up with Tommy's blossoming love interest, Penny. Kris gets to expose her bodily acreage (as she does in every volume) and blow things up, while fighting back against the bad guy and condescending the poor folks who live there. It's not great story-telling by any means, but it is entertaining if you don't take it seriously.

Kris Longknife: Mutineer by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WORTHY!

I've read many of this series, which is a follow-on to an earlier series about a different generation of the Longknife family, and one which I haven't read. I fell in love with the Kris Longknife novels, and read them avidly, but this was before I blogged reviews. My plan this year is to read the entire series, including two or three volumes I've acquired more recently, but not yet read. I'll be doing at least one per month, and posting a review for each one. I'll probably blow through this series rather quickly if the time it took me to get through the first novel is any gauge! For me they're very readable, despite an issue or two I had with them. I think it helps to go into this thinking of it more as a movie than a novel, because it reads like a movie script that's been fleshed out into a novel more than it reads like a novel that's written in the hope it might make a movie someday.

The first volume introduces a new member of the Longknife family: Kristine, who has recently joined the navy, which of course in this case is the space navy. I have to say this makes little sense to me, although it is a trope which pervades virtually all space operas that have a significant military component. I was surprised to discover that there's rather more of the David Weber touch in the Longknife novels than I remember from the first time I read them - and I don't mean that in a complimentary way, although I was a fan of Weber for a while.

Like in Weber's novels, the space fleet is very much a branch of the navy, a tired cliché in which far too many sci-fi writers indulge. They have fleets of ships which seem constrained by the maneuvering capabilities of sail ships from Georgian times, cavorting on a two dimensional ocean, rather than powerful craft traversing a three dimensional vacuum. I know a lot of sci-fi readers love it when authors gaze into their naval, but I don't. To me this approach is short-sighted, uninventive, and rather a lazy way of writing. It's also very Americanized. It's the US (although in this case named United Sentients, which is really clunky!) navy, not any other navy, despite the supposed homogenization of assorted planets, including Earth. In this case it's not even Earth, but an entirely different planet, yet these are American writers who can't seem to avoid Americanisms, American bureaucracy, and American historical references. There's even a reference to radio Shack! That's like a contemporary novel referencing a store form medieval times. It's rather blinkered and too often smacks of jingoism.

In the sixties, and after a rocky start, the US became without question the leader in space travel and technology, but that impressive lead bled dry over the next four decades. Now it's the Russians and the Chinese who are, if not exactly blazing trails, at least riding them, while the US sits without any means to put people into space. Even private industry is taking over, and after filling the astronaut ranks with white male military personnel, the diversity amongst astronauts is increasing significantly. Satellites aside, there is no military presence in space, so whence this impetus to have space navies in the future? Whence the sad bureaucracy which accompanies it?

Out of curiosity, I looked up the original seven Mercury astronauts, thinking they were largely air force personnel. As it happens only three were air force per se. Another three were navy, and the final one was a marine, but with one exception, all of them were primarily aviators. Even the exception, while beginning his career as a regular Navy officer, moved into aviation, so none of them were traditional navy personnel in the old fashioned sense. This was primarily a flying exercise not a naval exercise, yet now we're awash with navy references in sci-fi space operas. How weird is that?

I know that David Weber deliberately set out to replicate the Horatio Hornblower novels, which provides a root cause at least, if not exactly an explanation for his tedious by-rote naval parallels, but why anyone else would choose to go that route is a mystery and a disappointment to me. I honestly wonder why spacecraft are referred to as ships rather than as some sort of flying machine? Naturally they're not airplanes, since there's no air in space, but there's no water either, so why ships? Is it for no other reason than that they're simply larger than any airplane? Ships were what we had before airplanes, so even the pilot is a captain, but he's still a pilot! I guess old habits are really hard to break, and people don't like to think of large aircraft as anything other than ships.

Even if we let that go, there's still the bureaucracy. Shepherd employs the same US bureaucratic and stagnated institutions which Weber uses: Bureau of Personnel, which he refers to as BuPer(s), just as David Weber does. There are other such bureaus. too, such as BuShips, and so on. It's tedious and unrealistic. I think Elizabeth Moon does a far more realistic job in her Vatta's War pentalogy, which I recommend, and will also get around to reviewing at some point. I have mixed feelings about the Star Trek universe, but I think they got it right - or at least closer to right than too many sci-fi authors manage. Yes, they still start with the captain and descend through all the other such naval ranks, but the ships are not primarily 'war ships' - not the ones featured in the series. They're spacecraft of exploration so we don't get the same bureaucratic tedium and military saber-rattling in which other stories wallow.

That said, let's set it aside and get on with a look at the story itself, because the nicest thing about this series is that it isn't a space-naval-opera. I understand in the early editions of this book there were misspellings and grammar issues galore. In the paperback I read there were very, very few. Kris is a navy ensign, and she's depicted in some scenes aboard the navy craft, but most of this first story finds her on the surface of one of three planets. We meet her as she's leading a mission to rescue a kidnapped girl, and the mission almost falls apart. It is Kris's expert flying skills which save the mission.

This brief introduction in the first few chapters puts her head above the radar when it comes to another mission - to go to a water-logged planet and distribute food. This occupies the bulk of the novel but by no means all of it, and some of it makes no sense. We're told that a huge volcanic eruption had clouded the sky, and continual torrential downpours are washing out crops and roads. We never do learn how it manages to be raining the entire time she's there. With that much rain, the ash and soot would be gone from the sky in short order and the rain would stop!

A better question is where is this rain coming from? If the rainfall is planet wide, then where is the water being evaporated to feed the continual rain? If there's a clear sky somewhere else, then why not move the people there? If they're moving equipment off planet because the acid rain damaging it, then it's going to be damaging the soil. People need to be evacuated off planet too!

I read a lot of negative reviews on this to see if I needed to take into account anything my positive outlook had not covered, and I failed to find any. A lot of the reviews mentioned inconsistencies and logic problems but not a single one of them detailed any! That's not a review it's just a complaint! Maybe these reviewers had a case, but if they did, they failed to make it. This is why I got into reviewing in the first place - to write more useful reviews and to discuss author technique and general writing style. Yes, there are problems with every book - plot inconsistencies and issues, which I highlight, but the issue isn't whether there are any (it's fiction, so there always are), but whether those problems and issues spoil the. For me they did not. This doesn't mean a book is perfect. None are, but the bottom line is whether the novel overall is worth reading. For me, it was. I enjoyed the story and the characters.

The book blurb is completely wrong in one regard. It says, "...she enlists in the marines" and she does not. She's in the navy. This is one excellent reason to ditch Big Publishing™ they're utterly clueless. The people who illustrate the cover and write the blurbs are usually in shameful ignorance of the actual content of the book since they've never read it. They're "just doing what they're told" which is pathetic and no excuse whatsoever.

I noted that some reviewers have chided this because it doesn't take place in space (at least not as much as they think it should), but it's not set in space per se. It's just a futuristic action-adventure story. I think those reviewers went into it after reading David Weber's Honor Harrington series. There is no rule that says this has to be a space opera, although in parts it read like one. I've also seen Mike Shepherd accused of trying to emulate David Weber, and while he does appear to mimic Weber for some of the space scenes and background military story, so does every author, as does Weber. To me, that stuff is boring, which is why I quit reading the Weber series. it started out well but went into the toilet.

Shepherd emulates him with regard to the space conflicts, but any story about a navy, on the ocean or in space, is going to be the same in many regards since most writers really aren't that original, but just because there are parallels doesn't mean the story is a copy. With regard to Weber v. Shepherd, Shepherd's background is the Navy, whereas Weber's is in games and sci-fi literature, so I'd give Shepherd precedence for knowing the navy! At least Shepherd isn't rooted in the nineteenth century as Weber is, which is patently absurd! That said, he could have done a lot better, because his "naval battles" are far too rooted in the same problems that Weber's are - battle ships in 2D on an ocean, not spacecraft in a 3D vacuum. he makes the same mistake that Weber does with regard to a complete lack of robots and drones. Any navy which sought to conduct itself as Weber's and Shepherd's navies do would get it's ass kicked royally by a realistic navy four hundred years into the future!

Kris is possibly an alcoholic. It's a mess and it's hard to decide if she really was one, or just a teen who drank too much. I suspect it was the latter, which excuses Shepherd in the way he addresses Kris's sobriety and her behavior around alcohol. On this same issue of Kris's personal problems, the stress on her tragically kidnapped brother is rather overdone. I can see it at the beginning, where she's in process of freeing a kidnapped child, but her feelings seem to be far too raw to be left from a decade or more ago. Military training doesn't seem to have helped. Novel might have done better had it skipped the large central section on Flooded planet, and instead follow Kris through basic training where she could have worked through her issues. That said, her Eddy fixation is really only dwelt on this rescue mission, so naturally her thoughts are with her brother then. Later, she's far less preoccupied by his, and this to me seemed realistic.

So none of this made sense, and the phrase "one of those Longknifes" is way-the-hell overused in this series, but the story wasn't so ridiculous that I could simply not stand to read it. I liked the story and went with the flow - literally in this section! I liked the way Kris was depicted here. She slowly grew into her shoes. She was no Mary Sue and she made mistakes, but she was smart and figured things out in her own way. She had a good attitude and a can-do sense of mission, and she sorted the place out in her own way. You'd think this part was the big story, but it was what happened after this which shows us why the novel is titled Kris Longknife: Mutineer, and again it's down to her smarts and quick thinking.

Despite some issues, the story was eminently readable because it was a good story. It held my interest, made me willing to overlook some issues, and it rather subtly laid some groundwork for a sequel, without hitting the reader over the head or leaving them in the slimy grip of a cliffhanger. Despite issues and personal preferences, I recommend this novel as a worthy read.

A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac

Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
"...take it to my Rob." should be "...take it to my Uncle Rob." maybe?

This novel was a roller-coaster of "Do I like it?" or "Do I not?" I started out liking it, started going sour on it around 40%, and then came back to it, so despite several issues (which are not easy to discuss without giving away too many spoilers) I decided, overall, that this is definitely a worthy read. Let's talk!

This was an advance review copy, for which I am grateful, and it’s in first person PoV which is typically horrible for me. 1Pov is so full of self-importance and self-aggrandizement, and it’s 'all me all the time', which can be sickening to read. It limits the story to the narrator's PoV, which is too restrictive, plus it gives a huge spoiler away - you know for a fact that no matter what happens, the narrator isn’t going to come to any serious harm because they're telling the story and they wouldn't be able to, had they died during it, so all suspense in that regard is lost. In this case, the author managed to carry this PoV without nauseating me, so I'm also grateful for that, but I felt that this caused a problem with the ending, which is rather hard to discuss without giving things away that I don’t want to spoil. I'll try to discuss it briefly later.

The basic story is told by Clare, who is living happily insulated (by the entire width of the continental USA!) from her family and the town in which she grew up on the east coast. The sudden shooting death of her parents drives her back. She is now the legal guardian of her brother Wes, who has some serious mental issues very much tied to Biblical matters, in particular, angels versus demons. This is not, however, a paranormal story; it's a sci-fi one with some elements of dystopia tossed into the mix.

This business of guardianship was my first issue because it made no sense. Clare is in her thirties (nice ot get a sotry abotu an older woman, so kudos for that!), and as such is a responsible adult, but Wes is also an adult, and he's being discharged and is planning on moving into his own apartment, so I don’t get why he has a guardian, and nothing in the text made this clear to me. He's either fit to live his own life or he isn’t. This was further confused by the fact that Wes's uncle lives right there in town, so why is he not the guardian? Clare has made it perfectly clear that she wants nothing to do with her hometown and hasn’t been back there in a decade or more. To me it made no sense, not even as a ploy to bring Clare back to town; she's coming back for the funeral anyway!

Yes, the funeral! Clare discovers that her mom and dad were shot by a family friend, who also then shot himself. When she flies back for the funeral, and to take charge of Wes, she encounters some bizarre behavior among the patients at the hospital and pretty soon it becomes clear what's going on. A prion disease hilariously named Gaspereau has sprung up, and is very dangerous. It makes people behave psychotically. Why Gaspereau? I have no idea. I found it hilarious because I kept thinking of The Tale of Despereaux, so I couldn’t take the name seriously. Couldn’t it have been named something else? Please?! This disease made little sense because it supposedly wasn't airborne (although prions can go that route), yet it was spreading ridiculously fast - too fast to be credible for the vector it took.

The real issue for Clare however (apart from her backstory secret which explained a lot), was that Wes appeared to be immune, and so his presence was forcefully demanded back at the hospital so they could use him to find a cure, or at least a vaccine. This was the second thing which made no sense to me. Clare shared the same genes that Wes did, yet absolutely no interest was shown in her. As desperate as these people were to get a quick fix for this epidemic, it made no sense that Clare would not have been considered. This leads me to my third problem, which is that Clare wasn't very smart, and was, frankly, a bit juvenile for her age and rather selfish. I did manage to explain away the latter two problems - to my satisfaction anyway! - when I learned her back-story, but the first was harder to excuse.

I don’t demand a genius in my female main character, but I do require that they're not painfully dumb, or if they start out dumb, that they smarten-up over the course of the story. Clare never really did, although she came through for me in other ways, which is one reason I am rating this positively. Clare wasn't the only dumb cluck. Not even the trained medical staff considered every option. I've worked with medical staff and this was a bit of a stretcher for me to swallow; however, I enjoyed the overall story so much that I was willing to overlook these issues, even the one with the 'fluffybunnies' password!

Yes, the password was hilarious, but Clare didn’t even ask if it had any capital letters or number substitutions for letters. When the password appears in print, you can see what it is, but when it’s merely spoken to you, you have no idea about punctuation or the fine details. Clare should have asked since she was not reading this novel! Or Kenneth ought to have explained it was "all one word, all lower case." It’s a minor point, but too many such points can spoil the credibility of a novel.

The ending was a bit abrupt. I would have liked more, but maybe short and to the point was better. I had ot read it twice to make sure I got it, and I gather i am not the only reviewer who was in this position. That said, I have to refer back to my problems with first person PoV. I think it was the wrong choice here. I freely admit that I typically think it's the wrong choice, but it can work. Here though, I think third person would have been a better approach, because a first person story-teller made little sense given the ending. That's all I'm going to say on that topic!

The funny thing about the ebook - which, by the way had no horrible formatting issues, thankfully - was that it announced on my phone's Kindle app that there were 4133 locations, but it would not let me swipe past location 4129. Wait - there are four secret locations? Is this evidence that there really is a government conspiracy? What are they keeping from me about this novel?! LOL! It was an amusing 'end' to a very readable story. When all is said and done, I recommend this as a worthy read.

Parallel by Lauren Miller

Rating: WARTY!

Parallel is a young adult novel about a girl who is trapped between two parallel worlds, each containing a slightly different version of her life. This happened when these two world somehow came into contact, resulting in an earthquake in the one version, and inexplicable dull headache in the other. I'm not sure that the author really understands what a parallel universe means, although the science is not fringe, by any means. Parallel universes are the inevitable outcome of the physics we have which gives us our best understanding of how the universe came to be - to date! It's always 'to date' in the world of science because understanding can change with new information. The problem is that if two of these universes collided, you'd be probably more likely to end up with a brand new Big Bang and a third universe created than you would be to get an earthquake and a headache, but this is fiction, so go with it, right?

I don't mind it when authors play fast and loose with science if they can give me a good story, but for an author to shrink an event of this magnitude down to a teenage girl's love triangle is taking things way too far for my taste, and doing real science a disservice. The story is written like the only important thing this massive event affected is Abby Barnes's career plans, and no one else noticed! Say what?! In the entire universe, the only sentient being who is aware of what's going on is Abby? Doesn't that make her special! And rest assured she is very special. She has the perfect life and the perfect career path and the perfect friend and the perfect family and everything is laid out perfectly to perfection. Yep, this isn't Abby Barnes, it's Mary Sue!

I enjoyed the opening chapter, but by chapter two I was already having issues with this, and by a quarter the way through I was really feeling like this was going nowhere that had not been gone before by a thousand crappy YA novels replete with high school melodrama and love triangles. I mean, seriously, this girl is aware of an Earth shattering event (almost literally!), where two parallel universes have collided, and yet rather than focus on that, she's much more interested - forget that, she's much more obsessed - with some random guy she met that she's inexplicably head-over-heels in love with after one drunken date than ever she is with this incredible event! I lost all respect for her when she became a jellyfish if he so much as breathed in her direction (this spinelessness actually happened on one occasion, I kid you not).

Her behavior is that of a fourteen year old freaking over the latest music star than ever it is the behavior of a supposedly smart and together career path student in her late teens. I get that even though this has happened, she has to get on with her life, and that her life is rather more difficult to get on with than most, but seriously? It was laughable how shallow she was. Worse than that, she was not likable, nor was her snotty friend Caitlin who was not only runway model gorgeous (so-called), but has the brains of Einstein. Not that that can't happen (Marilyn vos Savant I'm looking at you!), but question here was: is there anywhere in this cozy little universe that perfection has not pervaded?

Abby's original plan had been to go to journalism school at Northwestern after which she would then get a job at a newspaper. This was set in 2009, admittedly, but newspapers were going down the toilet even then, and this is her career plan? Yes, they moved online, but who at Abby's age, even considers newspaper, print or online, a source of news these days? I don't doubt that some do, and that Abby should, but she never even talks about newspapers, keeping up with the news, reading web news sites or anything. She doesn't even blog! It's a total disconnect, but then this was written by a lawyer, so maybe that explains something.

The only fly in Abby's luxuriously creamy ointment isn't even technically in her ointment so why it's such a bother to her is a mystery. This fly is named Ilana (and I had the hardest time, because of the typeface used in the hardback, figuring out what the heck her name was. Was it LIANA? LLANA? ILANA?! Ilana (the latter version) was the most abused character in this universe, and for no good reason except that Caitlin and Abby simply spewed vitriol at her with far more dedication than even the most rabid skunk will try to get you.

They didn't even care that their purported best friend Tyler (can we get names any more down-home than these three: Abby, Caitlin, Tyler? really?) likes her and hangs with her. They abuse her anyway and Tyler never even gets pissed off with their attitude! Not that Ilana was exactly the most pleasant person on the planet, but it occurred to me that the reason she was that way, was because of the endless hate rays being beamed at her by the truculent twins. The only difference between these girls, as far as I could tell, was that the one actually had sex, while the other two were all but virginal, so obviously they had the moral high ground and Ilana was lower than snake vomit. Ri-ight! Got it. Is that the legal view? No wonder rape victims get nervous about reporting such crimes.

I honestly don't get why you would want to introduce a fascinating and cutting-edge sci-fi element into your YA novel, if all you're going to do then is tell a trope YA love triangle/high school melodrama story with it? What a chronic waste! The weird thing about it was that these two worlds which merged were not even at the same date. One was exactly a year out from the other, for no apparent reason. In what way was it parallel again? As the story bounced inexplicably back and forth between them, the younger Abby was seeing her carefully constructed baby blanket unravel in the present, and finding her life completely different from what she had planned.

We're told that the two worlds she is shown in are supposedly merging slowly, and she's afraid of losing herself, but she's losing herself in herself, so it's a bit weird and intriguing on that score. It's a bit like having schizophrenia, I suppose. In the future she can recall what happened in the past, but only bit by bit, just like she can only "recall" the new skills she has developed when it comes down to the wire. This made no sense to me, and it quickly became tedious, because Abby's perfect life only had the most minuscule of problems: like she didn't want to coxswain the boat for the rowing team.

Frankly she was pathetic, and not worth reading about.

Doctor Who 2 The Girl Who Waited, The Boy Who Lived by various writers and artists

Rating: WARTY!

I hate to end my 2015 reviews on a negative note, but this is the second of two novels I didn't like that I'm reviewing today! Fortunately I got them both from the library so I wasn't out anything but my time! Annoying as that is, it's not as bad as throwing good money after bad literature. I love my local library and all who sail in her!

I'm a big fan of the Doctor Who TV series, despite recently concluded series nine being rather less than satisfactory, but my experience with Doctor Who in written (as opposed to visual) form has been so unsatisfactory that I'm giving up reading Doctor Who stories! I will simply have to wait until series ten starts next year for my next fix!

This fat, hardback, large-format graphic novel weighed a ton, but while the artwork - by assorted artists - was okay, and in some cases good (except for the sad cover), the stories were derivative and uninventive with tired old characters being recycled in unengaging ways. For the most part, the stories, evidently compiled from individually-released comics, were not entertaining and I liked only one of them (out of a dozen or so). It was a double-feature, and the only saving grace it boasted was Kevin the dinosaur who turned out to be more interesting than Jim the Fish. The latter has had several mentions in the TV show, but has failed to put in an appearance so far, and he (or she!) is unlikely to put in an appearance now that River Song has evidently been retired from the series.

There were Sontarans and Silurians doing nothing interesting. There was a text-free Santa Claus story which made no sense at all to me. There was a sad Jack the Ripper story, and though there were lots of references to canonical events and catch-phrases from the TV show, the stories which contained them were lifeless and sadly executed. I can't recommend this one.

The Last Fall by Tom Waltz

Rating: WARTY!

I wasn't impressed by this rather gory graphic novel which really brought nothing new to the table. It was a mishmash of other sci-fi stories including a dash of Avatar wherein the brash rebel soldier falls in love with one of the enemy. Here it made no sense whatsoever. This young man, Sergeant Marcus Fall, was so filled with blind hatred of the Krovinites that his transition to pacifism made absolutely no sense whatsoever, much less his falling for one of them.

I read this advance review copy in electronic form on a decent desktop monitor, and the text was too small to read comfortably. I can't speak for the print version, but I wouldn't recommend reading this on an iPad, unless the text is improved considerably in the published edition. It was complete gibberish on that first page. Some of the text was humorously compressed. When I read, "What is he doing?" it looked like it read, "What is he dong." Another section read like it was "No talking, only dong" which is unfortunate at best! I skipped the introductory page because it was far too small to read the labeling on the solar system map, and the white on black text was just annoying. Maybe the final version is better.

The story is your standard fighting over a resource. This takes place outside of our solar system but is still fought largely between white guys. There is only a token few people of color despite people of color being in the huge majority on Earth. The soldiers on Fall's squad are clad in bulky suits of space-age armor and the carry swords and battle axes for no apparent reason other than gore. They look like a space-age A team. Fall's CO, Lieutenant Cole, looks Like a clown version of Mr T. He and a soldier named Lockwood are coincidentally about the only people of color on their side. Sgt Fall looks like he's ten years old, and he's a good Aryan soldier with yellow blonde hair and blue eyes. No wonder he wants to wipe out the other side and is constantly at odds with his darker shaded CO.

There are no robots here, for reasons unexplained. Yeah - the explanation is that writers can't get any emotional resonance out of an army of robots, although in this case the characters may as well have been robots being programmed and reprogrammed and on one note only. It was therefore amusing to me that the military was religious! Evidently the writers are fans of the Doctor Who episode Time of the Angels and its sequel, which, if true, is commendable, but this story didn't bring anything new. It never felt like any of these characters really believed what they were saying, not even the most dedicated religious devotees. Overall, the story made no sense, was constantly interrupted by boring flashbacks, and failed to really engage me at all. I only finished it because it was quite short. I can't recommend it.

Boy-1 by HS Tak

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"descision" on p98 should be "decision"

Boy-1 has a lot in common with the rebooted planet of the apes - genetic manipulation. They have super-intelligent chimpanzees, but the real focus, for reasons unexplained, is on producing genetically superior humans. Their DNA donor is code-named Clark Kent, for example. Jadas Riezner is a pill-popping young man with predictable issues, who is inexplicably in charge of the lab where the genetic manipulation is going on. He has, of course, the requisite "hot" girlfriend, who is evidently both very willing and long-suffering, and he has a 'Jarvis' in the form of a pale blue holographic face which somehow is supposed to help him with the experiments, and which magically hovers in the air in his lab. Jarvis here is named Victor, and "he" speaks in matching pale blue text which was actually hard to read.

Victor tells us he has already started on the experiment by tweaking chromosomes for disease resistance, and for "prolonged lung capacity". I have no idea what that is. We all have prolonged lung capacity - some people can reach a century or more on one pair of lungs. How much more prolonged do you need? I suspect what was meant here was increased lung capacity, but that would do no good without corresponding changes to the rest of the respiratory system, so the science here is a bit shaky, but not abysmally bad.

There was an unfortunate amount of active genderism and passive racism in this, which in some ways isn't surprising - it's a comic book and those features seem to go hand-in-glove. In any rational way it's disturbing that the girlfriend - and very nearly all other females featured here - are included purely as sex objects (with the naughty bits excluded, of course!). All the lab people are white males. Even Victor is really a white male notwithstanding his blue tinge. Victor utters genderist pronouncements like "...man discovered genetic superiority 700 years ago...." I suspect it was a lot earlier that that, and whoever was the first to have these ideas, who is to say it was not a woman? It would not have hurt to have phrased that as "...humans discovered genetic superiority many years ago...."

Jadas's issue is his dad, who evidently has disappeared and of course, Jadas knows squat about him. His dad was a scientist, so you know there's something going on with Jadas. The latter asks Victor, an AI which has been around in one form or another for a long time, for his help, but Victor can't remember! Jadas magically ditches his prescription pill addiction and starts investigating. Down in the computer area, the IT guy evidently knows squat. He opens a drive door and the drive slides out like it's a CD. No. These drives are sealed to keep out air and dust (and yes, this applied even in the nineties). You can't slide one open like that. Worse, the IT guy says he "wiped the drive to see what's left" I dunno. Maybe he means he wiped it with an oily rag, because if you actually wipe a drive then there's nothing left because it means you erased it all! LOL! It's highly unlikely that old data from the nineties would be on drives. It'd be more likely on digital back-up tapes stored off-site.

I would have been happy with the story as it was at this point, but there was a rather predictable back-story to it. There's a secret about Jadas. It's not just that he can ride the subway without having a penny on him! Nor is it that he's questioned by someone who thinks her name (rather than her title and name) is Dr Martinez! She was one of the few women in this story who was not a prostitute, a bad guy, or a submissive mating partner. So she was in it for only a few panels, of course. But there's a disease spreading out of Nigeria, and apparently Jadas's history and this disease are connected. Suddenly Jadas is on the run, and everyone wants to find him.

Like I said, I had some issues with the science, and with the author's idea of how evolution works. You can't create a 'superman' by genetic manipulation, because genes mutate, not only in your super-race, but also in diseases. This is how evolution works. Even if you created someone with powerful genetic resistance to disease, disease would evolve to combat your improvements and over time, down the generations, humans would succumb again, even had they been bred from 'super parents'. The fact is though, that we already are super people in a sense. We're the ones endowed with genes which have survived endless onslaught from disease and parasites. Our genes are super genes, having proven themselves for literally thousands of years, but as you can see from disease outbreaks all over the world, they will never be super enough to do what this story argues has been done.

If you're willing to overlook that, then this graphic novel may well do the trick for you, and be a worthy read. For me, the story wasn't that compelling, and it was far too white and genderist for my taste. For all the talk about global communities, almost the entire 'cast' of this novel was white. Even the Chinese people looked Caucasian. The two black guys featured were both shown in subservient roles. The fact is that although humans, having been through a bottleneck, are genetically homogenous, the greatest genetic diversity is found in Africans. I would have made more sense if Jadas had been a black child, and even more sense if he had been a she, since female infants tend to be much more hardy than males.

It's for these reasons that I'm not willing to rate this as a worthy read. Comic books are never going to shed their juvenile baggage if they continue to approach stories from an immature perspective.

The Private Eye by Brain K Vaughan, Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente

Rating: WORTHY!

This graphic novel was immediately interesting, well-written, brightly colored, and unusually, every "page" was a two-page spread! I liked this, but it makes the comic a bit small for reading on the iPad, and impossible on a smart phone! I read it on a desktop computer with a reasonably large screen. I used Adobe Digital Editions opened to full screen and it looked wonderful like that. I can't speak for how the print edition will look.

The novel's setting is either set in the near future, or set in an alternate reality. It wasn't completely clear, but the world is very much like ours except more futuristic (and in some cases anachronistic). This is a world where people routinely wear disguises. The reason for this was a cloud burst (after a fashion!) and subsequent flood of private information across the Internet which turned everyone obsessive about privacy. Now there's no internet, and it's all but impossible to find out anything about anyone. The people who do the investigations are not the police. I don't know what happened to them! The press are the ones enforcing the law! Weird but amusing, especially since they're not very good at it.

The first guy we meet appears to be a peeping Tom, but it soon becomes clear that he's actually the eponymous private eye. He's taking pictures of a woman who has just arrived home. She looks quite stunning, but then she peels off some sort of head cover in a manner rather like we routinely see in the Mission Impossible movies. Underneath, she's a lot more representative of the entire population: ordinary, and given to wearing masks. Nearly every in this country wears either a facial or a full head masks nearly all the time. Some of the masks are every elaborate, and run the gamut from the bizarre to the animal to the circus to human. The rich can afford expensive hologram projector for their masks.

The PI delivers the photos he took to the man who hired him. Curiously, the photos are on actual film, with negatives and prints. The client was someone who knew the woman in high school and was trying to track her down. This is where we learned that the PI actually does have some ethics. He won't give out her address. His next client is killed the same evening she hires him. She wants him to dig up any dirt on her that he can find, as a test for how hard it might be for her newly prospective employer to find out her secrets. And secrets she has. From that point onwards, all hell lets loose. What was she into? What did she know? Who is so bothered by it that they're willing to kill - and not just her?

The story borrows from a lot of movies for its artistic inspiration. The cars are right out of Back to the Future - hover vehicles with folding wheels. The motorcycles look like they were taken from Star Wars - the ones where the bike frame was within the one large wheel. Some of the ideas seemed odd. Although they have those hover cars, for example, they also have payphones on street corners, which seemed highly improbable.

Those were minor complaints compared with the artistry and story-telling here though, which was engrossing and which moved apace. I loved this story, and I recommend it as a worthy read.

Doodle Adventures: The Search for the Slimy Space Slugs! by Mike Lowery

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a really cool idea to get children totally involved in reading. Of course, it doesn't work in ebook form at all! The book is, in some ways, a do-it-yourself adventure, except that in this case, the adventure is laid out, and the reader has to illustrate it in places here and there, set aside for this very purpose. There are lots of pages for kids to draw on, and lots of different, weird and fun things to draw. I could imagine myself having a lot of fun with this were I of the right age. Maybe even were I not!

The story is about space slugs - duh! - which are causing all kinds of mayhem. You, the reader, are thrown into this at the deep end because the actual agent who is supposed to take this job fails to show. Carl the duck(!) us your advisor, and if you think that's quackers, you're right, but at least he doesn't demand to be addressed as m'llard.... The question is, can you find the missing artifact? And what's in it? Why is it so important? Do you really want to know?

There's one oddball adventure after another here, all crazy and fun. The slugs turn out not to be so bad, so it's nice to see a negotiated ending, and it's nice to see some slugs are helping Carl and the reader. I liked the story. It was fun, enticingly gross in places (it's slugs!), and interesting for the age group. It had lots of doodle opportunities and the doodles are a doddle. Apart from the word 'terribly' misspelled with an extra 'e' on P102, the text was good. I recommend this.

On by Jon Puckridge

Rating: WORTHY!

This felt like reading a William Gibson Novel, which in some ways was wonderful, because it was like Gibson used to be, before he lost his direction, but in other ways it was a bad thing because once you start down the road to inventing a new cool world, there's a danger you'll go too far and ruin it by rendering it in such obscure hues that it's unintelligible to the human eye. Fortunately, while parts of this world were obtuse, this author didn’t overdo it, and the story - once I settled into it - was engrossing. It’s Gibson by way of I, Robot and A.I., with a tang of Blade Runner for seasoning, and an ominous dash of 1984 that tingles like Takifugu on the tongue. While bits of it here and there felt like info-dumps and were somewhat irritating, for the most part it read well and drew me in, and it kept me engaged right to the end.

The initial premise is that this world is an extension of our own, many years into the future, where there are sentient and emancipated robots, although it was unclear, until about 30% into the novel, whether these actually were robots, clones, advanced humans, cyborgs, or even an alien race! Perhaps that was intentional. In a way, humans are becoming more like the bots, in that technology is being used to augment people, specifically in this case, by way of connecting them mind to mind, in the same way that the Internet currently connects people device to device. I can see this happening; not in the near future, but in fifty years or a century, this is going to happen. Will it ever start drifting towards being mandatory as it does here? Will corporations be all powerful as they are here? It depends upon what foundation you place 'mandatory' - and corporations are already becoming all-powerful!

In the novel, Earth's population is some 23 billion, housed on a host of satellites as well as on the dirty and polluted planet's surface. Everything - quite literally everything - is privatized. It's known as OneWorld, perhaps because everyone who can afford it is linked via the grID system and there are no national boundaries - only corporate ones. The grID system involves communicating through headsets using visors, and is evidently rooted in something like Google Glass. Goggle Glass! The next wave of this technology is already unveiling in the novel, and it's called "ON" - where everyone is on all the time, facilitated by means of an implanted brain device, plugged into the back of the skull in a manner reminiscent of the device in The Matrix movies. Yes, there are some elements from that story in here, too.

The problem here is that while this technology is awesome and supposedly hack-proof, evidence begins accumulating that it clearly isn't anything like hack-proof. The mystery is: who is hacking it and what’s their game plan? Or is there entirely something else going on here? Investigating an oddball murder, a rooin cop starts uncovering more mysteries than he's solving. Rooin is the polite name given to robots. Females are rooines, although why robots would put up with that is a mystery.

What does it even mean to be a female robot when robots don’t reproduce like humans do? As is usual with sci-fi, parts of it made no sense, not even in context! Even if, as in the movie A.I. there were some robots which were manufactured to give pleasure to humans, it makes little sense that that particular distinction would be continued once the robots were emancipated. I didn’t get the impression that these particular robots wanted to emulate humans very much. Issues like this are rather glossed over, as they typically are in sci-fi, so you either have to decide to let it go, and relax and enjoy the story, or quit reading it and move on to something else. I continued reading!

There were some minor issues with the text, such as my pet peeve: "My name is Doctor Rafaela Serif." No, her name is Rafaela Serif . 'Doctor' is her title. It’s not her name. I see this a lot in novels, and sadly, there's nothing to be done about it! Those minor issues aside, the writing was good. A bit obscure in places, occasionally confusing in others, but overall very well done, if we ignore common faux pas such as "I found it hard to place Dos’ origins," which actually should have read " I found it hard to place Dos’s origins," since Dos here is a name and not a plural. Those kinds of thing might irritate but they're not deal-breakers for me.

Rest assured that there are some brilliant bits, too. The 1984 part came in with Tempo corporation, the owners of time - not the magazine, but the passage of time! You have to pay to get the time of day in this world, so most people don't bother. Who has the time?! No one! It’s actually a waste of time since each person's personal assistant - the grID - tells them everything they need to know regarding appointments, and so on.

No one pays any attention to time anymore, which makes it hard for the rooin who's investigating the murder to actually determine when something happened that's pertinent to his investigation. People have to refer to one event in terms of other events - such as a sports game, or some scandal with one of the corporations. It even makes it difficult to know your own age or the age of your kids. Another such charmer was that insurance rules in this world. You can even get insured against committing crime. One guy missed a payment on his identity insurance and now his identity is owned by some Chinese corporation! I Loved that.

Be warned that this is yet another novel that acknowledges the acute limitations of first person PoV by switching person frequently depending on whose story we’re following. Normally I rail against this, but in this case it was hardly noticeable - I think because the novel was so weird anyway, set in a rather alien future, that things like a shifting voice didn’t really register against all the other background noise, so it wasn't an issue, which was refreshing! The mixed views and voices made more sense at the end than they did sat the beginning.

Though this is written by an Australian author, it's hard to tell precisely because (it seems to me) it's sci-fi and as such, features many advanced concepts and buzzwords. This is the upside of the very thing which was a bit annoying to me at other times! Only a word or two here and there (a spelling of colour, as opposed to color, for example) gives it away, so for picky American audiences, too many of whom don't seem to be willing to stretch themselves outside national boundaries, there should be few problems with intelligibility or slang here. British readers will feel right at home.

Overall I rate this a very worthy read. It was interesting and engrossing, and kept me following it right to the end. I recommend it.

The Shrinking Man by Ted Adams

Rating: WORTHY!

Based on by Richard Matheson's novel, and illustrated by Mark Torres, this is Ted Adams's view of the story. Set in 1956 to begin with, Scott Carey, a six-foot tall guy who was exposed to some sort of chemical when he was younger, is out on a boat when he gets exposed to a chemical fog, and from that point on, he begins shrinking at the rate of one seventh of an inch per day, which means he has barely more than five hundred days before he's dwindled to nothing.

I have to say I really didn't like Scott, who was small even before he ever began to shrink, but you don't have to like a character to enjoy a story about them, and I really liked the way this had been translated to imagery. It bounces back and forth between the recent past, when Scot was trying to cope with the beginning of his condition, and the present, when he's only five sevenths of an inch, and had less than a week to go. Normally I don't like these 'switch-back' stories, but in this case it wasn't so bad. The present part was far less interesting than the past, even though it ought to have been more dramatic and engrossing. In the present, Scott is trapped in the basement and desperately trying to climb the fridge to get to a pack of crackers, and is also trying to fend off a black widow spider. Hey, she was a widow, maybe she just wanted to marry him?

This preference for the past story was despite the petulance of the shrinking Scott. At first he noticed no change, but then as it started to become clear he was shrinking, there were trips to doctors who could do nothing for him evidently, even though they seemed to understand what was happening, and his life began to fall apart for him. The explanation for the shrinking was a bunch of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo of him losing nitrogen and creatinine and other such things, but the doctors never really explained how that worked without him getting sick, and the reason for this is that it wouldn't work without him getting sick!

His higher brain function at the very least would be severely degraded with such shrinkage, especially as it went below the normal human range. Maybe his shrinking brain actually did create issues, because Scott's treatment of his wife and child was inexcusable. All she did as love him and support him throughout this, but he increasingly rejected her and at one point took off with a circus midget! None of this is endearing. Note that there was no issue with the midget's brain being relatively small because she hadn't shrunk to it. Instead, she had grown into it. It was normal and ordinary for her, and her intelligence was perfectly fine, whereas Scott was daily losing parts of his previously normally-functioning brain.

This is the problem with shrinking character stories. The writers of such stories (and note that this is a criticism of Matheson's original story) give no thought to the real consequences of shrinking. Let's skip over problems with the fact that this would have to be a highly coordinated loss of literally every component, even solid, rigid ones such as as bone, reducing in perfect lock-step, and go to the issue with him at five sevenths of an inch, where even mild air currents would blow him over. His climbing to the top of the fridge is portrayed as though he was still of normal proportions and regular weight, but this would not be the case. He wouldn't even be injured from a fall because his mass is so low. He would pretty much float down! But an annoying sliver on a broom handle to us, might end up as a stake through his heart!

On the other hand, his mass is so low that his shrunken muscles would be barely strong enough to function, even in pulling his reduced weight up the thread. He would probably have the functionality of a person who had been severely afflicted with polio You can't shrink a human-sized person down indefinitely before something gives out! Yes, there are some very small mammals, as indeed there are humans, but these have grown into their situation, not shrunk to it from something larger. Essentially, this is one good reason why insects are nothing like us, or more accurately, we're nothing like them, since they were here first. As his size continued to shrink there would be a point where his veins would be too small to admit passage of his corpuscles, and he would suffocate - assuming he wasn't so small at that point that air molecules couldn't effectively fill his lungs!

But scientific issues and some quibbles aside, it's fun to read a story like this where a person is thrown into what is, effectively, an alien world. That makes for the best kind of story, and please note that the quibbles are actually with the original story, not with this, which is a fine graphic representation of it and one which I think is a worthy read, as long as you're willing to let the impracticality slide! I recommend it.

A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe

Rating: WARTY!

According to the book cover, the Star-Telegram out of The Fort Worth (that's the best they could do! LOL!) says that Gene Wolfe is among the best writers working in this country - although a search of the Star-Telegram's website returns zero results for 'book review gene wolfe'. Admittedly, the Star-Telegram's search engine sucks majorly, so maybe it's in there - it's just impossible to find. Google is no better, however, at finding it, so what are we to conclude? Well I conclude that whoever wrote this acclamation (assuming someone actually did) doesn't know what they're talking about. In pursuing their desire to discover what her dad knew, Coldbrook and Smithe track down an astrophysicist her father had visited, and this "best writer" turns him into a clichéd university eccentric professor wearing tweeds, smoking a pipe (this is in the future, remember) with a clammy handshake. Seriously, that's the best this 'best writer' can do?

Coldbrook is the girl whose father and brother have died, apparently in connection with something in a novel her father had locked in his safe. Smith is the clone of the author of the novel, titled "Murder on Mars". Coldbrook checks him out in order to try and figure out what happened. In this world, writers are cloned after their death and the clones are stored in libraries where they can be consulted and checked-out like library books. I found this an intriguing idea, but the execution of it made no sense, and I quickly grew tired of the amateurish writing.

This book was published in 2015, yet it has a 1950s feel to it. Let me complement that by saying I don't mean that as a compliment. There was something off about it, and it wasn't just the first person PoV which I typically don't like. That wasn't so bad in this case, but there was something off about the writing. The story, which is told from the clone's perspective, is about Colette Coldbrook and EA Smithe as I mentioned. The latter is called a 'reclone' but I have no idea why. Clone is quite sufficient. If you clone someone a second time, it's still a clone. At first I thought 'reclone' was being used to indicate when someone had been cloned before, but this was not the case, so this pretentious use of a meaningless word was annoying. It is, however, typical of the way in which sci-fi writers write.

Talking of which, the cloned authors aren't even allowed to write, so we're told. There is more than one "edition" of the clones, so what I didn't get the value of this when databases and AI's could do the same thing much more cheaply and without any controversy. I mean, what happens when you borrow one from library A and another from library B where they've 'grown up' apart and so are different? Which one is closest to the original? We do learn what happens when they are found to be no longer of use - they're burned. How that works in detail isn't explained. What also isn't explained is what happens when the clone exceeds the age at which the original died? Are they killed and cloned anew? I cannot imagine any society tolerating this! At the very least, even if the majority accepts it, there would be a solid and vocal movement against it, but we never hear of such a movement - at least not in the fifty percent or so of this novel that I read.

Smithe is kept in a library, and these library clones are not considered human, but how that ever came to be goes unexplained. Library clones have to sit on a shelf in the library - a shelf designed to resemble a small room,with one wall missing. They're required to stay there through library opening hours, but can get out and wander around when the library is closed, yet despite their demeanor being exactly that of a regular human being, not a one of them seems to have any issue with the fact that they are essentially prisoners and slaves.

The book, "Murder on Mars, was the only thing in her father's safe. Her brother had the safe opened after dad died, and now her brother is dead too. Two henchmen men show up at Coldbrook's apartment demanding the book, but they leave without it. Evidently these two victims are safe until and unless the henchmen find out where the book is. The blurb tells us, of the book, "It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police," but the book isn't lost. It's in her possession as it had been from the start of the story! Unless she loses it later, beyond where i could stand to read, then this is an outright lie!

Coldbrook struck me as precisely that - a cold brook. She was unpleasant and completely anal. When she takes her borrowed man home, even though she has a large apartment with many rooms, she confines him to the living room and bathroom, flatly refusing to let him use bedroom or even the kitchen. After the tough guys have tied-up both Coldbrook and Smithe (naked!), ransacked the apartment and then left, Smithe gets himself free, and using a knife from the kitchen, he cuts her free too, yet she chews him out for going in the kitchen! What a bitch!

Evidently there's something critical in that book, because when, out of curiosity, they try to obtain another copy by ordering it from a book printing shop, there are no more copies to be found. The story was therefore interesting if annoying. What could be in a book - a book that was until recently widely available, that suddenly became important when that one copy got out of the old man's safe? Unfortunately, I quickly lost interest in what the mystery was because the writing was so awful, and the world-building so nonsensical. I mean, for example, that these clones are not legally human, so what's to stop some jerk checking out the authors of their fancy and raping them? It couldn't be judged rape, could it, if they're not human? Maybe they just fine you for defacing library property?

If the cloned author was supposed to represent the original, it would be a spectacular fail because these clones were not the original and had completely different life experiences from the author, even if they did have the author's original memories - memories that would be subject to modification, and therefore thoroughly unreliable! Despite their unwarranted credibility in front of gullible jurors, eye witnesses are in fact the least accurate source of evidence in a trial precisely because they readily modify their memories for one reason or another, and without even knowing that they're doing it.

The author has hover-cars and hover-cabs! Why? That's never going to happen because energy is far too expensive and gasoline is going to be gone completely in a few decades. It takes far more energy to support the entire weight of a vehicle and move it, as would be the case in this hover world, than it does to support the vehicle on wheels and merely employ energy to move it, as is the case now. The robe (a robot rube - I made it up!) in the cab tells Colette that it will take a load of energy to go where she wants to go. Well then don't use a hover-cab! Duh! Worse than this, the cab is sentient at least to a degree, but speaks like this: "Don't mean nothing by it". Seriously? A cab is programmed to speak like that? The more of this crap I read the less confidence I had in this author having thought things through. Yes it's impossible to predict the future with any great accuracy, but that doesn't mean that anything goes in a sci-fi novel. The future will, as it has in the past (!), grow organically from the present. If you can't have your future doing that, then you're making the wrong choices in your novel.

One of the things the author repeatedly mentions is print-on-demand operations. Most things in this word are electronic, including books, but you can get print books by ordering them online and having a business sprint up one copy which is mailed to you. This is the same system which Amazon and others use to facilitate self-publishing. Right now, these machines which print and bind books are a bit on the steep side to buy, but the price will come down, just as it has for 3D printers. In the future, anyone who enjoys print books will have a machine at home which can do it. There may be online print houses, but it made little sense that a book-lover who was rich, like Coldbrook was wouldn't have such a machine.

There are some oddities which contributed to the feel that this was a fifties novel, such as when Smithe says, "I pulled off my shoes and stockings." Who calls socks stockings these days? Later, he refers to them as socks, so there was no consistency. Every time I read something like that, it kicked me out of suspension of disbelief, and this novel was a really bumpy ride! It didn't help that, true to sci-fi writing everywhere, the author was constantly trying to come up with cool names for stuff and failing epically. Computers were called screens, even though there's no such term, nor even a hint of such a term, in use today. The only way that term is employed now is to describe the things we swipe when reading an ebook! Worse was diskers! Disks are out of style already, yet he has us using them in the future?

I was also surprised to learn that men nearly always tell the truth because they're awful at lying, whereas women are good at lying and lie fluently. What?! He has Coldbrook say this, but that doesn't make it any less of an insult to both genders from what I can see. I got to the start of chapter nine, which is almost half-way through, and the chapter was so pathetic and so pedantic that I simply quit after reading one page of it. There are better things to do with my time. I cannot recommend this novel based on what I read.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: The Power of the Mind Worms by Steve Darnall

Rating: WARTY!

I was a big fan of playing Sid Meier's Civilization game when I first discovered it, but I only liked the 2D version. The "isomorphic" version was just confusing to me. It made it really hard to keep track of where your pieces actually were. I know of no battle strategy display that uses such a bizarre system. On top of that, the bizarre rules were heavily biased towards making it all but impossible to win, especially if you had the gall to trespass above level two or three. I reached a point where I lost patience with trying to get the rules to work or the game to work within them, so I refused to play by those ridiculous rules, and I developed methods for bypassing them, such as creating a large number of cities quickly, defending them well, making them close enough that cities co co-defend each other, and upgrading military units as soon as better ones became available.

In terms of economics, instead of building up large cities with all manner of amenities, I would have each city build one thing (typically city walls to begin with, and later cathedrals, for which the sale price was higher). I would keep selling and rebuilding the thing over and over again, to fill my coffers, and eventually I would have so much that I could conquer cities just by bribery, and then sell off their buildings and use that cash to bribe the next city. I tried to be at peace with all other civilizations, but this is not a game that promotes peace and harmony at all (which is why this graphic novel was such a joke to me!).

Once another civilization betrayed the peace, I would became ruthless in destroying them. My leadership was always despot so I never had to worry about my 'advisers' or 'government'. I always kept one token 'enemy' village alive, though so I could continue playing out the game and not have it end prematurely, but after a while I started quitting the game as soon as it looked like I was unbeatable, because it became boring then. It also annoyed me that a civilization never really got anything for exploring or for however many years of peace you maintained. Like I said, it was all about hostility and this really didn't interest me that much. It was the exploring and building up a civilization which I really enjoyed.

The supposed goal of the game was to build a rocket to take your civilization to a new world, but I rarely made it to that stage of the game, and I didn't care because it was boring and time-wasting to me, since you never could actually go to another planet - not until a later version came out, and that version didn't interest me. This story, then, is based on that idea, and on those later games which were produced which took Civilization to the next level - where you started the game by colonizing another planet.

This graphic novel, with amazing art work by Rafael Kayana, takes it from there. People are living on the laughably unoriginal planet named Gaia, and the female ruler of these people is at odds with another faction of humans led by a guy. She wants to live in harmony with the planet, and her opponent essentially wants to strip-mine it. The situation is literally black and white since she's white (or pale Asian at least) and he's black. She's the 'gentle passive female' and he's the 'aggressive, belligerent male'. It's so pathetic as to be a joke. There is no gray area here.

Her position is as sad as it is weak because the planet isn't in harmony with the people. How can it be? Humans did not evolve there, and evidently do not belong since they cannot even breathe the atmosphere. They're required to wear a mask outdoors in the same way the humans were so required on Pandora in the Avatar movie. There's no harmony here, although I'd take issue with the contention we read at one point which states that nitrogen is harmful to humans ("If the nitrogen in the air doesn't kill you, the mind worms will"!). Seriously? Eighty percent of our atmosphere here on Earth is nitrogen. It doesn't kill humans - unless, of course there's no oxygen with it and we therefore suffocate, but that's not due to the nitrogen. Any other gas would suffocate us in just the same way that water does. And water is made from oxygen! This poor science is inexcusable.

Of course, once she bonds with the psychic worms, then she can commune with them and use them to defeat the militaristic and superior forces opposing them. There is, of course no explanation whatsoever for the existence of the mind worms: no word on how they evolved so far and yet failed to evolve further, much less on how they're even able to commune with a completely alien species, or even why they would. Despite the beautiful art work, I can't recommend this because the story was quite simply too stupid to live.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Rating: WARTY!

I can't tell you what this is about, not really, because I gave up on the audio book after two disks. Nothing really interesting had happened at that point. It started out great, with the mysterious man purveying lightning rods, who arrives just ahead of a thunderstorm and a carnival, and gives James Nightshade and William Halloway a rod to attached to one of their homes. That sounded great, but then I got the impression that Ray Bradbury is a guy who loved to hear himself talk. I never got that impression from his short stories, but let him run to a lengthier piece, and I guess he does love the sound of his voice! Anyway I couldn't stand to listen to any more and I can't recommend this based on what I heard.

Doctor Who The Forgotten by Tony Lee

Rating: WORTHY!

Pia Guerra, Nick Roche, and Kelly Yates's art work was good here, except in trying to depict the seventh Doctor, who looked nothing like him! The framework for this is the tenth Doctor (David Ten-nant in the TV show) traveling with Martha Jones (Freema Agyemon) to a museum which seems to be aimed at The Doctor and no one and nothing else. The Doctor suddenly loses his memory and so we get a chance to enjoy a short story with each of the Doctor's incarnations in turn and in order, beginning with William Hartnell's first Doctor back in 1963. The first two incarnations are even depicted in gray-scale since their shows were transmitted in black and white. This story can only be done in this way (in print or in anime) now that so many of the original characters have grown old and died in many cases.

As the tenth Doctor tries to recover his memory, Martha brings to him in turn the walking stick from the first Doctor, and the descant recorder from the second Doctor (Patrick Troughton). In Hartnell's adventure, he's in ancient Egypt with his original companions, Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), Susan Foreman, his granddaughter (Carole Ann Ford), and Ian Chesterton (William Russell). Two of those four are no longer alive. The Doctor and his group manage to escape captivity when pharaoh Menkaure is attacked - an assassination attempt thwarted by the Doctor's walking stick!

Troughton appears with his companions Jamie McCrimmon (Fraser Hines, the only male companion not to wear trousers...), and Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury) fighting against the sentient snakes on a space station (evidently). The third Doctor is triggered by a set of car keys, and appears with his companion Jo Grant (Katy Manning, the only companion to appear nude with a Dalek to my knowledge!), and with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney). He also gets to ride Bessie once more (that's not what you might think!) as they flee dog-people riding mechanical spiders!

The fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) arrives with the scent of Jelly Babies, and appears with a time lord companion Romana (Lalla Ward), who he married in real life. She's now married to Richard Dawkins. Their (that is the Doctor and Romana's) quest is to escape the labyrinth - of tunnels under Paris. The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) arrives with Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding), and Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson) and is triggered by not by celery, but by a cricket ball which he use it in a subtle sleight-of-hand to ward off the Judoon. The sixth (Colin Baker - no relation) is depicted rescuing Perpugilliam "Peri" Brown (Nicola Bryant who arrive on the show wearing less than Amy Pond was!) form a murder charge by employing his unexpected expertise in exotic firearms.

The seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) appears with companion Dorothy Gale McShane, aka "Ace" (Sophie Aldred), on another war-torn planet where some irresponsible Time Lord has given a virus to one side to use on the other. The Doctor corrects this by administering a restorative hidden in his brolly, which the tenth doctor makes use of to recover from a weak spell.

Held in prison, the eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) can hardly appear with his only companion Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook) so we get to see him with Chan-Tir, no doubt in some way related to Chan-Tho of the Utopia episode. They escape and bring the Doctor to his previous incarnation (Christopher Eccleston) and his companion Rose (Billie Piper). To defeat his own evil self, however, inexplicably requires all ten Doctors. Finally, he gets to hug his granddaughter Susan.

Despite a few flaws, this was a great retrospective and visitation with all ten doctors (minus the so-called war Doctor), and a lovely bit of nostaglia. I recommend it.

Doctor Who Vol 3 Final Sacrifice by Various Authors

Rating: WORTHY!

There were several stories in this one volume. Old Friend and Final sacrifice were written by Tony Lee with art by Matthew Dow Smith. Ground Control was by Jonathan L Davis with art by Kelly Yates. The Big Blue Box was by Matthew Dow Smith, and To Sleep Perchance to Scream was by Al Davison.

Old Friend

This is (combined with the separately titled part two) the longest story by far and occupies most of this graphic novel. It begins with The Doctor and his purely-in-print companion visiting a dying man in a retirement home. From there we quickly end-up several solar systems away with some Victorian adventurers, on a devastated planet fighting a bloody war between two factions, neither of whom knows when to give up. The planet, it turns out, was supposed to be terraformed, but the war has been going on so long that no one has a clue where they came from or how things got to be where they were. It's very reminiscent of the tenth Doctor and Martha's adventure in the TV ep. The Doctor's Daughter.

Final sacrifice

Is part two of Old Friend.

Ground Control

If you've ever been chased by a giant panda militia, you'll know exactly what's going on here, but that's just the introduction. The real problem comes when the Doctor is effectively pulled over by a speed cop and given the third degree.

The Big Blue Box

Borrows from Victory of the Daleks wherein the Daleks have left a robot human in London which they plan on detonating but which fails. This story doesn't involve Daleks, but otherwise is pretty much the same idea.

To Sleep Perchance to Scream

What does the Doctor dream about when he finally sleeps, and who helps him out when he has a bad dream?

I liked this in general. It wasn't spectacular, but parts of it were really good. I wasn't too keen on the sexism exhibited by The Doctor when he snidely remarks about a man and a woman:"I just knew them as the 'annoying woman'...and the one in the dress". Later he repeats this kind of insult referring to 'screaming like a girl". That aside this was, on balance, a worthy read.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Wraith World by Cavan Scott, Mark Wright

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one-disk audio book, read impeccably by Elisabeth Sladen who played Sarah Jane Smith in the long-running BBC TV kids' series, spun off from the even longer-running Doctor Who, was excellent fun. Very much in the spirit of the TV show, but separate form it, this story was about an aging fantasy writer, who has just published his last book in his most famous series. Little do Sarah Jane and the young adults she works with, dealing with or even combating alien visitations, realize that another one is going on right under their noses.

Being a big fan of the series, young Rani visits the author with Sarah Jane, but little do they know that the author, because of the alien paper he wrote on, quite literally made up the series - and precipitated it in real life. Before long, there are worm creatures, which can congregate into evil aliens (note unsurprising similarities to season nine of Doctor Who!, which is current as I wrote this.

This story isn't brilliant by any means and the Beeb lards it up with too much special FX, but that aside, the story was a fun romp for youngsters, and I enjoyed revisiting one of the most loved companions of The Doctor, who died long before her time. The only companion so far to have had her own spin-off series. RIP Elisabeth. You will never be forgotten.

The Empty by Jimmie Robinson

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of the most amazing graphic novels I've read in a long time. It's highly original, and though the science is questionable (seven thousand years isn't enough time for the evolution we saw going on here), I was willing to let that go and bask in the glory of the story. Tanoor is a fiercesome hunter in her impoverished desert land where gangly, somewhat disproportioned people eke out a dwindling existence.

One day Tanoor encounters a strange woman in the ocean, and she's smart enough, and desperate enough to know that this brand new thing in her world - a woman who looks like Tanoor and not like Tanoor, maybe the break-through they need to overcome the poison roots which are spreading and destroying everything in their path. Her fellow villagers, however, disagree, and banish both Lila, the new girl, and Tanoor into the harsh land of the Mool, a savage race which lives across the chasm. Lila, however, who has proved ot ahve unexpected and beneficial powers, discovers that the Mool are peace-loving and just as threatened by the encroaching roots as everyone else. Traveling with her pet, the foxelope, and her two new companions, Tanoor eventually discovers more wonders, and eventually, the deadly secret which has brought the world almost to extinction.

I really loved this story. The artwork was excellent, the story intelligent and brisk, and despite my scientific misgivings, I felt this did more than enough to overcome the reservations I had. I recommend it.

Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue Deconnick

Rating: WARTY!

Kelly Sue Deconnick was batting a .500 with me. Now she's down to .333! This one sounded like a fun romp from the blurb, but isn't that the blurb's job - drag you in no matter what it takes? The fact is that I didn't like this. Others may disagree, but to me it didn't seem very supportive of - or complimentary to - women. It also seemed disorganized and wasteful of paper. I read the e-version, so no trees suffered, but this was clearly designed for a print version, which was itself problematical. The problem with e-versions of comic books is that the regular tablet screen is smaller than the printed comic, so the images and the text are all compressed somewhat, making for a read of sometimes questionable quality.

Two-page spreads simply do not work on a pad, because (at least in Bluefire reader on my iPad) it will show only one page at a time, and even if you rotate the pad to landscape view, it merely makes the page smaller - it doesn't show you the other page in the spread. There are probably settings to make it show two pages at a time, but then you're screwed because it's too small to read. Yes, you can enlarge the image, but then you're screwed because you're constantly having to slide the image around to see all of it. In short, it doesn't work in the e-version and comic book creators don't seem to be able to get this into their heads.

There was one other issue, too, in the e-version. Pages 118 and 119 were completely devoid of text. This isn't down to this comic alone. I've seen this before in other comics I've read in e-version. The speech balloons were there, but no one was home! I don't know what causes this, and it was just these two pages, but the images alone failed to convey what was being said there, not even vaguely, so this was a serious fail form more than one perspective.

So much for technical problems. What about the graphic novel itself? Graphic novels are all about imagery, but for me unless they're also about story, they don't work. I mean if I want simply to look at pretty pictures I can go to an art show or buy a coffee-table book. I need a story to come with the images. The images alone, especially in this case where they were less than wonderful as they were here, don't do it unless the comic is designed for them to do it, such as the Love comic series, for example, which has so far been excellent. So art work having failed, the entire thing came down to the story, and this story made little sense.

First of all, it's a rip-off of Margaret Atwood's The Hand-Maid's by way of the movie Rollerball, and the intention is to presumably and eventually show these oppressed women as victors, yet here they are starting out from a position of defeat when they had previously - i.e. in our own time - been gaining successes after previously being in a position of oppression for centuries. How are we supposed to imagine them being victorious when clearly the premise here is that they've obviously been thoroughly defeated and humiliated, and when nothing has changed since that defeat, whenever and however it came about?

Worse than this, nothing was offered to explain how this sorry state came to be from what we have now. How did women become even more objectified, even more doll-like, even more subjugated than they already are today? What this story says to me is that women were somehow weak or inadequate, or passive that they descended from the hard-won position they're in today - not ideal, I admit, but a lot better than they had a hundred - even a thousand - years ago. How did this happen? What went wrong? This is an important question and it's unanswered - at least in this volume.

I found the central idea of this novel to be contradictory. The idea that "bad women" - in this novel, those who fail to conform to a male-centric view of how a woman should be - are actually then rewarded by this absurdly punitive and oppressive society, in that they're treated to an interstellar trip to what, for all intents and purposes, appears to be more akin to holiday camp in another solar system than ever it does to a penal system - or even a penile system! On this "prison" planet, they don't have to deal with men at all! That's like punishing homosexuals by locking them up with a bunch of sex-starved and horny male prisoners! We've wised-up about that, but here, we're being told that if the evil men-that-be are intent upon punishing or even reforming these women, they send them on vacation?

Interstellar travel is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. It's definitely not the the modern equivalent of shipping convicts to Australia and leaving them there. It cannot be justified given the premise we're presented here: that women are second class and devalued. Why would this be the result of infractions in the future, when today men and women are - at least on paper - equal, yet women are routinely treated as second-class, objectified, and raped? Wouldn't the future be worse if this is truly a society in which women are openly and actively treated as second class citizens? Understand that I'm certainly not prescribing such a thing, but the novel seemed like it wasn't very well thought out to me, given this and other plot points.

Note that there's a lot of nudity and bad language in this story. Talking of objectivity, the nudity is all female. This doesn't bother me, but it may bother others. What I found intriguing about all the nudity (aside from comic book artists complete lack of inhibition over portraying nude females contrasted with their fastidious avoidance of male nudity) was that in this future world, all women no longer shave. There's no explanation offered for this. Not that I have any say in it, but personally I prefer a natural look; however, that's not the fashion today in the US, so again we have a circumstance holding for which there is no explanation offered. It's one more unanswered question amidst many.

Perhaps the biggest problem though, is in the way these women are "allowed" (from the plot) to try to escape this slavery. It isn't through smarts. Once again it's through exploitation of their bodies - through sports, and not even via intelligent individualism! Seriously? Yet again it comes down to: "Hey, don't concern yourself with what's in their pretty little heads, just focus on their bodies, because let's face it, that's all they really have to offer, isn't it?" I'm never able to avoid raising eyebrows at the sheer number of female authors who evidently buy into this, at least as judged by how they write.

Maybe things change in future volumes? I can't speak to that, but for this volume, I honestly think a story is insulting to women when they're put into a position of having to act like male stereotypes, or of kow-towing to men to garner a victory. There are a lot of different ways of being a kick-ass female; I just wish female writers would explore more of those instead of confining their lead females to being 'men with tits' as the phrase has it. I can't recommend this, and I have no desire to read any more in this series. I think this needed a far better grounding and a lot stronger plot than it has. The way it is, it simply doesn't work in my opinion.