Tag: Post-Apocalyptic

New Book Review 31: Rise of the Europan

europanThe next book I’m reviewing is Rise of the Europan, a collaborative science fiction work led by Joel Stottlemire. The book’s central premise is that in a future where humans have established colonies on other worlds in the solar system and elsewhere in the galaxy, settlers on Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter, have awakened a god-like entity (Genabyel) who begins a campaign of destruction against humanity. The book contains interrelated stories by six different authors chronicling the events of this war, on different worlds and from the perspectives of different people and from Genabyel himself.

Using multiple authors to tell various parts of one story is an ambitious project, and I laud these authors for taking it on. The project brings to mind the Star Wars expanded universe novels (the Thrawn trilogy, the New Jedi Order series, etc.) which I consumed and loved as a teenager. It gives a sense of size and scale to the narrative, even when the characters of the different stories don’t interact with one another. The continuity and connectivity of it, the fact that in spite of the distance between stories it maintains cohesion, is admirable.

Of course, the fact that the stories uses different viewpoints in different locations means that the novel-length book does not follow a consistent set of characters, but instead several characters with short character arcs. The only character who appears in each of the stories is Genabyel himself, about whose personality and attributes we learn more and more as the book progresses. Genabyel has some Lovecraftian attributes about him. He comes from a home deep beneath a strange ocean, he claims to have travelled through other dimensions and made contact with various divine beings, and he looks on humans in the same way that a human might look on cockroaches: troublesome creatures to be crushed. He thinks of destroying humans as a divine mission, and uses language reminiscent of the Bible in his musings about them. I liked Genabyel as a character; at first I thought he might be just a Cthulhu knock-off, but as the story progressed I appreciated how well-developed he was. The human characters that appeared throughout the stories were, as far as I recall, adequately developed as well. There are soldiers, politicians, scientists, and generally diverse cast all reacting to the crisis of the Europan in various ways, some heroic and some cowardly. We don’t get to spend a lot of time with these characters, but the time we get is enjoyable.

The war against the Europan, however, is completely hopeless. He is undefeatable, and this kid of has the effect of making the genre here seem a variant of apocalyptic fiction. It’s about the human characters reacting to the end of their world, that is to say the end of their world-spanning human civilization. The sequences of destruction, happening in their various ways and various places, are very detailed, and generally I liked the way the book was written. There was one significant problem, a surprising one given the otherwise high quality of the book. There were tons of typos, tons of misused apostrophes and spelling errors and use of incorrect words. The problem was throughout the book, not just in the stories of one or two of the authors. A bit more proofreading  would have easily solved the problem.

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 1: Sand and Scrap

I’ve decided to do a series of posts offering my review of recently-published books, with a focus on indie authors. This post is the first of the series. I’m reviewing Sand and Scrap,  the first novel of the dark fantasy series ‘Dregs of the Culver Waste’ by Chris R. Sendrowski. At the time of this post the  book is only available as an e-book.

This author, I think, likes Dune. If the sandworm wasn’t a dead giveaway, the use of the word ‘melange’ in a phrase spoken by a wizard certainly was. Nothing wrong with that; Dune is currently my favorite science fiction novel. In many ways the world in the novel resembles Frank Herbert’s desert world Arrakis, but more prominently it resembles the post-industrial hellscape of George Miller’s ‘Mad Max’ films. Slaves toil in impossible conditions, there is radiation and mutation and the abandoned scraps of a now-dead civilization, but the story finds place for more traditional fantasy aspects as well. There are wizards of sorts, spells and curses, and mystic monsters roaming or hiding in the landscape. The post-industrial aspect gives allows stand-ins for fantasy races as well. A Tolkienesque world would have its men and elves and dwarves and goblins, but this world has humans in stages of mutation depending on their place of origin. It’s a smart way to present an alternative to more typical fantastical races.

The world is hideous and brutal, and very well designed. As far as fantasy goes, I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. The story within the world is quite good as well. Most of the major characters are memorable, and the situation they are drawn into has suspense and dangers and obstacles to overcome which make for a very interesting adventure.

One trouble with Sand and Scrap, unfortunately, was that it felt terribly unpolished. There were mistakes in the writing, lots of them. The prelude the worst for it. The mistakes get to be less frequent as the reader gets closer to the end of the book (and in the final thirty pages there are almost none), but even so, I cringed every time a word was misused or a punctuation mark misplaced or a paragraph improperly indented. There is a difference between a hyphen and a dash, and there is a difference between “it’s” and “its”, but errors in the use of these are all over the book. These problems could have been resolved by editing, either by the author having an independent editor or by the author putting in the painstaking hours to take care of all the edits himself. It’s a long and frustrating process, but this book needs it badly. I hope I haven’t upset Mr. Sendrowski by saying so, but this is what the book needs. The further books of the ‘Dregs of the Culver Waste’ series need to be more polished. They need to feel complete, as opposed to two drafts short of complete.

The story also contains what could certainly be read as a lot of homophobia. I was uncomfortable with in the same way that I am uncomfortable finding casual racism in books from, say, the Victorian Era. However, I don’t know exactly how the series is going to develop. Homophobia can be an aspect of the hellish wasteland without the series necessarily being homophobic, just as rape and misogyny an aspect of Westeros in George R.R. Martin’s  ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ while the series itself is not misogynistic as a whole. I’d prefer to withhold judgment regarding the prevalence of homophobia in the Culver Waste, but as it stands with just this one book, I have the impression that the book might just be irredeemably anti-gay.

Another problem is the way the point of view works. The reader is jolted back and forth between several different points of view (which is not a problem), in many cases put into the point of view of a new and unknown character who the reader has no reason to be invested in (which is a problem). This happens throughout the book, and the way it’s done is very disorienting.

To summarize, I really enjoyed the setting and I thought the story was fairly good, but the high number of writing errors in the text and the way point of view operates were real problems.

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.