Title:
Reader
Author:
Erec Stebbins
Publisher: Twice Pi Press (no website found)
Rating:
WARTY!
This novel began with a series of appallingly depressing chapters filled with gratuitous violence. I was ready to quit it because of the unrelenting cruelty when things turned around and the main character's life began to take an up-tick. So begins book one of the Daughter of Time Trilogy. I'm not a fan of series unless they're extraordinarily well done, which is rare. My problem with this one is that a few short weeks after I read it, I'd completely forgotten it. I had to read this same review that you're reading to even recall what happened in it. That's only one reason why I rated this negatively: it made absolutely no impression on me!
This novel is written in first person PoV, which is a serious mistake for most books, including this one. Once in a while a writer makes it work, but nine times out of ten, it's so unrealistic as to be pathetic. It's irritating to read a novel where the writer is constantly pulling on your shirt or tapping you on your shoulder and telling you: "Hey, it's all about ME! Listen to ME! You'd better listen to ME because who cares about anyone else?!" The premise here is that this teen-aged girl is supposed to be telling us of events she can't remember because they were so bad, and she was so brutalized that things overwhelmed her. This not only makes no sense, it's completely unrealistic.
That said, I found the underlying story interesting enough to put up with the 'me me me' all the time for a while, but I quickly came to regret it. Ambra Dawn has a brain tumor; her parents are going nuts trying to get expert advice on what to do, and they're spending a fortune. One day some shady, unidentified, and purportedly "government" operatives show-up claiming that they can fix her for free, although why they say anything is a mystery because they end up kidnapping Amber, and slaughtering parents. This apparently has no effect on Ambra, at least as judged by the fact that she never mourns them in any way at all.
As if this wasn't bad enough, she's placed in (not even placed in, more like slammed into) a facility which makes Oliver Twist's circumstances look idyllic. Her tumor isn't treated, it's encouraged, because it gives her psychic skills that these men, for reasons initially unexplained, wish to encourage. She and other children are beaten and punished in a thoroughly misguided attempt to train them to be proficient in certain skills. When this is done, Ambra finds herself dragged aboard an alien space craft. All this abduction and treatment is evidently to placate our alien overlords and provide children who can fly their spaceships!
How the aliens ever arrived at Earth if they needed humans in the first place to even get here goes completely unexplained. The aliens are the standard, trope, clichéd, unimaginative, tedious sci-fi aliens which are inevitably rooted deeply in non-mammalian Earth life forms, but inexplicably made intelligent and advanced - yet so un-advanced that they need humans. In short, we get squids and insects.
The squids brutalize the humans even more, and inexplicably, the humans don't all break down. Despite the fact that humans are evidently invaluable to the aliens and very much in demand, after foolishly risking killing off the children or driving them insane with this inhuman treatment, the aliens auction off their trainees, even allowing smugglers to buy them! None of this makes any sense. Despite how critical humans are to space navigation, non of the aliens have any respect for the health and welfare of their vital 'components'. They're treated exactly like Jews, male homosexuals, and Romany peoples were treated by the Nazis.
This was the point where I was ready to quit reading this nonsense, but then a new alien race appeared - not squid, not insects. These were good guys so naturally they were much more like humans, but with inexplicable differences. Erec Stebbins needs to read a good textbook on evolution. Ambra and all the other kids are rescued and restored to health. I decided, tentatively, to continue reading in the hope that this novel might salvage itself. It failed.
I have to advise that I had some problems, not only with these space operas in general, but with this novel in the particular. In general, I've never seen any authenticity in the way space operas always seem to center on a battle between bad guys and good guys fighting for control of the galaxy. This juvenile PoV can make for a very dramatic story if done well, but it is, at its core, inherently ridiculous to pretend that anyone can control a galaxy. It takes so long to travel from one place to another, and the distances are unimaginably huge. Even if you add in faster than light travel using warps or worm holes, you still haven't addressed the problem of why one civilization would want to subjugate another over such massive distances.
These stories typically assume that planet Y has a resource, something valuable - even the people of the planet perhaps - which planet X needs to control and exploit. For what? If these people can make interstellar journeys, they certainly don't need slaves. They have the technology to build intelligent robots which are far easier to control, far more robust, have far more potential for specialization, are far hardier, and require far fewer resources than do biological beings!
What non-living resources could there be? One solar system is much like another in that there may be one or more habitable planets together with a host of uninhabitable ones which could, if the locally resident civilization wished, be mined for resources. Comparing one similar planet to another (obviously a planet like Jupiter isn't comparable to one like Mars, for example, in terms of resources and ease of extraction), it makes no sense to travel interstellar distances for resources which can be mined or processed right there in your own system.
Other stories try to suggest that Planet Y has a unique resource (like unobtanium, for example), but realistically, one part of the galaxy - indeed, the universe - is very much like another in terms of what it has to offer. There are no unknown elements in the sense that these sci-fi stories like to pretend. So this business of galactic empires, or space hegemonies, or star kingdoms is nonsensical when you think about it. As usual, it all comes down to the question of how many liberties you - as a reader - are willing to let the writer get away with before you put your foot down (or more accurately, put the book down). This depends on you as an individual reader, and some of you are more wiling to forgive - or at least overlook - nonsense than others are for the sake of getting a decent story.
This brings it down to the issue of what particular nonsense the writer of the book you're reading is trying to get away with. This author has the trope bad alien empire being fought against by "rebel factions". In this case it's Xix of one and half a Dram of the other, the Dram being the bad guys, the Xix being the good guys. The latter make no sense. They're presented as being a rather pacifist race, with very advanced technology, yet claiming that they don't have the resources to take on the Dram. This is the same people who rescue Ambra by attacking the Dram ship!
To me, this made no sense at all. They're either capable of aggression or they're not! First of all, their pacifist claim is effectively negated by the fact that they did attack the ship, and were successful in doing so. Secondly, even if they're the pacifists they claim to be, and given that they're as technologically advanced as they claim to be, how is it that they have been unable to develop means to undermine the Dram's power and negate their aggression without attacking them directly? It made no sense at all.
Underlying all of this, once again, is the issue of a writer not grasping evolution properly. Even Darwin, as primitive as his knowledge was, understood that in any environment populated by living things, there will be competition for resources, and only those best able to capitalize on available resources would pass on their genes to the next generation. Nature is, at its very roots (sometimes literally!) a battle ground. It's not possible for an organism to survive, much less thrive, if it isn't in effect a soldier. Aggression is almost paradoxically a necessary evil for any organism which rises to the top of the intelligence scale as humans have done. Understanding evolution, it's no surprise that humans are so ready to compete and even fight. The Xix could not have climbed as high as they did by being pacifists. Aggression is in their genes; it has to be!
Another slightly mysterious issue is how main character Ambra manages to see. We're told she's gone blind because of the tumor, but why and how this happened is rather glossed over. We can chalk it down to no one caring about her sight as long as her second sight is working; however, Ambra actually can see after a fashion. This is explained by her ability to mentally envision the past, but that itself isn't explained. We're told that if she 'looks' at the very recent past all around her, it enables her to see in almost real time, just as though she has actual vision, but given that she literally can't see, and has not been able to for some time, how is she able to envision anything from her own PoV? This isn't explained at all! Nor is it explained how she sees in such vivid detail.
The author makes a giant leap from her being able to recall her own past in rich detail (from a time when she had sight) to her being able to see her current surroundings in equal detail - surroundings which she's actually never seen, and has at best experienced only through sound, smell, and air currents on her skin. What I didn't get most of all was: if the author is going to grant her this, why bother making her go blind in the first place? Was it nothing more than yet another gratuitous attempt at doing violence to her? None of this made any sense to me, especially given that the Xix, with their hugely advanced technology, never even tried to restore her sight. It just wasn't discussed.
So no, just no! There were way-the-heck too many issues and problems with this story to continue reading it, not when there is better-written material out there just waiting to be explored. I cannot recommend this.
