Book Review: Armchair Safari, by Jonathan Paul Isaacs

This showed up as a recommendation on Amazon, and it had lots of good reviews, so I took a chance on the Kindle edition.  I saw some reviews that referred to this work as:  "an inferior implementation of Neal Stephenson's REAMDE".  I have not read REAMDE, so I can't speak to that.  But, I took a chance on it - anything that involves a virtual world sounds interesting.  My initial reaction to this book was that it would be something like Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, but the only similarity is the online game.

I have to say, I had some trouble getting into this, but I stuck with it.  The description of the book refers to the character Megan and her exploits in the multi-player online game called Armchair Safari.  Her character becomes involved in a quest to obtain a major jackpot which will free her from crushing debt.  Initially, the story jumps around between several different characters, and much of it seems unrelated to the description of the book.  At the start of the story, there is very little content about Megan.  Gradually, she becomes more involved in the story, but it is really unclear as to how everything else is related to Megan and Armchair Safari, and I have to say the book was not holding my attention for the first 50 to 100 pages, and I considered giving up.

Somewhere around the halfway point, things started to become clearer and more interesting, and then with each chapter I wanted to see where the story would end up.  There were a few surprises, and you do learn how everything is connected, so the story ended up in a good place for me.  I'm not sure why the first half was a struggle to get through, but this ended up being a rewarding read.  Was the writing style different?  Maybe.  Did it change halfway through the book?  Maybe.  Did I have difficulty because I was expecting a story like Ready Player One?  I don't know.  Is the story similar to REAMDE?  I won't know that until I get around to reading it.

There are a few things that really stood out for me.  First, there are some characters that are kind of nasty, and do some nasty things to other people - be warned.  Second, the game Armchair Safari had some really interesting elements to it, and the characters in the game had some really interesting ideas regarding protecting their fortunes in the game.  Third, there are some story elements that I totally did not see coming, which is always nice when an author can pull it off.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes stories with many complex elements which end up being woven together into a complete story - it just takes a while to get there.

Lost at Sea, by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I was originally on the fence regarding reading this one.  The graphic novel Seconds was the first work I read by Mr. O'Malley, and I really enjoyed it.  I found it to be as engaging and appealing as Scott McCloud's The Sculptor.  After reading Seconds, I learned that he was the author of the graphic novel series that the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was based on (a film which is on my "to see" list, but I still have not gotten around to watching).  So, I read that entire series and enjoyed it.

I was looking for whatever else this author had written, and found only Lost at Sea (although Snotgirl was being worked on, but was unreleased at the time).  Immediately, the book didn't look as appealing to me, and I waffled about getting it for quite some time.  In the end, I broke down and got it in paperback.  I figured it must be just as good as his other works.

I figured wrong - at least for me, since this does seem to be a highly regarded story.  The recommendation on the back cover is:  "If you've ever been eighteen, or confused, or both, maybe you should read this book."

Well, I've been both, and now I've read it, but in the end I just couldn't identify with Raleigh.  For me, the story just wasn't as engaging or interesting as Seconds or Scott Pilgrim.  This is in line with my initial reaction to the story in this book - but, I frequently take a chance when I am hesitant about a book, because more than half the time it does pay off.  In this case, it didn't.

I'm not saying this is a bad book, because I do see how others could identify with this, but it just didn't work for me.  Perhaps I'm too far beyond the age of 18 to identify with it?  I don't feel that should be the case.

Anyway, I will end with saying that this story is extremely different from Scott Pilgrim and Seconds as a warning to potential readers that this book just might not be for you if that is the kind of story you are looking for.  Or, you can take a chance like I did, and maybe it will work out for you.

Book Review: Deck Z: The Titanic: Unsinkable. Undead. by Chris Pauls and Matt Solomon

This is the second story I've read that uses the Titanic disaster as the backdrop to a horror story.  The first was Carpathia by Matt Forbeck, which involves vampires.  This one involves a zombie outbreak.  I have to say, for some reason seeing how an author mixes a story like this into the timeline of the sinking of the Titanic is interesting and appealing.

The story starts in a similar way to James Cameron's film Titanic - people on a submersible are collecting relics from the wreck at the bottom of the ocean, and they come across a flask.  Then, the story steps back to 1912 to a German scientist who flees with a virus that he is concerned elements of his government are trying to weaponize.

Ultimately, our protagonist attempts to escape on the Titanic, hoping to hide and develop a cure.  But..as the proverb goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Ultimately, things don't go as he plans and the virus ends up spreading through the ship shortly after it sets sail.  He comes to realize that some people have been infected, and he enlists the help of the Captain to put a stop to things.

I have to say that this story was very appealing, and was very engaging right up until the end.  There were some nice surprises along the way, and I was really interested in seeing how this story would map to the real events that took place on Titanic, as reported by survivors - I didn't see how it could be pulled off.

In the end, aside from a few relatively minor changes (such as the reason why the final boilers were lit to speed up the boat - it wasn't to arrive earlier than expected to prove that Titanic was truly the fantastical ship of dreams), there is little impact to how Titanic encounters the iceberg.  I was expecting there to be more of a connection.  I had to assume that anyone who knew anything about the zombie outbreak simply would not be among the survivors, which would explain why the knowledge of the outbreak was not known.  For the most part, this is the case.

The story wraps up rather suddenly, which was a bit of a surprise.  As I mentioned above, I expected there to be more of an explanation of how events impacted the voyage of Titanic, and perhaps even contributed to its encounter with the iceberg, but my expectations were not met.  The ending leaves things open to a potential sequel.

While the story itself ultimately fell short of my expectations, I did thoroughly enjoy this story.  The writing style was engaging, and the origin of the zombies was new and different.

Book Review: The Wrenchies, by Farel Dalrymple

Ok, let's get the good stuff out of the way first.

As Mike Mignola (author of Hellboy) says, the artwork is beautiful.  It is dark, gritty, and relatively unique (and, apparently, water-color, which I would not have guessed, but this is what the author page on Amazon states).  I've seen something like it before, probably many years ago, I'm guessing on the pages of Heavy Metal magazine.  I found the world interesting, and some of the characters were interesting.

That's pretty much where my enjoyment ended.  When I first saw this book, I did notice the mixed reviews.  But, there has been very little graphic work I've read recently that I haven't enjoyed on some level, so I took a risk.  In this case, it didn't pay off for me.

While I enjoyed the artwork, in the end the story just didn't work for me.  The main problem was in trying to understand just what exactly is going on.  A few times, I felt that I was starting to understand it, and then another curve ball would be thrown.  By the time I reached the end, I had no idea what had happened.

I have to say, this was one of the more disappointing reads this year, but I have to assume that the point of the story just slipped past me.  I did not make it through this particularly quickly - I had to take several breaks from the story, and in the end that may have contributed.  But, the story was not engaging enough to keep me reading through it in larger chunks.

Book Review: The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold

I've never read anything by this author before, which is amazing to me.

When I was a child, I used to love the Sid & Marty Krofft TV show Land of the Lost (anyone else remember Doctor Shrinker, The Lost Saucer, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Wonder Bug?).  Mr. Gerrold was responsible for the creation of the Sleestak race on that show (unclear whether he was also responsible for the character Enik, whose race ultimately turns into the Sleestaks).

I also liked the Star Trek:TOS episode The Trouble with Tribbles.  Mr. Gerrold was responsible for that as well.  In the foreword to the book, Robert J. Sawyer confirmed my suspicion that the Tribbles were actually a homage to the Martian flat cats in Robert. A Heinlein's The Rolling Stones juvenile novel.  Mr. Sawyer - thank you for this validation.

In the past, I have sought out books by authors responsible for various movie scripts and TV episodes.  So, the fact that I've never read anything by Mr. Gerrold is very strange indeed.  Perhaps this is due to these things being from my childhood, which seems very far in the background now.

A friend recommended this book several years ago, and stated it was his favorite time travel story.  At the time, I didn't feel like shelling out $12 US for a book that was less than 150 pages in length.  Recently, I was able to get this book for under $3 for my kindle, so it got moved to the front of my reading list.

The story starts off in a very interesting way, and reminded me of Philip K. Dick's Paycheck short story - there's no introduction to any characters, and we just jump right in.  You could say that the story begins in a confusing way.

It begins with this line:  IN THE BOX was a belt.  And a manuscript.

Then there is a divider in the text - three dots - and the story begins with the central character, Daniel talking in the first person about his Uncle Jim.  I had to assume that this text was the start of the manuscript, and I didn't think much of it.  But then, there are several areas where the divider of three dots appears in the text.  I still didn't think much of it, assuming that these were like chapter breaks, and I just kept reading.

The story had several unexpected turns, and deals with time travel differently than many other stories I've read, particularly in the realm of paradoxes.  I found the escapades of this time traveler very interesting and entertaining.

And then...somewhere around the middle of the story, things started to get strange.

If you have read the book:  I'm not talking about the sexual themes that develop.  Back in 1973, when this book was first published, these themes must have been pretty controversial.  In my book, this adds Mr. Gerrold to the "pushing the envelope pioneering ranks" (Bravo!) alongside Philip Jose Farmer (for some of his stories in Strange Relations, such as The Lovers, and his Secrets of the Nine series with Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith - pastiche's of Doc Savage and Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, respectively), Ursula K. Le Guin (for The Left Hand of Darkness, which includes a race of hermaphrodites), and Robert A. Heinlein (for Stranger in a Strange Land, with its free love and communal living aspects).

I've never had any problem with this kind of subject matter in novels.

No, I'm referring to the point in the book where it started to became somewhat difficult for me to keep straight what was going on.  And I started having questions about who wrote this manuscript, and I even started to wonder if there was actually more than one author.  It was getting a little surreal, and it was becoming difficult for me to determine what these chapter separators indicated.

Anyway, I continued reading, and the story became even more complex, and covered some really interesting territory.  Ultimately, I felt I could see where this story was going to end up, and as it turns out, I guessed right, so there wasn't much surprise for me when the end was reached.

I did enjoy this book quite a bit, but by the time I finished, I felt that there were some unanswered questions with regard to the manuscript itself, and I had difficulty understanding how it ended up being written.  The treatment of paradoxes in the story might help explain some of this, but I couldn't wrap my head around it.  It may be that I was just very tired when reading this portion of the book, but I found it very confusing.

But, I suppose this can be expected with a time travel story.  I've read many time travel stories over the last several decades, including Downtiming the Night Side, by Jack L. Chalker.  This was also a very involved, and potentially confusing story.  In the Authors Note, Chalker called out the complexity of the story as the main reason he would never write a time travel story again.

Something I really liked about this edition of the book is that it was updated in the 2000's.  The description of some of the events that Daniel witnesses occurred decades after this book was first published, and it adds a nice touch to the story.

Ultimately, this was a good read, and no reader will be able to see the direction in which things are heading for a while.  If you like time travel stories, this is a good one to try to wrap your head around. and this one contains a very unique and original treatment of time travel that I expect will be very different from anything you have seen or read before.

Book Review: CyberStorm, by Matthew Mather

This book was not what I expected, and that is not a bad thing.

With a name like CyberStorm, and the words "full scale cyber attack" on the back cover, I immediately had visions of the movie Live Free or Die Hard.  That is, a hacker bent on revenge is slowly bringing down the Internet and the power grid.  Enter Bruce Willis, who works with Justin Long and Kevin Smith to put a stop to the villains master plan, complete with over-the-top action sequences and the impossible physics of gravity defying stunts.

This is not that kind of story.

Well, it really is - but not told from the perspective of a Bruce Willis action-hero character.  This story is told from the viewpoint of an ordinary man in New York City.  A man who tries to survive this attack with his family and friends - with a major snowstorm occurring a the same time.  I don't believe there have been many attempts to tell a story like this before, in a novel or in a movie (I haven't seen the film The Day After Tomorrow, but that might be close - though without the cyber attack).  This was quite a different tale from anything I've read before.

Imagine the scenario.

First, your smart phone is no longer able to access the Internet consistently, and it gets slower.  Next, you are unable to send/receive text messages or listen to voice mails.  You can't reach your spouse on the phone, and their "errand" is taking way longer than you expected.

Then your internet connection on your laptop is slow and flaky, so you have no access to email and either limited or non-existent access to web pages, so you aren't getting any news of what is going on.  Then you realize that you have now lost contact with your spouse for several hours and a major snowstorm has begun.  Then the news starts reporting plane crashes, virus outbreaks, and there are rumors of non-US vehicles in US airspace.  Of course, you can verify none of this - you can't tell what is happening outside due to the storm.  All you have is the vague speculations being reported on CNN.

Then, things get even worse.

The power goes out.  It briefly comes back, but then goes out for good.  The storm becomes a blizzard.  Now you are trapped in your Manhattan apartment with no heat, limited food, and no access to information aside from the vague, unverifiable reports you get from the radio.

The snow starts to accumulate to a depth of 1 - 2 feet and is not showing any sign of letting up.  The temperature drops much lower than expected for the time of year.  There is widespread panic, and nobody seems to know what is going on.  As if things weren't bad enough, let's heap a little more misfortune on the characters - at the same time, you start to have family problems, leading to trust issues, adding an additional dimension to the survival challenge.

Would you be prepared if this unlikely scenario occurred tomorrow?  And, to make matters worse, you live on Manhattan Island with millions of other people.

This story contains elements of The Walking Dead TV show.  No, not the zombies!  (Story idea:  Zombie Cyber Apocalypse - words that have never been strung together before!)  No, I'm referring to the drama of survival.  Trying to survive in competition (mostly for resources like food, medicine, and heating fuel) with others who are also trying to survive - perhaps at the expense of others.  In this case, people who live in your building, perhaps on the same floor, or on a different floor, and the people you might encounter on the street.  Who do you trust?  Who do you really know?  Who can you count on when the chips are down?

This was a great read involving a new kind of war - Cyber War.  A cyber attack that takes out the entire infrastructure of the United States.  This is a horrifying concept.

One of the things I really liked about this story was that there were no John McClane hero-type characters.  These are everyday, ordinary, fragile, people who are concerned about their family - just like those of us in the real world (I think this is one of the reasons that The Walking Dead is so popular - the characters aren't heroes, and they have real problems).

This story reminds me of a statement that was made in the James Cameron movie The Terminator.  The character Kyle Reese states the following about who started the war in his future:

"Defense network computers.  New...powerful...hooked into everything, trusted to run it all."

This was back in 1984.  At least ten years ago, if not longer, a friend tried out a new oven that was Internet accessible.  You could place it in refrigeration-mode, put a turkey inside, and leave it there.  Hours later, you could connect to it via a web browser from your office and start the cooking process so that it would be ready when you got home.  Within the last 5 years I have also seen commercials for applications that you can use from your smart phone to turn off the lights and lock doors to your house from a remote location.

So, if baby monitors with wireless cameras can be hacked, then why not these applications?  If the entire power grid and defense network is Internet accessible, why couldn't that be hacked as well?

The Internet was originally designed back in the early 1990's - but not with security in mind.  Security has evolved as a bunch of features added on top of the Internet structure for decades, but security issues continue to be found (Windows 10 just had a security vulnerability revealed recently by Google).  Attaching critical systems to a network like this seems like a really bad idea.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to be on the edge of their seat while witnessing this terrifying world of speculative possibility.  At the time of the writing of this review, Twitter and several other services were taken down by a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the Dyn DNS servers, which have apparently been probed for months to determine potential weaknesses.

It kind of makes you wonder - is CyberStorm just a work of fiction?  Or could this nightmare scenario actually be played out someday?

Trashed, by Derf Backderf

This cover of this book immediately caught my eye in the bookstore.  It just seemed like it would be an entertaining read, and it definitely was.  But this book is more than just entertaining.  This book draws on the authors prior experience as a garbage man in the years 1979 - 1980, and attempts to raise awareness of the huge problem that garbage has become in our world.  That's not something you would normally expect of a graphic novel.

First, let's talk about the story itself.  J.B, the central character, starts the story being harassed by his mother to take the garbage out.  He ends up making a mess out at the curb and decides that the garbage man can take care of it.  Little does he know that this will come full circle - he ends up becoming one of the two new garbage men in his town, and needs to deal with messes more disgusting than the one that he left for the previous garbage man.  He quickly quickly comes to realize that it is a thankless job, and that there are major problems with our waste management strategies.

The escapades of J.B. and his cohorts are very entertaining, funny, and sometimes they are downright nasty (after reading this, you won't want to piss off your garbage collector).  The story line in general is fairly familiar, and somewhat parallels the movie Backdraft (a rookie firefighter has a rough time after starting out, gains experience in a very traumatic way, and ultimately becomes a seasoned firefighter, and ends up right where he started, ready to show the ropes to the next rookie).

Second, there is the factual part of the story, which is provided in sections throughout the book.  This is the most sobering part of the story, and I found some of it very disturbing.  One of the first disturbing facts is that not much has changed in waste management since 1980.  This book was published in 2015, so let's call it 2013 to allow time for writing - that is still 30+ years with very little advancement.

When I was a young child, we used to take yard waste to the dump in my town, which had its own incinerator, and for years everything was burned.  I don't remember when, but at some point that changed.  The incinerator was shut down and was simply used as a collection place, and all of our waste was trucked to another town and that was pretty much all I knew about it - I assumed it was being burned in an incinerator in another town.

After I graduated from college and moved out of my parents house, I learned that our garbage went into a landfill.  It is interesting that I learned this once my town started curbside recycling.  This was the year they first came out with those small blue bins, and there were many restrictions on what could be recycled (I remember bottled drinks like the coffee drink Capio being a particular pain, since the bottle caps left a metal ring around the bottle which you needed to clip off before it could be recycled).  Anyway, MASSPIRG (Massachusetts Student Public Interest Research Group) came around with a petition for people to sign, because they found out that recyclables which were now being picked up separately from garbage were actually still going into a landfill instead of being recycled.  That was the first I had heard of a landfill, and I was in my early 20's.

This book revealed details that I never would have guessed.  I know that over the least 20 years we

have increasingly become more of a "throw away" society - you see it everywhere (if you can name it, there's probably a disposable version of it).  But, apparently we started this process way back in 1960 - over 50 years ago!  It hadn't taken full hold yet when I was a child.  I remember getting milk delivered in glass bottles, which then got exchanged for full bottles at the next delivery - they may not have been recycled, but they were definitely reused.   We also used to get Charles Chips potato chips (see picture) in a big metal tin, which I imagine must have been recycled back then (or at least reused).

But, just take a look at how things are today:

• Plastic bags are used by most stores (particularly grocery stores, but CVS, book stores, department stores, etc. all primarily use plastic).  If not recycled, they end up in a landfill, and lets face it, remembering to recycle them is a pain.
• Soda/seltzer/juice bottles are all plastic - you need to take them back to be recycled, or recycle them at your curb, or they end up as garbage.  Many of these do get recycled, but at various events involving many people in a public place, they most likely just get thrown out.  It is getting better, but not where it should be.  Note that hundreds of millions of these bottles get used, and they have been around a long time.
• Plastic utensils, plates, cups - all of which are recyclable.  But, when you attend a party, how much of this do you see get actually get washed and recycled rather than being thrown out?
• Everything is made disposable these days - plastic razors, condiment packets and bottles (ketchup, mustard, relish, BBQ sauces), toothpaste tubes, toothbrushes, etc.
• Food scraps - we should be keeping these for compost, but much of it ends up in the garbage or down the sink disposal system.

Things are improving, but slowly.  These days, we have large bins (30 - 50 gallon size) that we leave at the bottom of our driveways for both trash and recycling, which get picked up by a semi-automated truck.  We recycle more and more every year, but it barely makes a dent in the amount of garbage we are producing.  As of a 2013 study, we are only recycling 29% of our 389 million tons of garbage produced every year.  Check out the pie chart to the left to see the distribution of our garbage.  An alarming amount of it - almost 30% - is just packaging that most of our stuff comes in.  Some of that can be recycled, but packing materials like Styrofoam, or those plastic bubbles that are filled with air, cannot be recycled.  The percentage of materials that cannot be recycled is also alarmingly high - over 20% consists of things that cannot be recycled, like diapers.  But, another 20% called "durable goods" contains items that can be recycled to some degree - but not if they are left out at the curbside to be collected by the garbage man.

Some other interesting facts (I won't reveal them all):

• Wealthier people produce more garbage (this is somewhat counter-intuitive, but is apparently true).
• The average person produces 5.06 pounds of garbage every day, which amounts to 1,874 pounds every year.
• Roadkill is included in garbage pickup in many areas - 129 million dead critters every year.  I had no idea this was handled by garbage crews.
• Garbage collection is the 6th most dangerous job (the top 5 include loggers, fisherman, pilots, roofers, and iron workers, in some order).  It is interesting that policeman and fireman don't make the top 6!
• Yellow torpedoes. I won't reveal what this one is - either read this book or research it on your own, but it is a major problem in many states.
• Landfills can be up to 400 feet deep, and one of the largest covers over 2,000 acres of land.
• Many landfills don't have sufficient regulation and safety precautions, and all of them (even the most recent ones) are leaking toxic chemicals into the environment that could poison a water supply.

Ultimately, the only way to put a major dent into the amount of garbage produced is to stop producing so much, meaning buying and using less stuff, and recycling what we do use.  It seems clear that there is a long road ahead of us.  Can we make things better?

This book is an alarming testament to our legacy of destruction on this planet, and reveals things that most of us have no clue about in our daily lives - we take it for granted that things are properly handled.  This is an entertaining story that opens your eyes to the harsh realities of the world we live in.  I think this is a story that everyone should read.

Book Review: Seed, by Michael Edelson

The back cover blurb for this book got me interested immediately, and I just had to read it.  The basic story idea was familiar to me.

Fifty people go to sleep in their own beds, and wake up in a compound with no idea how they got there.

Each person has their own assigned living space where they wake up, and it has a DNA lock.

Each person is from a different background (mathematician, surgeon, military paratrooper, etc).

They have food (if you can call it that) for decades, and seemingly anything they could need (there is an operating room - accessible only by the surgeon, and a room filled with weaponry, which can only be accessed by the military paratrooper).

They are isolated from the world due to a barrier that they cannot pass.

Why are they here?

The premise is very similar to the American TV show Persons Unknown, which aired in 2010 (only one season).  I enjoyed that show until it started to get near the end, and then the finale was quite strange.  Of course, the finale is not the only measure of a TV show.  The British TV show The Prisoner (aired in 1967), starring Patrick McGoohan, was excellent, with an equally strange and confusing finale which had current fans and future fans of the show speculating about its meaning.

Before continuing, I'd like to have a brief interlude about The Prisoner.  This show also had a similar premise at the beginning, although seemingly isolated to the central character.  A secret agent angrily resigns, and while packing in his house is rendered unconscious by knockout gas (this is all conveyed in the opening credits).  When he awakes, he finds himself in a place called The Village.  He no longer has a name, and is simply referred to as Number 6 (everyone in the village has a number).  Most of the events that take place in The Village are attempts to ascertain why Number 6 resigned.  Number 6 reveals no information, since he does not know who he can trust.  Has he been incarcerated by his own people, or by what is vaguely referred to as "the other side"?  This show is the first story of this kind that I recall seeing.  If you have an opportunity to see it, I highly recommend it (not the AMC miniseries, which changed many elements of the story, and is quite slow and difficult to follow).

Now, let's move on.

The story is told from the point of view of Alex, the military paratrooper.  It starts off with a mission he is on, and after he goes to bed for the evening wakes up in a compound with many other people. Not one of them knows why they are there, but they do know they cannot leave because of the barrier - but is the barrier there to keep them in, or keep something else out?

I found this to be a very interesting story.  I didn't want to put it down, and I was always anxious to know what was going to happen next.  I also wanted to know what the "horror" outside the barrier would end up being.

In general, this story has shades of Michael Crichton's novel, Sphere.  You get the impression that Alex and the others were hand-picked to be deposited as a group in this compound (there are various experts to fulfill various essential needs).  Between the two stories, the major difference in is in the reason why the people are in the compound.  In Sphere, it is a team of experts pulled together to investigate something.  In Seed, these people are brought together for a much different reason:  survival.  The mystery unfolds quite nicely as the characters learn more and more about their environment.

Unlike some other stories I've read that deal with survival situations, this one specifically deals with the characteristics of small group which is thrust into an extremely stressful situation, and how cliques form in the group, resulting in what you could call various power struggles and political schemes.  This is a necessary element as the characters try to surmise what is going on.  In that sense, there are also shades of Lord of the Flies here - while this isn't a group of children, there is still an examination of what happens to a group when they are removed from the rest of civilization.

There are a few good surprises in Seed, and the "horror" outside of the barrier was fairly original and unexpected - at least, it wasn't anything I expected.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for an interesting, riviting, and suspenseful story.  I already have my eyes on Ice Fall, which is the first story written by this author.

Book Review: Alien Hunters, by Daniel Arenson

After trying to get through a very slow fantasy novel, this story is just what I needed.  Alien Hunters is a fun, light, action filled and interesting novel.  I came across this on Amazon as a "free" kindle download, so I took a chance on it.  I'd never heard of this author before, and I don't believe I have ever seen any of his books at the book store (seems to be the case for many authors these days).  But, it is hard to argue with "free" - the only cost is an investment of time.

I am very glad I took a chance on it, but the book isn't quite what I was expecting.  From the title, I was thinking this might be a story of bounty hunters, or tough Han Solo types hunting down rogue aliens (at the time I downloaded it, I was anxiously awaiting the SyFy Channel show Hunters, based on Whitley Strieber's Alien Hunter series of books, which ended up not being very good - no, I haven't read the books).  Boy, was I wrong!  The blurb on Amazon revealed that the Alien Hunters handle "small critters", so they are really along the lines of a pest control team (I didn't read this fully when I downloaded it).

The general story is similar to other stories you may have read.  Riff Starfire doesn't care about much except his music, he is estranged from his family, lost the love of his life years ago, and is barely getting by.  And then, in the tradition of Star Wars, he gets unexpectedly pulled into an adventure that he cannot avoid.  All of a sudden, he is running for his life, and ends up the Captain of an old ship with a crew of alien hunters.  In the course of the story, they get involved a potential invasion from the alien skelkrin.  I will also say that the whole "alien hunters" concept contains a surprise or two.

The crew is an interesting mix of humans, human-derivatives, and one non-human.  By human-derivative, I mean humans who colonized another planet with higher or lower gravity, and other different elements, the ultimately changed the human form slightly.  I will say that the non-human character is quite interesting, and I'm very curious about their origin.  By its very nature, the character seems somewhat out of place in a space opera style novel, and I have to say that the characters personality seems somewhat familiar to me, but I'm not sure why.  I won't reveal more, so you'll just have to read the book.

This story reminded me very much of the books of Alan Dean Foster, most of which I read during the years 1980 - 1990.  Simply put, a good adventure story in the form of the original Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers TV shows (meaning that the story is a good mix of action, interesting character interactions, humor, and not too heavy - unlike the Battlestar Galactica remake which started in 2004, which was really a drama).  I would also liken the style of the story to the movies The Last Starfighter and Krull (interestingly, Alan Dean Foster wrote the novelizations of these films as well).  I wonder the author drew inspiration from these sources.

If you are looking for a light and fun book, with hopefully more of the same in the rest of the trilogy (which I plan to check out at some point), I recommend this book.

Book Review: Area 51: The Reply, by Bob Mayer

This is the second book in the original Area 51 series by Bob Mayer.  There are also two spin-off series (Nightstalkers and Time Patrol) - I'm not sure how interconnected the stories are, so I'm staying away from the spin-off books until I make it further into this series.

Unfortunately, I've been delinquent in getting this review written - it has been over a month since I read this book - so I'm going based on what I can remember (having read a few other books after this one).

The story picks up almost immediately after the first book one ended.  Mike Turcotte and Lisa Duncan have their plates full as they scramble to understand what the mysterious reply to the Guardian's message at the end of the previous books means, and what the mysterious organization STAAR is all about (is it US government, is it the aliens, some combination of the two, or something else entirely).  Very quickly we start to learn that things are not as they appear.  The characters are operating on limited information and there is a lot of speculation and assumptions based on that information.  Some questions left open at the end of the first book are resolved, while new questions are raised.

I liked how real-world mysteries are involved in the story.  For example, photos of the Cydonia

region on Mars taken by NASA's Viking 1 and 2 seemed to reveal a face (see inset picture), and nearby what appeared to be a pyramid, and a ruined city.  These photographs sparked speculation of aliens and visitations to Earth.  Photographs by later NASA probes, with better camera technologies, showed the original photos contained data flaws.  These elements are brought into the story in the guise of the original photos - there are aliens on Mars!  I understand that this kind of thing is frequent in Mr. Mayer's books, where it becomes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.  Bravo!

As the story progresses, the characters are faced with multiple concerns, including the aliens and their agenda, the contents of the tomb in China, and the organization STAAR itself, which noone seems to know much about.  Although the members of STAAR seem to have the highest security clearance - so high, that many government and military officials are not even aware of its existence!

Once again, as in the first book, the story resolves some of the open questions, raises others, and leaves things open to continuation in the next book, and it shows what a feisty lot we humans can be when our back is against a wall.  The part of the story where old satellites in Mars orbit are put back into use reminded me very much of the films Apollo 13 (the creative ways that problems with the Command Module and Lunar Module were solved), and The Martian (where the main character had to find a creative way of communicating with Earth) - if you haven't seen this movies, I highly recommend you do so (the book version of The Martian contains even more details, so I recommend that as well).

I did like this story, but I didn't find it quite as gripping as the first book, which I could hardly put down.  But, I am interested in what will be happening next.  At some point, after I get through some other books (such as the next book in The Expanse series - Caliban's War - which I need to finish before the second season starts in a few months), I will likely check out book 3:  The Mission.

Book Review: Death Check by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

This is the second book in the Destroyer series.  Before reading this book I read Created the Destroyer and The Day Remo Died (a prequel to the series) back to back, and quickly noticed how different the writing style was and how different the characters were in the two books.  I then learned that book one was first published in 1971, and the prequel was published in 1983 (as a novella in a book called The Assassins Handbook).  I believe there was also a foreword in The Day Remo Died explaining the difference in the characters, and the different tone and content of the first two books in the series.

So, I came into book two knowing all of this.  I have to say, I did not enjoy this book as much as the first one.  This was for several reasons.  First, if I remember correctly (I read this sporadically over the last month), this story takes place eight years later than book one - that is a pretty sizable gap where Remo is trained more by Chiun.  Second, Chiun is hardly in this story at all.  In fact, he never physically appears - it is all in Remo's memories.  Third, almost the entire book takes place at Brewster Forum (I kind of thought of it as a think tank country club for geniuses).  To me, this was kind of like filming an entire James Bond film at a golf course - the concept didn't work very well for me.

The story is kind of like a mystery.  It is believed that this think tank of geniuses as come up with a "simple little plan to conquer the world", and that someone is attempting to manipulate/control the group to obtain this information, which CURE sees as very dangerous - big national security problem.  So, Remo is sent in to discover what is going on, and potentially kill everyone to prevent anything bad from happening if he gets the order.  He spends most of his time interviewing the members and getting their backgrounds.

I did not find this book as interesting as the previous two books I read.  I'm still going to read book three, Chinese Puzzle, to see if the series changes for the better.   This is the point where Chiun becomes more involved and the characters become who they will be for the rest of the series.  If I don't find it any more entertaining than the first two books, I will likely stop reading the series.  However, given that there are at least 150 novels in the series, there must be a major upturn coming, so I'm optimistic.

Book Review: The Didymus Contingency by Jeremy Robinson

The Didymus Contingency is the first book that Jeremy Robinson wrote, originally as a screenplay, which after not being optioned by Hollywood, became a self-published novel.  This review is for the Tenth Anniversary Edition (currently only available as a Hardcover or Kindle book), which contains many edits to the original book.  The plot is something that may not appeal to everyone - after discovering time travel, a man decides to travel back in time to Biblical times to prove that Jesus is a fraud, and bear witness to the fact that Jesus will not resurrect after he is crucified.

This isn't the first novel I've read which deals with the question of the divinity of Jesus - The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is probably the most famous at this point in time, and that is already thirteen years old.  There have even been novels and films with non-terrestrial assumptions of Jesus, and I've enjoyed those as well.  (There are stories out there where someone goes back in time to meet Shakespeare, so Jesus doesn't stand alone).  There are likely others out there.  But, most of the stories I've read dealt with characters speculating and/or uncovering evidence in the present day.  However, this book is something else entirely.

I'm not really a religious person, and I don't identify with Christianity or Jesus as the savior.  However, this story concept was interesting to me.  Just the thought of going back in time, even to see if a figure like Jesus was real or not, putting aside the question of his divinity, is an amazing idea.  My main concern was the religious content of the book - would it be overbearing or preachy?  After reading six other books by Robinson, I thought it safe to say it wouldn't be the central part of the story.  Also, I read a blurb by Robinson which stated something along the lines of "assuming the Bible was accurate", so I figured some key scenes would be present in the story (I don't have a great familiarity with the Bible, but these are events that are pretty well known).  After reading the book, I can say with confidence that any kind of religious message is a relatively minor part of the story.

I don't want to reveal too much of the story, but I will say that this is an adventure story of the greatest kind.  The characters are very interesting, and the interaction between Tom, the doubter, and David, who has a very strong faith in Jesus, is very well done.  It is also interesting that both men were born in Israel, and David changed faiths.  I will also say that I loved the portrayal of Jesus.  He is not a person who acts like a divine being - he is very much a regular guy who has fun with his friends.  There are several surprises that Tom and David encounter along their journey to learn the truth of Jesus - I'll leave all of this for the reader to discover on their own.  I highly recommend NOT doing any research into the title of the book before reading it, as it will spoil something that was a surprise for me.  I couldn't wait to get to the end - not to learn the outcome of the quest for the divinity of Jesus, but to see how other things came out.  As with most time travel stories, there are some interesting and strange things that happen which are then made clear later on.

After reading several of Robinson's books, I have to say that The Didymus Contingency is a monumental first effort - even with the warts the original version had that Robinson's admits to (the story is the main thing here - not typos, grammar, and other problems).  I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a fast paced, interesting story with very believable characters - completely putting the religious element aside, since this is a work of fiction.  Apparently, people of many different faiths have a great love for this book, which is a testament to the story, and it appears to be one of Robinson's most loved books.

Book Review: Pulse by Jeremy Robinson

I just discovered the works of Jeremy Robinson this year.  I was browsing on Amazon and Project Nemesis was recommended.  I saw that Island 731 was listed as book #0 in the series, so I checked it out and quickly became a fan.  Pulse is the sixth novel by Robinson that I have read this year.  It is the first book in one of his most popular series;  the Jack Sigler "Chess Team" Thrillers.  Here is the list of previous books that I've read, in order:

• Island 731 (Nemesis Saga #0)
• Project Nemesis (Nemesis Saga #1)
• Project Maigo (Nemesis Saga #2)
• Raising the Past
• Torment (written as Jeremy Bishop)

Before writing this review, I also finished The Didymus Contingency, which is Robinson's first book.  I enjoyed all of these books, and they all had a similar writing style which kept you wanting to read.  Island 731 really got my interest after about 50 pages - I didn't want to put it down.  The same with the rest of the books once I got around 30 pages into them.

However, I found Pulse to be a somewhat different.  For some reason, I found the writing style to be less engaging, which is interesting, since this book was written after The Didymus Contingency and Raising the Past, and before the rest of the books on my list.  For lack of a better word, Pulse had a different "voice".  Perhaps the style and tone of this book is consistent with the rest of the "Chess Team" thrillers.  I don't know, since I haven't read any others - yet.  I'm not sure if I will read the rest of the series .  I'm on the fence as to whether I will enjoy them as much as the other books on the list above.  At some point, I may check out book #2, Instinct, but that will likely be after I read several of his other books, which currently include (at a minimum):

• Project 731 (Nemesis Saga #3)
• Project Hyperion (Nemesis Saga #4)
• Beneath
• Unity (first in a new series)
• Apocalypse Machine

Overall, Pulse was a good story, and I did find it entertaining, and I liked the characters - but I just didn't find it as easy to read or enjoy it as much as the previous books that I read.  I'm not really sure why.  I enjoyed The Doomsday Key by James Rollins, which also focuses on the escapades of an elite military unit - so it isn't the content of the story.  For some reason, I just didn't find it as engaging.  I think that this book also had a slower pace for a longer period than the other stories - the pace does eventually pick up, at which point I was able to get through the material more quickly.  If I recall correctly, this was somewhere around the halfway point.

It is a good thriller, and it does cover a lot of material.  In short, the Chess Team takes on a powerful organization planning to create invincible, regenerating soldiers using the DNA of a creature from Greek Mythology.  There is an excellent mystery in the story, and I was pretty satisfied with Robinson's very original viewpoint to the mythological aspect.  That's about all I want to say about it - I don't want to spoil anything for future readers.

I will say that the characters are consistent with Robinson's other books.  They are all interesting, some of them have interesting pasts, and some of them need to deal with some very interesting personal problems.  This contributes greatly to the story, as they seem like real people.  They aren't super heroes, and they make mistakes - the good guys don't always win in this story.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys thrillers, especially those that involve a military team fighting to save the world from disaster.  After finishing the other books on my second list, we'll see if I turn my sights to book #2 in the series.

Book Review: Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines

This is the first book in a series of five about a world that suffers a zombie-apocalypse, but which also had some interesting super-heroes around at the time that it happened.  About 3 years ago I came across the second book in the series, Ex-Patriots.  The concept sounded interesting, and it had a blurb from Ernest Cline raving about it, so I checked it out.  Only after reading it did I realize that there was a previous book - but there was not really an indication that this was the second in a series.  Now I've finally gotten around to reading where everything started.

The book is just as good as Ex-Patriots, and has flashbacks to the origin of several of the heroes, as well as to a few things that have a bearing on the story occurring in the present.  The flashbacks also deal with the start of the outbreak, and how disbelief largely contributes to it getting out of control.  Similar to Ex-Patriots, the story starts a little slowly and then builds to the point where you don't want to put it down.

I have to say, this story has a very interesting catalyst for the zombie outbreak.  In fact, one of the most original that I have seen in any zombie story, and it ties in with the rest of the story structure incredibly well.  It was a very big surprise for me when it was revealed.  Very well implemented.  Bravo!  Encore!  Encore!  Oh wait - this is followed by Ex-Patriots, which I've already read.  But, that is followed by Ex-Communication, Ex-Purgatory, and this year Ex-Isle was released.  So, there are plenty more zombies in my future.  Well, in this series they are referred to as "exes" (as in ex-humans), and they are caused by the "Ex" virus.

The heroes are interesting and their powers are fairly original - at least to me.  St. George, or The Mighty Dragon, is pretty much invulnerable, can breath fire, and has somewhat limited flight ability.  Zzzap is a man who can transform into an energy form, capable of very fast flight, and a few other things.  Gorgon has a vampire-like ability to drain the life out of people.  Regenerator has the ability to heal himself and others, but in the present his ability is all but gone.  Stealth has the ability to move quickly and silently, like a Ninja, and she has fierce fighting ability.  Cerberus isn't really a hero - it is a woman inside a military exo-suit of her own creation.  But, it is resistant to zombies and really packs a punch.

Things start off with the characters on a mission to scrounge food and medical supplies from the city outside the Mount, which is an old movie studio in Hollywood that has been fortified to isolate the population being protected by the superheroes.  Pretty much an expected problem in any zombie story which is about survival - the world is radically different.  Things quickly get complicated when they run into a rival group called The Seventeens, which was a former gang in the area before the outbreak of the Ex-virus.  They are a competitor for the limited resources of the city, and they constantly cause problems for the survivors in the Mount.  The survivors quickly learn that things have recently become much worse, and they are facing a very alarming and unexpected threat.

The portrayal of the Seventeens very much reminded me of the Humungus and his group of bandits in the film Max Max 2:  The Road Warrior - they essentially want to be the number one group and annihilate anyone else who gets in the way or doesn't get in the way for that matter.  When the depth of the threat is realized, and the "normal" people start to realize what they are up against, they have the typical expected reaction:  they have a strong desire to get the heck out of dodge!  Of course, the heroes succeed in showing them that they are only motivated by fear - there is nowhere they can go without being destroyed by the zombie horde, and staying at the Mount and fighting is the best choice.  This is all very believable.  The final battle is filled with action, desperation, and a few surprises.

One of the best things about this series is that all of the characters, even the heroes, are very human.  They are just as flawed and imperfect as the rest of us, and in some cases just as unsure, and they make mistakes.  This puts the reader on the same playing field as the heroes - they could be someone that you know.

In typical classic hero form, Stealth and the other heroes have the lofty goal of not only keeping their own people at the Mount safe - they want to save as many people as they can.  This really seems like an insurmountable task given that the majority of the population is made up of zombies.

This is a great start to the series, and I'm looking forward to reading the remaining three books.

Book Review: The Day Remo Died, by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

This book is a sort of prequel to Created, The Destroyer, which is the first book in The Destroyer series.  This is a novella was published in 1985, several years after the first book.  It takes place during a window that surrounds the material in the first book, and it is told from Chiun's perspective.  The characters in this book are quite different than the characters in the first two books in the series, and are apparently consistent with the characters in book 3 onward.

I read this immediately on the heels of Created, The Destroyer, and found Chiun's side of the story very interesting.  There is much more detail about various aspects of Remo's training, as well as why he is apparently so easily trained by Chiun, who believes that an inferior white man could not possibly master the art of Sinanju, which should really only be taught to those of Korean descent.  That being said, the novella is only 85 pages long.  Anyway, Remo surprises Chiun at every turn, and ultimately the story takes a somewhat mystical turn which is not seen in the Remo Williams film at all (though, since they planned a series of films, it is quite possible it may have been explored at some point had the film series continued).

By having characters which are more consistent both with the film, and with books 3 onward, this book has interested me in reading at least through book 3 before deciding on whether to continue with the series (the whole series is 150+ books, so it is a considerable investment).  In fact, I believe some of Chiun's dialogue in this book is fairly close to some of that in the film, although I still remember many lines from the film which have not yet appeared in my reading.

I highly recommend this to anyone who has read the first book, as it does make the series more interesting.  Chiun has motivations that no other character in the series is aware of at this point, and I wonder if it will all come out at some point.

Book Review: Created, The Destroyer, by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

I saw the film Remo Williams:  The Adventure Begins in 1986 on a VHS tape that I rented from a video store several months after the movie came out at the theater. I enjoyed it very much, and was surprised that it didn't do better at the box office.  The character Chiun had many funny lines, and his evaluation of American soap operas was interesting (I won't reveal in case you haven't seen the movie).

About 4 or 5 years later, the film came up in a discussion at work.  It was at this point that I learned that the film was based on a series of books called The Destroyer (IMDB didn't exist back then).  I sought out these books at bookstores, but was never able to find any.  At some point over the next several years, I did come across one, and I believe it was in the early 100's - far to late to start reading the series.  So, I gave up and have not seen any books in the series since.

I just happened to come across the first book on Amazon, and noticed it was available not only in a Kindle edition, but was also re-issued in a paperback (it also appears that all of the books through #151 are available as Kindle editions).  I immediately downloaded the Kindle version and started reading.

This is a good origin story, and it definitely fits the time period when it was written, which is 1971.  What I found most interesting is how different this is from the film.  Aside from the character names and a few other details, the two stories are extremely different.  A few of the major differences are:

• In the book, Remo Williams is the characters real name.  In the film, this is his new name given to him by his employers at CURE.  How they gave him the name is amusing in the film.
• The method of his faked death is different.  In the film, it was an accident.  In the book, it was a faked execution after he was framed for killing someone.
• In the film, Joel Grey is amazing as Chiun, and he has many funny lines.  In the book, not quite as many.  I think the best stuff was in the movie.

Aside from a few similarities in the above, the are no others between the film and book.  I suppose it is possible that the film was like the Doc Savage movie by George Pal, which was an amalgam of a handful of the original 181 stories (though I have not read anything to this effect anywhere on the internet).  This was a big surprise to me.  However, when I read the novella The Day Remo Died (a kind of prequel seen from Chiun's viewpoint) I learned that Remo and Chiun are very different characters in the first two books of the series.  By book 3, they become consistent for the rest of the series, and match their portrayal in The Day Remo Died (which wasn't written until 1985), which I found to be more consistent with the characters in the film.

I really liked how the book started off with a foreword by Chiun, calling the story "lies".

Something of interest, at least to me, is that Warren Murphy was a writer on Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction film, and on Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon 2, which are both good endorsements of his writing.

I do plan on reading this series at least through book 3, where there characters evolved into who they will be for the remainder of the series.  By book 3, the ratings for the rest of the books are consistently higher.  I'll make my decision on whether to continue the series based on my enjoyment of that book (though, 151 novels is a good investment of time and I do have plenty of other stuff to read).

Book Review: Torment, by Jeremy Bishop

When I saw this book, I read that it was a "controversial" novel.  I will say, even though this is a zombie story, that is in fact the case - there are definitely some disturbing elements to this story.  Let me first say that Jeremy Bishop is a pseudonym (pen name) for Jeremy Robinson, who is responsible for the Nemesis Kaiju series and the Jack Sigler Chess Team adventures (I have not read any of these yet, but Pulse is on my list to read soon, and I understand it might be made into a movie).

Now, let's get some of the story basics out of the way (you can glean some of this from the back cover).  A small number of people survive a nuclear apocalypse and then must fight for their lives in a world overrun by zombies apparently produced by the conflict.  You don't often have the words "nuclear apocalypse" and "zombie" used in the same sentence very often, and I'm not aware of any zombie stories that start with a nuclear war.  Usually it is something like a virus, or in George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, it was speculated to be radiation from Venus which was reanimating the corpses.

This book is unlike any other zombie story I've seen, in book or film.  The way the nuclear conflict starts is a frightening idea.  It reminded me of one of Tom Clancy's books where a plane is used to take out a joint session of Congress.  The start of the nuclear conflict in Torment is an equally frightening concept.

A small group that is with the President of the United States launches into space to avoid the nuclear devastation.  Upon returning to Earth, the survivors quickly learn that the devastated world is not what they expected, and from the moment they touch down they are running for their lives.

I won't reveal much more of this story, but I will say this.  The breed of zombie found in this story is immensely creative, horrifying, and unlike anything I have seen before.  The pace of the story kept me reading until the end.

I will say that I was not a huge fan of the ending, and I have to say I'm not entirely sure what happened.  Note that this is not necessarily a major strike against this book. I have read many books that I enjoyed until the very end (one that jumps immediately to mind is Stephen King's Under the Dome - the story was great up until the final resolution at the end, and I understand that I'm not alone in this assessment).

One other item that bothers me, but may not bother others, is the fact that the state of the world after the nuclear apocalypse is left as a mystery.  There is no scientific explanation for how the zombies came into being, or more specifically why fallout isn't a problem when the survivors return to Earth such a short time after the devastation.  Typically, these kinds of things are explained in novels - it is part of the story.  This isn't so much the case with movies, which have a much more restricted time period in which to entertain an audience, and there is a larger expectation that you will suspend your disbelief.

Even with these two relatively minor flaws, I still found this to be a very enjoyable read, although I would not put it at the same level as the other books I've read by Mr. Robinson.

Book review: Raising the Past, by Jeremy Robinson

As James Rollins said in the cover blurb, this is an adventure not to be missed.  This story is an interesting mix of several different themes in adventure and science fiction:  an arctic expedition (somewhat reminiscent of the film Iceman), the discovery of impossible technology found buried in the ice from 10,000 years ago, aliens, etc.  I've seen many of these things before in different guises, but this story brings them all together in a way that I haven't seen before, and it does so very well.  Mr. Robinson, as usual, manages to pack a large amount of story into a small number of pages.

The story starts off in the past, with a prologue setting the scene for what is to come in the present day.  This is a common enough mechanism used by many stories.  In the present, the Mammoth is discovered in melting ice, which should not be possible given the location and time of year.  The mystery deepens as the mammoth is freed.  The group involved in the dig involves an interesting group of people, ranging from the man who funds the dig, to the "experts", to the film crew there making a documentary.  The author does a great job of showing how each group does what is necessary to get what they want.

Ultimately, it comes down to a race against time, because there is a force working against them as they travel across the ice towards their destination.  As is typical in this type of story, not everything is as it seems, and the characters end up having a realization of a ethical dilemma of epic proportions which will test the moral compass of each of them.  As the characters reach their destination, I couldn't wait to find out what would happen, and I was fairly surprised by what the team encounters.  Things frequently aren't as simple as they appear to be.

When the story ended, I felt that while the immediate crisis is averted, things were left pretty open for a sequel, but there wasn't one in sight.  I later found out from the author that this story ties into the Project Hyperion story-line in the Nemesis series about Kaiju (Japanese for "strange beast" - most excellent series).  I'm not up to Project Hyperion yet, so I'm looking forward to it even more now, and I'm glad the story of Raising the Past isn't over.

Book Review: Sleeping Giants, by Sylvain Neuvel

I'll start off by saying that this is a most unusual book.  Note that this is not a comment that is negative, derogatory, or intended to dissuade people from reading this book in any way.  I'm saying that this book is different.  Let me explain.

This book is not written like a typical novel, with prose and dialogue.  Sleeping Giants reads like a dossier or case file, like you may have seen in various TV shows or movies that involve the FBI, CIA, or some kind of government project - in particular, ones which are told from an "interview" standpoint.  One that immediately jumps to mind is The Usual Suspects, with Kevin Spacey - he is being interviewed, and everything other scene in the movie is a flashback of what his character is describing.  Aside from the prologue, every other chapter is presented as a "file number" which is one of the following:

• a journal entry by one of the characters
• an interview conducted by a mysterious, unnamed character who appears to be running things from the shadows
• a recorded conversation from a telephone call or a mission which is being monitored remotely.

An interesting aspect of this is that, while the files are consecutive, we are apparently only getting a glimpse - there are many gaps in the numbering, representing missing or omitted files.  For me, an interesting question is:  what is contained in those files, and does it matter to the story?  That is, will we find out about some of these files in the sequel?  Then again, this might just be how the author decided to arrange things, assuming that the missing files contain tedious and mundane elements of the story that don't offer much into the big picture.

The story begins simply enough, and the pace is a little slow at the beginning, but gradually the pace picks up and the story becomes much more interesting.  During the course of the story, I was surprised by several events, and there were a few things that I guessed would be coming.  Although this book is relatively short, at just over 300 pages, it deals with some pretty complex issues.  Without revealing much of the story (all of this is available on the jacket of the book):

• a giant metal hand which is thousands of years old is found buried under the ground - we are not alone in the universe, and it is obvious that the architects of the hand were significantly more advanced than humanity a LONG time ago.
• world politics and cold war attitudes play a part.
• the ethics of taking human lives and/or promoting suffering to further scientific progress - this is something that is repeated several times.
• with access to such powerful technology, would humanity ultimately destroy itself.

The last item reminded me of Jeff Goldblum's character in the movie Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, who made three disturbing statements about the technology being used to create the dinosaurs:

• it didn't require any discipline to obtain it
• you didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it
• your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

If you've seen the movie or read the Michael Crichton book on which it is based, you now how well such uninformed meddling plays out.  All of these statements apply to the technology in Sleeping Giants; if you don't understand what you are dealing with, you shouldn't be messing around with it.  While many of these themes have been explored in other works of fiction in the past, I feel that they are explored somewhat differently here.  After all, there is no typical action as you would find in a normal story, due to the story format - you learn of just about everything second hand, after it has happened.

There are also plenty of twists in this story, some of which I saw coming, but most of which I didn't.  I found the characters to be very real, and I appreciated that several of them had to deal with very real problems.  There are no super-humans here.

By the end of the book, the potential direction of the story becomes much more complex, there are many unanswered questions, and there is a "holy crap" cliffhanger ending.  It is going to be a tough wait for book 2 to be released in April of 2017 - at least its not on a George R. R. Martin release schedule.

Over the years, I have only read one other book that executes this story format to this degree.  That book was Exegesis, by Astro Teller.  That story is constructed as a series of email exchanges between an artificial intelligence researcher and their program which becomes self-aware.  Back when I read this book, the email format really drew me in - and, when this book was first published, email would probably have been the only way a program would be able to communicate with a person once it was on the network.  While I initially found this format took a little getting used to, I ultimately felt that it worked very well for Sleeping Giants.

Sleeping Giants is a very successful debut by a very promising new author, and the fact that this "dossier" format was attempted was pretty daring.  The fact that it was inspired by UFO Robot Grendizer, known as Grandizer in the US (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Five), made it all the more intriguing.  Here's the interesting article where I first read about this (shared with me by the author):  http://io9.gizmodo.com/sylvain-neuvel-tells-us-how-anime-grendizer-jumpstarted-1774962665.

I'm really looking forward to the continuation of the story in Waking Gods next year, but I am left wondering if this will be an ongoing series, or if it is possible for things to be wrapped up in a single sequel.

Book review: The Lazarus War Book One: Artefact, by Jamie Sawyer

When I first came across this at the bookstore, it immediately interested me - I thought it would be space opera.  However, reading the description made me feel that this was military science fiction, which I typically don't enjoy as much.  So, I was on the fence, and did not make the purchase.

The next time I encountered this book, the comments on the back cover from Neal Asher and Gary Gibson were encouraging.  I've read Angel Stations by Gibson and Gridlinked by Asher, and I enjoyed both, so I decided to give this a chance.  In the "extras" section, which is pretty common to Orbit books these days, it was also encouraging that Sawyer is an avid fan of the Alien and Predator universes, which was an additional plus.  I was looking forward to "a gripping read" that was "action drenched".

The start of the story was familiar - something I've seen before in many books and movies, although the opening action ends somewhat unexpectedly.  Once the group learns of their mission, and head into the Maelstrom, there is some more action, and then the pace of the story changes - it becomes much slower.  This pace shift made the story more difficult to follow for me, and I found my interest waning.  For about half of the book the team is stranded on the planet Helios, with the mysterious Artefact which seems to have so much influence on the enemy Krell, and the pace does not pick up again until the final battle, which, for me, was somewhat reminiscent of the movie Aliens.  I don't mean that a "queen Krell" is encountered, but I'm referring to the general pace of the story - the tension gradually builds until the final showdown and escape.  But, for some reason, there was not enough interesting stuff to engage me during this slow period, and I found the flashbacks into Harris' past, which ultimately reveal much about him and his interest in what is found on Helios, to be disruptive to the pace of the story.

I was disappointed that the team did not use their "remote avatars" more often - I think this only happened three times in the story.  While I don't remember an explanation for how they can remotely control the avatars over vast distances, I did like the explanation of the mental and physical toll that it takes on their operators - after all, each body is effectively a disposable tool which is, more often than not, killed during an operation.  Also, when the avatar is killed the operators really experience it - being ripped apart by the enemy Krell, limb by limb, or dying in the vacuum of space.  When the operator transitions back to their real body, they even suffer physical effects to their body for a period, in addition to the mental anguish of the ordeal.  I also enjoyed the position that Captain Harris is put in near the end of the story - it is unique to his personal struggle in the story, and impacts him alone and not the rest of his team, and it ties in well with his background which is revealed in the flashbacks.  So, from the standpoint of the full story, the flashbacks work and deliver what is necessary to flesh out the story - but for some reason, this particular execution did not work for me.

The Krell are an interesting "hybrid" alien race, kind of a combination of things I've seen elsewhere.  They live in the vast, uncharted Maelstrom, which is largely inaccessible to humanity due to lack of star data which would allow identification of Q-points for them to jump to.  All of their technology is organic - even their ships are grown,  They have a hive-mind.  And, for me at least, they are somewhat similar to the creatures from the Alien movies - but not identical.  These are all concepts I've seen in other works of science fiction, and it was interesting to see them joined together.  I also found the Krell to be interesting due to their apparent duality.  They are savage creatures that operate as a hive-mind, with different forms like the creature from Alien, and yet they posses amazing technology.  It could be argued that the Klingon race from Star Trek is similar, but I wouldn't agree with that - the Krell seem to have more in common with the savagery of the world of insects than they do with sentient species.  But, they must be intelligent, if humanity was able to make a treaty with them.  I think it will be interesting to see further exploration of such a race in the next two books.

Regarding the mystery of the Artefact, I'm not sure we really know what it was, or why it was built - I view the ideas postulated by Kellerman to be theory - I don't recall any physical proof of the findings.  But it is made clear that a third-party is responsible for its construction, which probably speaks volumes to what may potentially be coming in the future.  I didn't think that the effect the Artefact has on the Krell was adequately explored, although there is potential that we may learn more in the last two books of the series.

This book was different enough from what I consider to be mainstream military science fiction that I enjoyed it, although the story stretched out in a few places where it almost wasn't holding my interest.  Overall, I feel that this is a successful debut novel, and it was well written, and it does deal with very human issues - addiction, loss, and most importantly that war is hell and its impact on soldiers.  I've got a long list of books to read, but I'll probably be checking out book 2 at some point.

Book Review: Area 51, by Bob Mayer

I believe I first came across this when it was originally published back in 1997.  The title immediately interested me, but then after reading the back cover it just didn't appeal to me for some reason - I can't remember why.  It could be that the text was different back then - I've seen this happen to republished books over the years - but it just didn't sound interesting.  It may also be that there was an abundance of books with this kind of subject matter around that time which just weren't very good.

Fast-forward to 2016.  I see a social media post (facebook/twitter - I can't remember which) about  'Area 51 Time Patrol:  D-Day' being published soon.  I thought:  isn't that the book I saw quite a long time ago?  So, I looked into it.  Not only is it the same Area 51 that I saw years ago, but the series has grown (and, it was originally published under the pseudonym Robert Doherty).  There are nine (nine!) books in the main Area 51 series (7 books in the main storyline, plus two that appear to be prequels to the entire series), there is a Nightstalker trilogy, and then the Time Patrol series, which appears to be an extension of the Nightstalker series.  The series has grown over the years, but I don't recall ever seeing any of these books past the first one at my local bookstore (and I'm usually there a few times every month).  I'm finding this happening quite a bit recently - various books are becoming increasingly difficult to find a bookstores.  A bunch of bestselling authors I've recently started reading appear to have almost no presence in bookstores - but, thankfully, you can find just about everything at Amazon.

I noticed that all of the books had very high ratings, so I read the blurb on Area 51 again.  This sounded very interesting, and since 2015/2016 are years where I have been taking a chance on many authors I have not heard of before (and have gotten quite a bit of enjoyment reading as a result), I decided to take a chance yet again.

I'm sorry I didn't pick this up years ago!  This story has several elements that I enjoy - ancient civilizations and their mysteries, aliens, conspiracies, etc.  This story covered all of the bases, and addressed many mysteries of the ancient world:  Atlantis, the Egyptian pyramids, Easter Island, etc.  The story involves a journalist, an archaeologist, a former Nazi, UFO conspiracy theorists, and powerful military groups. I was surprised by a few things which were really unexpected.  Events do get wrapped up at the end pretty quickly, but I am very interested in what is going to happen in the next book, and I'll definitely be checking it out at some point.