More Books than Time

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

The Fold by Peter Clines – Science Fiction Done Right

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Peter Clines takes a fascinating idea – instantaneous travel – adds a background setting of creeping dread, likable  characters, good dialogue and writing to make a fun novel, The Fold.  Lead character Mike Erikson teaches high school English but he’s not your typical teacher.  He’s brilliant and remembers everything, everything he ever saw, read, heard, felt, thought.

Mike’s old friend in DARPA asks him to check out a group DARPA funds that seemingly has incredible success, yet is frustratingly unwilling to take more steps or widen their discovery.  This friend wants to use the technology, called the Fold, to revolutionize travel if it works, or to stop the research funding if it does not.  Everyone says the Fold works, that it is perfectly safe.  Yet everyone on the project is uneasy and one previous investigator came out of his trip somewhat changed.

Mike learns the Fold actually doesn’t move you from point A to point B, but exchanges you with someone else in a very close alternate reality.  Oops.  And sometimes, if there are more people around, the alternate reality is not close at all.  After one researcher comes through the Fold with radiation burns that are at least a year old, the science team comes clean about what they have and how they developed it.  It is true Mad Science, based on the metaphysical ramblings and equations of a Victorian fruitcake.

Now Mike has a problem, because the Fold isn’t shutting down.  And it isn’t connecting anywhere benign either.

The plot is excellent.  We learn more about the characters throughout the story and author Peter Clines does a very good job with creating characters that we can relate to.  The primary hero, Mike, is amazingly smart, in fact a little too brilliant to be completely believable.  He comes in from outside the project, armed with his eidetic memory  and pattern skills and quickly understands the project.  It takes him some time and some inexplicable happenings to see the most likely rationale, an alternate world.  Once he does it’s obvious to everyone that the Fold offers great promise and even greater threat.

I did have a little problem visualizing the setting.  The scientists built the fold in a concrete building with several rooms.  The action takes place in a few of those rooms and in a couple of the alternate worlds.  It was the building that I had a hard time visualizing, but that is minor quibble.  (How exciting is a concrete building?)

Overall The Fold is entertaining, an enjoyable fast read.

4 Stars

The Warehouse by Rob Hart – Totalitarian Retail Juggernaut

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What happens when the quest for ever-cheaper products, delivered ever faster, completes the takeover of American business?  The Warehouse.  The Cloud company.

Cloud is to Amazon what the Black Death is to a cold.  Cloud takes everything down to the cheapest possible solution, whether it is products, delivery, employees, vendors, customers or government.

Amazon today hosts “camperforces”, RV parks to house their seasonal workforce, who migrate around the country seeking work.  Cloud builds huge dormitories housing tens of thousands who must wear ID trackers to access their rooms, the trams, the work space, the bathrooms.  Employees work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, with nominal breaks.  Warehouses cover hundreds of acres, too large to see from one end to the other; with few bathrooms and break rooms scattered inadequately.  Cloud pays in script and charges hefty fees to convert between script and dollars.  It’s the company town and company store on steroids.

Cloud’s founder Gibson Wells believes the market should dictate everything, that customers only value low prices and convenience, and he has Cloud work aggressively to swipe ideas and push vendors into bankruptcy in order to cut prices ever lower.

He tells us about his triumph with Cloud Pickles.  He liked a brand of $5 pickles and wanted the company to sell them for $2, but the company could not.  So Cloud came up with their own almost-as-good product and drove the original pickle company out of business.

Cloud privatized the FAA in order to deliver via millions of drones and expects to privatize the rest of the government.  Wells never considers the long term end state because the ends – cheap products and services – justify the means.  

This is not libertarian economics run amok, it is totalitarian rule with a bit of bread and circuses thrown in.

Morality Play

One way to read The Warehouse is as dystopian economics.  What happens when one company dominates everything, from transport to food to retail to government services?  What happens when that company is just about the only employer left?

How do the people running this behemoth justify their predatory behavior?  How do their employees, their vendors respond to the never-ending push push push for more for less? 

When people forget the basic rules of decency and morality, stop following the Golden Rule, they become monsters.  That’s what is happening in Cloud.  Gibson Wells sees employees and vendors, even the country, as giant sponges to be wrung dry, turnips to suck to dust.  He justifies everything by his goal for cheap products and services, ignoring the cost to everyone else.

Paxton and Zinnia, two new employees at a Cloud warehouse, also have decisions to make.  Paxton had invented a gadget to cook the perfect boiled egg and his company did quite well, for a while.  Then Cloud demanded to purchase at below Paxton’s costs and put him out of business.  Now Paxton is a reluctant security guard at the warehouse.  Zinnia is a corporate spy hired to find out how Cloud is powering this enormous facility.

Paxton is more reactive while Zinnia takes action on her own.  Zinnia discovers a creepy pervert supervisor and tries to protect others from him; Paxton later discovers the man was never fired, just reassigned.  (The security lead says it’s quieter and easier to move someone than to fire one, although Cloud routinely axes their lowest performing decile every quarter.)   

Characters

Gibson Wells is the most interesting character.  He narrates his story now as he is dying, and manages to justify the destruction Cloud has done by remembering the good he has done.  Or thinks he has done.  It’s very difficult to justify putting millions out of work and treating employees like dirt just to cut a buck off the price of some gadget.  

One lesson I learned very early in purchasing for my small business was that deals need to be good for everyone.  You have to be willing to leave money, not on the table, but in the pockets of your supplier.  Otherwise you won’t have a supplier.  Apparently Gibson Wells never learned this.  He thinks it’s great if he’s the only supplier.

Zinnia is fascinating too.  She has zero intention of falling in love, or even caring about anyone at Cloud.  She’s there to do her job, get the information she came for, and get out successfully.  Instead she gets pulled into an affair with Paxton that may cost her life.

Paxton is there mainly as a foil, to move the story along and to show us a bit more about Cloud and the misery it causes.

There are a few minor characters, also well drawn and believable.  The other security people are willing to ignore cruelty in order to keep Cloud running smoothly, while dealing harshly with small infractions.  They see their job as keeping the place running the best it can for everyone, making mediocre omelettes while breaking more than a few eggs.

Overall

5 Stars

I received The Warehouse via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Retrograde – Group Survival on Mars by Peter Cawdron

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

Plot Synopsis

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

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

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

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

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

Characters

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

Overall

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

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

3 Stars

Recursion: Book One of the Recursion Event Saga. OK Time Travel Novel

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Recursion by Brian J Walton starts with a bang as Molly, narrator and main character, slides out of the time travel tunnel into 1950s Paris and a burning hotel.  The tunnel station in 1950s Paris is in a hotel basement and the entire building is on fire.  More, Interlopers – other time travelers from unsanctioned groups – are present and shooting to kill.

I thought this might be one of the time travel series where bad guys are trying to change history and the Time Patrol (or whatever name the author chooses) try to keep history on the straight and narrow.  Books with this time travel plot can be a lot of fun and it’s always interesting to see how the author will spin the inevitable paradoxes.  Will the time travelers even be able to change history?  Will changes spawn new parallel worlds?  Will the resulting paradox cause total collapse?

Unfortunately Walters’ novel started to flag a bit as we got deeper into the story.  I kept waiting for Molly to ask some obvious questions, such as the one prompted by her mentor, Helen’s comment, “that’s what the ISD pretends to do.”  C’mon.  Who wouldn’t follow up on a lead in like that?

The paradoxes were left as paradoxes.  Molly had multiple memory sets of different pasts, married, not married, and the Interlopers were able to change events by having someone and their time traveler duplicate get close.   Walters kept using the phrase “own timeline” to describe going back or forwards in time during one’s own lifetime.

I finished the entire novel but was not intrigued enough to look for its sequels.  Molly as a character didn’t have a lot of depth, although in fairness it is hard to be deep when you are running for your life.  The back story looked interesting but the villain and his almost-magical powers seemed ridiculous.  If I were the bad guy in this story I’d be doing a lot different things than chasing Molly to find out what her Dad was up to.  The bad guy was cardboard, a stock villain character.

The writing was uneven.  The last third of the novel seemed disjointed and didn’t make a lot of sense while the first third was good.

Overall I’d give this 3 stars.  Keep in mind Walters is a fairly new author and may improve in future books.

I received a free copy via Instafreebie and the links here are referral links to Amazon.

Mini Reviews: Five Fantasy and Science Fiction Novellas to Miss

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These short reviews cover books that I want to remember not to try again.  Several were free from Instafreebie, meaning the authors are likely new and may improve in their later books.

A Magical Reckoning: Magic and Mischief Book 1

This is a set of 6 novellas about supernatural betrayal.  I only got partway through the first story because the back story is all about people who have [insert animal here] genes and thus have [insert favorite power] here.  The lead character has skunk genes that give her fatty glands in her back that secrete thiol, which can be either really really good stuff or not.  Unscrupulous evil people are dragooning skunk/people and forcibly draining their thiol.

Can we say “yuck”?

The writing wasn’t too bad.  N. R. Hariston, the author had a big backstory to tell and crammed as much as she could in the first few pages.  We know about the skunks, the evil dragoons, the dragon/people, the fact our lead is in some vigilante or police force.  What we don’t have is a reason to care about the character.  I decided supernatural betrayal is probably not a good sub-sub genre to pursue.

Warning!  Do Not Read this Story

Somehow I managed to finish this longish short story by Robert Jeschonek but it was a close one.  It isn’t very good.

Moon Men:  A Science Fiction Comedy

Author Chris Lowry describes this as extremely funny.  Not particularly.  It’s science fiction, sort of, given the aliens want to talk to our hero on the moon and he’s having a hard time getting there.  On the other hand, you can’t just point a rocket at the moon and expect to get exactly where you need to be.
I did finish it, mostly because I wanted to see what the aliens had to say but the story ended before our hero actually arrives.

Xander  An Incandescent Short Story

I didn’t get past the first page.  Main character is a teen boy with hormone issues.

Complicated Blue:  The Extraordinary Adventures of the Good Witch Anais Blue

This was boring and I quit almost immediately.
I don’t recommend any of these.

Review: Under New Leadership – Intriguing Novella about an IRS Agent (Really)

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Writing coaches and English teachers all say to write what you know about.  New author Shawn Robert Smith is an accountant so he wrote about…yes, an IRS agent on jury duty.  If this sounds weird for a science fiction plot, then know his short story, Under New Leadership, works.

Smith built an intriguing back story that makes me want to learn more.  Why are there 10 new alien species all in the United States?  How come one (or more) are IRS agents?  How does that work?  I’m trying to visualize people from really far away and really strange backgrounds learning double entry bookkeeping, auditing, and taxation and coming up a bit short.

I took accounting classes years ago (so as to pass the CPA exam just in case I needed a career change) and can say that one must put a different hat on in order to think in accountant-ese.  Accountants measure stuff and record stuff and the biggest conflicts are on how to do it, not whether the thing being measured is worth doing in the first place.  Now we’ve aliens who fled to Earth and the US’s welcome worrying whether to double discount depreciation?  This is one new back story and it’s lots of fun.

Main character Jrulnik is blessed with super hearing and discovers a plot by criminal masterminds to pool their efforts for greater profit and less bloodshed.  He shows up for jury duty but gets bundled into a closet while the supposed jurors agree on new leadership for their cabal before freeing Jrulnik and blithely finding the defendant guilty.  All the way through Jrulnik wants to be a good citizen, worries about maintaining the honor of the IRS by performing his juror role with care.

We have lots of mysteries.  Who is the girl with purple eyes really?  Where did she come from?  How did we get 10 alien species all fleeing to Earth?  What are they fleeing from and did anyone nefarious follow them?  And last, how did the IRS survive and thrive in a world with aliens?  (Or is that another way of saying that death and taxes will be with us always?)

Such a simple plot.  And so much back story!  I look forward to reading the novels Smith will write set in this same world. Right now this story is free on Amazon and I recommend it.

4+ Stars

More Instafreebie Mini Reviews: Zero Flux and Soldier of Charity

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Recently I got several dozen science fiction and fantasy novels for free from Instafreebie.  Getting the books meant getting their authors’ newsletters too.  I unsubscribed immediately from newsletters that were all fluff, or talked about angels, demons, shape shifters, mermaids, steampunk, vampires, werewolves, alpha mates, alien romances or featured bare chested men or barely dressed women, were aimed at YA audiences or were incoherent; no point in wasting the writers’ email quotas or my time.  I’ve been going through the rest and reading the books which have interesting titles or covers (yes, it is hard to judge a book by its cover), or the author sounds like someone who has a story to tell.

So far I’ve found some real winners, the Excalibur Rising series and the General’s Legacy series are excellent.  A few have been so bad I deleted them immediately and most have been so-so.  This post reviews two in the so-so bunch.

Zero Flux by Carol Van Natta has a super cover.  What’s not to like with a flyer in a cave and the subtitle about the Central Galactic Concordance?  The novella builds on the cover with an interesting premise and setting but fails to deliver any sense of danger or tension.  Things just happen.

Luka Foxe’s old mentor Einer asks Luka and Mairwen to help him investigate two people found murdered in an ice cave on Luka’s very cold home planet.  Luka, Mairwen and Einer nearly die when the ice cave partially collapses and survive by taking refuge in an abandoned lab facility.  Unfortunately the facility alarm alerts the murderer who shows up and starts hunting all three.

This sounds exciting but it’s not.  Events happen with no sense of dread or tension from the danger, even when Luka realizes Einer has hidden much.  Author Van Natta tells us that Luka fears for Mairwen’s safety and his own, but we don’t feel it.  It’s flat.

The characters don’t have personalities.  Luka and Mairwen have unusual powers that don’t add much to the story.  The setting, an ice cave, should have felt cold.  It didn’t.  I couldn’t visualize much nor was it interesting.

Cold Flux is a novella in a larger series that has quite a few higher ratings on Amazon.  I finished the novella so am rating it 2 stars.  I kept reading expecting it to get better, it just never did.  There were hints of an interesting backstory and the writing wasn’t bad.

Soldier of Charity by Luke R. Mitchell is a prequel to his post apocalyptic Harvesters series.  Mitchell writes well and his main character Jarek is sympathetic, about 18 years old, idealistic and owns a protective high-tech exo suit with its own AI.

I mostly liked Soldier of Charity and wanted to like it more, but the novel was limited by its protagonist’s youth and lack of wisdom.  Several times I wanted to shake some sense into that kid.  For example, he joins a paramilitary group that protects outlying farms in exchange for some of their produce.  Now this is either the beginnings of feudalism or a classic shake down racket, but Jarek falls for the idea and joins the group enthusiastically.

Pryce, one of the men who recruits Jarek, is ambiguous.  He tells Jarek that the boss will never ask him to do something he doesn’t believe in, yet slowly leads Jarek into all sorts of grey areas.   Jarek starts to question these but continues to believe Pryce.  The ending with Pryce is a bit unbelievable as I doubt the character would have acted as he did.

Overall the novel is well done with solid writing, an intriguing idea and fairly well-done characters.  Ultimately my rating of 3 stars reflects that it is YA fiction and I didn’t enjoy it enough to check out the next books from this author.  Older teens would like this.

The Last Star – Finale to Compelling 5th Wave Series

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Sometimes You Don’t Need to Know the Answers to Know What to Do

First the bad news.  Author Yancey never answers the questions of what the aliens were doing, why they invaded Earth, why they killed off so many, why they were so consistently cruel.  For the good news, most of our main characters survive and the tiny remnants of civilization remain.

Characters

Yancey developed his main characters, Cassey, Ringer, Ben, Evan and Sam, in the first two books and does very little to further them in The Last Star.  We do see Ringer developing tentative alliance with Cassey, and all the older characters keep trying to figure out what is going on, the alien’s plan and purpose.

The three main human characters, Cassie, Ben and Ringer, are confused and torn, angry and frustrated.  This feels real.  I don’t understand Ringer’s attitude towards Cassie, a little contemptuous until the end, but it fits her overall sense of superiority.  Ben is realistic, never quite sure of himself, never quite hopeful, never ready to give up, looking for people to love.

Evan is the saddest character, neither fully alien nor fully human.  Sam is stubborn.

Writing Style

The 5th Wave flows very well.  We have a start and an end and events and characters move one into the other.  The Infinite Sea takes a very different approach with mostly new characters and tone.  The Last Star is jerkier with pacing issues and diversions that don’t add much.

Yancey uses multiple points of view in The Last Star which gives more background and depth but also makes it less even.  The first POV character is the priest Silencer whom we re-encounter later as a 3rd party.  A few of the POV switches are disjointed.

The mood changes over the course of the series.  The 5th Wave characters are sad, frightened.  Cassie was terrified of being the last human and horrified that she had killed the crucifix soldier but we ended hopeful because Cassie and Evan ally and plan.   The Infinite Sea is darker as we see depths of cruelty and misery, but the characters are determined and will fight back.   The Infinite Sea has a sense of hopelessness in the beginning that changes; in the end we once more see hope albeit with sadness, loss and worry.

Plot Problems (Spoilers)

The ending is a bit too tidy.  In part it satisfies because we see hope for the future, a seed of family, community, learning.

Evan tells Ben there are more military bases than just the one in Ohio, and they also had been training kids to kill.  Evan takes his personal mission to clean up all these bases, killing thousands of indoctrinated kid soldiers.  The novel stops with Evan walking into the sunset, off to kill people while Ringer and Ben create a family and teach trust the hard way.

(Spoiler) The bomb requires one to breath in order to activate, which means the mother ship must have air.  Hmm.  If aliens are incorporeal why is there air?

(Spoiler)  Aliens embedded the program/personality/augmentation into Evan when he was in his mother’s womb, then activated it when he hit puberty.  At least some of the other Silencers and military leaders are adult humans.  Were they embedded as adults?  Or were their alien personalities (real or artificial) formed earlier?  If earlier then where was the mother ship all this time?

(Spoiler)  The Silencers expect to be evacuated before the aliens bomb every city and town on Earth.  Vosch tells Ringer that there are only 12 of the evacuation pods and none of the Silencers are going to the mother ship.  (Vosch lies all the time so we cannot know whether this is true.  It is true that he has a pod.)  So what are the Silencers going to do?  If they die in the bombardment then the 5th wave is done; if they lived then they too are betrayed.  Evan believes the Silencers would move to destroy the remaining bases but I don’t see the connection.  If I were a Silencer and my ticket home got torn up I’d fade into the background and be human.

(Spoiler)  Vosch has Evan’s character mind wiped, then reloads only the alien part with the result that alien Evan is solely a killer, no shred of personality or anything else.  Does that tell us the aliens are just killers?  Nothing else?  From a plot perspective, how did Ringer and Ben figure out which of the 10,000 plus personalities to reload?

There are other too-neat or unrealistic plot issues, but mostly they don’t get in the way of a solid book.

What Were the Aliens Doing?

Option 1.  Destroy Trust to Destroy Civilization

Ringer ends up believing the aliens are trying to reduce human populations and permanently twisting us to never trust, never again come together as community, never again build civilization, never again take over the earth and destroy other living creatures. Vosch hints at this with her although he never came out and agreed.  Destroying trust to destroy humanity while leaving a few humans alive is certainly one possibility, but it doesn’t make sense.

True, the aliens used unbearably cruel methods to kill the survivors of the first four waves.  They are betrayal itself, first of all the people who died, then of their children/soldiers and weaponized toddlers; even their Silencers are to be betrayed by abandonment and bombardment.

But consider this.  If you do not yourself witness small groups dying because they brought a booby-trapped child inside their home, would you still learn the lesson to trust no one?  I suppose if everyone who does trust dies, then the remaining survivors may have less innate tendency to trust and form communities (assuming there is some genetic factor behind trust).  But overall I don’t see this working.

I don’t believe the no-trust rule would settle permanently into our collective hearts.  People are hardwired to form families, to reach for something more than themselves, to build communities.  We need trust to have children, trust to form families.  Small families turn into larger family groups, then tribes, then hello civilization.  We could end up with Stone Age family group sizes but I don’t see how this could end up permanent.  The aliens would have to re-teach the lesson every few hundred years.

Last, for a group that supposedly venerates life they sure kill a lot of people.

Option 2.  Keep a Small Number of People for Hosts, aka Kill the Humans and Take Over

Evan believes that he is an alien personality downloaded into a human host.  He discusses the aliens’ origin and names with Vosh and is convinced that his purpose was to kill enough humans for the aliens to take over Earth.

This option makes more sense to me than number 1, although it begs the question how the aliens would operate without bodies and why they needed a planet if they were pure thought.

Option 3.  Aliens are Killers First Last and Always

Vosh strips out the human Evan leaving only alien Evan.  That stripped Evan is a killer, nothing else, no goal other than to kill everyone he can.  If this is typical alien mind, then the aliens are here to kill.  Perhaps they are just plain evil.

Option 4.  Something Else

It’s possible the entire story is a lie, that the aliens do in fact have bodies and are in fact trying to kill off everyone so they can take over the planet free of annoying humans.  Or something else, pick your favorite.

Ultimately

In the end it doesn’t matter why the aliens did what they did.  We don’t know and that’s probably Yancey’s purpose here.  The characters wouldn’t know.

If the purpose were to destroy trust – permanently – then Ringers and Ben’s determination to live with trust, to form community, to regain civilization would be the answer.  And if the purpose were to take over Earth, then Ringer and Ben’s nascent community and others with like minds would be bulwark against that takeover.

We don’t need to know the answer to enjoy the novel and the series, and the guessing adds to the sense of sorrow and terror that Cassie and Ringer and Ben and Sam and Evan would feel.

Overall

I can’t give The Last Star 5 stars, mostly because it doesn’t flow as well as it should and because the characters don’t change much.  It is otherwise enjoyable and thought-provoking.

4 Stars

All Our Wrong Todays – Jetsons World or Ours? Loneliness or Love?

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All Our Wrong Todays is an imaginative time travel story starring Tom Barren as a guilt-ridden doofus in a Jetsons world who never seems to quite get it right.  Tom’s world diverged from ours in 1965 when scientist Lionel Gottreider demonstrated a power source that used the Earth’s motion – clean, non-polluting, infinite.  The power source gave off radiation; in Tom’s original world Gottreider leaves it run and he and the 12 scientists observing the experiment die a few months later, but only after Gottreider gives the technology to the world.

Tom is miserable for lots of reasons and impulsively jumps into the time travel machine his father invented.  Unfortunately, true to his track record, he forgets to use the suit designed to keep time travelers invisible and unable to interact with the past and unable to change history.  When Tom goes back to the crucial moment he startles Gottreider and interrupts the experiment.  Gottreider survives and Tom returns to the present.

Our present.  No flying cars, no fantastic gadgets, good-bye peace and hello to the world we know, as mucked up as ever.  Tom is now John Barren, a visionary architect with loving parents and a sister.  Tom has much happier life as John but is torn by grief and guilt for destroying his original world and causing millions of people to never be born.  Of course it could be worse.  Gottreider’s experiment has a third possible outcome, a massive meltdown that destroys North America and causes Tom to be Victor, a vicious special ops agent.

Characters

What makes All Our Wrong Todays work is the character, Tom/John/Victor.  He stays himself, Tom mostly, as he tries to integrate Tom and John, learns to enjoy his family, falls in love.  We walk along with Tom as he develops a personality, possibly the first time he’s ever been himself and not just his father’s son or the famous architect.  He meets Penny and learns to love, meets his sister and learns what it is like to have a family that cares about him.  He gives a talk about his architectural vision and learns what it is like to be successful.

All through Tom never stops thinking of himself as at least part doofus, trying to figure out what to do to correct the world – and trying to decide whether that’s the right thing to do if it is even possible.  We can imagine ourselves in the same situation because Tom isn’t a miracle worker or a hero, he is just a guy and kind of a failure.

Tom learns to enjoy his new world, despite the guilt, decides flying cars are no match for a happy, fulfilling life.  Still he knows the world as a whole is less well-off, less peaceful and he wrestles with the question whether to risk everything to put the world back even if he loses himself.

A Lot of Fun

Some time travel stories are awful, with bad plots or cardboard characters or too much technical jabber.  Most lack a sense of fun.  All Our Wrong Todays feels right.  We can imagine being Tom, making the wrong choice, ending the world as he knows it, trying to discover what is true vs. imaginary, trying to correct the problem.

All Our Wrong Todays reminded me of The Door Into Summer, one of my favorite novels from Robert Heinlein.  It has a similar sense of an individual who is caught up in time gone wrong and who then must correct the outcome.  The Door Into Summer was about one person with little sense that his mix up affects the world, while All Our Wrong Todays has a more consequential change and Tom has a personal and global impact.

Debut Novel

All Our Wrong Todays is the first novel by Elan Mastai who is screenwriter.  I don’t see room here for a sequel, unless Mastai uses the same setting and it will be interesting to see where he goes next with writing.  Dutton will publish All Our Wrong Todays  in February 2017 and Paramount has already picked it up for film.

4+ Stars

I received All Our Wrong Today’s from Net Galley in expectation of a review.

The Best of All Possible Worlds – Wife Hunting on Cygnus Beta

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In Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds humanity is descended from four primary planetary group and their cross-breeds.  Long-lived Sadari masters of mental discipline, subsume their emotions into strong telepathic bonds; the Ntshune are emotional, masters of the heart, strong empaths; Zhinu are strong with things, technology and trade while Terrans are “unmatched in spirit”, strong in mind, heart and body.  Terra (Earth) is quarantined but the rest of humanity can see everything we do and has access to our current arts and literature; Shakespeare and Casablanca are well known.

People on Cynus Beta are a mix of all four with many having been rescued from dire situations by the Caretakers.  Our heroine Delerau is half Terran and Ntshune while her counterpart Dllenahkh is full Sadiri.

The Best of All Possible Worlds opens with Sadira, the home planet destroyed and the only Sadiri survivors are mostly men, those who were off planet at the time.  Author Karen Ord notes that the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami left mostly male survivors which is the inspiration for her novel.  The central question for Dllenahkh is:  What shall the Sadiri do to survive as a culture and race?  Shall they double down and maintain strict racial purity?  Or seek out taSadiri, those Sadiri who do not practice the mental disciplines?  Or cross-breed with other humans but raise the children as Sadiri?

To that end Dllenahkh and Delerau are part of a science team visiting the many taSadiri settlements on Cygnus Beta to evaluate potential wives.  This sounds horribly clinical, eugenic, although Lord makes it clear that human interests and likes are a very large concern.

You might not think that a wife hunt makes a good plot for a science fiction novel, and if you are looking for action or exotic locales then The Best of All Possible Worlds is not for you.  Lord uses the agglomeration of societies on Cygnus Beta to provide plot movement although the biggest events happen inside Delerau’s heart and mind.

Characters

Dllenahkh is complex.  It is unfair to say he’s unemotional and he’s no Mr. Spock with logic overriding all emotions.  Instead the Sadiri are extremely emotional and the only methods to keep from running amok are to become a mind ship pilot, form a close emotional telepathic bond to a spouse, or serious mental discipline and meditation.  That need for a close telepathic bond is the driver for the wife hunt; finding compatible wives is truly a matter of life or death.

We see him as a complicated person but I don’t think we really get to know Dllenahkh.

Delerau is easier to know.  She narrates the story and we see events and people through her eyes, struggle with her through the emotional tangles with Dllenahkh and her family.  She faces a difficult problem when the science team visits the isolated enclave Kir’tahsg and discovers almost slavery and coerced sexual relations.  She decides to run genetic analyses on individuals, when such analyses violate the General and Science Codes.  Even though this this has to be a difficult ethical choice for her, it seems distant, remote and I don’t feel we are privy to her decision or its difficulty.

Plot and Setting

The wife search gives Lord a chance to show off around ten different cultures, all on the same planet and all descended from Sadiri.  They range from the Faery Queen (yes, the Terran version) to an abandoned underground city to a secretive, monastic, isolated group of adepts.  The culture descriptions and the little touches to show the people and their settings were by far the best part of the novel.

Overall

I enjoyed The Best of All Possible Worlds.  It was different from anything I’ve read before, even from other science fiction/romance novels.  The writing is good and the characters are interesting with a plausible plot and actions.

The Caretakers are so intriguing that it’s a shame we see very little of them.  We don’t know who they are or why they act to rescue people.  One of them may make an appearance near the end of the novel.

If you like your science fiction full of dire threats and extravegent action then skip The Best of All Possible Worlds.  If you like reading about people in impossible but subtle situations then try it.

4 Stars