SPSFC4 – My first ten reads

Company Assassin – Strong No

Positives about this book, first off: I really liked the setting and the premise. A harsh world where no one really wants to care for orphans, but some minimal support is provided… enough so that the orphans can largely survive if they band together, with the main character (MC) just about to age out of the system.

However, there were a lot of issues. For one, it was very unclear to me why the MC actually had to leave the orphanage. There didn’t appear to be any adult in charge or anyone monitoring them in an active way, so it wasn’t strictly clear to me why he couldn’t just… stay. Yeah, it was against the law, but… who would notice? Who would care?

Additionally, the writing itself needed work. There were a lot of grammar issues, including a multitude of sentence fragments. There were unreasonable levels of detail in some places and no explanation at all in others.

In retrospect, I think the author may want to look at varying their sentence length as well. Tuning up the prose quality would make a big difference to this book.

The Faithless and the Damned – Strong No

I was drawn in by the premise, but the prose was difficult to follow. I noticed sentence fragments, miscapitalizations, and changes in verb tense. This is one of several titles that could really use a more thorough edit.

Rebellious Nature – Strong No

The good: the characters and setting felt real and believably flawed, and I believed that they had history with each other.

The grammar was better in this book than many, but the issues that existed made it particularly difficult to read. To be specific, the tendency to over-attribute dialogue and to put dialogue in a separate paragraph from actions made by the speaker made conversations hard to follow, and I often found myself doubling back to see what exactly people were responding to, or to figure out which action had been taken by which person.  

I also found the premise that someone had accidentally created the most addictive drug in the universe while attempting to modify genes for attractiveness a bit hard to swallow… but I think I would have forgiven that if I wasn’t having such a difficult time reading the book itself.

Umbra – Strong No

I really liked the premise of this book, but I think the author needed to take more time to develop the three viewpoint characters at the beginning, and the book needed at least one more editing pass.

The woman who decided not to renew her contract of service with the military was instantly likable, but the other two leads were pretty opaque to me and hard to empathize with.

Navvy Dreams – Strong No

A big plus for this book is the character writing. I liked the main character, and her asshole ex was immediately irritating (as he was clearly supposed to be). I only saw a bit of Teapot the robot, but even that little bit made me want to know more.

So… why is this a strong no?!

I have more tolerance than most readers for being thrown in the deep end of things. I will read along with perfect contentment for hundreds of pages while not yet understanding why everyone fears The Bad Thing or what exactly The Bad Thing does. But even I have limits to how lost I’m willing to be.

The first several chapters in this book take place in four different parts of the universe (at least). They go back and forth in time. The main character is drunk for part of it then has a horrible accident that leaves some of her memories suspect. At the point I had read, we’d seen:

• Opening heist scene with not-exactly-husband
• Jump to a year later back on her home planet, flirting with some other dudes in a bar
• Crashing a bike
• Waking up on a completely different planet as a captive of Space Rich Dude, potentially months or years after the previous scene
• Jump back in time to a scene with a character mentioned in conversation whose immediate relevance was not clear

The character writing here was good and the prose was decent, but I think some massaging needs to be done to the narrative structure. Either add details so that there’s more transition between the sharp scene changes, or find a way to start the book in a stable situation (perhaps when she’s already captive?), potentially providing the other information piecemeal as her memories return.

The Correct Order – Soft No

I love a good political sci-fi, and that’s what this is. Yes, there’s some futuristic tech, but it’s there to support the narrative, which is largely political.

The political stuff would have been so easy to do badly, but the author deftly weaves around the simplistic answers and scenarios that would have made things feel cartoonish. Almost all the characters are complex. You don’t get the sense that the vast majority of people doing evil things are getting up in the morning and laughing maniacally as they ponder their villainy: you get the sense that they’re just doing their best.

A lot of male characters found themselves in situations that were explicitly or subtly mirrors of situations women faced. Some, they were placed in intentionally for that reason as “reeducation,” but the author was brave enough not to harp on the others, to trust the readers to notice the parallels themselves. I really enjoyed that simultaneous feeling of “Oooh, look at this horrific abusive situation, how can anyone put up with that?” and “Huh, yeah. I totally see the parallels to stuff that’s normal for women today or in the recent past.”

So, given that effusive praise, why am I not recommending it move forward? For one, there were a lot of grammatical errors, with comma splices being particularly prevalent.  The second reason is that I felt like the ending was by far the weakest segment of the book. Everything ended up very tidily, and the main character’s prominence to the resolution felt contrived.

Turn Left at the Mooncrow Skeleton – Soft No

I was back and forth between “yes” and “no” the whole time I was reading this book. The setting is so good! The world and characters felt so real!

Unfortunately, the author’s heavy reliance on jargon adds a ton of work for the reader. There are four major sources of unknown words:

• Non-Western Earth cultures, e.g. “Okikpe” from West Africa
• Words from the settlers’ culture, like Tyrrhenian being a word to denote a group of people descended from a group of entertainers aboard the colony ship, or “funicular” to describe some sort of mass transit (a bus or a train analogue, perhaps?)
• Words describing things from the extinct indigenous alien culture, whose artifacts archeologists are studying. Things like “makiri.”
• Normal English words that, for no reason explained to the reader, have been given a variant spelling, such as synnamon, silque, milque, and creem, but which seem to refer to the same meaning as the standard English word.

When you see a word you don’t know, you just sort of have to guess which group it belongs to, ride the wave for a while, and occasionally reinterpret a scene when you suddenly realize it’s about an alien artifact.

It was a bit exhausting, but still unique and enticing enough that I read to the end, still torn on how to vote. I felt that some of the reveals at the end were rushed, and mysteries solved by someone simply explaining them aren’t very satisfying, so I’m regretfully giving this book a “soft no.” That said, this is the book I had the hardest time settling on a vote for.

Wilderness Five – Soft No

Okay, first off: LOVE the setting. The author put a ton of thought into how a construction as massive as a Dyson ring would really be developed, and the idea that it’s being made as a bunch of linked-together smaller projects really worked, as did the tension between the management company, the investors, and the employees on the scene. The whole vibe with the employees being promised land in the completed platform, then having the rug pulled out from under them when the company decides the entire platform is being re-tooled… It felt awfully realistic.

I also really liked one of the lead characters, a cranky older scientist manager lady who has an adversarial-but-loving relationship with her husband. They were a delightful couple, and I feel like we don’t see enough stable relationships in fiction.

The bad:

Some details of the history and setting should have been more explicitly spelled out earlier. There’s a very trippy prologue sequence, and its position in time and space relative to the main plot wasn’t clear to me for some time, nor did I quite understand its narrative importance. It’s clear that Some Technology Has Gone Wrong Somehow, but I was nearly halfway through the book before I really understood what the actual threat was, which probably meant that I missed some “oooh, worrying!” moments I was supposed to have in the main story.

There are also some editing issues. They’re not constant, but they are frequent.

I didn’t end up reading to the end, though, because the reveals that come about two-thirds of the way through didn’t feel foreshadowed, and it started almost feeling like I was reading a totally different book with totally different characters.

Time of the Cat – Soft Yes

This is a very silly book. To me, that’s not a bad thing at all! The footnotes reminded me delightfully of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (Which is awfully high praise, as any true fan of footnotes will know!). I do wish Kindle would handle footnotes better, but that’s not really on the author. I expect most fans of British humor will find this book oddly charming.

The editing was overall good, and I really enjoyed the main character. Some of the side characters were very flat, but it sort of worked with the tone that the author was going for.

Some of the reveals felt unearned, and I got very lost in the middle, but some of my confusion was clearly intended by the author. In the end, it was a fun adventure that I enjoyed reading, and I’d read a sequel if there was one.

Theft of Fire – Strong Yes

I’m going to flip things around here and start with the negative: the major female character is Real Messed Up, the male character is only better when put next to her for contrast, and their issues combine to create a deeply uncomfortable scene in the middle of the book.

Fortunately, the author had built up enough trust from me at that point that I kept reading past it, because that moment is Peak Discomfort, and from then, things between the viewpoint male character and the major female character start getting healthier, though with many, many backtracks.

This is basically a story of two-to-three really messed up people being forced into a situation that highlights every character flaw and mental issue they have, against a dramatic life-and-death backdrop, and I’m super here for it.

Other things I liked: the author does an excellent job of keeping the characters in peril without either making things repetitive or unveiling some deus ex machina to save them in a particular crunch. Instead, cleverness and their own unique skills keep them flipping from frying pan to frying pan as the story progresses, getting singed and crisped here and there, but never quite incinerated.

I feel like some people might not like the end of the story, which isn’t a very tidy ending and leaves a lot of open ends, but it really worked for me. Very H.M. Hoover-esque. It tied up the main conflict enough to feel satisfying, but left other questions open for the reader to ponder.