More Books than Time

Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

Review: The Memory Magus: The Haze by Dean F. Wilson

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This short story came to me through InstaFreebie and the cover and title intrigued me so I read it.  Unfortunately the title is the best part as the story has no plot, no point, no character development, no setting.

An old enemy arrives one evening and demands that Magus Ladesan uses his memory altering talent to ensures this enemy wins an election.  The method is brutally simple:  first extort and torture voters then erase memories and record their vote.

That’s the story.  Bad guy wins.

1 Star

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Sparrow Hill Road – Ghost Stories by Seanan McGuire that Read Like Folk Songs

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Sparrow Hill Road is a ghost story that reads like a folk song.  The book is made of small snippets of story, between refrains about Rose, the ghost of Sparrow Hill Road, a hitcher who travels from one end of America to the other.

Rose is ghost who takes on living flesh when someone gives her a coat.  She makes her way hitching with truckers, eating in roadside diners and truck stops (but can only taste what someone living freely gives her).  Rose is also a psychopomp, someone who guides the souls of newly dead to their afterlife.

Several of the stories have multiple parts which connect and disconnect from the flow.  The author used headings to anchor us in time and place and introduced each scene change so the narrative flow was not confusing.

Overarching all of these vignettes we see Rose desperately trying to stay ahead of Bobby Cross, the man who sold other people’s soul to the cross roads to obtain immortality.  Bobby believes he owns Rose’s soul because he ran her off the road and killed her.  Rose escaped him then and now.  (It’s ridiculous of course to think that someone could obtain a lien on another’s unwilling soul.)

The ghost stories are OK and a few are better than OK.  When Rose acts heroically she is interesting and the stories feel whole, complete.  Otherwise she is tiresome and the constant repetition about the twilight roads is annoying.  Only one character is aware of the spiritual life or death implicit in the ghosts’ actions and Rose herself neither knows nor cares about heaven and hell.

I didn’t care for the repetition refrain in between each story and wasn’t crazy about most of the characters.  Sparrow Hill Road is more of a series of short stories and novellas than a true novel and we do not get a resolution for Bobby Cross.  He is delayed once again but not stopped.  Rose herself rejects travelling to the end of the road, to go to the next place whether heaven or hell and prefers her hitching present.

I would have preferred a story structured more like a novel and not a folk song turned into a semi-novel.  A novel requires a heroine with more gravitas than Rose who is lightweight, with not enough going on to carry a full novel.  She is suited to a folk song.  As a story this is flat.

3 Stars

I received this for free through NetGalley with the expectation of providing an honest review.

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Sad Times for Max – A Second Chance – Chronicles of St. Mary’s Book #3

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Have you ever shut someone out of your heart because you could not accept something they did?  They did something so heinous that you could not see them with loving eyes?  Max and Leon come to this point in A Second Chance, where both look at the other and see behavior that they cannot accept.

Max and the historical research unit at St. Mary’s are in for grim times in book #3, A Second Chance.  Max and Leon have their ups and downs, mostly because they don’t or can’t talk to each other and Max is an emotional midget, albeit a midget who takes the first steps to growing up.  Unfortunately she and Leon come to a point where neither can tolerate the other’s action and attitude.

The novel works on two levels:  plot and character.  The plot involves the usual mayhem punctuated with serious events, concussion by cheese and mass rape and murder in Troy.  The historians thread their way through the Trojan war, they observe Troy at peace before the Greeks, then observe Troy as it falls.  No one could see this and remain unmoved.

If we view the St. Mary’s stories purely as historical fiction they are outstanding as Taylor brings the conflicts and the historical people to life.  She adds details to the stories and verisimilitude by having a real observer right there to see and feel everything.  Max enjoys the peaceful year before the Greek war and walks the Trojan streets, watches the royal family and mingles with the inhabitants, and Max is a keen observer.  She sees it, records it and tells it so that we are there too.

The characters’ growth parallels the historical actions.  Max shuts Leon out, but too late realizes she still cares and that manic action doesn’t do much to heal heartbreak.  (Max’s go-to strategy for any emotional upset mixes work and booze.)  She very slowly comes to realize that just maybe she made a mistake when the question becomes moot.

Jodi Taylor does a fairly good job on the people, although I’ve noticed her female leads in this series and the Nothing Girl are emotionally stunted and/or not able to step up like adults and take responsibility for their own future.  Max hides behind “history” and her job and settles in to nurse a grudge.  Is her grudge justified?  Somewhat, yes.  But that’s what it means to be an adult and to love someone:  It’s an act of will, and no, you will not always like (or even tolerate) the one you love.

Max reveals a streak of cowardice that turned me off.  She didn’t even want to try to save a little boy, not even to make a short side trip in space and not in time to get him to a safer place.  It was only later that she realized she could have tried something, and in fact, should have done so.

The best part of this novel is the up close and personal view of Troy and Agincourt.  We are right there.  Taylor adds a lot of guesswork and embellishes the story from the bare facts we know, so the plain narrative comes alive and we see and feel the Trojans’ terror and the desperate clash of armies.  I suspect many of her readers are closet historians, or like me, interested but ignorant, and that’s one reason we love the books.

Why is it called A Second Chance?  Max gets a second chance – more than one actually – including the biggest chance of all at the end.

4 Stars

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Time Travel for Historians 2 – A Symphony of Echoes – Jodi Taylor Chronicles of St. Mary’s

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Jodi Taylor continues her frantic race up and down Time while Max struggles with an emotional seesaw in her second book, A Symphony of Echoes, in her Chronicles of St. Mary’s.  We start off with Max and best friend Kal jaunting off to late Victorian London to see Jack the Ripper.  Unfortunately they find Jack.  And worse, bring it back with them.

Plot

Max deals with Jack for the first quarter of the novel, followed immediately by: Max rescues Leon from dastards who kidnap and bring him to a future St. Mary’s where they also take over and kill most of the personnel (reason hinted at but not really explained), then Max takes over as temporary director of this future unit, visits Mauritius to abscond with some dodos as a works outing, returns home, witnesses Thomas Beckett’s assassination, gets incandescently angry with Leon, wrecks his car and drives it into the lake (necessitating tens of thousands worth of repairs),  gets stranded in Nineveh, gets rescued, reconciles with Leon, shoves Mary Queen of Scots into a locked room with Bothwell, and ends with her learning the next mission is to Troy.

Yes, the plot truly is this busy.  The emotional highs and lows go along in parallel with the action as Taylor shows us what Max is doing and we see how she reacts to and feels about Leon and her friends.  This is a book you read for the plot more than for the people.

There are plot weak spots.  For example, why would someone select Jack the Ripper/Victorian London when they can choose any time or place?

And why would Ronan and accomplices want to capture Max so badly that they first kidnap Leon and leave coordinates on the mirror in the men’s room?  I understand one villain hates Max but really, there should be easier ways to get her alone and vulnerable than to go through the fuss of getting Leon.

Max speculates the villains want to control a St. Mary’s point in time in order to have a base of operations; that makes sense but also invalidates kidnapping Leon.  They would have to know that the original St. Mary’s wouldn’t abandon Leon without a fight.

Characters

While Taylor shows us Max as a person with emotional depth she leaves most of the other characters less finished.  She tells us that Tim Peterson is calm and solid, warm and caring, but we see Tim in relationship to Max, through Max’s eyes.  We don’t get to know Tim.  We get more acquainted with Leon, but he too remains a bit vague.  Taylor concentrates on her plot and Max and everyone else is something more than backdrop and less than a full person.

Max’s reaction when Leon spurns her is overwrought.  Max and Leon have gone through some rough spots before but this time she goes up like a rocket and simply cannot stop being angry.  Max gives in to temper and severs relations with Leon in the first three books in the series and I think it’s flaw that the author corrects in the later novels.  I get tired of Max acting like a kid.

Overall

A Symphony of Echoes is very good, enjoyable, and a very fast read.  Don’t budget more than an evening for this despite the length.  The story moves so fast that I got caught up in the plot and, to some extent, the characters.  The book is plot-heavy, not so much driven by characters as it drives the characters and us readers.

I’ve read all of Jodi Taylor’s novels and this is one of the weaker ones, plot heavy and character light.  Mind you I still loved it despite the flaws.

4 Stars (3 Stars if it weren’t so entertaining)

 

 

 

Time Travel for Historians – Just One Damned Thing After Another – Jodi Taylor

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Just One Damned Thing After Another is a lot of fun wrapped around people and history, full of quirky humor and an incitement to delve into Wikipedia.  (I only thought I knew some of these events!)  It is the first of several books featuring Max, a historian working at St. Mary’s Institute for Historical Research which “investigate major historical events in contemporary time”, i.e., sends historians back in time to observe and record what really happened.

Max is a complex character who tries desperately to be one-dimensional, hard-drinking, loud, incorrigibly curious, uncaring, but her bursts of common sense and exposure to death and misery make her far more than the cardboard cutout she wants to be.  Max prides herself on her attitude and her “we can do this” approach, but gets sidetracked by the people around her and the human misery she views as part of her job.

Overall the book is reasonably well-written, although it jumps around a lot and we often lose the sense of time passing.  Everyone around Max is gung-ho dedicated to history (or to historically-inspired R&D) to the point where it seems almost a caricature.  Would you really be that thrilled to go witness a hospital blowing up after The Battle of the Somme?

These events take a toll on Max and the others.  She and a few others compartmentalize, separate their feelings from their experiences.  Some leave St. Mary’s.  Some act stupid.  To me the biggest weakness of this first novel and all the others is how poorly the characters face and deal with the emotional toll from seeing other people die, including all too often, their friends and colleagues.

I loved the plausible historical accuracy – of course the author is guessing for meat to add to history’s bones – and the novel inspired me to check references to learn more about the background and key players in these scenarios.

This first novel takes Max and colleagues back to Edward the Confessor’s coronation, World War 1 and the Cretaceous, back to the Cretaceous twice (one an unauthorized rescue), on to the burning Library of Alexandria to rescue scrolls. That’s quite a range although Max manages to get injured in two of the events and wet on by colleague and friend Peterson in the other.  History, you see, is jealous of herself and barely tolerates historians observing.  She does not tolerate even tiny interference, such as warning a mugging victim.

The plot is full and busy and moves at lightening speed.

There are plot holes.  For example, why does Thirsk University fund St. Mary’s?  How on earth can it justify the enormous expense for historical research?  (We learn in a later novella that St. Mary’s founder actually captures British government support and patronage which filters through Thrisk.)  Even so it is hard to imagine the funding nightmares.

There is one serious sex scene in this first novel that I did not see as necessary.  Just One Damned Thing After Another has the usual vulgarities and a couple blasphemies against the name of the Lord.  I didn’t like either the smutty scenes or the blasphemy, but I’ve learned to read past them.

The biggest flaw from a narrative / literature perspective is the constant harping on historians being disaster magnets.  They apparently have the attention span of a fly and can’t stop themselves from acting stupid.  Jodi Taylor uses this as a convenient catch-all to explain any inconsistencies or flights of fancy that creep in.  I understand someone not wanting to stop a good thing (like watching dinosaurs) to deal with housekeeping, but the characters do this all the time and it gets a little annoying.

Overall this is a very enjoyable start to a very enjoyable series.  I would not recommend reading all the books immediately after one another because some of the flaws become obnoxious with repititon.  I do recommend that you read the first three books close together, Just One Damned Thing After Another, A Symphony of Echoes, and A Second Chance because these flow one after the other.

4 Stars – Almost 5

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Friends at Thrush Green – Gentle English Country Town Novel by Miss Read

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If you get tired of novels about married angst, or alien invasions, or children misbehaving, then try Miss Read’s novels set in small English villages.  Her people enjoy life; they meet problems and forge through, always with neighbors and friends along to help (or gossip).

I enjoy Miss Read’s novels.  I like to read about people whom I would like to know in person, and people who embody the best of human nature, generally good but imperfect, with failings large and small.  I like that there is little or no profanity, no vulgarity, no smut, no blasphemy.  The characters attend church, grocery shop, help out a neighbor, clean the house, enjoy life as it comes.

The characters in Friends at Thrush Green confront serious problems.  Elderly Bertha Lovelocks is senile and has taken to thieving, driving her gentle sister nearly to tears.  Margaret Lester is an alcoholic.  Percy needs a wife and several young ladies need to get married suddenly.  Friends come together to help.

The setting is enjoyable.  We are in a tiny village where not everyone has a telephone.  No cell phones or internet mar the peace and the biggest hobby is gardening.  This is a peaceful novel about life in a quiet English village.

I think this novel may be easier to read in print format.  If you want to look up a given character (is he the minister or the retired doctor??) it is much easier to flip back in a print book.

4 Stars

Survival: A Novel (Star Quest Trilogy) by Ben Bova

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Survival is the first novel by Ben Bova that I have finished. Our library had Survival in the new book section, I was looking for something different and decided to try Bova again.  I’m glad I did because Survival is a decent read.

Characters

I liked the main character, Alexander Ignatiev.  He is a crotchety older man we meet first on a short trip to a close-by star.  He discovers their ship will not be able to gather enough hydrogen to power the life support systems and manages to mousetrap the AI running the ship into changing course.  We meet Ignatiev again in the main story when he leads a group of 2000 scientists on a mission to save a machine civilization 2000 light years away.

Ignatiev is interesting and likable, with a quick sense of humor and a bit of cynicism.  The other characters are sketchier and the machine civilization is flat, without personality.

I got very tired reading how dedicated the scientists are to their research, to the point where they are perfectly happy being fobbed off with a well-equipped lab when they could be digging into the intricacies of the machine civilization.  This felt off, even allowing for the single-mindedness one needs to be a world class researcher.

Plot and Story Telling

The first part of the novel, the trip to Gliese 581, doesn’t do anything except set up Ignatiev as the man to watch.  It doesn’t fit into the rest of the story and feels like a novella the author decided to graft onto his main narrative.

The other part that I find extraordinarily jarring, unbelievable, is the machine civilization’s response to the human mission.  Initially the machines intend to trap the people on their planet, then let them die in the death wave, but somehow at the end, Ignatiev manages to convince them that it would be more fruitful, more interesting, to cooperate with humans and the Predecessors to save and unite as many civilizations as possible.

We are supposed to believe that the machines, initially ambivalent about the humans, then became implacable, only to then decide, oh yeah, let’s band together.  Sorry, I don’t believe it.

I don’t believe in the whole machine civilization, sentient artificial intelligence world building either, but Bova tells the story well enough that I could nod and go on.

Writing Style

Bova writes quite well and puts in enough in-fighting and political jockeying to give the story some meat and make the people more believable.  He uses dialogue and introspection to advance the story and keep the pace moving.

Overall

Jack McDevitt wrote several novels using the theme of galactic omega clouds (death weapons or art objects, depending on your point of view) that threaten all civilizations.  In his novels the weapons are attracted to straight lines and right angles and ruthlessly attack any they come upon.  Bova’s gamma death wave reminded me of McDevitt’s omega clouds – and reminded me how much I liked McDevitt’s novels.

Survival is a decent read albeit a fast read.  If you have a spare evening give it a shot.

3 Stars

Retrograde – Group Survival on Mars by Peter Cawdron

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Retrograde starts with 120 people from all over the world living as a science colony on Mars.  The four national groups live in separate habitats formed out of underground lava tubes and all four group habitats connect to a large hub full of growing plants and animals.  The teams are happy, doing research on Martian conditions, living, joking, playing games, eating and loving when suddenly they learn that over twenty large cities have been destroyed in nuclear attacks.  It’s not clear who is fighting whom, or why, and although indications are the US started it, nothing makes sense.

Plot Synopsis

Liz, the US scientist who narrates the novel, urges the national team leaders to not fight, to cooperate, to share the limited resources, to live and not to die.  Survival is complicated and challenging because the resupply mission apparently missed Mars and is zooming off into space.

Several of the team get suspicious that the whole story doesn’t make any sense.  There is no reason for war on Earth, no reason for the supply ship to go astray, and some see evidence that the supply ship in fact landed quite close by.  Liz goes out to one of the outposts to look for the ship, falls and is badly hurt, almost dies.  She is rescued and brought back for treatment by the Chinese doctor Jianyu who is her lover.

Some of the facility sections lose oxygen and many die, including Jianyu, although Liz survives.  This is one more oddity that makes several team member suspect the culprit is not a person at all, but an AI.

The rest of the novel focuses on how the teams come together to fight off the AI, and with a few snippets about parallel happenings on Earth.  Luckily enough people realized the attacks were fishy that the military and political leaders around the globe did not call in massive retaliation strikes.  In fact, although millions were killed, many survive even around the destroyed cities.

There are parallels to Andy Weir’s Martian, in that people must survive, must use their wits to figure out and overcome challenges that will otherwise kill them.  The difference is Retrograde looks at groups of people, individuals working with a few other individuals, although the challenges are in fact far greater.  (The AI could kill off everyone on Mars and go back to Earth and destroy even more.)

Characters

Retrograde is about people, but it is not a character novel, it’s more of a story about people facing a very bad situation.  It reminds me of some war movies that focus one one person after another, leaving each when they die or go offstage.  Dialogue is OK, but in general the characters are just so-so.  There wasn’t anyone I want to get to know better.

Overall

I mostly enjoyed reading Retrograde.  It is always refreshing to find well-written science fiction that has believable people, although the main plot twist was unbelievable.   The pacing is uneven and to be blunt, I got a little tired of the story.

So many new authors try to write military science fiction, or novels about small traders, smugglers, folks living on the edge,, and so few do it well.  Too often the basic approach is to take a story that could be set on Earth just fine and dump it into outer space and call it science fiction.  Sometimes the only way we can tell it’s outer space and meant to be science fiction is that the character will mention their ship or their trips to other star systems.  Retrograde is real science fiction; Cawdron takes a semi-plausible scenario, and uses real science as the story backdrop.

3 Stars

Don’t Look at the Cover! Piercing the Veil: A Supernatural Occult Thriller by Guy Riessen

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Ignore the cover.  Please.  This book is pretty good, enjoyable with plenty of nutty characters, a wild plot and enough background to make it all work.  Just get by the cover, open it up and enjoy.

Guy Riessen creates a world where all the Lovecraft horrors are real, where the veil between our world and Evil is slim and frayed.  And researchers/monster-busters Derrick and Howard, with their team members Mary and Sara, are professors at Miskatonic U in the day and creepazoid slayers at night.  Derrick teaches astrophysics and is an electronics whiz with eidetic memory.  Howard, former military and NAS, is a peerless sharpshooter, teaches history and is a linguist.  Mary is a medical doctor and scientist.  Sara leads the team.

The chemistry among the team members is real and believable and makes the book.  We open with Derrick and Howard investigating a poltergeist report in national forest somewhere remote in California.  They enter a deserted house, find the meth operators cut up in the basement and barely manage to escape a giant bone monster.  In fact Derrick breaks his leg and the necromancer behind the trouble captures Derrick to learn as much as he can about security around artifacts that Miskatonic holds.

This small part and a few others were a bit confusing.  Howard gets away but Derrick doesn’t, yet Howard leaves and we don’t even see where the necromancer had been hiding.  With books like Piercing the Veil you usually find a few implausible leaps of plot, and if the author is good you don’t stop reading, you shrug and go on.  That’s what I did.

I’ve been reading several books in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series and found Piercing the Veil a notch above for readability and enjoyment.  (Correia spends way too much time describing his guns.)  It reminds me of Charles Stross’ Laundry series more than anything else, but with less moral ambiguity, less bureaucracy, and more interesting people and more fun.

Characters

Piercing the Veil  spends many pages showing the interplay between Howard and Derrick.  Both are – or can be – completely serious, adult, dedicated.  In the meantime they play games like Dungeons and Dragons, drink beer and watch bad movies.  They are friends.  Derrick is the prototypical clueless nerd, desperate to go past “colleagues and friends” into romance land with Sara, but he’s afraid and keeps waiting for the perfect moment.  Howard urges him to man up, stop waiting and take a chance but it doesn’t happen here.

Riessen describes Mary as the stereotype girl scientist, right down to glasses, lab coat and pocket protector, but it’s obvious that Mary is far more.  She and Sara risk their lives working with Howard and Derrick to stop the Shadow Men, then the necromancer.  All four have unique gifts and one of Mary’s is the ability to see real vs. fake artifacts, to see through magical deceptions.  The book ends with her discovering that the recovered artifacts are mostly fake…leading of course to a sequel!

We don’t get a good idea of the villainous necromancer.  He’s obviously short on ethics, but we don’t know much about his motivation.  You have to be pretty motivated to kill a bunch of people, suck an entire town into worshiping the elder pseudo-gods, kill even more people, sacrifice more people, and send Shadows against the Miskatonic team.  We know his wife and son were killed in a brutal attack, but not who killed them, why or how that connects to his nastiness now.  That’s probably in the sequel too.

Overall

Piercing the Veil is not great literature.  it is entertainment.  It’s reasonably well-written, with a fast plot that’s fun to read, with characters that I liked, with a villain that is not so villainous as to be unbelievable.  I will certainly look for the sequel.

I tend to rate books at face value; so a book that aims to entertain and does so, that only minor eye-rolling moments, that keeps my interest, that I look forward to reading, that I stayed up to finish, I rate based on the entertainment value, not for its literary quality.

4 Stars (entertainment)

Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners by John Ringo and Larry Correia

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The Monster Hunter Files, an anthology of stories set in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International world, prompted me to read other books by Larry Correia or set in his world.  John Ringo has written three Monster Hunter novels, that star Chad Gardenier, also called Iron Hand, set about 30 years prior to the rest of the series.  I reviewed the first novel, Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge here.  Ringo tells a pretty good story although he does go off on tangents.

Ringo’s second novel is Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners, tells more about Chad, this time fighting waves of monster invasions in New Orleans.

I didn’t enjoy this second book quite as much.  Sinners has plenty of action – New Orleans attracts plenty of people that believe in and practice witchcraft or sorcery – and this activity fuels the ongoing problems.  Sinners does not have quite the character depth.  We already know a lot about Chad from Grunge; we know he’s fatalistic, unwilling to say no to carnal desires, a lounge lizard, brave, smart, a natural leader, and has a good sense of humor.  Sinners builds on this Chad foundation but now we see him more as a hardened fighter, less funny, less introspective, less humble and more obnoxious.

Sinners has some very good points.  Although Chad is a girl aficionado Ringo avoids smut.  Chad talks a lot but thankfully avoids giving us the details up close and in person.

I really appreciated the Catholic, religious angle.  Remember, Chad died in Grunge and came back because St. Peter asked him to.  He converted to Catholicism in Grunge and although he’s surely not the most faithful worshiper, he believes and takes advantage of the sacraments to strengthen himself and cleanse his soul.  Ringo covers this with a light touch, just a few sentences.  If you don’t believe you can still enjoy the book.

Maybe I liked Sinners less because I read Monster Hunter International at the same time, and simply had a surfeit of monster, guns and violence.  I don’t know.  I will read further books in Ringo’s series because he is so good at telling a story, but I think I will wait a while for those.

3 Stars

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