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 6: No Dogs in Philly

The sixth book I’m reviewing is No Dogs in Philly, the first book of the ‘Special Sin’ series by Andy Futuro. It’s written as a mix of genres, with cyberpunk, dystopian, Lovecraftian horror, and crime noir all represented in the story. This is definitely one of the best indie books I’ve read, and I’d definitely recommend it to other readers.

The protagonist is a woman named Saru, a detective working in a future version of Philadelphia. In this world, most people have brain implants that allow them to have continuous internet access inside their brains (side-affects include getting your entire perception of reality taken over by hackers). The highest level of society is the Gaespora, alien-ish beings who are more or less benevolent but whose motives deliberately unclear. Somebody in Philadelphia is murdering girls with blue eyes, and the Gaespora put Saru on a case to protect one particular girl, Ria, a young woman who goes through her life protected by a dog-like entity who only she can see. As the story goes on, we learn of divine-ish forces controlling the all of the events, a concept fitting with the Lovecraftian horror concept of the story (the works of early 20^th century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft featured god-like otherworldly beings who are either indifferent or antagonistic to our world).

It’s a pretty wild premise. The world of the story is dark and gritty as any noir story, with the addition of monstrous otherworldly threats lurking in the landscape. All of these different genres could clash with one another in really ugly ways, but in fact I was thoroughly impressed with how well the author blended them. In the world that he’s made, everything fits in. Every hallucination, every death-cult, every drinking binge from the protagonist, not one of these elements feels out of place.

The story does jump around some between points of view, and certain aspects of the story were deliberately mysterious for so long that I never really felt that I fully grasped everything that was going on. This may be a book that benefits from being read at least twice, as there were times when I felt really lost. This was not a matter of sloppy craftsmanship though. The pieces were all there. They were just difficult to understand in the first read.

Apart from the excellent crafting of the world, the story’s writing was superb. The sentences were clean and professional. The editing was for the most part flawless. I say “for the most part” because there were a handful of word choices which I found unusual. The author had a strange fondness for the word “tits” which never really made sense to me. It was very distracting. The rest of the writing was good enough that I’m willing to overlook the overuse of that word.

As I said before, I would definitely recommend this book. There is violence and profanity and horror themes, so readers who are sensitive to those things probably wouldn’t enjoy it, but I think fans of science fiction, horror, and crime fiction would enjoy it quite a lot. I certainly did. Andy Futuro published a sequel earlier this year, Cloud Country, which I will probably buy and review later.

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

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 5: Rise of an Orphan

The fifth book I’m reviewing is Rise of an Orphan, the first book in the ‘Sky City’ series by R.D. Hale. The book defines itself as a biopunk epic (now there’s a genre you don’t hear about every day) and has overtones of science fiction, fantasy, and dystopian fiction. It was also voted winner of the Wattpad Award in 2014, so it’s had some publicity and popularity in the past.

The book is set in a future version of a parallel reality in which religious fanatics of the San Teria cult (I don’t practice Santeria, I ain’t got no crystal ball…) have taken over a Blade Runner-esque society and implemented a strict social order in which elites live in grand aerial cities while the poor scavenge for existence in disease-ridden slums. The hero, Arturo Basilides, is a teenager from the slums who gets caught up in a revolution against the San Teria government after he meets Dynah, a ‘transhuman’ girl whose body has been turned into a kind of supernatural weapon by government experimentation.

Robots! Superheroes! Ghosts! Cavemen! Sasquatches! Mutant monsters! Dystopian religious fanatics! Drugs ‘n’ sex ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll! This book shoves together the most diverse and random of tropes and tries to make them work together in a world that has echoes of various other fictional worlds but stands alone in its originality. There are old tropes in the book, certainly. Dynah, the lab-created superhuman, is much like the cast of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series or any number of characters from the literary tradition of comic books (she has a lot in common with Dark Phoenix of the X-Men comics, I noticed). Some descriptions of the divisions between the upper and lower stratums of the book’s society were very close to similar divisions in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series, and the mutant monsters which populate the book’s landscape could have been lifted from any number of sci-fi sources. This is not to say that these tropes are bad. They were used pretty effectively here. But, they are familiar tropes and they were used in familiar ways.

The story tries to do a lot and fit a lot together. Its storyline includes attempted revolution, failed romance, prison break, car racing, plague epidemics, and other elements. It’s undeniably fun, but the lack of cohesion does get to be an annoyance after a while, especially considering how long the book is (I read the ebook, but the print length is 439 pages). The book has a central plot, but along the way that plot is constantly delayed by the numerous side-plots. Some of the delays are great, but some of them completely stop the plot for long stretches (in one part Arturo and his sort-of girlfriend Myla go on a mission to Sky City and spend all of their time, and several dozen pages, exploring local entertainment and shopping).

Despite its lack of cohesion, the characters are engaging, the plot is interesting, the dialogue is witty, the action is entertaining, and the fictional world is quite spectacular. Fans of dystopian fiction, action fiction, and soft sci-fi/fantasy will enjoy it. Of the five books I’ve so far reviewed on this blog, The Rise of an Orphan is so far the best one.

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

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.