More Books than Time

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

Royal Tournament by Richard H. Stephen – Beautiful Cover on a Morality Tale

by Leave a Comment

I picked Royal Tournament by Richard H. Stephen based on the cover and his website artwork linked in from Instafreebie.  I am a sucker for medieval stories and this one looked promising.

Royal Tournament is a novella featuring Javan, son of a local farmer who is the reigning jousting champion in his baron’s territory.  Now the king is visiting the baron and holding the royal tournament at the castle right near Javan.  Of course he must compete.

Compliments

The story itself is unusual for a fantasy set in a medieval world.  Javan makes friends with a dark-skinned man from one of the kingdom’s allies.  The stranger defeats one of the kingdom’s knights who is badly injured in the joust.  His men take revenge on the stranger and then turn their violence on Javan when he tries to intervene.  I’ve noticed more fantasies taking on themes of racism and basic fairness, and it was good to see a novella that handles this without moralizing or sermons.  Javan simply does the right thing for the right reasons; he acts honorably.

The other plot-related pleasant surprise is the ending.  Normally the young hero wins the competition, somehow defeating everyone.  That doesn’t happen, resulting in a more believable outcome.

Not So Good

I’m no expert in feudal economics but the whole Javan set up didn’t make a lot of sense.  If he and his father worked their land alone – without hired hands or even seasonal help – then they could only farm a small plot.  In that case they couldn’t afford the trained warhorse or even dented armor for Javan or be on such good terms with the baron.

There were a few other points that felt off, but the economic set up was the most obvious.

Overall

I enjoyed this short novella, but probably not enough to pursue more books by this author.

3 Stars

Archangel Down – Solid Start to…? Alien Invasion Maybe? by C. Gockel

by Leave a Comment

Archangel Down starts a new series by C. Gockel that uses some of the same world and characters as her short story “Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe”.  I liked the short story and was glad to see Noa Sato taking the lead in this novel.

The premise and world building are excellent.  The colonists on Luddeccea distrust technology in general and believe their time gate, which allows interstellar travel, has been invaded by non-corporeal aliens who can control people through their augments.  No one outside of the Luddecceans believes this story.

The story opens with Noa in a re-education camp with her ethernet port blocked, half starved and frozen, surrounded by others who have had artificial limbs torn away.  Noa escapes and meets James Sinclair, a professor who comes to Luddeccea for a vacation.  Sinclair is highly augmented and Noa knows the authorities will kill him if they can.

Noa hatches a plan to escape the planet and bring warning to the rest of the human worlds, to bring the navy to Luddeccea to stop the murders and rescue the people in the camps.

Weaker Points:  Pace and Character

The plot is choppy.  Noa and James must run and stay ahead of the authorities and the novel spends quite a bit of time on this, making for inconsistent pacing.  It also is a little unbelievable.  Noa has escaped from a concentration camp, is woefully malnourished, and gets a serious fungal lung infection.  Yet she is able to stay several steps ahead of the manhunt even while contacting others she believes can help.

The other point that hurts pacing is the author brings in some 20th century jokes, mostly allusions to Star Trek and Star Wars, plus some racial observations.  The jokes aren’t funny and the race stuff doesn’t add anything to the story.  (In Noa’s world most people are medium tan while she is dark and James is white and blond.)  These slow down the story and feel a little forced.

Noa is a strong character, albeit secondary, in the short story and provides the main point of view and lead.  We see she is loyal to a fault, strong-willed, serious, willing to trust people she knows, ready to love and support her friends.  She is also ruthless, smart, bold.  By the end of Archangel Down we feel like Noa is a real person, not necessarily a realistic one, but someone we want to read about.

James Sinclair provides point of view part of the novel but is more sketchy.  Sinclair realizes he cannot remember anything prior to a serious accident that resulted in him getting so many augments, but he worries that he may not be himself.  This helps explain the paucity of character development, but it left me feeling like he needs more work.

My favorite character is Carl Sagan, currently inhabiting a wherfle on the Ark with Noa.  The short story hints that The One, the individual minds that can inhabit wherfles or other semi-intelligent creatures, know about the dangerous aliens that are in the Time Gate.  I do hope that Noa and James figure out that Carl Sagan is a lot more than a cute pet who keeps the rats down.

Overall

Archangel Down opens a lot of plot strings and leaves us with lots of questions.  It is fairly well-written and interesting, with a good plot and interesting characters.  I intend to read the next book in the Archangel Project series, Noa’s Ark: Archangel Project. Book Two.  I debate between 3 and 4 stars because yes, I liked the book, yes I intend to read more, but it just isn’t quite as compelling as most 4 star novels.

3+ Stars

Liquid Gambit by Bonnie Milani, Good World Building in a Novella

by Leave a Comment

Bonnie Milani offered her novella Liquid Gambit as a novella via a give away and it sounded interesting enough to try. In fact it is well-written, with interesting characters and back story.

We meet Rick, a Lupan, tending his bar in the down-and-out section of the next-to-the-bottom deck of space station Bogue Dast, aptly named “Hell” because it’s a short walk to the Void.  Most of Rick’s customers are seedy types with young pickpocket and con man Snicket standing out only because of his extreme Mohawk.  Rick hates slavers and kills them when he can, so far without being caught, although cop leader Bayliss is itching to get him for murder.

Rick decides to leave Bogue Dast while he can but needs a lot of money to pay off all the bribes to stations and polities who want him dead or alive.  He gets his chance when Snicket leaves a vial of Earth water – that he stole from the Mayor – under a bar stool for his mother to find and use to ransom his sister who is held by a slaver and destined for the Mayor.

The action proceeds as we can expect given the characters and the world-building.  The plot is good enough to carry the action and show us the people and setting.

Characters

The characters are the best part of the story.  Rick is the consummate hero, willing to help others even at the cost of his life and livelihood.  Policeman Bayliss is interesting, not completely a villain but definitely not a clean cop either.

Rick is the narrator and main character and Milani shows us inside his head and his personality by actions, words plus his memories and thoughts.  She does a good job letting us get to know Rick, what drives him.  Rick could have been just a stock character until Milani brings to life with her writing.

Overall

I liked the novella. I was surprised to see Bonnie Milani authored Home World, which I didn’t care for; she has written other novels and stories in the same universe.  Liquid Gambit shows people as people in difficult circumstances, all doing what they can to survive while acting with honor and morals, a satisfying foundation for story.

3-4 Stars

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The Chronicles of St. Mary’s Book Six – Not the Best

by Leave a Comment

I’ve read and enjoyed every book Jodi Taylor wrote because they are fun, with great characters, lively plots, plenty of humor under laid by serious conflicts.  What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: The Chronicles of St. Mary’s Book Six is not a weak book.  We again have Max doing Max things, this time training new historian wannabes, with all the usual adventures and danger.  Yet I didn’t like What Could Possibly Go Wrong? anywhere near as much as the other books in the series.

Why, oh why, would anyone want to observe Joan of Arc’s execution?  Max justifies her decision to use this horrific event as her make-or-break/witness-gore-and-death training moment by saying that Joan would burn whether they observe or not.  That is true, but there is something wrong with using someone’s agonizing, tortured death to educate.  It is using another person’s suffering and even though Max’s reason is virtuous, the act is not.

The scene with the mammoth hunt is great and Mary the Mammoth is a fantastic addition to St. Mary’s lore.  I always enjoy Taylor’s detailed descriptions of the history and this view of Neanderthals and modern humans living together and hunting mammoths is superb as always.

Max allows one of her trainees to hijack the pod and visit Bosworth Field, which sets her feet on the wrong side of the line and leads to her actions in the next book, Lies, Damned Lies and History.

Overall my distaste for the Joan of Arc scene tramples the otherwise excellent What Could Possibly Go Wrong?   I find myself disinclined to re-read it (I’ve re-read all the other books multiple times) although others apparently liked it very well.  What Could Possibly Go Wrong?  has the highest Amazon rating of all the St. Mary’s books, with no 2 or 1 star reviews and a handful of 3 stars.

3 Stars

Wrath of the Fury Blade – An Elven Police Procedural with Racial Overtones

by Leave a Comment

Wrath of the Fury Blade tries to be several things:  It is a police procedural, a commentary on Nazism, a semi-romance and a fantasy.  The story itself is engaging, with police elf Reva Lunaria untangling the mysterious murder of the First Magistrate, a murder where the victim is cut completely in half, in his own home, with no witnesses.  A second murder, this time of the kingdom’s finance minister, soon follows, then more attacks and murders.

Elvish Nazis

It’s clear that someone has a vendetta against a group of people, but what ties the group together?  Reva’s only clue is the pin that each victim wears, from a club dedicated to elven racial purity; the victims’ pins all have one black star, possibly indicating a secret sub group.

Here’s where the Nazi problem comes in.  The king promulgated Purity Laws three times, each one decades apart, and each one increasingly strict.  Now a person with a great grandparent who was not elvish is no longer an elf and cannot own property nor be married to an elf.  (The authors say this is Fascism, but Fascists revere the State, not the blood.  Nazis revere “pure” blood.)

This Nazi/Jim Crow/Apartheid nasty mess is a backdrop that doesn’t add much to the story.  It explains a little why some of the secret society is so careful to hide their Dark Elf ancestry, but we didn’t need the entire Jim Crow racial nonsense to make that point work.  The authors brought in a few incidents with the now-denigrated non-elves that felt pasted on, as if they initially intended to make those incidents a big part of the story, then changed their mind and left the stubs.

The primary story, Revi and her new partner Ansee, unraveling the murders and finding the culprit, is good.  It moves fast and is engaging.  The secondary story, with the Gestapo-like Sucra working hand-in-hand with the new police commissioner, is also quite well done.

This secondary story is terrifying all by itself as we see the Sucra’s Senior Inquisitor Malvaceä torturing, imprisoning without cause, extorting, killing and setting up false trails.  I’d like to see the authors further develop the primary story against the backdrop of this secret police threat to the king and kingdom.

Overall

Wrath of the Fury Blade is readable and I mostly enjoyed it.  There were a few spots that are far-fetched, for example, when Revi’s long time information source not only recognizes the pins but knows there is a centuries-long plot against the king that ties into the pins.

The characters were fairly interesting but not well developed enough to carry the novel without the fast plot.  Revi felt too much like a composite police/dectective/good guy crime fighter and the authors dropped a few clues that she may have more going on than the stock character they present.

Wrath of the Fury Blade leaves us ready for a sequel.  I think we’ll have more Revi/Ansee interactions, possibly more about Revi’s family and murdered father and we’ll see why Ansee and his sister do not get along. I’m hoping the authors build onto the Sucra threat.  I also hope the authors write a little less of a multi-genre mash up and concentrate on the characters and pick one or two main stories.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in expectation of an honest review.

3 Stars

Amazon links are ads that pay commission to blog owner.

Shi: A Dark Adventure into Living Forever (Immortality Interrupted Book 1) C. F. Villon

by Leave a Comment

Shi: A Dark Adventure into Living Forever (Immortality Interrupted Book 1) has its good points and its bad.  On the good side the story moves along and kept my attention as I wondered what Eliza would do, the group she served, and how she would extricate herself.  On the bad side the story is ridiculous and the character left me cold.

Eliza made a very bad bargain 80 years ago.  On the one hand she escapes murder charges and now gets to live “forever”.  On the other hand her “forever” is contingent upon her always doing what her unknown bosses tell her to do, enforced by a drug, Shi, that confers youth and life, if she gets a dose every day.  Dose Denial is a death sentence because this drug withdrawal is a killer.

Characters

Author Villon presents Eliza to us as a normal soccer mom, aside from her assassin skills, secret hideout and drug problem of course.  Consistent with her “normal mom” persona, Eliza feels emotionally invested with her ex husband’s grandchildren, even though she knows none of them and detested her ex for dumping her.

Eliza is a murderer, a true villain, yet we somehow see her as likable and root for her to find a way to ditch the organization.  She shows her selfish side when she idly makes a crack to her drug administrator about him skimming – despite knowing that such actions will cause the organization to kill him.  She also will not give up the imitation immortality, and it appears she wouldn’t give up the Shi even if she could do so safely without dying 24 hours later.

Her character is inconsistent.  Eliza has no reason to trust anyone associated with the organization but follows Asher.

Overall

I didn’t like the premise or the characters but must admit I finished Shi and enjoyed parts of it.  I don’t intend to read the sequels.  I’m curious how it ends but do not care what happens to the characters.

3 Stars

 

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

by Leave a Comment

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.

Amazon links are ads that pay commission to blog owner.

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

by Leave a Comment

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)

 

 

 

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

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

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