The Zondon by Robby Charters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Zondon by Robby Charters
This was an interesting read unfortunately I can see that it might easily be one that is quite easily discarded before being finished. Overall I think it was well plotted out storyline with interesting features. I read it all the way through but I swear that it took me a very long time to digest the first two pages of chapter one and I'm not sure exactly why other than that the style of writing and sometimes oddly structured sentences were distracting not to mention the notion of twins right away that called for names that were closely related Eddie and Ernie. I had some difficulty being assured that we were always in Ernies head. After that bit it became easier to read.
A word of caution this has spelling errors-wrong words- missing words and very odd sentence structure on occasion that number beyond a dozen and for me reaches the severe warning level. Such things as the word father instead of Farther; Though instead of thought; 'that I do what have now done.'(missing an I maybe.) 'there did came a time'. There were instances where the grammar and word choices were correct but the sentence was a bear to digest and that often comes from passive sentence structure.
Robby Charters has a lot of background in religious study so there is a lot of theology in here. It is quite diverse and probably because his background is with interdenominational church. I did not find it preachy or anything of that sort and it was pretty integral to the plot of the story. What I did find interesting was the exclusion of many religions considered by mainstream Christianity as cults. The main reason for the aspect of exclusion to be of note is because this story reads like at least one of those religions. If I had not checked his bio I'd have thought Robby was one of that ilk. There is at least one time where the dive into theology becomes so steep that it could be construed as preaching (except it wouldn't be preaching anything from any of those interdenominational churches).
This story takes place in many geographical locations but it centers often on Ireland and Thailand, which I gathered from the bio were the two places the author calls home so he's well acquainted with these areas.
Also most of the characters often end up with odd speech patterns somehow related to geographic origin which is okay but when that serves as the only device to give the characters depth it falls short for me and even with that aspect they all manage to sound the same as many people complain when an author fails to use this device. Unfortunately it began to feel for me as though someone decided everyone sounded the same so lets change up the speech patterns. That's always a good trick to start with if you really feel you need to do that. In this case I think most of the time it worked alright, but on occasion I got confused about who was from where and had to keep looking back to make sure that that speech affectation worked for that person. Sometimes for me this use for differentiating characters by speech affectation becomes a distraction when overused.
There are a lot of pop references. Almost too many of those. And there were even some where the reference became a bit obtuse for some reason.
Also it became evident at some point that the quest in this book was patterned like some of the MMORPG's online. Each quest done in a specific order and often portioned out one at a time or at least in that order.
I'd recommend this to lovers of SFF that are not too finicky about the Science part and don't mind a lot if theological discourse. Also Young Adult, but not anyone who hasn't yet grounded themselves in their personal beliefs about religion. This could just get confusing.
There was even a place I started thinking Thetans. (And that's not even the religion this reminds me of.)
Overall I enjoyed the book it contained a lot of interesting information pertaining to mainstream religion and some unusual notions.
There was one very interesting passage that felt like a recurring dream I've had and it was really pretty creepy having someone crawling through ever tightening passages until they get stuck.
J.L. Dobias
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Dark Nights by Christopher A. Gray
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Dark Night by Christopher A. Gray
A friend of mine suggested I read this. He gave me a sneak peek of the copy he had and I decided it would be worth the small amount to check the rest out. This is one of those slow moving suspense novels that kind of unravels before the readers eye keeping them hanging there in the same confused place that the characters are at until it finally kicks in.
We agreed on one thing this reminded us of some stuff we've been reading from Robert Sawyer so if you like the Science Fiction of Robert Sawyer you should like this. I read Rollover and the pace and intensity of that story are similar to this. This is not one of those seat of your pants thrillers that are a dime a dozen these days. It's more of an intellectual plodder that requires you to think and also requires wading through a bit of scientific description.
The first thing that struck me about this story was it started out sounding a lot like the (1969) Roy Thinnes movie Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. In this book future technologies allow us to peer beyond and around the sun and we discover a world quite similar to Earth on the other side. And they're pretty sure it wasn't there not that long ago.
Next it begins to sound like the 1966 book by D. F. Jones Colossus:The Forbin project. A story about a pair of computers that go just a little bit out into left field. In Dark Night the Computer has become sentient and has the ability to out think modern day physicist and has found a way to move very large objects through dimensional space and into our dimension. There is a whole end of the world scenario that leads up to this. Now one small hick-up here is that this big brain seems to have overlooked some simple things that must remain intact when making the transfer.(Maybe it was just too much work and energy to move the planet.) Still this is an important plot point to help make this story interesting.
Christopher Gray takes us on the long scenic route to get there, but I think it's well worth the journey. Most of the early chapters are spent in finding cataloging and theorizing. Possibly for me not enough time was spent on development of the Characters. There seem to be three characters that drive the story, I almost said two but I can't ignore the sentient computer of the alternate Earth. Since there is a strong plot thread that runs to the end with this character and it makes a deep decision along with its several errors I have to admit that Mekhos is definitely a sort of antagonistic protagonist. Then we have Doug Lockwood of real Earth and Norman Stravinsky of the alt Earth who created Mekhos. Though there is all speculation about the two worlds colliding eventually and studies to determine the stability of the orbit of the alt-Earth, the real excitement in this story doesn't begin until about one third the way through when we find out how devastating it is to an Earth to try to survive some drastic changes.
Later on there are even elements in this story that remind me of the 1984 thriller Terminator. Pitting man against machine.
On a side note the web comic Skin Horse written by Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Channing Wells that has rather funny thread about something similar to this story about an AI that goes sentient and causes a lot of grief..
If I had to put Dark Night in a nutshell:
Mekhos, an artificial intelligence that has grown far beyond all expectations finds itself at the cusp of a decision as to how to save humanity from the impending disaster. The very design structure of its computational array is integral to the solution that presents itself. With too little time to allow the inhabitants to make the decision; Mekhos moves its Earth into another dimension and shifts the time reference to insert it's Earth half a year out of sync with the present Earth in the new location. But Mekhos has made a small error by leaving something behind that is vital to the continued survival of the humans. There is a solution because what Mekhos needs is just on the other side of the sun.
Mekhos has a problem. The inhabitants of the alt-Earth are unaware of what Mekhos is doing; mostly because Mekhos has a firm grip on the people of the planet and the real Earth is about to discover Mekhos plan in a most horrifying way.
Soon there will be a mad dash on both planets to pit human against machine and the ultimate consequence could be the destruction of two global civilizations. If that's not bad enough; man being man and already unable to trust himself is going to have a devil of a time trusting his counterparts from a parallel world.
And that's where this story diverges from the comparisons I just made above.
I recommend this for all SFF lovers Hard Soft and in between. Anyone that likes authors like Robert Sawyer and those slow-boiling science thrillers.
If there comes to be a second book to this I'll be reading it. Well written and edited. I did find a couple of minor faults that were easily overlooked and did not impact the read.
J.L. Dobias
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The Short Victorious War by David Weber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A Short Victorious War (#3 Honor Harrington) by David Weber
While I do love my kindle and I sometimes seem to read much more smoothly with it, when it's a book I already have on my shelf its difficult to justify paying more for the kindle version than I did for the paperback on my shelf. And who can deny the thrill of coming away from the book with ink smudge thumbs.
Back around 98 I bought these four at once and I'm no longer certain if I ever read these in the correct order the first time because the Flag in Exile is missing from the receipts.
A Short Victorious War
Field of Dishonor
Honor Among Enemies
In Enemy Hands
In my effort to recapture the experience I'm trying to go through them in order.
I've also tried to pay attention to something purely out of the fact that I purchased these solely on the strength of the character herself-Honor Harrington. So just as an observation I found that out of 360 page there are roughly 180 pages that actually center upon the part of the story that I came into this for. That's pretty good because 180 pages is okay for a novel. So what's in the rest?
That's actually a good question because I've come to see Honor's novels as being multi-plot and multi-story novels. Of the first three I felt this was the most diverse in the number of plots or plot threads that were running through it. I'm not even certain if I could easily qualify what the main plot and story is. Instead I'll begin by highlighting the main part that was of interest to me.
One major Storyline and plot/theme that runs through these novels is the notion that Honor Harrington is constantly trying to prove herself. This is mostly her trying to prove herself to herself because as the reader progresses through the stories its easy to see there are three kinds of people around Honor. There are those who see her as already proven and those who have mostly preconceived or prejudicial views who have to be won over. And there are those who outright hate her and don't care that she has proven herself. In honesty there might be some shades in there but its mostly that. What's prevalent is that though she needs to prove herself to some she never goes out of the way to do so in fact sometimes she goes counter to that and it becomes more evident that she mostly needs to prove herself to herself. I'm not sure if she ever realizes this although people keep dropping hints.
Another plot/theme story is that there are a number of people who would like to see her fail and the plot involves how they move to help that along intentionally or accidentally. These range from severe hatred such as Paval Young to people working out of ignorance such as Admiral Park. And of course her enemies among the Havenites who just would rather win than lose to her.
In the previous two novels her brilliant decisions have made many friends and enemies alike and have helped her come through the battle nearly unscathed. But many around her have fallen and this novel does touch some on the impact that has upon her personally. When all is said and done Honor works like a well oiled machine despite all the odds that stack against her when it comes to her duty and command. In this particular novel she gets to see a bit of romance which was nice to see and it in no way interferes with the performance of her duties. So in a way this is the story of Honor's healing process both physically and emotionally with the plot that helps show how this occurs.
What David Weber does in these novels is keep a thread of plot about the various political and military factions of both sides of the conflict. In this particular novel it seemed that we got a large portion of this. I'm not sure how necessary they are to this story but they do seem to track toward being necessary to the series as a whole. There's a story about Hamish Alexander and those around him figure prominently within this story I'm not yet sure there is a plot to that story. This book contains two heavy stories about the Haven side. One is the attempt for a short victorious war hopes and the other is the shift in the political power brought on by coup. Those both seem well plotted.
So there are a handful of stories with just as many plots that all converge into one story, which perhaps could perhaps be the story of the horror's of war that inevitably culminates in the major loss of life and limb for honor and duty. It would be easier to say that this has one story with about six major plots, but it's hard in many cases to see those plots until you put all the books together so they become more like threads stories that are told through several other stories which are the novels.
Once again this is great SFF for those who don't mind some hand-waving and love to trace the internal logic of strategy and battle that are woven into the story. There's even a section in back for those who haven't gotten enough techno-speak from the internal parts of the story.
After reading this three times now I still rate it high for it's entertainment value although it still contains sections that almost beg to be scanned by some readers.(Including myself sometimes.)
J.L. Dobias
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Memoria. A Corporation of Lies by Alex Bobl
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Memoria By Alex Bobl (They control your memories - They tell you how to live.)
This was one of those few that took my interest by the book cover. It's cover reminded me of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in its incantation as Blade Runner (the movie) and the tag line and it's title reminded me of Philip K Dick's We Can Remember it For You Wholesale aka Total Recall. But in reading it I couldn't help but be reminded of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The story sucked me in and caught my interest and eventually the closest it ever came was mostly to the movie versions of the Philip K Dick Stories which include all the dynamic twist and turns of plot while mayhem and carnage reigned supreme.
While little that's published today seems to ever reach that same literary level that the Huxley parody of other utopian works has reached it is of note that there are some interesting similarities in this story that plot-wise bring it close only toward being like examining Brave New World in a distorted fun-house mirror that populates today's writing styles.
I love a good suspense novel. I confess that I could never read them at any sustained level. I like mine in small doses. This is the second one this year and both have contained a theme that borders onto paranoid conspiracy theories and the possibility of mass mind control. They both have high body counts also.
As the story goes; Frank Shelby is an attorney coming back to the city from a non-productive meeting and is looking forward to connecting with his girl friend Kathleen whom he believes he wants to take the next step with despite the fact that he doesn't know that much about her, including her last name. His troubles start when a pushy cabbie tries to pick him up, he doesn't know it yet but that's his first clue things will go south. When he arrives at his apartment where Kathleen is waiting, because he gave her a key, he finds her dead and ends up embroiled in...well a conspiracy of a sort.
Frank becomes a fugitive and as the bodies begin to pile up it's clear that giving himself up is no option. The problem is that he lives in a world where everything and everyone is controlled by Memoria tech that monitor everyone all the time and everyone is expected to periodically show up at Memoria to have their brains cleaned. They have their thoughts scanned and have bad memories removed. This of course leads to something similar to PKD's Minority Report where criminals might be caught by their thoughts. The bracelets they wear and the procedure they undergo are similar to the notion of Soma in BNW. But soon we will see that things might go further with the Memoria tech and skills might be transferable which is similar to what goes on in PKD's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (Total Recall).
The group Frank is helping to negotiate with are the people who don't have bracelets and are on a sort of reservation away from the rest. These are like the savages in Huxley's BNW. Because the Memoria tech has been weakening the will of the people they have come to rely on much of their food and energy coming from the reservation. The powers that be are looking toward changing that.
If the author Alex Bobl tried to tell me he'd never read Philip K Dick he'd be hard pressed to convince me although it's possible since Aldous Huxley did claim he'd not read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin prior to writing Brave New World.
Anyone that loves Suspense Novels and lots of action and body counts should find this enjoyable. And for those who have read the other books mentioned it will be an added treat. For anyone who hasn't read those books I'd suggest reading a few them to make the comparison and because i feel they are superior.
As always I warn there were a few grammatical stumbles with word choices that seemed odd and sentence structure that had me reading a few times to figure something out and the use of things like 151th that just seemed like it would sound better as 151st although it looks just as bad that way. As a total less than a handful of serious road-stops so not so bad.
J.L.Dobias
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Window in Time - A Time-Travel Fantasy by Charlotte A. Banchi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Window In Time A Time-Travel Fantasy by Charlotte A Banchi
I enjoyed this book a lot. There are a few speed-bumps (mostly of my own making; I believe) along the way that could have gotten in the way but I think the Charlotte Banchi does a great job of keeping the pace going and keeping the readers interest up and it makes this a very good read. I did have some reservations about another wizard school story-a certain British wizard uprooted and dropped in Oregon. The time travel aspect added a nice spicy flavor but that too has it drawbacks in that it reminded me of a device similar to the parallel universes of Star Trek where the main cast get to alternately play some evil part. And as far as time travel goes I love all kinds and really enjoy the ones with a lot of history showing up in the pages. I don't think I got much history in here. But internally and just trying to keep up with the lives of the main characters I think there was enough going on to say that historic accuracy could have just been too much distraction.
I've read a few Mage novels in the science fiction category so I'm only a bit more schooled about magick's than I'd be if it were only the HP novels. Still it took a few pages to get past that feeling that this is written around that set of novels before accepting it for itself. Wands, spells and spell-books, grimoire's and evil creatures from other dimensions and the dark evil that brings out the worst in everyone all almost smelled like fan fiction. There are a lot of similarities and so we have to go for what stands out and that's that this is a time travel novel.
Sentinel Sebastian Darkus already has problems, with his marriage, and he's trying to figure out just what went wrong between him and Kenna when the Dark Magick Warlock Hunter Sloane decides to wage war on Merlyn Academy killing adults and students alike. Being left in charge of several orphans and with the help of his twin sister Celeste they are waiting for the other shoe to drop while Sebastian is still struggling with the notion that everyone saw his Kenna helping Hunter Sloane kill the other witches and wizards. Knowing that this has something to do with the great dark magickal Obsidian Star, Sebastian decides he should address the question of where the Star is by going to the source in the past. He starts in the immediate past because his father in-law Bill Abbott has laid claim that he held the Star in his bookshop just only a few years earlier.
This eventually leads to the necessity to go all the way back to the real source, the time when the Star dropped into our dimension and Sebastian has mostly only tales and myth to guide him, but he eventually visits Merlyn in the 16thcentury past.
I've recently read a number of time travel novels (One that hasn't yet been published -ARC) and there is always that place where the author has to decide what to do with the altered time lines. In this case Charlotte double duties it as I mentioned by using it as a device to pass the evil ball from character to character, which was rather interesting.
There are a couple errors that slipped past the editing process but really not that much. A few times I was befuddled by the way a sentence was stacked. And there's a reference to Anne Frank that still has me scratching my head, but I'll get over that.
This is for fantasy lovers who are not obsessed with historic accuracy or being transported visually into a stunning rendition of the past. Time Travel afficionados should enjoy it as a light read.
This story keeps the reader moving along and guessing at where and what the grimoire is and reads well enough to finish in one read.
J.L. Dobias
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STEM by Christopher Blankley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Zombpunk(book 1) Stem by Christopher Blankley
First of all; this was a thoroughly enjoyable read despite what some people see as catastrophic failure and I only see as mild speed bumps. I like the way that this started because you have this impression that there will be zombies you also get this confusion because the alleged zombies are neat, fit and civilized while the non-zombies are dirty, wretched hungry creatures who are what you mostly expect zombie's to be.
The bottom line to that is it's difficult to really see at first who is going to turn out to be the evil in this book.
Now it does seem that someone might be trying to make some new genre here- calling it ZombPunk in sync with Steam-Punk of course without steam technology and I somehow think it would have been more appropriate to call this Stem-Punk but then the whole idea of a potential for horror would be left out. As it is I'd much rather go for the title of 'The Night of Bread and Fish' although if it's going to be more than one type of fish it should be 'The Night of Bread and Fishes'
There really are no redeemable characters in this story. You have the terrorists against the pod people. I say pod people because at first they seem more like the pod people from the Body Snatchers than anything else. In fact this seemed like a quiet rework of the body snatchers with a twist that the people left are not so much pursued by the pod people as they are phased out by the lack of processed food.(Somehow they all have forgotten how to hunt and then again we don't see much in the line of repopulating the wildlife and such; so maybe that is a factor.) Anyway the Pod People do have that pod people attitude that says we're superior and if you understood that you wouldn't resist.
The book starts out reading as a comedy of errors where things snowball by little misunderstandings until you have the non-stem group becoming terrorists because they feel so threatened and you have at least one of the Stem group thinking they are targeting him because of a coincidental incident. And then you finally have the group targeting him just because.
I read this straight through in one sit and enjoyed it.
Now for the caveat. This book has a few grammar errors. My copy didn't seem to have as many as some readers have claimed. And by way of search I'm fairly confident that this copy has been corrected since those claims. There are still some problems, but it is hard even with professional editing to get them all unless your professional editor has more than two sets of eyes looking at the manuscript and even then it depends on their ability to catch everything. So there are still some errors but nothing distracting. There might still be some style choices that are suspect, but overall this copy is pretty solid.
I think that this qualifies more as good SFF for those types of fans and only the ending comes off a bit zombie-ish. Even then it still seems more pod people especially in some scenes where the pack sniffs out the normals. Overall this is great entertainment.
J.L. Dobias
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![The Honor of the Queen (Honor Harrington, #2)]()
The Honor of the Queen by David Weber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Honor of the Queen(Honor Harrington) by David Weber
Once more I'm reading the next Honor Harrington novel to try to understand why I like them so much. One might ask why( I'm doing this) and this came about because in trying to read the newest of the series I found myself making constant starts and stops and wondering what has changed. Obviously the most changed factor would seem to be me. (Since some of these books are twenty years old it is that long ago that I first read them.)
I really love this book the first three times I read it and I still do but this time I tried to pay particular attention to why. And I discovered first that the style of writing is one that I would describe for myself as a reader as the writing that reads like a bad LP plays on a player. There are passages that are like a scratch on a record and you suddenly find yourself at the bottom of the page wondering how you managed to skip those last three paragraphs. I realize that in the best description I can give I have been scanning large portions of this book to get to the parts I like.
This in fact is caused by the massive walls of techo-babel that seem so important to the tactics of battle that will play out later. It's quite interesting because it does add some element of depth to that part of the story and it suddenly made me realize that the main character in this story often seems to be the techno-babel. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it can be annoying to some readers. There is still a lot of world building going on here and David has a lot to tell us about this new system where Grayson is. There is a lot of political and religious background that goes into the telling of this story. In fact it all might be considered Techno-Politico-Religio-babel. That's a trifecta destined to either awe or bore.
What I love about these novels is the character of Honor Harrington. She's one of the best female protagonists in this type of science fiction and yet she is in some ways the worst. I say this because David Weber seems to have difficulty in directly accessing the true emotions of Honor Harrington. I believe that its an effort to make her some uber war strategist that might impair this process. Most, not all, of her emotions are throttled until something within the context of her general macho nature goes beyond the pale. Let's translate that to the type of character Clint Eastwood plays so well. The kind that shows few emotions until he's pushed beyond some limit. That means most of the time we see Honor as a dispassionate soldier. Oh sure she has her opinions of politics and other such things but they are all driven and focused into her military career. This is probably quite accurate for what David is going for here, but it creates that sort on one dimensional character that people can't peer around without loosing sight of since the other side of the page is blank.
What David does do is give insight into much of Honor's character through how other characters see her. The problem with that is is that it's no holds barred in the field because it ranges from everyone from close friend to worst foe. Mostly this ends up creating caricature's of these other characters who are being judged by how they perceive the protagonist and that perception is colored by the reader's own opinion of what Honor is (as they see her). The largest window into Honor is in chapter Twenty Six and her reaction to the way the prisoners of war were treated. Unfortunately the focus on the treatment of the women in particular causes the rest to pale, but the overall reaction in Honor is again a good indication of what this woman soldier is all about. Sad to say that's a small portion of this long book.
The interesting part of all of this one dimensional nature of Honor is that in a way David Weber is leaving it open for the reader to fill in a lot of the blanks based on the information and misinformation traveling through the thoughts of others. This is actually normally a good trick in writing-not telling the reader everything and letting them think for themselves. It obviously works quite well here because more people like these books than those who don't. The caveat here is that those who don't can't grasp the fundamental to why they don't like it other than that the characters are all flat.
David has an interesting opinion and take on the directions that politics, religion, and technology might shape the future and unfortunately the reader gets a lot of this in long bouts of telling that leave little to the imagination though sometime it left me scratching my head. The biggest stumbling block for Honor this time might be this sexist thing with the Graysons and its in Chapter Twenty that we see Honor putting the nails to that coffin by her selfless act (which she later tries to minimize by stating she was only protecting herself.)
And just like many of those protagonists of the great movies everyone around Honor gets killed and injured while she walks away with all the guilt and the rewards. Once again the most heroic people are those who have cleaved to this their leader and have marched off to their deaths in defense of honor and country (world).
This is a great read for SFF fans who like a lot of techno-babel and somewhat authentic sounding space battles and strategy.
Once again I loved this story, but I'm not sure if I see the same Honor Harrington that David wrote about by the time I reach the end, and I don't think that that is such a bad thing.
J.L. Dobias
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