New Book Review 41: Eddies in the Space-Time Continuum

eddies The next book I’m reviewing here is Eddies in the Space-Time Continuum by J.M. Hushour, a thoroughly unconventional comedic sci-fi novel. This is going to be a longer review than the others, because there is a lot to say about this work. I downloaded the ebook over two years ago and discovered three things: one, the writing is phenomenal; two, the book does not exist in print; and three, the book would be over a thousand pages long if it did exist in print. I don’t enjoy reading ebooks as much as I enjoy reading print books (I know, it’s 2018, sue me) and this book’s improbable length added to that issue, but the writing was so good that I wasn’t willing to give up on it. So, I tried and retried this book a couple of times before I finally got a running start at it and spent a month reading through the whole darn thing. It was most definitely worth the read, but likewise reading it was a real chore.

The novel consists of twelve chapters. Each chapter (with one exception) takes place on March 30, 2050, the birthday of our protagonist, Eddie. As we gradually learn, Eddie has a condition similar to that of Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day or Tom Cruise’s character in Edge of Tomorrow. He is constantly reliving the same day. In this author’s interpretation of the theme, each repeated day that Eddie experiences is in a different version of the future. Humanity just keeps on finding new ways to make itself miserable, and Eddie is witness to every one of them. Doom by rising sea levels. Doom by corporatocracy. Doom by plague. There is always some monstrous crisis coming to a head on Eddie’s birthday.

In every version of the future, Eddie is a physically imposing but gentle-hearted creative type, fairly befuddled by his place and time. He owes some inspiration to Douglas Adam’s baffled protagonist Arthur Dent (and, the book’s title is itself a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Eddie is inevitably and hopelessly in love with Viola, a Scottish woman who in every version of the future is some kind of outsider radical extremist, in her own mind fighting to free the world from its present crisis. Though their first meeting in the first version of the future was filled with quite a lot of hostility, every subsequent future brings them closer and closer together, with Eddie becoming braver and stronger in each repetition, and with cycles of déjà vu and shared recurring symbols—an enigmatic sandwich, the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night, butterflies—revealing to Eddie and Viola that they have met each other over and over again in different versions of their reality. Binding all of these realities together is the mystical notion of the qutb, something like the axis of a wheel, a notion taken from Islam and explored in this work. Also in each reality appear a cast of characters whose fates are bound with those of Eddie and Viola. To name a few key players: Hijack, Eddie’s sometimes-male-sometimes-female sibling who is a sort of drug dealer Willy Wonka; Aivia, a woman who is inevitably in the process of using science to change into a bird; Hélolard, sometimes a therapist, sometimes a cyborg stripper, sometimes a military commander, usually a mentor, always taking command over Eddie; and, crucially, the antagonist, a mysterious entity called the Queen of Hurts, who is always appearing to tear down reality. If I haven’t made this clear yet, it’s all a lot to take in.

One of the reasons this book impressed me from the very beginning was its intense, colorful use of language as a vehicle for ideas, delivering metaphors and zingers and philosophical notions in every sentence, keeping the scene interesting even when little was happening. It reminded me a lot of the books I’ve read by Tom Robbins (and, I saw that this author listed Tom Robbins as an influence). The book is very funny from the very beginning, funny in a Douglas Adam kind of way, but as it goes on and the nature of the book’s central threat becomes clearer, the tone becomes much more serious. The change happens slowly, so much that you might not notice it happening unless you get a ways into the book and begin comparing one chapter to another. With all this business of multiple realities and multiple speculations about the future, sometimes the book got very confusing. There were times when the events on the page really didn’t make a lick of sense. But, I was so impressed by the work as a whole that this didn’t bother me at all.

Readers should be aware that this is a book for adults, with quite a lot of violence and sex and coarse language and coarse themes and so on. Some readers are put off by that. As for me, I was blown away. I really wish this book existed in print, because I want it on my shelf. I want to be able to flip through physical paper pages of it and enjoy it that way, because it is a masterpiece. I would highly recommend it to a wide variety of readers: fans of science fiction, fans of comedy, fans of absurdism and surrealism, readers looking for new and original ideas, etc. This book seems to be pretty obscure right now, but I don’t think it should be. I think a really wide audience would and should appreciate this book as much as I have.

And now, as I always do in these reviews, my bit of advertisement. If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

New Book Review 39: A Keeper’s Tale

A Keepers Tale The thirty-ninth book indie book review I’m doing here is for A Keeper’s Tale: The Story of Tomkin and the Dragon, by J.A. Andrews. Way back in August 2016 I wrote a review for this author’s high fantasy novel A Threat of Shadows, which is one of my favorite indie fantasy novels. If you like, you can find that review here. A Keeper’s Tale is presented as a fable told and retold by people in the world where A Threat of Shadows takes place, and consequently is a little more like a fairy tale than a high fantasy novel.

Our protagonist is Tomkin, the younger and less-favored son of a duke in a dull kingdom called Marshwell. Tomkin is a teenage dork, peevish, too weak to lift a sword, hardly the heroic archetype. He is sent on a quest through two coinciding events: learning that he’s been betrothed to a reputedly shrewish woman, and learning that a dragon has allegedly been devouring local livestock. Before long our brave hero finds himself trapped in a ruined castle alongside a moody dragon named Vorath, a longsuffering kobold named Wink, and a sarcastic young woman whom he calls Mags. The primary plot involves Tomkin’s attempt to escape his predicament, with the supporting characters helping and hindering him in various ways.

Tomkin and Mags are fairly well developed as characters. Thy both have some gaps in their backstories, but they think and act in pretty credible ways. Vorath initially seems like a pretty stereotypical Smaug-esque dragon, but he gets some good development as well. I would have liked to see more development in Wink the kobold, as I was left with a few questions about his personality, motives, and background. That being said, I think it’s to the story’s benefit that there are so few characters. We’re able to get to know those characters without being distracted by keeping track of a wide cast of side characters. Overall I thought characterization was done very well.

For the first half of the novel, everything is pretty light and comedic, and there are notable nods to other mostly light-hearted fantasy works like The Hobbit and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Around the halfway point there is a pretty significant mood shift. Learning more about how Mags and Vorath have come to be in the castle raises the stakes in the story, and it gets to be a little less light-hearted and a little more serious. That being said, the story and Andrews’s writing in general are proudly noblebright fantasy, and the menace stays PG and never quite reaches PG-13 or R. Fantasy fans who favor heavier, grimmer stories might dismiss this more positive fantasy as infantile or pointless, but I appreciate a wide variety of fantasy and thoroughly enjoyed the book. I suppose the target audience might be teenagers and kids rather than adults, but as an adult I liked it, and I think many other fans of the genre would too.

And now once again, the plug. If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

New Book Review 37: Deep Space Accountant

My next indie book review is for the sci-fi novel Deep Space Accountant, by Mjke (yes, that’s the correct spelling) Wood, the first book in the Sphere of Influence series. This novel starts out with strong comedic overtones, but as it develops the story becomes closer more like a thriller. The novel is set in the 23^rd century, in which humans have abandoned the scoured and polluted ruins of Earth and spread throughout the universe. The sum area of human habitation is known as the Sphere of Influence, but most of Earth’s biodiversity perished with Earth, including all trees and most animals. Lightspeed travel, teleportation, vat-grown meat, and a sentient AI companion called an imentor (using the pronouns Jim or Kim, depending on the gender of the user) are regular parts of life in the 23^rd century.

The protagonist, the Deep Space Accountant in question, is Elton D. Philpotts, an everyman nobody sort of character who works a mediocre job as an ordinary ground-bound accountant but aspires to the lofty and glorious position of a deep space accountant. Not being an expert in Relativistic Accountancy (that is, assessing costs involved with lightspeed travel, the wear and tear on spaceships, and so forth), he is utterly unqualified and can only dream. It’s notable that since genetic modification of embryos is a regular part of the future, a botched attempt at making him a superior human left him with the ability to memorize any number he sees. This is useful for his job, but no replacement for Relativistic Accounting experience.

Despite his lack of qualifications, Elton lands an interview with Space Corps for a deep space accountant position, and despite the comical awfulness of the interview, he gets the job, boards a shuttle which promptly explodes, and finds himself fleeing for his life from a sinister corporation which had meant to use him as a scapegoat and pawn in their wicked schemes for…well, if you want to know what the schemes are you’ll have to read the book, because I’d hate to give further spoilers.

The writing is smooth, without the nagging little errors I’ve come to expect from so many indie novels. The humor does fade as the story progresses, but it’s good where it is. Elton, a mediocre accountant who is forced to be a hero, is an entertaining character. With his ticks and quirks and so on, I can imagine him being a character in a Wes Anderson film, which was endearing for me. The secondary characters weren’t all quite as strong, some of them kind of blended together for me, but that’s not so bad. There is a romantic arc to the story which was a little improbable, but it’s a genre of improbable things, so that’s not so bad either. Elton really does have “plot armor”, consistently surviving shootings and crashes and explosions and so forth because the story needs him alive, but being a comedy, this sort of thing is expected. There was one weakness to the story, in my opinion. The main antagonist, a Space Corps bigwig named Martin Levinson, is a pretty clichéd character. He’s a bad guy in a business suit, driven by greed and sociopathy without any meaningful complexity behind him, and characters exactly like him have been oozing their way through the offices of sci-fi in various media for decades.

All in all, the story was a good one. I enjoyed it, and I’d recommend it for fans of comedy (specifically off-beat comedy) and sci-fi (including hard sci-fi, which we so rarely see). I’d especially recommend it for sci-fi fans who are looking for something fresh and different.

Now, once again, my bit of promo. If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

New Book Review 22: Stupid Humans

stupid-humans-cover The next indie novel I’m reviewing here is Stupid Humans, by Vivian Cummings (using the pen name V.R. Craft). This is primarily a science fiction novel with strong overtones of satire and social critique. The setting is sometime hundreds or thousands of years in the future, on a space station on the opposite side of a wormhole that has opened hear Earth. Despite the exotic location, the author carefully and cleverly included many familiar aspect of the real and present world, with a focus on the more obnoxious and, well, stupid aspects.

In this book’s backstory, the most intelligent humans on Earth fled the planet millennia ago in an event the rest of the world knew as the sinking of Atlantis. They established a spacefaring civilization and named themselves the People, in contrast to the stupid Humans who they left behind on Earth. The passage of time led to somewhat divergent evolution between the People and the Humans (for example, the People developed tails), and the People saw themselves as in every way superior to the Humans they’d left behind. The novel kicks off some years after a wormhole opens between Earth and the space station Five Alpha, where several thousand People live. The unexpected first contact leads to distrust, fear, political wrangling, business opportunities, and a war which the People’s public relations officials struggle to avoid calling a war. In this conflict we have doctors and politicians and beer moguls and regular Joes of both the Humans and the People all trying to find an unlikely stability.

The writing is very good, the pacing was good, and I thought the story overall was very clever and original. It had many familiar elements to it (in some ways it seemed to take the concept behind the movie Idiocracy and invert the premise) but was very fresh as an independent sci-fi work. There were some small typos throughout the story, but they weren’t concentrated anywhere and they weren’t enough to be distracting. The characters were complex, the dialogue and interactions were quite believable, and there were several legitimately funny bits of comedy throughout the novel.

There was one area where the book had some weakness though. It had quite a lot of characters who were difficult to keep track of, and the character who fell into the protagonist’s role is deliberately mysterious about her motives and backstory. I’m referring to Samantha, a Human bartender and reporter who ends up on Five Alpha and is subject to scrutiny by People who are suspicious of her desire to stay on the station. The question of her motive isn’t answered until the very end of the book, and this crucial aspect of Samantha’s personality prevents the reader from developing a very strong connection with the character.

That being said, Stupid Humans is an intelligent and high-quality work of science fiction, a caliber above many other sci-fi novels that I’ve read. I would definitely recommend it to fans of the genre, and to fans of humor and satire.

Now as always, my bit of promo. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here: New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8–New Book Review 9 –New Book Review 10–New Book Review 11–New Book Review 12–New Book Review 13–New Book Review 14–New Book Review 15–New Book Review 16–New Book Review 17—New Book Review 18–New Book Review 19–New Book Review 20–New Book Review 21

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

This post was originally featured on cwbookclub.com.

New Book Review 11: Obsidian Son

The next book I’m reviewing is Obsidian Son, the first book of the ‘Nate Temple’ series by Shayne Silvers. The books is billed as a supernatural thriller, but it was more of a modern/urban fantasy thriller with some overtones of detective drama and comedy. There were aspects of the book that I really loved, and some other aspects that I really hated.

But first, the premise. The protagonist, Nate Temple, is a tough, wisecracking, handsome bookstore owner whose parents owned a multi-billion-dollar tech company. He also happens to be a wizard. In this world there are wizards, werewolves, living gargoyles, the monsters and gods of Greek mythology (albeit quite a ways past their prime), and all kinds of magical shtuff. The story takes off shortly after Nate’s parents die under mysterious circumstances. Soon Nate’s bookstore is being attacked by strange incendiary women, Nate’s magical powers start going haywire, and everybody in town is in search of an ancient book about dragons. Nate’s investigations lead him into the thick of a plot by scheming, shape-shifting dragons to establish the Obsidian Son, a kind of dragon übermensch who will usher in an age of dragon world domination.

It’s a fun concept, made even more fun by the comedy delivered by the book. There’s great banter among characters and great wisecracks from our hero, but even apart from that the situations and scenarios in many cases are genuinely hilarious. Saying too much about them now would spoil the jokes for potential readers, but the jokes are definitely a strength. The action is written as it should be in a thriller. It’s fast, it’s vivid, the details are all there, it’s all working great. There’s only one thing about the action that doesn’t work so well: Nate Temple is so powerful that he never seems to be in any real danger. The reader never has to wonder if he’ll survive a fight. With his plot armor securely in place, the fights have a somewhat cartoonish quality to them. His absolute wealth also allows many problems to be resolved simply by throwing money at them. That’s not so bad though. It’s entertaining anyway. It bothered me a little that there really wasn’t really any character development in the book, but it’s a thriller. It’s entertainment. I can accept that.

There’s one big thing that did bother me about the book: the majority of female characters in the book served the primary purpose of being (to use Nate Temple’s term) “eye candy”. Every single female character has supermodel looks wear skintight clothing, when they wear clothes at all. The dragons vying for domination consist of a kingpin-like figure and his “harem” of females, all of whom appear as usually-naked supermodels when they are in human form. Nate Temple’s love interest (whom he doesn’t mind forgetting about when he’s ogling the other female characters) does literally nothing in the entire book except be sexy and serve as the love interest. The story could follow its exact same plot without her ever appearing. As far as I remember, the only exception to the every-woman-is-a-sex-deity rule was one elderly Christian secretary who was just in the story for one comedic scene in which she reprimands Nate for being too sinful. Now, I’m not about to try and be the moral arbiter of the genre. And, there’s nothing wrong with a character being attractive. But with the exception of the elderly Bible-thumper, every woman in the story has sexiness as their first and most defining characteristic. Their value to Nate starts with their sex appeal. It bothers me. As I said, the book is just entertainment. It’s not going for anything profound. Still, it bothers me, and I can certainly see it bothering other readers.

So, I can recommend this for fans of action and thriller novels, and for fans of modern fantasy, and for readers who live in the common ground between the two. The writing is not at all bad and I had a lot of fun reading it. I’d like to hope that if I read any of the author’s other books, I won’t find in them the same issues that I found in this one.

And now, the plug. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here:

New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–

New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8–New Book Review 9 –New Book Review 10

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.