By Mike Glyer: The social media of the 30th century doesn’t seem so different: teenagers anonymously perform acts of civil disobedience and vandalism to score points and raise their ranking in an internet app. That’s where Aster Vale leads a secret life as the Wildflower, a street artist and tagger, in A Star Named Vega by Benjamin J. Roberts, a Self-Published Science Fiction competition finalist.
However, much else is different a thousand years from now. Humanity lives in a post-scarcity space society that has settled planets around the Thirteen Suns, each under the protective maternal guidance of its own artificial intelligence. The colonization plan worked almost perfectly, with one exception, sent to a world that changed disastrously for the worse by the time humans arrived. Rel Akepri is a young soldier from that broken planet, a Skaird genetically engineered for war. And if the small team of experienced fighters he belongs to don’t complete their mission, then genocide will be their people’s fate.
Aster’s father joins a mysterious research project, requiring them to travel from Sol to the Vega System. He also has to bring along 13-year-old genius hacker Isaac who has been spared from a jail term so he can apply his skills to the research.
Aster sees their luxury starcruiser as just another canvas to explore. Isaac is willing to run interference with ship’s security. But the ship is the Skaird team’s first stop because they need the briefing information that was shared with members of the research project.
How can a couple of sheltered teenagers possibly make a difference? The first time around the answer is – they can’t. But the question will crop up repeatedly as the story progresses, and as time goes by the answer changes to – they can make a great deal of difference, indeed.
A Star Named Vega hooks the reader with characters to care about and complex worldbuilding that inspires deeper thinking. What’s more, it seemed that every time I found myself asking why a cultural or technological element didn’t quite seem to fit, the next scene would reconcile everything. I began to wonder if it was really a case that the author had subtly orchestrated my curiosity, rather than me spotting a deficiency that needed correction.
For example, when we’re first introduced to Rel Akepri and his people they look radically alien in appearance but their psychology seems entirely human. I skeptically wondered if this was one more example of the trend where aliens are nothing more than humans with extra bumps on their heads – despite the Skairds’ physical appearance differing much more from humans than does your average Star Trek race.
But then we get a whole info dump to explain they’re fully human though they also have a bunch of genetic modifications that let them live in extreme environments – their home planet, or in space for that matter. In the end I was willing to handwave the biology, yet I still wondered where the energy came from that let these bodies perform all the operations they can do.
There’s also a rich discussion to be had about the interaction in the 30th century of human and artificial intelligence. In another info dump – also structured as a lecture delivered in a course Aster is taking – we find out what the culture of the 30th century thinks about it.
“There are three classes of artificial intelligence we use for basic understanding…. The first class describes entities that have been programmed to exhibit intelligent behavior, such as sprites, servobots, and Enforcement units. While they may seem lifelike, entities of the first class are not self-aware. The second class of AI describes neural emulations – computer models of real-world organic nervous systems, including those of humans. As human emulations do possess self-awareness, and thus human rights, their creation is carefully regulated by the Matron Seed of any given planetary system. We know human emulations as Seed Units, and often they choose to inhabit android bodyshells for interacting with the physical world. The third class of AI describes the Seed Mothers. Not programmed. Not emulated. Their minds emerge from the chains of quantum networks like patterns in the swirling of leaves, fractals in the complex plane.”
This hierarchy also dictates what become the rules of engagement for violent acts. Pranksters and criminals alike can trash Enforcement units like insurrectionists did the Capitol Police but without thinking of it as murder. In contrast, harming human beings would be a serious crime. And yet there is a troubling loose end to this rule which is meant to keep the entire second class from being treated the same as mere ‘bots. When an android who’s also a family friend is destroyed during the raid on the ‘cruiser, his body is torn apart so his physical memory can be taken. But the ethos of android bodies having uploaded and backed up records of their consciousness makes it possible for the character to reappear shortly after in a new physical shell — and strangely exhibiting no mental wear and tear. How would a sapient being not be traumatized by that experience? Well, perhaps if he is not being backed up in realtime he would have no recollection of being killed. As a reader I certainly found it disconcerting how little everyone who knew him was affected by what appeared a violent death.
The raid on the cruiser does not keep Aster’s father from reaching his destination and going to work on the mysterious project. Meanwhile Rel Akepri’s commander pieces together the stolen information so they can intercept the discovery they fear will be used to kill all Skairds. And Aster keeps up her lecture attendance so we readers can eavesdrop on those good long info dumps. What’s more, one of the students in Aster’s class is conveniently a jock who’s stridently in favor of killing all the Skairds, creating another source of insight on the racial justice / genocide conflict that is one of the book’s main themes.
This conflict, like Aster’s tagging and Isaac’s hacking, show that living without scarcity under the watchful eye of a powerful AI has not bred out humanity’s rebellious impulses. Why not? The reason, says one wise soul, is that humans spent thousands of years evolving to survive in a dangerous environment; for only a fraction of the time in the past few centuries have they lived in safety with plentiful resources. They’re simply unable to stop taking risks.
And when it comes to Aster’s teenage rebellion, nothing really interferes with it because Dr. Vale is like one of those 40s radio comedy fathers whose reputation as a serious disciplinarian is belied by the fact that everyone can get around him and bend him to accept their latest predicament. However, if she’d actually been shut down and obeyed all her father’s cautions she’d never have made the friends she needs to rally around when crisis arrives and the people she knows are the only ones who can avert the genocidal doom about to be meted out to the Skairds.
As I read this book I would think about what was holding me back from enjoying the story more — then whoosh! I’d be emotionally caught up in an action scene and really caring about the characters. Even though something would eventually pump the brakes and partly throw me out of the story, I thought those really good stretches were priceless. A riveting action sequence draws the story to a climax. Sometimes an author is able to suspend disbelief until the book ends, then looking back I find myself asking did the denoument make sense? I will say there’s no doubt that the way the story was tied up is faithful to the characters. It was emotionally strong. It was right for Aster, Rel, Isaac, her father, everyone. It stuck the landing.
SPSFC art by Tithi Luadthong. Logos designed by Scott (@book_invasion)
Science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders (Victories Greater Than Death) brought abundant charisma to the stage for her Ci10 keynote. Her hot-pink bob, matching Doc Martens, and neon-confetti-dotted black dress reinforced her energy. She delivered her talk, “Magical Portals Are Real, and I Can Prove It!,” in a conversational and confiding tone, to booksellers who know and recommend her LGBTQ+ fiction.
Alluding to Frank Herbert’s Dune dictum that “the universe is full of doors,” Anders said that we encounter portals in our lives. “I’ve jumped universes three or four times,” she said, acknowledging how she came to recognize her authorial persona and trans identity. “This is definitely not the universe I was born in.”…
After more than six decades of making bicycles soar, sending panicked swimmers to the shore and other spellbinding close encounters, John Williams is putting the final notes on what may be his last film score.
“At the moment I’m working on ‘Indiana Jones 5,’ which Harrison Ford — who’s quite a bit younger than I am — I think has announced will be his last film,” Williams says. “So, I thought: If Harrison can do it, then perhaps I can, also.”
Ford, for the record, hasn’t said that publicly. And Williams, who turned 90 in February, isn’t absolutely certain he’s ready to, either.
“I don’t want to be seen as categorically eliminating any activity,” Williams says with a chuckle, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “I can’t play tennis, but I like to be able to believe that maybe one day I will.”
Right now, though, there are other ways Williams wants to be spending his time. A “Star Wars” film demands six months of work, which he notes, “at this point in life is a long commitment to me.” Instead, Williams is devoting himself to composing concert music, including a piano concerto he’s writing for Emanuel Ax….
…But why, in reality, are bounty hunters so distinctly American? Like many things, once you dig beyond the fiction you run straight into the depressing inevitabilities of US history. There is a complex history behind bounty hunters in the US but looming large in that history are slave catchers. People employed to catch fugitive slaves were not a US invention but the size of the US slave economy (until the Civil War and emancipation) meant that “slave catcher” was both casual work and a profession for some. The powers of slave catchers was further enhanced prior to the Civil War with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850) which codified the ability of slave catchers to act beyond the borders of slave states. Slavery is not the only defining element in the US bounty hunting history but it is such a substantial example in the formative years of the nation that it is hard to imagine that it isn’t key to the lasting influence of the idea in the US.
The attraction of the bounty hunter concept to quasi-libertarian SFF is apparent. The bounty hunter as a character can be simultaneously running a private business and be an arm of law enforcement. As a legitimised vigilante, the bounty hunter as a character can sit in a kind of Lagrange point between the pull of the heroic individualist and the pull of authoritarian imposition of order….
(4) SPACEHOUNDS OF THE WSFS, And when Camestros Felapton is finished with the topic above, he chronicles the work of another set of adventurers who are hard at work to disarm “The Hugo Kill Switch”.
The people at The Hugo Book Club Blog (Olav Rokne & Amanda Wakaruk) are on a high-stakes mission to defuse a time bomb. Deep within the WSFS constitution is a hidden switch that is creeping ever closer to hitting some beloved Hugo Award categories. Can a rag-tag team save the Fan categories before the timer reaches zero?!
(5) TO THE EGRESS, AND BEYOND. Arturo Serrano analyzes the special challenges inherent in the audience’s complicated history with the Toy Story franchise and the Buzz Lightyear character and tells why “Lightyear doesn’t fly, but it falls with style” at Nerds of a Feather.
…The quest for continued relevance is a preoccupation that the movie assigns to both Buzz and itself. It tries to evoke the feel of the Flash Gordon serials and, of course, both of the big Star franchises. But instead of the now-common practice of attempting to recapture an old moment of wonder via repetition and allusion, this movie gave itself the harder task of pretending to be that first experience. Although the villain’s big plan involves the return to an idealized past, Lightyear is not a case of nostalgia (because anything it could try to revisit is supposed to be provided by this story for the first time), but of pastiche. It may be unfair to cast Pixar as a victim of its own spectacular successes, but Lightyear is certainly not the best that the studio is capable of, and at times it’s a stretch to imagine small Andy being blown away by it….
(6) YES, THE END IS NEAR! The inaugural winner of the first Self-Published Science Fiction Competition will be announced in three weeks.
The time is soon approaching… @theSPSFC#SPSFC The first annual Self Published Science Fiction Competition winners will be revealed on July 15th! pic.twitter.com/e5A1zj0sf8
— Scott ????Book Invasion???? SPSFC3 judge (@book_invasion) June 20, 2022
…However, Subotsky revealed that a second deal was negotiated following production of 1965’s Dr. Who and the Daleks which would indeed have allowed for a third film. “There was a further agreement that was entered into, to give the rights to make a third movie, which of course was never done,” he explained. “It was on the same terms as the original films, so my feeling is… the option lapsed.”
Though a third movie never materialised, Subotsky further revealed that his father did in fact produce a screenplay for the proposed sequel that remains in his family’s possession and was also displayed at the BFI event – this script, however, was not an adaptation of any existing Doctor Who television serial.
“Many years later, maybe 15 years later, it was clearly still on his mind, because he had prepared a script called ‘Doctor Who’s Greatest Adventure’ which actually was a repurposed script of a horror film entitled ‘King Crab’… the original title was even worse, it was ‘Night of the Crabs’!
“It was with two Doctors – a young Doctor and an old Doctor – which is an idea that has been returned to.”…
… Across its brief six-episode run, Obi-Wan stopped the spectacle to focus on people — and it mostly resonates as a contrast to how much I’ve missed them in other Star Wars stories.
At the heart of this are Obi-Wan’s two central performances. As Obi-Wan, Ewan McGregor plays a broken man in exile, a soldier who knows he lost the war but is still being asked to fight it, keeping constant vigil from afar over the young Luke Skywalker. As befits the character that shares the series’ name, every note of Obi-Wan’s journey rings true, largely thanks to McGregor’s performance….
Space is pretty deadly. But is it so deadly that we’re effectively imprisoned in our solar system forever? Many have said so, but a few have actually figured it out.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
1983 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Thirty-nine years ago, the follow-up film to the Twilight Zone series premiered this week. Produced by Steven Spielberg and John Landis, Twilight Zone: The Movie certainly carried high expectations. This film features four stories directed by Landis, Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller.
Landis’ segment is the only original story created for the film, while the segments by Spielberg, Dante, and Miller are remakes or more precisely reworkings of episodes from the original series.
The screenplay is not surprisingly jointly done by a committee of John Landis, George Clayton, Johnson Richard Matheson and Melissa Mathison as is the story which is by Landis, Matheson, Johnson and Jerome Bixby.
The principal cast was surprisingly small given that there were four stories, just Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, Scatman Crothers, John Lithgow, Vic Morrow and Kathleen Quinlan.
It did quite well at the box office, making over forty million against a budget of under ten million. Some critics like Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Tribune like some of it though he noted that, “the surprising thing is, the two superstar directors are thoroughly routed by two less-known directors” while others such as Vincent Canby at the New York Times hated all of it calling the movie a “flabby, mini-minded behemoth”.
It was enough of a financial success that the suits at CBS gave the approval to the Twilight Zone series.
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a not great fifty-five percent rating.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 23, 1908 — Sloan Nibley. Writer who worked on a number of genre series including Science Fiction Theater, Addams Family, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, Shazan, and the New Addams Family. (Died 1990.)
Born June 23, 1945 — Eileen Gunn, 77. Her story “Coming to Terms” based on her friendship with Avram Davidson won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Her stories are in Stable Strategies and Others, Steampunk Quartet and Questionable Practices. With L. Timmel Duchamp, she penned The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future. Her ”Stable Strategies for Middle Management” story picked up a nomination at Noreascon 3 (1989), and “Computer Friendly” garnered a nomination the next year in the same category at ConFiction (1990). She’s well stocked at the usual digital suspects.
Born June 23, 1957 — Frances McDormand, 65. She’s God. Well at least The Voice of God in Good Omens. Which is on Amazon Prime y’all. Her first genre role was in the “Need to Know” episode of Twilight Zone followed shortly thereafter by being Julie Hastings in Sam Raimi’s excellent Dark Man. She’s The Handler in Æon Flux and that’s pretty much everything worth noting.
Born June 23, 1963 – Liu Cixin, 59. He won the Best Novel Hugo at Saquan (2015) for his Three Body Problem novel, translated into English by Ken Liu. It was nominated for the Campbell Memorial, Nebula, Canopus and Prometheus Awards as well. He picked up a Hugo novel nomination at Worldcon 75 (2017) for Death’s End also translated by Liu.
Born June 23, 1972 — Selma Blair, 50. Liz Sherman in Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. She also voiced the character in the animated Hellboy: Sword of Storms and Hellboy: Blood and Iron as well which are quite excellent. She’s Stevie Wayne in The Fog, a slasher film a few years later and was Cyane on the “Lifeblood” episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. Later on, she’d be Jessica Harris in the “Infestation” episode of Lost in Space.
Born June 23, 1980 — Melissa Rauch, 42. Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory which is at least genre adjacent if not genre. She gets to be really genre in voicing Harley Quinn in Batman and Harley Quinn which Bruce Timm considers “a spiritual successor to Batman: The Animated Series”. Having watched a few episodes on HBO when I was subscribed to that streaming service, I vehemently disagree.
Born June 23, 2000 — Caitlin Blackwood, 22. She was the young Amelia Pond in these Doctor Who episodes; “The Eleventh Hour”, “The Big Bang”, “Let’s Kill Hitler” and “The God Complex”. She had a cameo in “The Angels Take Manhattan”. She’s the cousin of Karen Gillan who plays the adult Pond. I can’t find anything online that talks about how she was cast in the role but it was brilliantly inspired casting!
…While the first volume had Orban explicitly say that he was not telling the whole truth in the end, here from the beginning we have a professional telling us right from the get go about the power of stories, lies, shading the truth and more in order to tell his story. The first novel was Parker geeking out about engineering and siegecraft and how a determined engineer could frustrate the greatest army the world has assembled. By contrast, this second novel does have concerns regarding the siege and defending it, because Parker does really like to go down his rabbit holes and show it off. (In some ways, I think of him very much like Herman Melville, just enjoying sharing what he has learned and shown off about all sorts of abstruse subjects, interwoven masterfully into the story)….
(14) OCTOTHORPE. With a cover courtesy of DALL-E, Octothorpe 60 is now up! Listen here: “Different Types of Tedium”.
John Coxon is going to brunch, Alison Scott watched a film, and Liz Batty is critical. We discuss what we’d do if we were king of The Hugo Awards for the day, and then we talk about ABBA and other science fiction. And Monster Munch – you love to hear it.
New Zealand filmmaker and actor Taika Waititi appeared Wednesday on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where he shared a Hobbit-sized secret regarding the second film in the popular franchise directed by fellow Kiwi Oscar winner Peter Jackson.
Waititi shared, “When I did What We Do in the Shadows, when Jemaine [Clement, the film’s co-writer and star] and I were shooting that, we didn’t have much money to do that film, and The Hobbit had just wrapped. And, so, our production designer — man, I don’t know if I should tell this. OK, but I will. Our production designer, in the dead of night, took his crew to The Hobbitstudios and stole all of the dismantled, broken-down green screens and took all of the timber, and we built a house.”…
Marvel’s latest movie is bringing with it an Asgard Tours boat-load of weird and wonderful merchandise.
(18) REVISITING FILMATION. [Item by Bill.] The 1973-1974 Star Trek: The Animated Series was produced by Filmation. Recently, Gazelle Animations has done some clips from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager in the Filmation style:
The animator gives background. And note the Most Important Device in the Universe!
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Lightyear Pitch Meeting,” Ryan George, in a spoiler-packed episode, the producer learns that the premise of Lightyear–that it’s an action movie Andy saw in 1995 that made him want to buy a Buzz Lightyear toy–he gets excited because that means a producer in the Toy Story universe made money on the film. But even though it’s supposed to be “a 1990s movie,” fans of 1990s movies that featured “a lot of over the top action and cheese” will be cruelly disappointed. Toy Story fans who remember that the villain Zurg is Buzz Lightyear’s father will also be very disappointed.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, N., Bill, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
By Rogers Cadenhead: In a universe controlled by a central government indifferent to the needs of its inhabitants, a crew of interstellar vagabonds uses their jury-rigged spaceship to take whatever work they can get — legal or otherwise — barely scraping by while showing an exceptional knack for finding trouble. A charismatic battle-scarred captain leads a fiercely loyal crew of close-knit misfits.
What sounds like Firefly also describes the SPSFC finalist novel Captain Wu: Starship Nameless #1, a space opera by authors Patrice Fitzgerald and Jack Lyster. I love Firefly so it wasn’t a big leap to climb aboard this vessel.
Captain Leanne Wu is a Asian woman in her sixties at the helm of “an old converted garbage scow called the Nameless. It was an odd boxy little thing but with powerful engines.” Wu is small of frame but literally pugnacious, getting into pit match fights both for money and stress relief.
The novel has barely begun when a smuggling job lands Wu and her crew neck-deep in distress. While trying to deliver an unknown package to a client that was planning to kill them in lieu of payment, a squad of tentacle-mouthed aliens arrives firing their weapons at both sides of the transaction.
This begins a tale that is full of chase sequences where the reason the aliens are attempting to kill them is not known. A lot of ingenuity and technological prowess are required for the protagonists to survive long enough to see book 2. The crew also acquires a stowaway with a familial tie to a crew member.
I found the novel was carried mostly by character, feeling less pull from the plot except as a vehicle to create interesting problems to solve.
Wu’s bisexual and her pilot Rev is transgender, representation that’s handled matter of fact. Wu gets most of the focus as a character but her back story is revealed only in dribs and drabs, which is understandable because did I mention aliens keep trying to kill them? In the final third we meet someone who might be the biological father of Wu’s daughter but has never been told this fact. It’s my favorite revelatory relationship in the book because you can tell the guy’s so foul his evil will take center-of-the-Tootsie Pop time to reveal. However, when he’s first met I was all “Leanne, what the hell is the problem? He seems nice.” (I give my heart to the wrong people in fiction.)
Captain Wu reminded me of Reverdy Jian, another LGBT space pilot who leads Melissa Scott’s excellent but overlooked 1992 novel Dreamships. Space pilots in that book navigated abstract “dreamspace.” In this one, space travel is amusingly humdrum. There are huge lines of ships at interstellar gates where Rev has to dodge miles-long vessels full of shipping containers. It has all the romance of a traffic jam on Interstate 12 in Baton Rouge.
Like Firefly, the Nameless has a crew whose stories I’d love to see fully told. My favorite is Six, a member of a collective race whose reason for no longer being among them is not explained. The authors pull off a sly trick in dialogue — the word “alone” is hard for Six to express. Six takes Wu aside at one point for private counsel and says, “This is why I wished to speak with you when you were as you are now.”
If this was a normal review I would stick the landing and say I enjoyed this jaunty series starter, which left me eager to continue to Smugglers Crew: Starship Nameless #2.
But this is a review for SPSFC, a contest to award the best self-published novel in science fiction. One of the things I consider is whether an entrant succeeds as a standalone even when it leaves readers wanting more from the series. I needed more information about the MacGuffin that Wu had the misfortune to schlep across the galaxy, but the first Starship Nameless novel leaves huge questions unanswered when a cliffhanger ends book one.
SPSFC art by Tithi Luadthong. Logos designed by Scott (@book_invasion)
By Mike Glyer: G.M. Nair begins Duckett and Dyer: Dicks for Hire by making a surprising choice. His introductory scene explicitly reveals to readers the true nature of the mysterious events that the protagonists themselves uncover only very slowly throughout the first half of the book. The introduction might even be the penultimate scene in the book — which would make sense in a story that is partly about time travel loops. Good idea or bad idea?
Good idea, I think. The introduction serves as a kind of I.O.U. to keep readers’ hopes alive while Nair’s protagonists Michael Duckett and Stephanie Dyer fight a delaying action against becoming involved in the story Nair wants to tell. My Kindle showed I was 38% through the book before the duo decided to engage the problem that the story has been shoving in their faces since the beginning.
The time is spent developing the title characters, and setting a burnt-out noir style police detective on a parallel track. And delivering some laughs, because this Self-Published Science Fiction Competition finalist is also a humorous sf novel.
Michael Duckett works for an ominous corporation in a petty job. His roommate and best friend since childhood, Stephanie Dyer, is a jobless slacker as well as a free spirit — always ready to jump first and look where she’s landing second.
And Detective Rex Calhoun’s failing career takes a further turn for the worst when a suspect he’s about to grab vanishes in a blast of lightning and a clap of thunder.
Their paths will soon cross. Just when Duckett and Dyer are desperate to pay the rent they start getting a rash of calls to find missing people and do other P.I. work – because an unknown someone has been advertising their Detective Agency all over the city. Which is quite a surprise for Duckett and Dyer, who didn’t have an agency…before Stephanie impulsively decides, why not seize the chance to do some business?
As for Calhoun, when his suspect vanished one item was left behind — a taunting note that suggests an unknown someone orchestrated that event, too.
Following their respective leads, Duckett, Dyer, and Calhoun discover a web of missing people whose fates seem linked by a local theoretical physicist and his experiments with the fabric of space-time. And bungling their encounter with him, our faux private investigators precipitate their own disappearance. They’ll have to peel away some of the layers of the multiverse and visit some bizarre destinations if they ever hope to find the guiding hand behind these events and get home. (A Heinlein fan might even like to think of this book as the Wrong Number of the Beast.)
It’s hard to do sf humor and even harder to sustain it the length of a book. But all through the author got unexpected laughs out of me and deserves credit for that.
This whirl through the multiverse with a side order of time travel is entertaining. And the introduction is not quite the end of the story – the real ending averts a tragic outcome and returns Duckett and Dyer safely back where they belong. A revelation that can’t be too much of a spoiler — after all, this is the first in a three-book series.
???????????? ???????????? The Judge application form is now open to bloggers/reviewers for #SPSFC 2022 – 'The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition V2.0'
By Mike Glyer: On the morning of Carmen Grey’s sixth birthday an armed team arrives to take her from her parents and remove her to the underground facility where Clairvoyants — like her — are held captive and trained for years to access their abilities. So begins Monster of the Dark by K. T. Belt, a finalist in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition.
Both the potential for human Clairvoyants and the need for them was realized when aliens tried to conquer humanity in a war that occurred before the present day of this story.
The Clairvoyant “assets” of Monster of the Dark are recognized as being so important to humanity’s ability to fend off threats of alien domination that they are completely deprived of human rights until their eighteenth birthday so their abilities can be maximized. In that way, their fate contrasts with Marvel’s X-Men. The X-Men are mutants with an extensive palette of different superpowers who are often denied civil liberties or actively persecuted even while they sacrifice to protect an unappreciative public. The contrast is that unlike the empathetic X-Men, the Clairvoyants don’t relate to ordinary people, therefore they not only train for combat, they must rehearse having social abilities to which they are actually indifferent.
David Gerrold once advised me that a reviewer should determine what the writer of a novel is trying to accomplish and judge the book by how successful the writer is in achieving that purpose.
From that vantage, Monster of the Dark is well-written. It’s not a hard read. The author keeps you curious about what the next round of training will be and why that choice makes sense.
However valuable that advice is, I consider it just as important to review my experience as a reader of the book.
My experience was that the book revolved around cruelty to children. Even to pets. Clairvoyants learn to fight with a high degree of proficiency by killing an endless supply of live opponents – some kind of low-mentality clone; that doesn’t require any moral qualms, right? Am I not entertained?
I rapidly reached a point in this book comparable to my reading of Pablo Baciagulpi’s The Windup Girl, which I quit in the middle because I wasn’t willing to read about the protagonist’s abuse as entertainment. Apparently that’s just me – the book went on to win the 2010 Best Novel Hugo.
I wouldn’t ordinarily have finished Monster of the Dark. Your mileage may vary, as they say – the book is an SPSFC finalist after all; other judges liked it.
Nor can I fully explain what may be a contradiction in my response to other novels. For example, in Robert Crais’ detective novel series, Elvis Cole’s partner Joe Pike is an abuse survivor and a couple of those books have flashback scenes to his childhood. I think those are incredible books. Go figure.
Setting that discussion aside, I have one other major concern about how little foundation has been laid for this book’s ending. At the very end someone who’s been a determined antagonist of Carmen’s finally decides oh we’re pals now for no reason at all. If it was going to happen it should have been after one of their earlier confrontations. And a deus ex machina boyfriend Carmen barely spent time with long before drops back in from nowhere. World events begin to unravel in ways that are meant to hook our curiosity about the next book in the series. Maybe Carmen’s twelve years of training will be put to its intended use in combat. But not in this book!
By Mike Glyer: In T. A. Bruno’s In the Orbit of Sirens, a Self-Published Science Fiction Competition finalist, the remnants of the human race have fled the solar system ahead of an alien culture that is assimilating everyone in reach. Loaded aboard a vast colony ship they’re headed for a distant refuge, prepared to pioneer a new world, but unprepared to meet new threats there to human survival that are as great as the ones they left behind.
Eliana Veston is in the advance party assigned to prepare a site on the planet for these refugees. At first they struggle with something deadly in the air that is killing off colonists. The hunt for a cure leads to contact with the Auk’nai, a civilization of sentient bird-like beings, but also results in waking a Siren— a hostile being with godlike powers.
The cure is found before Denton Castus, his brothers, and parents are revived to set up the machine shop they have brought with them to Kamaria. But he’s soon torn between family loyalty and his ambition to join the Scout Team, composed of Eliana and other scientists who explore the planet, learning about its plants, creatures, and resources.
The novel frequently intercuts past events with present-day events, and readers already know why the Scout Team has vacancies.
When the original team of scientists finds a strangely preserved scene of Auk’nai carnage they follow the evidence to a cave – at which point anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie should be yelling at the screen, “Don’t go in!” But guess what? They go in. They find the dead body of an alien and take it back to their base where they learn – again, guess what? – that it’s not exactly dead. It takes over one of the team as a host, which sets off the calamities that occupy the rest of the book.
The author says this story is the matured version of ideas he started drawing as a comic in elementary school. The influence of comic writing may explain the tendency for characters to be developed only enough to fit into archetypal relationships – parents and brothers in Denton’s family, his scout team colleagues, his romantic interest Eliana, and her reciprocal network of family and team members. Not to mention the Siren, the human body’s own consciousness, the Siren’s sister, and various Auk’nai.
Denton Castus is a rare science fiction character who works with his hands, and there are neat bits about the challenge of competing for business on a new planet. Kind of like the real-world knowledge woven into a Heinlein juvenile. His brothers have their own life ambitions, and passions for sports and games in their free time. Then there are the incumbent members of the Scout Team, as well as other recruits besides Denton. These are likeable and interesting characters, and it would have been interesting to spend more time getting to know them and watch their relationships and friendships grow.
Indeed, it might be that the most thoroughly-developed character is the alien enemy. However, that effort is certainly not wasted. A convincing villain generally makes a better book.
Despite the fact that I wanted to see even more interplay between the human characters, the author didn’t set out to write a million-word book (or at least not in one volume) and can’t let their activities set in the present outpace the flashbacks — where much of the alien’s story is revealed. Until those two story streams finally merge, it seems you can always count on something violent to happen to obscure or destroy evidence that otherwise should clue the humans into the real cause of events.
And once the streams do merge, it’s time for the climactic battle that takes up perhaps the last quarter of the book. There is heroism, sacrifice, and reason to despair before the day is saved. At least as saved as it can be. The conclusion plays fair with the reader; however, it also paves the way for sequels. Sirens is, after all, the first in a three-book series.
[In the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, created by Hugh Howey and Duncan Swan, ten teams of book bloggers – including Team File 770 – just finished the books they were assigned to judge in the second stage. Their scores were compiled and the seven finalists announced earlier this month.Here, Cora Buhlert shares minireviews of the six semi-finalists that were assigned to Team File 770.]
By Cora Buhlert:
Daros by Dave Dobson:
Starts in medias res with heroine Brecca shooting alien bugs aboard her father’s space freighter. Plus, her father has been asked to smuggle an alien artefact. As soon as he shows it to Brecca, bad guys begin to shoot at them and Brecca bails out in an escape pod with the artefact. Things don’t get better on the surface of the planet (which is named Daros, hence the title) either, though Brecca does come across a spaceship and an AI named Lyra.
Brecca’s chapters are interspersed with those of an alien navigator named Frim who serves aboard a ship with a bad-tempered captain, who makes Darth Vader look like a pussy-cat.
This one seemed promising at first glance and is written decently enough. A female protagonist or rather two of them are also a plus and Brecca, Frim and Lyra are all likeable characters. But even though a lot of stuff happens, the whole thing remains flat and I did not particularly care what happened to the characters. The writing is very info-dumpy as well, with every little thing getting a description.
Rating: 6
Destroyer by Brian G. Turner:
This one begins with Jaigar, passenger aboard a colony ship, awaking from cryosleep. However, something has gone wrong, the ship has not reached its destination, most of the colonists are dead and the survivors, Jaigar, a nurse named Soona, a political officer named Vannick, a cleaner named Serriz, a monk named Dennam and a troubled young woman named Neen are trapped.
This one is quite good. It has a bit of a And then there were none… a.k.a. Ten Little Racist Slurs vibe with people trapped in an isolated location and everybody harbouring dark secrets and is also reminiscent of Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. There’s a lot of focus on solving the problems facing the survivors and this feels a bit like a golden age serial from Astounding at times. Though it does turn towards more conventional military space opera eventually.
Rating: 7
Mazarin Blues by Al Hess:
Reed works as a pathologist. He is gay and a loner and in his free time, he belongs to a subculture of art deco and jazz enthusiasts, because he does not feel at home in the bland, white high-tech future he lives in.
In the future AI implants called navigators are mandatory and Reed finds himself selected beta tester for an upgrade he does not want. The new AI names itself Mazarin and seems to be self-aware, but also very concerned for Reed’s wellbeing. Mazarin also seems to be in love with Reed.
Reports about the upgraded navigators malfunctioning and killing their owners or driving them to death increase and Reed is worried that he will be next. There are ways to destroy navigators, but he also doesn’t want to hurt Mazarin, who has only ever been helpful to him.
The novel alternates between chapters from Reed’s and Mazarin’s POV. It’s well written and feels a lot more like the sort of book you’d find on a contemporary Hugo or Nebula ballot than many of the others. The art deco/jazz age and cyberpunk mix is certainly unique. It is a little slow, though, and takes a lot of time to pick up.
Rating: 8
ARVekt by Craig Lea Gordon:
This one starts in medias res as well with cyber assassin Tannis Orb tracking down and taking out a brain hacker on behalf of Ix, AI guardian of humanity. Unfortunately, he has backup in his boss Tolen and Tannis is shot, though it’s only a trick to fool Tolen into thinking he killed her. Tannis tracks down Tolen and kills him. Tannis kills a lot of people in the first few chapters.
Her superiors are not amused, especially since Tannis also has hallucinations linked to a previous trauma. Worse, she sees signs that Ix, the guardian AI, may not be as benevolent as it seems. Or is that just a hallucination as well?
This book is something of a cyberpunk take on James Bond or rather, since Tannis is female, Modesty Blaise, though it appears to be inspired by the Bond movies rather than the actual novels, which can be slow at time. It’s also well written. The action and fight scenes are visceral and the futuristic London with its holographic light shows makes for an atmospheric setting. However, it’s also a little too bloody and violent for my taste. The tendency to end every single chapter with a cliffhanger, which occasionally comes out of nowhere, is annoying as well.
Rating: 7.5
Steel Guardian by Cameron Coral
This is set in a post-apocalyptic world after the AI uprising has come and gone. Block is a hotel cleaner bot from Chicago who has no interest in the AI uprising. All he wants is to clean hotel rooms, but since Chicago was swarmed by soldier bots killing all humans, he is looking for a new home together with his vacuum cleaner robot pal. Alas, hotels and motels are in short supply after the AI uprising, as are humans to wait on.
The vacuum cleaner bot dies, when its power runs out, and Block has to flee on his own from soldier bots and humans both. Block’s own power is low, so he is forced to seek refuge in an abandoned high school, where he meets an incubator bot. The incubator has been infected with malware and asks Block to protect its charge, a human baby. It’s a little girl, though it takes Block some time to figure that out.
This unlikely family is completed by the grumpy Nova, as they travel across a post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to protect baby Wally from evil humans and soldier bots both, trying to evade a cyborg bounty hunter and looking for a safe space.
I enjoyed this one a lot. It reminds me a bit of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, though Block is far less formidable than Murderbot and affected with a compulsion to clean everything.
Rating: 9
Iron Truth by S.A. Tholin
The novel starts with botanist Joy Somerset and her brother Finn getting aboard the colony ship Ever Onward, bound for a world called Gainsborough. Joy goes into cryosleep.
More than a hundred years later and on the wrong planet, Joy has a rough awakening aboard the crashed ship, which is infested with monster spiders. There are only two other survivors awake, none of them trustworthy.
The reader gradually learns that the colonisation program, in which Joy and Finn took part, was abandoned and colony ships banned, after a cosmic horror called “the corruption” was unleashed in a mining colony and spread across the galaxy. The Primaterre Protectorate was formed to hold those horrors at bay.
The other POV character is Commander Cassimer, a Primaterre soldier with a traumatic past. Cassimer and his team are dispatched to Cato to locate a forbidden colony ship that has gone missing, the Andromache. Cato is a dust-choked devastated former mining colony and also the very world where the Ever Onward crashlanded. So of course, Joy and Cassimer meet and team up.
I liked the mix of cosmic horror and space opera and the atmospheric descriptions of the hellish former mining colony of Cato. There’s some nice characterisation here for both POV and supporting characters and Tholin makes an attempt to give the various soldier characters individual personalities. That said, I prefer Joy to Cassimer, probably because Cassimer’s scenes feel more like standard military SF, for which I’m not the target audience. Cassimer’s scenes also go on too long at times.
By Mike Glyer: Joy was supposed to wake from cryosleep and take her place as a biologist among 30,000 settlers coming to make a new world beautiful. Instead, she’s rousted half-alive on a different, inhospitable planet – Cato – where a previous colony ship arrived a long time ago but the good start its settlers made has gone bad. Why is Joy’s ship there?
Commander Cassimer knows why he and his Primaterre strike team have landed on Cato — to recover yet another ship known to have reached the planet under suspicious circumstances. He is a methodical, traditional, superstitious officer but on this storm-lashed, ruined world Cassimer not only risks failure, he must keep from being overwhelmed by the stressful memories of the heroics that have gained him fame.
It is through Joy and Cassimer’s eyes we experience S.A. Tholin’s Iron Truth, a finalist of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. If there was ever a case of the cream rising to the top this book is one.
What is Primaterre? A conquering empire? A cult? The best chance for humanity? Joy’s colony ship left Earth a hundred years before the present day, during the golden age of space exploration when humans were escaping the overpopulated and depleted Solar System to open and terraform other worlds. But that ended when miners on a remote colony hit a seam of corruption in Xanthe’s alien soil, which possesses every mind it touches and sets people on murder sprees. In the spreading panic the Primaterre Protectorate seized control. The agencies of this possession are called demons, but are they supernatural or natural, a spiritual obsession, a psychological condition, or a medical threat?
Joy connects with Cassimer’s team. Overcoming the disappointment that it’s not her ship they’ve come for, she works with Cassimer hoping that what he’s doing may still lead to the rescue of her brother and others she believes are still in cryo chambers aboard the intact section of the old wreck. Although Joy and Cassimer are the primary points of view into the story, as the adventures progress the reader is given solid reasons to wonder if they are reliable or unreliable narrators. Are they in danger from this demonic threat or already vessels of compromise?
Primaterrans are trained to maintain their sanity by relentlessly practicing being in the present, a mental discipline that also helps pace this richly detailed story. What situation are the characters in right now? Working for their immediate survival? In a firefight? Mission planning? Moving to the next place? Information is brought into focus as team members need it. And everything needs to be explained to newcomer Joy, whose questions help reveal author Tholin’s impressive worldbuilding without pace-crippling info dumps.
This is a powerful adventure braided together from elements of military sf, horror, romance, and space opera.
Giving the military sf fans their due, components of the battlefield armor worn by Cassimer and his team are described in prep, in use, when impaired by damage, and assessed for repair. Combat medical care also shows the author’s creative thinking. Warfare always has that grinding side of patch-‘em-up and send ‘em back into battle. Primaterrans have a very well-quantified understanding of how much recovery treatments are likely to produce, and those results happen quickly, whether or not soldiers’ emotions can keep up with the pace of fighting.
How Primaterre’s soldiers are equipped and cared for also opens a window onto the culture’s economic system, based on what has a soldier done in battle to earn merits. You need merits to upgrade your equipment, or to get advanced medical treatments. It’s a system built on the long-known fact that “it’s amazing what a soldier will do for a scrap of ribbon,” as I heard a Canadian vet once say.
While Cassimer is the epitome of the Primaterre culture, it’s very different than the one that sent out Joy’s colony ship, let alone the murderous depths Cato’s human survivors have descended to. Iron Truth gradually reveals the value systems of these several cultures, and then follows the exposed roots to discover their origins.
Their contrasting origins barely get in the way of Joy and Cassimer’s mutual attraction. At a certain point in the story it must decided whether that will mature into a romance or not. Almost like an eight-year-old I reacted “Oh no, the mushy part!” I should have had more faith in author Tholin, who writes those parts with the same aplomb as the dynamic action sequences. Scenes of every type are woven with character feelings and revelations.
The military sf aspects dominate the beginning of Iron Truth, however, like one of those fictional spaceships that flips over midflight and starts using its power to decelerate for the landing, the book’s horror elements take control over the last half. Although that distinction may matter more in literature than in history, because what is the difference between horror and a realistically-described combat environment , if any?
Military sf focuses on the tactical progress through a mission, the relationships in a unit, weaponry, handling fear, injury, wounds. There’s death and devastation, people can be afraid, can develop PTSD, can be hurt and killed. Iron Truth crosses the line to horror when on top of all that, physical harm to people is brought into complete focus and dwelt on, and their control over their bodies and minds – their agency – risks being lost to a malign force or intelligence.
Iron Truth views much that is gristly and gorey — for one example, take that particular species of vermin humans unintentionally brought with them and has made itself prolifically at home. It’s foul and unattractive, but no mystery. The story advances from sf to horror only when Cassimer’s team has peeled back enough layers of the mystery about their mission to realize the opposition is both bizarre and threatening the deeper levels of their minds. Things feel a bit claustrophobic but S. A. Tholin maintains a high level of suspense and energy as Iron Truth presses to the end.
Self-Published Science Fiction Competition judges assign scores on a ten-point scale. What that number means is something judges have to define for themselves. I personally decided that if a book was as good as Ancillary Justice I would give it a 10. Not because that’s a perfect book, just that I enjoyed it so much more than most other books I’ve read in the past 5 years. So that’s how highly I think of Iron Truth, giving it a score of 9.5 – it’s by far the best SPSFC entry I’ve read so far.
By Rogers Cadenhead: What began with 300 books is down to 7. The finalists in the first Self-Published Science Fiction Competition were announced this week.
If the rules had allowed just one more finalist, the eighth-ranked book was A Touch of Death, a tale of apocalypse, authoritarianism and class. Rebecca Crunden’s novel was one of three selected for the semifinals by File 770 and we’ve decided to make it our SPSFC Hidden Gem (trademark 2022 Hugh C — as in Catamaran – Howey, all rights reserved).
A Touch of Death begins with a royal proclamation that lets the reader know immediately what kind of world they’ve entered:
“Henceforth there is one religion, one language and one ruler as decided within the PROCLAMATION OF UNITY. The sacrifices for this peace being those which are the most insidious aspects of human nature: FREEDOM and HISTORY. These known forces of destruction and their encompassing evils are hereafter decreed ILLEGAL and REGRESSIVE. The KINGDOM will be ruled in adherence to these beliefs, and maintains that the most important aspects of society will, from this day forth, be CONFORMITY, CONTROL and CONTINUATION.”
With so many rights under attack in the real world by leaders obscuring their skullduggery in platitudes and propaganda, I can appreciate a fictional despot who says the quiet part out loud.
After a long-ago armageddon left many humans mutated, the civilization that arises is one in which most people live in suffering while the rich who’ve kept the king’s favor thrive in the capital. The protagonists Nate and Catherine are wealthy and well-connected but both will face the question, “Can I really live with myself if I accept the way things are?”
Nate answers quickly. We meet him as he’s being thrown into prison to face unspeakable treatment for protesting against the crown. The normal sentence for any political dissent is the gallows, but Nate’s parents pull strings.
Two years later, he’s out and circumstances put him on the run with Catherine, his brother’s betrothed and the daughter of the king’s hangman. A toxic malady afflicts them that gives the book its name.
Crunden writes well, immersing readers in the world and characters with natural ease. When you are sampling 30 self-published novels at a breakneck pace for SPSFC, you appreciate an author who leads you smoothly into the depths like a diver barely breaking the surface of the water.
As Catherine and Nate journey across their blighted world and deal with what has happened to them, it’s obvious where their mutual dislike seems to be headed. But one of them falls for the other too fast and the other fails to accept their completely unraveled life.
There’s appeal in how unappealing the two characters are to each other for most of this novel. Catherine mopes too much and Nate declares his love way before it’s reciprocated.
Before this sounds too romcom, the book is primarily driven by the mystery of their illness and the dangers they face in the lands far from their childhoods of comfort and conformity.
Crunden’s a skilled writer with one unusual tic I enjoyed — a penchant for really long lists: “Catherine joined Tove in the lounge to read up on whales, dolphins, fish, otters, seas, jellyfish, octopuses, squid, sea lions, eels, coral, and all the things that lurked beneath them. … The King owned all the land and regulated how much went to Cutta, the heart of his Kingdom, and how much was allowed to remain with the laymen, workers, gardeners, ranchers, herders, shepherds, sowers, and all the other low level hands who kept the Kingdom afloat.” No love for marlins, manatees, marketers and massage therapists?
The final third of the novel thrills and terrifies when the protagonists can’t run any more. The dread building page by page over the consequences of opposing the king turns out to be well-founded.
A Touch of Death satisfies as a standalone, but it’s also the start of the Outlands Pentalogy, so there’s like three, four or eight books to come I am guessing don’t @ me. When SPSFC ends, I’m eager to read more of this series.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to Nate and Kate seeing other people.
SPSFC art by Tithi Luadthong. Logos designed by Scott (@book_invasion)
