Sex with Ghosts by Ion Light

Rating: WARTY!

The premise for this story was really intriguing and instantly attracted me, but the writing, spelling, and formatting quality was appalling. This was a free - well not an ebook - it came as a text file! I had to convert it to to an ebook in order to read it on my phone which is my normal book reading device.

The story started out fair enough. This guy Jeremy has the ability to will into existence anything he sees in a picture in a magazine. The story didn't mention things he sees on TV or in movies, or other media, which was disappointing. He seemed not to have experimented much, although there was a very brief mention of something to do with Polaroids and that was about it - at least in the 25% of this I could stand to read.

The things he generates through this method are real while they exist, but they are impermanent, and they disappear as soon as he sleeps, or when the object is encased in lead (or 'led' as the author insists upon writing it). He can make money through, say, materializing a diamond ring and pawning it, but he also seems to have some sort of an income of which we learn nothing in the portion of this novel that I read, so Jeremy is very much a mystery.

Not only can he create objects and machines from the pictures he sees, he can also manifest real people, who sometimes are mere shells of people, and other times much more autonomous. While he claims to have explored this, we’re told - not shown - it, so in the quarter of the novel I read, there was no such manifestation or interaction, nor any sex, I might add.

I wasn't as concerned about that as I was about the author's naming his novel with a title which fails to describe the content accurately. It felt like bait and switch to me. I don't mind sex in a novel if it's reasonably and realistically done, and it;s not gratuitous, but if you offer it and don't deliver it, it's nothing mroe than bait and switch, and it may alienate oyur readers. Also, when you then fail to deliver on any good sci-fi and start instead lecturing your readers on your own personal world view, you quickly lose my interest.

The one woman who shows up in Jeremy's life (based on the portion I read), is named Tory, and she claims to be a witch. We never get any of Jeremy's magazine creations to see what they're like or to run any sort of comparison between them and her. Nor did I learn why she shows up, or has such an interest in him, or even how she learned about him, and he seems to have no curiosity about any of these questions, which makes Jeremy a thoroughly boring charcter, as is Tory herself.

Jeremy also seems to be able - unintentionally - to shut down electronic devices, yet he's able to will a motor vehicle into existence and drive it, so why he doesn't screw-up the electrics and electronics of a car or an airplane he wills into existence, yet does this to other stuff went disappointingly unexplained. This kind of thing bothered me. It felt like lazy writing or inattentive at least. The whole novel went downhill about a quarter of the way in when it felt like the author was lecturing us about his personal pet peeves and his favorite things rather than getting on with telling a story. Until then it hadn't been too bad, but that turned me right off and I quit reading it at that point. Maybe the questions and issues I had are answered later in the novel, but I had no interest at that point in reading on to find out.

The problem with this novel is that it seemed to me rather like it might be more of an exercise in authorial wish-fulfillment than in a good-faith effort to tell a story, but even then it felt like the author got off-track about a quarter the way in, and lost the thread of what had been quite interesting until, then despite some issues. I kept reading, hoping he would get back to the story, but he didn’t seem interested in going there, which is why I gave up on it.

There were a lot of formatting and grammatical errors in the text. Here are a few that I noted: "Caucasian, bald, go-t beard" (should have read, 'goatee beard' - or just 'goatee') "Farah Faucet" (Fawcett - why she gets a mention rather than someone more recently popular seems to speak volumes about the author!) "Give me a brake" (break!) "DnD" as opposed to the more common (and more intelligible) "D&D" for Dungeons and Dragons. "The wanded him down" (They) Character Maria becomes Mary at one point in the story Scotish (when Scottish was intended, but probably should really be just 'Scots'). "I get carried away sometime." (should read 'sometimes') "people in harms way (should be 'harm's') There's a character named Shuri whose name is usually but not always shown with a lower cased 'S'

As far as writing is concerned, the author put in a awful lot of 'he said she said' in conversations. Of course a long conversation between two or more people can be confusing if it’s never identified who is saying what, but you don't need to put 'said' and asked' after every quoted speech. This author did, and it was really irritating and made the text sound like machine-gun fire. Below is an example (with the actual content of the speech removed and just shown as two sets of quotes: ""), and only the identifying parts are left in, so you can see what I mean. What's shown below is otherwise unaltered:
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory asked.
"" Jeremy said.
""
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy asked.
"" Tory asked.
""
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory asked.
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy said.
""
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy asked
"" Tory asked
"" Jeremy said
"" Tory said

Boring! There are creative ways to improve on this without having to employ the robotic he said she said metronomic approach. One thing the author wasn't big on was description and scene setting. Too much of that can be a distraction and lead to a rambling story, especially if it’s not germane to the story, but a little judicious description here and there really helps, and it can also be employed to break-up the rigid tick-tock of a back and forth exchange like this one.

Given the issues and the fact that the story completely and unapologetically derailed itself a quarter of the way through and became a lecture, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

The Song of Sirin by Nicholas Kotar

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is a retelling of the old Russian story of Prince Ivan and the Gray Wolf. Many of these old folk tales are bizarre and brutal, but this one takes some beating. It's a story of stupidity and cruelty, and of theft and kidnapping, and you'd seriously have to put in some work to render it into an interesting story for modern ears - unless you just wanted to piss-off people. It doesnlt help that the story has too modern of s sensibility. I read at one point for example: "Don’t forget that it’s in the main square today." To me, that didnt seem like it fit the antique sensibility the author was trying to extstablish here, and it took me out of suspension of disbelief.

This author in my opinion has failed to make the story interesting and worse, has failed to make the characters interesting either. I started out interested, but became bored to tears rather quickly, and despite plugging on for a while in the hope that it would improve, I gave up about third of the way through because literally nothing was happening except that the 'prince' character, here named Voran, was showing us quite often how stupid and lethargic he was. And just in passing, Voron has a sister named Lebía. His sister has a name that's reminiscent of labia? Really?

He ends up meeting a pilgrim (here that's like a sorcerer-cum-prophet) who specifically tells him that to save the city he must find the living water, but rather than ask about this water: where it is, how to find it, and rather than ask the pilgrim to magically transport him there (a trick the pilgrim has shown himself quite capable of performing), Voran lolls around doing nothing. Later, he takes off on a trip with a bunch of people going on a pilgrimage, and then he abandons them for no good reason despite having been haunted all his life by his father's having abandoned some people in the past in similar circumstances - a dereliction of duty for which he's despised as a traitor. In short, Voron should really be named Moron.

Voran knows that this entire society will come crashing down if he doesn't find this living water. He can see signs that society is dying, yet at no point does he show any interest whatsoever in getting started on his quest. He's a dick. The problem is that instead of telling this really short story of the wolf in one volume, this author has gone the mercenary way of trying to turn it into a trilogy or a series, and it has suffered for it by dragging tediously along when a reader like me wants to see something happen, so the hell with it. I'm done with this story and with this author.

Ouroboros by Odette C Bell

Rating: WARTY!

This book is a dumb - and I might add highly inapropriate - so-called romance between Nida Harper, who is a cadet at the United Galactic Coalition Academy (which is way more of a mouthful than it needs to be) and a superior officer.

Any book (or movie or TV show) that blabbers about some galactic-wide entity good or bad, or about a coalition, or about saving the galaxy, is full of shit. All it tells me is that the author doesn't have the first clue how huge and sparsely-populated the galaxy is - and I'm talking habitable planets, not even actual populations. What it does tell me is how narrow the mind is and how limited the imagination is of the author.

This novel sounded like it might be interesting, but in the end it was a joke. Harper comes off like that sad and pathetic Jar Jar Binks in the risible Star Wars 'return of the endlessly recycled movie plot' trilogy of trilogies. Her superior officer ought to be drummed out of the regiment for his inappropriate interest in someone under his command. Harper is the worst candidate at the school and would have been herself drummed out in any real world scenario.

On an evidently poorly-supervised trip to an alien world, Harper is exposed to a source of energy. Why this energy takes over her body and then ridiculously and desperately wants to return to the world where she picked it up is a complete mystery that's not explored - at least in this first volume I read. Why, when a cadet is found inexplicably unconscious and injured on an alien planet surface during what ought to have been a routine exploration, she's not hospitalized and a full inquiry conducted is another mystery. The author either doesn't understand the military, or military standards have plummeted precipitously between now and whenever this story is set.

The interest Lieutenant Carson Blake shows in her is not only inappropriate since he's an authority figure with power over her, it's inexplicable since the two are falling for each other without having spent any significant time together. So: the story is badly-plotted and badly-written.

I know authors do not have control over the book description or the cover when they essentially give up their rights as Big Publishing™ takes over their novel, but to read that Nida has "matted, black, compact curls" and then look at the cover image where she has long, flowing, straight hair tells me once again that the ignoramus who designed the cover never even so much as looked at the text underneath it. This is why I normally pay zero attention to book covers because they're typically so pathetic and misleading and aimed at the lowest common denominator - which often is the crotch, hence the cover image's tight, clinging leather, with the lowered zipper over the bulging chest. Pathetic. The cover designer ought to be chemically neutered.

I have a hard time with sci-fi characters who have ridiculous apostrophes in their name. Nida's best friend sounds like she comes from Vulcan: "J'Etem" who is Nida's token black friend, and who is, of course an alien. The first thing these two females talk about in worshipful tones is a guy, so I guess Odette Bell never heard of the Bechdel-Wallace test. J'Etem was supposed to be Nida's best friend, but after that initial introductory mention, she virtually disappeared from this story, like the author had forgotten who her best friend was. No matter what bad things happened to Nida, J'Etem didn't give a shit, apparently.

Given the image on the front cover I kept expecting Nida to grow a pair (of breasts) but she never did - always taking a back seat to the lieutenant or to the energy that raped her. I was as disappointed in that as I was in the poor biology on display here. Like in the dumb-ass Star Trek episodes, there was inter-species reproduction, which is nonsensical. I read that one alien was "An enormous man of half-human half-Yara build." No! Not going to happen! The closest species to humans on Earth is the chimpanzee with which we share a common ancestor and it's not remotely possible to hybridize those two species, so there's no way in hell a human is ever going to produce offspring, viable or otherwise by mating with an alien - unless it was through some bizarre Frankensteinian experiment in a lab.

Thoughtless writing didn't help. With a few pages I read these thing of the same charcter: "Now he had nothing to do." "He had things to do, and it was time to stop wasting the day." "Blake admitted he wasn’t busy." One could get whiplash reading a collection of stupidly contradictory claims in such close proximity to one another.

As usual there was far too much emphasis on shallow physical details and little to none of the important traits a being might have. I read, "J'Etem was stunning. She was Barkarian, and she was beautiful from her lustrous hair to her plush purple lips." Seriously? No. Just no. This novel is one of the most egregious examples of poor YA writing and it sucked.

Vast by Linda Nagata

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the last Nagata that I read although I understand this one is superseded by another novel called Edge. I have no interest in reading that. I have no interest in re-reading this one either (or any of this series), but I do have a decent enough recollection of it to say this was the best of the three I did read, and to give it a worthy rating.

The story could be a standalone since it's essentially unconnected with anything that preceded it and needs no connection with anything else. It tells the story of a group of astronauts in a spacecraft named the 'Null Boundary', who are running from an alien race known as the Chenzeme. The Chenzeme for reasons either unexplained or which I do not recall, are purging space of humans. Maybe they're terrified of the nano-tech that humans have unleashed? LOL!

There's some weird stuff that happens in this novel and some situations which make it interesting, but that's all I'm going to say about it. I do commend it as a worthy read although I have to say that after three of her novels, I'm really not feeling any need to read anything else by this author.

The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata

Rating: WARTY!

I know I read this, but I recall nothing about it, which tells me it wasn't that great even though at the time I did read two other novels in "The Nanotech Succession" of which this is supposedly the first, although Tech Heaven is also part of the series and precedes this one.

The story in retrospect makes no sense. It features two nano-enhanced characters, Nikko, and Phousita, both of whom were enhanced by a device from which this novel takes its title. Nikko is coming to the end of his allotted span, just like Roy in Blade Runner, and just like Roy in Blade Runner, Nikko doesn't want to go quietly into that bad night, or any night, so he steals the Bohr Maker, which despite the terror in which it holds society, was never destroyed, but was retained in the archives of the Commonwealth police. Why? Who the fuck knows! Honestly? It makes zero sense.

Only now are the Commonwealth police determined to wipe out all trace of the Bohr Maker, so like Roy in Blade Runner, selfish Nikko is on the run with Rachael, um, Phousita, and we're supposed to root for him after what he did? That's it. So, Blade Runner, really. I don't recall and I'm not inclined to go back and re-read it this or any other of this series! If I were I'd probably rate this more highly than warty!

Deception Well by Linda Nagata

Rating: WARTY!

I read this some considerable time ago and barely remember it, which is what is now coloring my rating, because if it had been more entertaining than it evidently was, I'd have finished out the series, but I have no interest in ever reading it again or getting back into these stories at all.

There is a series of four: Tech-Heaven, The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, and Vast and they're only loosely connected, although I believe a couple of them are more sequential and connected than the rest. I never did read the first one and cannot summon up any interest in doing so now.

This story, named after the planet where it takes place, is set in a community which lives on the side of a space elevator. Why, I do not recall, but they are trapped there. How they survive is sketchy. The planet below is supposedly infested with nanotech that is commonly believed harmful, so no one is allowed down there, but even though there are rebels who wish to be set loose down there, the authorities won't allow it. There's no reason at all given as to why they're not simply allowed to go. Naturally they do go down there eventually, but I can't for the life of me recall what happened, which should speak volumes about how uninteresting this was.

Nor is there any info as to why this high-tech society doesn't have robots - a common omission is far too many sci-fi stories. Those robots could have been sent down there to probe the surface and see if the problem was A, as bad as it was supposed and B, getting better or worse. It seems to me that nanotech has a lifespan and maybe all the tech is dead on the surface now. No one seems remotely curious to find out what the status is! That's not authentic and it's a common problem with this sort of dystopic novel because the author stupidly seems to treat everyone as though they all believe the same things and behave the same way - there never are any rebels or conspiracy theorists, or adventurers, or whatever. It's not realistic.

The novel must have seemed interesting enough at the time, but reflecting on it now, it seems silly. There is a main character named Lot who is the son of a guy named Jupiter Apolinario, which I'm sorry but is just plain stupid as names go, to say nothing of pretentious. Earlier, he led a group of followers down the planet and they were never heard from again. Just like his father, Lot is considered a potentially inspiring leader, but as a character, he never inspired me! After all of his suffering, maybe he should be consider a Job Lot?!

We're told in the book blurb that on Deception Well, "a razor-thin line divides bliss from damnation" but if they have no idea what's going on down on the surface, and have never investigated it, how can they possible know this? Again, stupid. Like I said, I did read this once, but I recall nothing of it and have zero interest in starting it again (I know 'cause I tried!), so in hindsight I cannot rate this a worthy read.

Speechless by Madeline Freeman

Rating: WARTY!

This is based on the Little Mermaid, but it's more like a Disney-esque version than a Hans Christian Anderson version (which is nothing like Disney's take). I'm not a fan of Disney because they're not known for originality, and these days they're far too big and powerful. It looks like this novel isn't very original either - especially since it's based on a rip-off premise to begin with. And for the first in a series it's predictably padded.

This novel could have begun at chapter nine, which is a quarter of the way in, and lost nothing at all from deleting the first eight chapters. The ebook has all the chapters listed (Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc., and if you can fit your finger on the right one (good luck with that!) it will take you to that chapter, but tapping on that chapter header will not return you to the content page. For the life of me I cannot see why the hell a content list is included in ebooks. It's stupid and pointless, and just one more indication of how clueless and robotic publishers tend to be, with sadly few exceptions.

The story is also a rip-off of another Disney property - Marvel's X-Men. It's set in a future where genetic mutation has given some people abilities that make zero sense. Main character Aria's special power is that she can breathe underwater using gills that appear when she's immersed and disappear when she's dry. There's nothing in the human genome that could do this. While we share some curious traits with fish, we haven't actually been fish in a very long time, but this author would have us believe we're just a mutation away from returning to the sea!

Fine; I'll play along. So what has this YA author got for us? Well, a lot of predictability for one thing, and sub-standard writing for another, but I shall get to that later. Predictably, and exactly like in Marvel's X-Men, Aria is an 'aberration' and aberrations are predictably pariahs. In real life they would actually be celebrities, so this rang hollow. Predictably Aria has a hot guy, Alonzo, who is her best friend, although naturally she never sees him that way because he's an adopted 'brother'. Predictably, Aria wants more than her present life and dreams of joining one of the Mars colonies which ridiculously has also become a reality TV show for those on Earth. She predictably defies her father and signs up for inductee testing where predictably she's roomed with three vicious, lying, back-stabbing bullies. Yawn.

Predictably she meets a hot guy named Declan who's a bit of a bad boy and who is predictably in a position of power. Predictably she starts falling for him despite his betrayal of her, thereby setting up the predictable YA 'love' triangle. The tests she has to go through are stupid and worthy of a badly-written middle-grade novel, but Aria is chosen as a special snowflake because the testers are wise to her aberration. She's chosen - for no good reason - to go on a special mission to retrieve some data for them, otherwise Alonzo will be hurt somehow.

Here I have to give a minor spoiler. There is no Mars colony. At least not on Mars. It's on Earth and everyone has been fooled. This is profoundly stupid because people would know. At the very least there would be conspiracy theories about it, but here everyone is completely fooled! What, no one who worked to actually build the colony ever figured out what they were building? If the colonists actually built the colony, no one ever noticed that Martian gravity - which in reality would be less than 40% what it is on Earth - is exactly like Earth gravity? People would notice! The author makes no mention of gravity, even as she talks about faking the different positions of the stars and the smaller relative size of the sun from Mars. She would have been better-off choosing Venus which is equally unlivable, but if you can terraform Mars, then why not Venus? It's much more like Earth in terms of size, gravity, and so on.

So Aria's job is to break into the Mars colony and steal data that would allow her boss to prove the colony is fake? Seriously? None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Since they know where the colony is, all they needed to do was expose the location to bring the whole stupid façade tumbling down! But apparently only Aria can break-in because the route is underwater. They claim no one can use SCUBA equipment because it would be found, despite there being countless places to hide it. So instead of a specially-trained agent breaking in, Aria does it and she's hobbled by being morphed into a lookalike of one of the colony residents, despite this change hampering her mobility and losing her the ability to speak. All of this is done to conform to the fairytale, but none of it makes any sense whatsoever in the context of this story!

And who does she run into twice while on the mission? Only the guy she moons over from watching the colony reality show. I'm sorry but this is horseshit. It's thoughtlessly written, badly-written, and makes no sense overall. Badly written? Yeah. I read at one point, "and she gritted her teeth and pushed through" and then less than one screen later, I read, "She gritted her teeth as she pushed herself to her feet." There must be a lot of grit on those teeth. Hopefully she won't have to smile too much....

Aria's break-in takes place during a solar flare when the Mars satellites have to be shielded and no show is transmitted, so it's a quiet time on the colony: there's no filming, and she can sneak around. Since she's going in at night, it makes no difference because there's no filming at night so we're told! But here's what Aria says: "I thought only satellites around Mars had to go into shielded mode." She has this confirmed, but the author seems not to realize that Earth is nearer to the sun than Mars and therefore more at risk from solar flare damage, not less! If Mars satellites need to be shielded then Earth's satellites sure as hell do!

In being transported to the colony for her mission, Aria, who has this huge affinity for water, somehow fails to notice she's on a boat! There's this tunnel she has to swim through to get to the colony and we're told, "There aren't any cameras in the tunnel - for obvious reasons." What reason are those? Would one of them be so someone could swim into the easiest ingress into the facility undetected?! This is really bad writing. Yeah, they wouldn't transmit a TV show from cameras in underwater tunnels, but for security they would need them. And if they're maintenance tunnels why are they flooded?!

At another point I read, "Aria nodded, but her minds spun with terrible possibilities" Um, how many minds does Aria have? Is this another of her mutations? Or just a typo that wasn't caught? My theory? She has only one mind, but she makes up the others! LOL! A common YA author faux pas - meaning literally, a false step - is to say something like "He wanted to explore the areas of Mars that people had yet to step foot on." The phrase is actually 'set foot', not 'step foot' unless of course you're an evidently ill-educated YA author, in which case by all means step your foot in your mouth.

The author writes that for the colony, they had "genetically engineered some of the heartiest trees on Earth to thrive in the Martian environment." Heartiest really? I think she meant 'hardiest'. This is right up there with 'step foot' and 'staunch' when 'stanch' is meant. These are common, annoying and utterly predictable YA author screw-ups. I see them all the time. It's almost a hallmark of YA authorship.

The author seems not to know what a schematic is. I read that Aria had seen a "holographic schematic of the chip Declan had sent to help her identify it", but a picture of the chip isn't the same as a schematic, which is a circuit diagram! A schematic shows the wiring of the chip and it's hardly something that would help her identify it unless she saw inside the chip and was an engineer who was familiar enough with the technology to identify it from the schematic. Trust me, that's not Aria.

Another problem is when authors try to be too clever for their own good. This isn't a YA issue per se (not 'per say', which is another YA faux pas), but it is a sci-fi issue. The author has her characters on Mars referring to a day as a 'sol': "I haven't seen you in years, and now I've seen you twice in less than a sol." No one talks like that. Even Mars colonists, if there ever are any, will not talk like that, They will say 'day' since the Martian day, as the author points out correctly for once, is only about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day - The Martian year, on the other hand, is twice that of Earth, which is another reason the colonists and the viewers would know they were not on Mars.

There's no reason to use sol, just like there's no reason to refer to humans as 'Terans' as is done in every freaking stupid space travel story ever told. No one uses that word. Why would it suddenly become universal in the future? The planet is Earth, not Tera. It never has been called Tera. It's Earth and we're humans, Why would that change? And why oh, why would aliens call us Terans? It makes zero sense!

This novel doesn't make that mistake - at least as far as I read - but it does have people routinely swearing, yet using completely ridiculous cuss words - namely the names of the moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. No one will ever do that! It's never been done. Why would it? People have been saying 'fuck' and 'shit' for centuries. It won't change! Why are YA authors so stupid, and pathetic and squeamish about cuss words? I guess that says a lot about who these tepid stories are aimed at, huh?

Needless to say at this point, I lost patience and DNF'd this pile of crap. The truly sad thing is that the author apparently taught high school English for ten years. Ten frigging years! That makes me truly sad and actually glad she's no longer teaching. I condemn this novel for being yet another exemplar of all that's bad with story-telling, with the English language, and with YA novels.

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is where I quit reading this series. At the time I didn't know I would be quitting it, but I sure wasn't anywhere near invested enough to actively seek the next one. In the end I read a prequel in which I was seriously disappointed. As is usual in this series, McDevitt spends way too much time on things which really don't drive the story. In this case it's ironically the new drive (which will power McDevitt's other series in this universe, but which is set a couple of centuries later, I believe).

Finally McDevitt gets serious about the biggest threat to the galaxy, which was discovered in the first book in this series, but then inexplicably neglected until this story, five novels later! It turns out that the omega 'clouds' are coming from near the center of the galaxy, and inexplicably after being rather retired from spaceflight, Hutch pilots this next trip to seek out the source, which turns out to be rather boring. Nothing much happens - it's all journey and little payoff, and I think this boredom is why I lost interest in the series - that, and the fact that with this discovery, it was largely over by then anyway.

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

Priscilla Hutchins isn't even a pilot in this one - she's an administrator and the book focuses on a different pilot whose main qualification, it seems, is that she's 'beautiful'. Interest in space travel is waning (despite a deadly omega cloud with Earth's name on it?!) and so Hutch is fighting that, and a mission is launched to try and figure out what these 'UFOs' are that are being spotted out in space. They're named moonriders for no good reason, but why is the novel called Odyssey? In Omega, the clouds are called Omega clouds, so the novel is called Omega. Not here I guess. Anyway, this new pilot drops monitors to discover what these moonriders are, yet they apparently can't drop monitors to watch the omega clouds, one of which is barreling down on Earth?!!)

The story made little sense and is perhaps the most boring of the series that I read.

Omega by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is the fourth novel in the Priscilla Hutchins series and like the previous one, it has nothing to do with the omega cloud threat per se, even though it is a threat from one of those 'clouds' which starts the story off.

Given that this threat was discovered in the first book in the series, you would think by now that humanity would have monitors on every known omega cloud out there, tracking it, but once again they're taken by surprise as an omega threatens a planet with a civilization on it. In true Star Trek mode (barf! I am not a fan of Star Trek), they've somehow convinced themselves that they must save the planet without revealing themselves to the aliens. This makes zero sense.

The idea in Star Trek is that civilizations must inevitably suffer after contact with a superior civilization, but this is bullshit based on a primitive and ignorant past. It makes no sense in an enlightened future (and Star Trek breaches the rule constantly!). It especially makes no sense here when an entire plant is threatened. Rather than try to tackle the Omega cloud, the focus inexplicably is on the planet and of course they end up making contact.

One again we have minor and uninteresting characters and a planetary threat - pretty much the same as in previous volumes, which is why I detest series for the most part - it's inevitably the same story over and over again with the same characters and that's precisely what happens here; same threat, same urgency. These novels could each have been written independently with new characters instead of being part of the same series and nothing would have been lost while there stood much to gain. Of course, then the cloning of the earlier volumes for re-use in later ones would have been far more stark. I guess maybe that's why it's a series? The more I reconsider these though, the more I wonder why I stayed with this series as long as I did. I must have viewed them differently when I was younger than I do now! Clearly my tastes and tolerance have changed!

Chindi by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

The "Chindi" in the story is an asteroid that's been converted into a space ship to capture samples from across the galaxy. The story of Chindi is another example of McDevitt tossing a bunch of spoiled, uninteresting, flat and minor characters into a spaceship piloted by Priscilla Hutchins, the least commanding commander ever, and having them do stupid things repeatedly despite life-threatening scenarios on repeat. These "rich, amateur SETI enthusiasts" hire her to pilot them on a jaunt to try and track down where a mysterious signal is coming from, and their journey takes them on a sort of hare and hounds trip from one planet to another, each of which is orbited by an alien satellite. Why Hutch would go off on yet another trip populated by idiots is a mystery, and I forget what happened here. Maybe she lost her job or got fired or something, and was desperate for the gig?

Given that one of these secret satellites is around Earth, it's very strange that this group and Hutch are the only ones who are pursuing the signal, but here it is. Improbable is what McDevitt does, but he's well-off and old now so I guess she doesn't much care how he got there. The idiots abroad encounter evidence of a snake society which destroyed itself in nuclear war. How snakes would ever get that far is a mystery, but this is how McDevitt creates his aliens: they're just like Earth creatures with no consideration given to how or why. After snake world, they encounter beautiful aliens who fool the visitors into falling in love with them only to prove to be murderous and who take two victims from the passengers.

Finally they encounter the asteroid and discover it's a space-going zoo, so really, Star Trek 'The Menagerie'. It's been so long that I read this and I barely remember it, so I guess it really didn't leave much of an impression, but it certainly didn't turn me off the series otherwise I would never have moved on to the next one, which I did. Reflecting on it now though, several years later, I feel less benign toward it!

Deepsix by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the immediate sequel to McDevitt's The Engines of God. Unlike that novel, which I read some time ago and then recently revisited via an audiobook, this one I read some time ago and haven't thought much about it since, so my recollection of it has dwindled somewhat and I had to refresh it a bit for this review. I do recall the basic story - just not a lot of the details.

It's set in 2204, and on the negative side, the second book in this series suffers from everything I despise about a series: that the subsequent volumes are really a warmed-over redux of the first volume, which is only a prologue to begin with. In this particular case, there's too much of the first book being repeated here, evidently in the hope that readers won't notice it's the same dinner with a different dressing: doomed planet (it was a moon in the last book) with people trapped on it (same), who do dumb things (same) such as wasting time on a formal burial on a planet that's going to be destroyed anyway, and finally, archaeology with a dramatic deadline looming.

That complaint aired, there was enough in here for me, having read the first volume, to continue with this series. I never did go back to re-read any of this series (apart from the aforementioned audiobook), so maybe that should tell you something! But here a rogue gas giant is threatening a planet with destruction and Priscilla Hutchins is once again the one who's on the spot. She takes a bewildering array of unimportant (to the story) characters there to study the wildlife and flora and also the remnants of a previous civilization. These minor characters get far too much airtime, and she really becomes a minor character in her own story. On top of that, the book is too long, but evidently I found it entertaining enough on my first read through to pursue this series into the next volume.

The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first in a series called "The Academy" - a series title that could have been a lot better! Why would anyone be excited by that title?! I'm not a fan of series, but I found this one, written in the mid-nineties, palatable when I read it some time ago in a print version. The rest of the series was written between 2000 and 2007, with one more novel coming out in 2018. The last one I read was Starhawk which was a prequel and which I did not like, so I haven't read the 2018 release. I recently listened to this first volume again as an audiobook and found it less thrilling than I originally had, but still a worthy read on balance. It has issues, but overall, I think if you like hard sci-fi this might be to your taste. There are times when it plods and the characters are a bit flat. They sometimes act stupidly, but after the last four years this should surprise no one.

I wasn't a huge fan of the reader of this audio book, which was Tom Weiner. He wasn’t a disaster, but his voice sounded a bit too hard-bitten for my taste. He'd be better of reading a noire private dick novel if you ask me - and one which I wouldn't have any interest in hearing! Given that the main character is female, I felt a female voice was required here, but that wasn't a story-killer.

The story is of a woman named Priscilla Hutchins, who of course predictably goes by 'Hutch' and who is a pilot for the Academy, an organization that fosters archaeological expeditions not on Earth, but on alien worlds where life once existed, but now no longer does. This is why this series appealed to me to begin with, because it’s different for your usual let’s kill evil aliens or evil space humans and which typically makes sci-fi stories so predictably tedious.

The story is slow-moving, and the pilot and the archaeologists she transports to several worlds do stupid things and get themselves into improbable scrapes, but the underlying story isn’t too bad, and it offers a mystery which threads through the series and is eventually resolved without making this volume feel like a prologue or a cliffhanger, and I appreciated that. Each story is self-contained while advancing the mystery through the sequence, although not all volumes address the mystery.

The underlying premise is that there was, perhaps several thousand years before, a race of advanced aliens of whom there is now no trace save for the monuments they left behind them: strange and often confusing monuments. One is a statue of an alien. This is where the story begins, and the archaeologists don't know if this is the people themselves - who have come to be known as the Monument Makers - or if it’s a representation of one of their gods or mythological figures. Other monuments they leave behind consist of very angular geometric shapes and which often seem to have been severely damaged by warfare or by some natural catastrophe. Some monuments look like cities from a distance, but close up are just solid 3D shapes with many right angles. Just enough to make them look unnatural. The story is one of the slow-dawning of knowledge among the archaeologists, as to what all of this actually means.

There are some problems with the story - of the nature of Star Trek-like stupidity or lack of inventiveness and foresight. Despite drones actually being in use since the mid-1960s and especially of late, and despite robots being in use since the mid-1950s, neither Star Trek nor this novel acknowledge that there are any such devices in use anywhere in the universe! Consequently we have these archaeologists and this pilot romping into unknown situations with no support or backup and every trip they make seems to have serious problems befall it.

There's clearly been no attempt whatsoever by this so called 'Academy' to send drones or robots to map newly-discovered worlds before humans go there to study them. It seems like their approach is to simply fly there on spec, using their FTL technology and then eyeball the place until they find something interesting to go down and look at close-up. In that regard, the writing is a bit primitive and amateur. It is from the mid-nineties, but I don't see that this is an excuse for equipping these people with pretty much the same technology and mindset we have today (minus the robots and drones!).

The premise at the start of this story makes little sense. The archaeologists are working on this one find, which is semi-submerged in the ocean. They've had almost three decades on this planet to dig and evidently they still haven't excavated this particular site. There's no word on why. There's a terra-forming corporation waiting to start making over this planet so humans can live there despite there being at least one other planet where humans could live without terraforming (more on that later). The thing is that the terraforming involves multiple nuclear weapons being detonated at the poles in order to melt the ice which somehow they figure will fix the biting-cold temperatures. To me that made no sense. The planet would be irradiated and unlivable, and if this project is looking like it will take a century to complete, as they say, it will have frozen over again before they can move there! Nuclear weapons? Maybe McDevitt's military past was overriding his common sense.

It’s been known since Eunice Foote demonstrated it in 1856, that carbon dioxide traps heat. A study in 1938 showed the greenhouse effect on Earth's atmosphere, and we’ve known Venus was such a runaway greenhouse planet since the late fifties and early sixties. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988, so it’s not like this idea of a greenhouse effect was unknown when McDevitt wrote his novel, yet he wants to use nuclear weapons instead of seeding the atmosphere with some CO₂?

But here’s the thing: we're told that it’s going to be a century before the planet is livable anyway, so what difference does it make if the archaeologists take another day or two, to finish their dig? It doesn’t. Yet the corporation seems obsessed with a deadline, and in order to scare the scientists off, they let one of their comet snowballs fall early into the ocean, which ends up causing a tidal wave, and costs the life of one of the archaeologists.

In order to get even with them, Hutch the hero decides to send them a snowball, but this one is fake, made up of this expanding foam they use to package the artifacts they find. The problem with this is that even though it's low mass, it’s coming at their space station at over 4,000 mph, which means it would do some serious damage and Hutch ought to know this, but she claims it won't do more than bend a panel here or there. It ought to have got her fired, but no legal penalties come of either of these dangerous actions. Given the political scene of late I geuss this isn't so far-fetched after all.

The other problem I had with this scene is that they're planning on nuking this planet and there's no outcry or complaint anywhere about the indigenous life, some of which seems to be quite intelligent if rather apelike. That was shocking - that an author would write this - even in 1994, and not have any consideration for the ecology of the planet that they were destroying. It felt inauthentic. The other side of this coin is a planet they land on where the indigenous life ought to have been wiped out in my opinion, because it was too improbable or dangerous to live anyway, but no-one thinks of this then.

This is the planet I mentioned earlier which could support human life. These team goes down to explore it on foot without any weapons and with zero foreknowledge of local fauna. Nothing happens at all until they’ve been down there for a while and then suddenly there are literally hundreds and hundreds of crabs which have an appendage they can use to slice open their prey. The problem is not the existence of the crabs per se, it's the existence of endless hordes of them in one place and the fact that they're ravenous predators.

Nothing like this could realistically evolve and this is a problem writers frequently make - they know nothing about evolution and invent these threatening creatures which couldn't exist in reality or in isolation from their ecosystem. Anything as ravenous and endlessly predatory as these crabs would have quickly eaten their entire world's food supply. They would then have turned on each other and eaten themselves into extinction. It’s simply not possible to have such a deadly predator in such numbers.

The third improbable crisis is in their finding a possible solution to their question as to what was inflicting the damage on these artificial constructs they'd found - the ones left by the Monument Makers. They have a chance to study this but instead of staying far from it, they land on the very moon this thing is going to destroy and almost get killed. They're afraid to take off because they’re in a very boxy shuttle which they fear will attract something that appears to target angular constructs. It makes no sense. First it makes no sense that the shuttle would be so boxy, second it makes no sense that they would try to get so close to the thing, and thirdly it makes no sense that the thing would come after their angular shuttle when they'd visited a world earlier where a space station had not been attacked by this thing despite it being quite visibly artificial.

So yeah, there are problems with this story, but overall I felt it wasn't too bad of a tale and I commend it as a worthy read. That said, I have to add that I don't feel any urge to keep pursuing a re-read of this whole series. Maybe in future I may take it up in audiobook form if Chirp offers another volume at a discount, but right now I'm not moved to do it, having already been through it once!

A Lady's Maid by Sarah Gailey

Rating: WARTY!

This was a short story I got into reading when I was looking for a sneak preview of a full length novel by this author - one I decided, after the preview, not to buy. This story is really short, only 16 screens on my phone, but I still couldn't finish it. If you wish, you can read it at: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/ladys-maid-sarah-gailey . It's described as "an original short story" and I don't know why! Shouldn't the assumption be that it's original as opposed to...what? A rip-off? A plagiarized story? A clone?! I sincerely doubt that! So why specify that it's original? I dunno. Maybe they mean it's not tied to a full length novel? Still it sounds like a stupid way to refer to it, to me.

It's described as a "Victorian comedy of manners," but to me it was so boring I could not get into it and quickly resorted to skimming. It immediately felt to me like it was going to be a sixteen page long whine that was served with its own cheese. I should say up front that the book description conflates oysters and clams. They're not the same. To be sure, they're all bivalve mollusks, but oysters and mussels do not behave like clams do. For me, this confusion is to be expected from your typical idiot book description writer. The author has little to no control over that unless the book is self-published, so I'm not sure in this case who wrote it.

I had to read outside the book to discover what it was actually about, since the opening few pages were completely confusing to me. Maybe it's just me, but I felt it ought to have been clearer what was going on, and given that it wasn't - at least to me - I had a hard time generating any kind of sustained interest in it, even for as short as it was. I gave up on it and skimmed bits here and there and was still unimpressed. I can't commend it based on my experience of it so I guess, after two strikes. I'm probably done with this author, which is sad because having seen an image of her online I was under the impression that she might write just the kind of a story that would interest me. I guess I was wrong!

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Rating: WARTY!

This was a great idea for a novel and I was about to pick up the audiobook version which was on offer for a very reasonable price from Chirp, with whom I've had great success. But! I've been down this road too many times to fall for an intriguing publisher's book description without knowing more. I know those who dishonestly write these descriptions only too well from bitter experience, so I thought maybe I could get a peek inside the cover on B&N or something to help make up my mind. It turned out there was a 'sneak preview' for free download, so I got that, thinking if I liked it, I'd go ahead and buy the audiobook, but I did not like the ebook sneak peek, so I can't commend this based on what I read of that.

The first problem was first person. I can't stand that PoV and have found very few occasion to make an exception to my distaste it. It just wasn't right for this story. It's not right for most stories, but authors are obsessed with it for reasons which escape me. In this case it made the protagonist come off as whiny and self-obsessed - as it typically does - and if there's one thing I truly hate it's a novel-length whine. The book makes Evelyn (who's called Evelyn anymore?) look far too stupid, especially given that we know right from the book blurb that her 'rival' for her husband's affection - a rivalry which Evelyn lost - is actually a clone named Martine.

Why take so long to get dealing with this? It should have been front and center; if not page one, then certainly chapter one. I know authors don't write their own book blurbs unless they self-publish; they have some idiot publisher's peon do it, which explains this description, because such people typically seem to have no clue what the book is about, so I had to wonder if the left hand of the publisher knew what the writer's hand was doing here. Apparently not.

There's really nothing up-front discussing cloning even though this is what Evelyn is apparently getting an award for! That, for me, was a blunder, so when the non-reveal comes, I imagine it's supposed to come out of the blue, but it doesn't because: Hello? Book description, and it makes Evelyn look brain-dead at best. I don't do books featuring brain-dead main characters.

There's also an actual dead character - the husband - and the blurb claims that the "Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up." What mess? Is a baby a mess now? And why reduce them to an appendage of a dead man? I don't read books that have a title which is of the style "The ____'s Wife" or "The ____'s Daughter". It's demeaning to label a woman like that, ye this one boldly pigeon-holes them as "The Caldwell Wives." Like they have no other value. So why read this? Well I started out intrigued, but that faded pretty quickly.

I wasn't remotely interested enough to want to pursue this - not even at a discount - because I'd already discounted it as a novel of interest. After this I went out and read a few negative reviews from others, and they served only to confirm my wise decision not to get into this any further than I already had. Like I said, the basic premise was intriguing, but the execution of it left it dead in the water even before the waters broke.

It was as improbable as the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The 6th Day wherein adult clones can be 'activated', programmed, and fully-functional within a very short time, which is nonsensical. Even if we assume a body can be programmed using memories extracted from a living person, it still doesn't account for getting an inert body into full physical functionality, including efficient and coordinated muscle activity, when it's being lying inert in fluid for who knows how long!

The novel also had elements of The Handmaid's Tale in that Evelyn's husband had somehow programmed for himself this tame, compliant, controllable wife (apparently he didn't like the one he had - at least not her personality, but he did like her body). It makes little sense. Why go to all that trouble when - as these stories typically portray it - he could have just found himself a more subservient girl to avail himself of, and a younger one into the bargain? Why clone a wife he evidently didn't like? I dunno. Maybe it's all explained later in this story, but I wasn't interested enough to stick around and find out.

So I couldn't get into this and have no intention of pursuing the full-length novel. I typically regret the time I've wasted on reading something so unsatisfying even if it's only a few chapters, but in this case I don't because it gave me a great idea for a novel! That said though, I can't commend this because it felt so insipid, lethargic, and so poorly done.

Post-Human Omnibus Edition by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shades of Treason by Sandy Williams

Rating: WARTY!

The most memorable thing in this novel was the short sentence, “You burn, I burn, Ash.” Ash is the abbreviated last name of the main female character. I don't think the author realized there was unintended humor in writing that. Or maybe she did. But it seemed emblematic of this novel: one I had begun to like, but which by fifty percent of the way through had devolved into such a dumb-ass romance that I couldn't stand to read it anymore.

Thoughtless phrases like the one mentioned above littered this novel, so even as I started to like the main character and started to get into the story, these still brought me up with a short sharp stop every now and then. At one point, I read, "The second grabbed her arm, the arm connected to her dislocated shoulder." If it’s dislocated, it’s not connected, and vice-versa. I know what she's trying to say, but there are much better ways of saying it that evidently went unexplored there.

Another laughable line was: "She kept navigation on manual, took the controls, and banked away from the Obsidian." Spacecraft don't bank. Aircraft bank because they have to. Spacecraft don’t. Again, thoughtless writing. Another was a Star-Trek-ism: "She was as still as a Caruthian deer." On Star Trek (I don't even watch it any more, but unfortunately the memory refuses to fade) they were always talking about 'planet of origin-Item' as an indivisible pair. It was laughable. Same here. Why a Caruthian deer? Why not just a deer? Do Caruthian deer turn to stone when they become still - à la a weeping angels from Doctor Who? I doubt it. Just 'a deer' would have been fine. You don't need to specify the planet it came from because such a reference is both pretentious and meaningless. And poor writing. One last one: "You’re anomaly is unresponsive, Commander." She doesn't mean 'you are anomaly'; she means 'your anomaly'. Again, inattentive writing. As writers, we’ve all been there, and one of these once in a while is forgivable, but so many of them were too many.

In terms of the story itself, the anomaly is Lieutenant Ramie Ashdyn, or Ash for short. Nowhere in the 50% I read is an anomaly actually explained. It references a certain type of person, but how or why they're considered anomalies I cannot tell you because the author couldn't tell me. This genetic condition (or whatever it's supposed to be) appears to render them into a super soldier or spy or whatever is it they choose to do. Why does this happen? I don't know.

So anyway, Ashdyn is an anomaly and of course even more anomalous than others because of her attitude. I enjoyed this to begin with because it made her badass - that is until fifty percent into this story, when the romantic bullshit between her and her commanding officer became far too big a part of the story and entirely inappropriate for three major reasons. The first of these was that he was her commanding officer - her superior, her authority figure, and therefore this was entirely wrong. The second is worse, believe it or not. This superior officer - who she referred to as 'Rip' - were given unnatural mental control over their subordinates through the use of some sort of compulsion brainwashing, which meant these subordinates were unable to refuse a special type of command the officer could issue. The command could be anything, but when issued in the right way, they had no choice but to obey it. In short, they were slaves. Again, having sex with someone under that kind of control is entirely inappropriate.

The third reason was simply ridiculous, and I guess I should have paid more attention to the 'Shades of' portion of the title here. While it's a gray area, I do take full responsibility for my lack of focus here. Ashdyn has been off these special meds she takes and so is extraordinarily weakened (because she's an anomaly). On top of that, she'd been tortured for an hour, including having too-tight manacles on her limbs, and having at least one finger deliberately broken as well as having some device that causes extreme pain, but not damage, applied to her head several times. She'd been in a fight - both physical and using weapons - had stolen a space transport and crash-landed on the nearby planet, hiked in her increasingly weakening state through a forest, and then been forced to roll down the side of a canyon in order to escape being shot. In other words, she wasn't beaten, but she was battered and bruised, cut and damaged, with lord knows how many broken ribs and pulled muscles, and at the end of her string.

After all of this, and while washing off in a river - during which of course she has to get naked in order to get 'properly clean', as does her finely-chiseled and muscular superior officer - she's entertaining sexual thoughts about him - all her injuries and pain completely forgotten. This is the woman whose fiancé betrayed her, yet she has zero thoughts about that guy: not a sliver of a longing, or a regret or anything, and yet now she's suddenly lusting after this rugged commander for whom she's had zero feelings until he all-but beats up on her while she's manacled. I understand that later she has sex with him. But thankfully, I didn't read that far. I'd like to invite the author to abuse herself to the same extent she dictates that her female character gets abused and then see how sexual she feels after it. My guess is that her answer will be 'not bloody much'.

I can see a guy writing bullshit like this, but a female author? I don't get it at all. It’s entirely inappropriate and all it achieves is to turn what was shaping up to be a fine and strong female character into the wilting violet star of a cheesy Harlequin southern romance. It’s barf-worthy. This novel is warty to the max and I don't see where it can possibly go that's intelligent after this. Wherever that turns out to be, I don't want to go there with it. Half of this was too much by half.

Ghost Legion by Andreas Christensen

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is your standard alien invasion deal, and those can be entertaining, but this one seemed so full of clichés and it was badly-written. Plus it’s the first in a series and I was already off-put by this volume, let alone the prospect of reading a whole series like this.

The story is that aliens came 18 years prior to the start of the main story. This ebook had an introduction, and a prologue, both of which I skipped, so chapter one began 'eighteen years later' - that is almost two decades after the birth of the main character. The book blurb claims that " A race of conquerors from deep space had set their eyes on Earth´s riches." I guess these guys are from deep space as opposed to that shallow space we’re always hearing about. But here’s the thing - what riches? What is it that Earth has that some random uninhabited and therefore, ripe for the plucking planet doesn't have?

I liked the 2011 movie Battle: Los Angeles even though it was also clichéd, but one of my problems with that movie was the claim that the aliens liked Earth because of the water - their technology was based on it. The thign is that at least three moons in our solar system have abundant water which they coudla hve had without a fight. Water isn't that rare in space, either. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and oxygen is the third most common. Water is merely oxidized hydrogen. All you need to do is burn hydrogen in oxygen, and hey presto, you have water!

Aside from that, Earth isn't made of anything that doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe, so clearly it wasn’t water that brought the aliens to Earth in this story. Was it physical resources? Earth has nothing that other planets do not have! Was it food? The chances that aliens would be adapted to be suitably nourished by food growing on Earth are a bit on the slim side. You have to evolve with your food, so unless their own planet was pretty much exactly like ours and they had something like parallel evolution to ours, which is a long shot, then what exactly is the attraction of Earth - a planet they would have to fight for in order to garner for themselves these things? That was never made clear. But I have a hard time buying this premise in a story like this unless the author really does some work to specify why Earth is truly the only place that can satisfy their needs. This author didn't do the work.

That wasn’t even the worst issue though. The blurb went on to say that humans chased "them off Earth and most of the Solar System" but it didn't say why they didn't finish the job. Instead, it insists that the "war still rages on, and every year young people are sent out to die, far away from Earth," but why is this? We already have pretty sophisticated robot technology today. This author is saying that in an age where we can fight a winning battle across most of the solar system, we don't have military robots, drones, or other automated weapons to deploy? They don't explain why it was such a battle given that these aliens - admittedly arriving prepared - managed to give the entire population of Earth and its mighty militaries and its considerable manufacturing resources such a hard time. The aliens were necessarily outnumbered and fighting with limited resources. Why was victory so hard won and so incomplete? I don't know and the author evidently doesn't care.

So not only was the plot lacking considerably in oomph, so was the writing. I read at one point early in the novel, "For a millennia." No! The singular is millennium. Millennia is plural. A writer should know this and so should any editors they hire. At another point I read, "... Jews and Muslims, Christians and Atheists, blacks and whites, all united in one single purpose..." so apparently the author believes that 'blacks' and 'whites' are religions, but Hinduism isn't? Atheism is?! Either that or he needs to word his sentences better. Later I read, "Ethan looked at Julian and heaved his eyebrows slightly." I'm frankly not sure how one heaves one's eyebrows slightly. I can see someone lifting them slightly, yeah. I can see them raised slightly, but heaved slightly? It doesn't work, and given how many of these irritations cropped up in the first few pages, neither does the novel. Not for me anyway.

The author apparently thinks we’ll still be using the same weaponry when we have advanced space travel rather than having advanced our weapons at the same rate as our space travel abilities. Worse than this, when Ethan decides for no apparent reason to join the military, the testing is ludicrous. They get some tests on a computer and later their 'decision-making' test consists of whether they choose to go get a soda in the lounge or go down a dark corridor into a room. That's it! That's the entire test and Ethan passed it. The next day they’re led into an area where they have to fight this trained soldier. They all lose of course, and most of them get injured. It was like a direct lift from Divergent, and that's where I quit reading. Divergent sucked, and this story is no better. It's ridiculous, pathetic, and totally unrealistic.

Prototype by Jason D Morrow

Rating: WARTY!

The premise for this story was a bit silly. It starts from the old trope that nuclear war has destroyed much of the world and the human population, and a century later nothing has apparently changed. We’re told that 'humanity' has been reduced to one surviving city which struck me as highly unlikely. No doubt that city is in North America, just north of Mexico and just south of Canada, since it always is in these stories despite the USA being a prime target in the event of nuclear war.

These people, the "Mainlanders" have food and water, and they have a wall that keeps out the "Outlanders" who for some reason want to keep attacking this city instead of getting on with their own lives on the rest of the planet! Why? Who knows. My question here is, if the mainlanders are 'humanity' what, exactly are the Outlanders? Inhumanity?!

But these attacks are why the Mainlanders build a prototype fighting robot which for reasons unexplained, they give emotions. Why? Who knows? I got the immediate impression that this author had not really thought this through. Instead he had cherry-picked ideas from sci-fi movies and TV shows that he then tossed together into a kind of kedgeree of a novel which really made no sense.

Why was the robot left in the desert a mile or more from its target, instead of at the point where it was of most use? If the people who built it could leave it there and leave supplies for it elsewhere close by the obtjective of the mission, why couldn't they themselves complete the mission? Was this merely a test?

If it was, then who were the real people the robot was killing? A knee-jerk response to this would be to ask, 'why not read on and find out'? but when the writing is this transparently bad, I have no wish to read on, and I sure as hell don't want to read a series that's written like this. The first volume is inevitably a prologue and I don't do prologues.

Besides, there were much more serious questions. Why did the robot, supposedly programmed as a military bot, not know better how to fight the 'outlander' soldiers who were chasing it? Why, when it pulled up information from memory, did it have to present the information to itself in front of its eyes - as a heads-up display instead of processing it internally? I read, "His vision allowed for information to display semi-transparent in front of him." Clearly the author was getting his ideas from movies, and bless him, he never imagined for a minute that a robot might function differently form a human.

The robot was suppsoed ot be a prototype fighter to save human lives and defend their life form the Outlanders (who no doubt all wore kilts! LOL! Seriously, outlanders and mainlanders? What dumb names. Besides, if the outlanders were wont to attack the city walls, why not just automate machine-guns to shoot them down as they attacked? Why the need for robots at all?

This novel was poorly written, unimaginative, and made no sense, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Longshot by Sean Platt, Johnny B Truant

Rating: WARTY!

These two authors, under the slightly altered names of 'Sean M Platt' and 'Johnny Truant', wrote "The Fiction Formula" a seemingly paradoxically non-fiction audiobook which claims to teach a reader "All you need to know to be a full-time storyteller" but I have say I have grave doubts about such books.

Have you noticed how these books are nearly always written by people you never heard of, much less saw their names on any best seller list? It seems clear to me that such people make their money not from selling fiction, but from selling books and/or running courses that offer to make a person into a best-selling author. My problem with this is that, to begin with, it's not possible, and secondly, I have to wonder how they propose to do that for others when they haven't done it for themselves.

I've heard it said that everyone has a story to tell, but even if it were true, it doesn't mean that the story is interesting, or that a person can write their story and have it sell no matter how much coaching and encouragement they get. That's why we have ghost writers!

The two authors in question here started up the "Sterling & Stone Story Studio" which for all I know could be an author mill or it could be legit. I honestly don't know, because from their website it's impossible to tell just what it is they do or how they do it. Naturally, if they're charging for their 'tuition' or whatever it is they offer, they're not going to give you everything up front for free, but for a website like this to not give so much as an outline of what their expectations of you are, and what their requirements are in return, will always make me suspicious.

They claim they have put out about a hundred novels since 2011, but to me, for multiple writers that's not very impressive. Counting my children's books, I've put out over well over fifty all by myself since 2013, yet I don't consider that any great achievement. The thing is I don't know how they work there: whether it's a tutoring arrangement or whether they have people write stuff like in "James Frey's Fiction Factory" or whether it's some other system.

Their website offers no help. None of the author's names on the website meant anything to me. None were familiar. Not that I've heard of every writer and not that a writer needs a best-seller to make a living from their craft, but you'd think, if this method was so spectacularly successful, there'd be one or two names that that your average reader might have heard of. I hadn't, and I've read a heck of a lot of books in all genres.

This, to cut a long story off, is how I came to read this novel. When I read about their audiobook I looked them up on Barnes and Noble to see what they'd written, and recognized none of it, but the first four books they had on offer there were all free - probably as loss leaders for series, which I will have little to no truck with. I ahve ot say here I ahve doubts abotut he vlaue of an audiobook in that genre to begin with, but the ultility of that format for this kind of a book is a separate issue.

Anyways, I picked one of their novels at random and started in on it to see how well these people - who claim to teach others how to write - write themselves. Maybe I was wrong in my take on their offer. Maybe I'd missed something. The best way would be to read something they've written and see how it compares to other things I've read, and I have to say: I was not impressed with their trope effort.

I've often wished I had a co-writer - someone to talk over my stories with and maybe share some writing, but I've never had that. Of course, on the other side of that coin is how well a pair of writers will fare. How do they work? Who writes what? How do they resolve conflicts? Maybe it's better to write alone! The thing is that when I launched into this novel, I found nothing new, or startlingly original, or particularly inventive. It was just your boilerplate writing about alien invaders have arriving around Earth and failing to communicate with the locals.

In this particular regard it was just an Independence Day redux. The thing is that there was zero backstory. Admittedly, I skimmed a lot of this, and I DNF'd it, because it was boring as all hell to me, but in what I read, I came across nothing which explained what had happened from day one here. I didn't want a flashback or an info dump, gods forbid, but you'd think the writers might have put some effort into filling out the story a bit, with a word or two here and there. No. They had other plans.

Instead what we got was a soap opera, and the conversations these jackass characters had were unreal and unlike things they would likely say to each other if this were a true story. Worse than this though were the clichés: women doing the screaming, ridiculous and unnecessarily gory alien robots (or wildlife whichever it was - I didn't stay to find out), inexplicable violence, the alien vehicle they interacted with being cold as ice, advanced aliens who were improbably and brutally violent, and so dumb they evidently couldn't communicate with the locals, and it went boringly on and on. There was nothing to see here: nothing new or surprising, or remotely interesting. This a formulaic encounter of the worst kind. it was a flimsy sci-fi veneer over a daytime TV show.

So we got into the story with no idea how the aliens had become so dominant, why the world's militaries could not fight them off, and so on. The problem for me was that instead of a story about alien invasion, we got that as a backdrop for a soap opera among the enforced residents of a Las Vegas casino, and there's nothing more boring than that - the switch and bait of offering an alien invasion story, but making it all about these uninteresting people - none of whom I liked at all - is not going to make me read it. Normally I would not have picked up a book like this where a 'ragtag band of people' is involved. There's nothing worse.

The idea is that these people encounter a dying alien, How they determined that is a mystery. This is where I quit reading, so maybe I missed that, but according to the blurb they have to (warning: 5-alarm cliché ahead) transport the sick alien to area 51 - and no doubt save the world by curing him, her, or it. Yep! This was the alien motive. They thought Earth was an ER! I'm sorry but this is really bad writing and based on what I read of it, I sure wouldn't pay - or even get for free - any tutoring these authors have to offer. I can't commend this novel at all based on my experience of it, and I'm done with these writers and anyone else in their stable.