Tag Archives: sci-fi

Apocalypse Alley

Book Review of Apocalypse Alley (Blue Unicorn #2), by Don Allmon

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I received a copy of Don Allmon‘s Apocalypse Alley through Netgalley. I reviewed book one, The Glamour Thieves, here.

Description from Goodreads:
Home from a six-month assignment to war-torn East Asia, genetically engineered supersoldier Noah “Comet” Wu just wants to kick back, share a beer, and talk shit with his best friend, JT. But JT’s home has been shot up like a war zone, and his friend has gone missing.

Comet’s only lead is a smart-mouthed criminal he finds amid the mess. His name’s Buzz Howdy. He’s a con man and a hacker and deserves to be in jail. Or in handcuffs, at least. The only thing the two have in common is JT. Unless you count the steamy glances they’re sneaking at one another. They have those in common too. But that just makes Comet all the more wary.

Despite their mutual distrust, they’ll have to work together to rescue JT before a cyborg assassin gets to him first. Racing down a miserable stretch of road called Apocalypse Alley, they must dodge radioactive spiders, a lonely cannibal, and a killer Buick. They also try to dodge each other. That last bit doesn’t work out so well.

Review:
Honestly, I didn’t love this one like I did The Glamour Thieves. I liked it just fine, but there was no love. I still got a thrill out of Allmon’s world and there is a lot of humor in the book that tickled me and I really like the writing style, but the romance literally goes from gun-to-the-head-of-a-stranger to in love, in less than six hours. There is just no way to make that work for me, even if the two go through some heavy stuff together. Almost especially if they go through a storm together, because then you have to sort what feelings are just leftover from the experience and what is real. The book doesn’t even touch on that little psychological reality.

Plus, the book just never stops. There are no rest points in the narrative and I, personally, needed them. And lastly JT and Austin are hardly in the book and I missed them.

Having said all that, I’ll still be on board for book three. This might not have shown like the star book one was, but it is still a fun read and I look forward to more of Allmon’s work.

The Left Hand of Darkness

Book Review of The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I have owned this copy of Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Left Hand of Darkness for years. One would presume I bought it at some point.

Description from Goodreads:
On the planet Winter, there is no gender. The Gethenians can become male or female during each mating cycle, and this is something that humans find incomprehensible.

The Ekumen of Known Worlds has sent an ethnologist to study the Gethenians on their forbidding, ice-bound world. At first he finds his subjects difficult and off-putting, with their elaborate social systems and alien minds. But in the course of a long journey across the ice, he reaches an understanding with one of the Gethenians — it might even be a kind of love.

Review:
This is one of those books that is more a thought experiment than an actual reading experience. I can’t say I’m sad to have read it—especially now, so soon after Le Guin’s death—but I’ll say I’m glad to have read it, to be done reading it. As interesting as it was, I was bored for almost all of it. The world was breathtakingly described and, again, the moral and social implications of the Emissary’s circumstances were interesting, but the whole thing was soooo slow and indirect. Plus, while I understand the book was published in 1969 and therefore a product of it’s time, I was uncomfortable with the way women were positioned and described. All in all, I think of this much like I do Moby Dick. I’m glad to tick it off my list off books I’ve meant to read, but didn’t enjoy it all that much, though I can appreciate it’s worth.

Neutral Space

Book Review of Neutral Space, by Rebecca Tran

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I won a copy of Rebecca Tran‘s Neutral Space through Goodreads. This was especially exciting for me because she turns out to be a local author and I have been trying to read more books by authors who live in my region.

Description from Goodreads:
Lieutenant Jackson Peterson thought he knew who the enemy was. A bitter war with the Kelsairans made it abundantly clear. When Jackson saves a Kelsairan woman from a wrecked ship, the line is suddenly blurred. The enemy isn’t what the government said they were and he can no longer blindly follow orders. A shocking discovery leads Jackson down a sinister path of intrigue that could change the fate of two races. But, both the Kelsairan and the Human governments will kill him to keep their secrets. Jackson will risk everything to stop them. Will it be enough? Or will he die in the process?

Review:
This wasn’t bad, just simple. Simple in it’s writing and narration style and simple in it’s plotting. By this I mean the writing is readable, but not elaborate (and it REALLY needs another editing pass, especially to look a punctuation), the narration is a straight forward first person, past tense monologue and the plotting is….well, here’s where it all falls apart really. It’s simple and not deeply thought out.

For example, in all the universe the two characters get put in the same single prison. The male lead is already there and anticipates the female lead will be placed there when he hears she’s to be jailed. (Is there only one such prison in all the universe?) There was no mention of other women (except for a single staff nurse), so I don’t know if this was a co-ed prison. But when she arrived, she seemed able to wander at will and sleep wherever she wanted. She was never actually locked up at any point. That doesn’t seem very prison-like to me, but it sure was convenient for the plot.

Most of the book is a romance in space, which I don’t mind. I like those. But the plot is basically them running around talking to people that they already knew and somehow, miraculously uncovering, in some small amount of time, a secret that had gone undiscovered for 200 years. One of the clues they find is a copy of the original treaty, the breach of which started the war. You guys, if a war starts because someone is said to have broken a treaty, I really think someone would have thought to look at the darned thing before 200 years passed.

That war is basically just a background prop. You never feel the tension of it. The characters met ON VACATION. Yes, I know it’s the space-fairing equivalent of shore leave. But it’s hard to be concerned about a war when the main character trots off to go fishing and throughout the whole book they go wherever they want, including to their families, and no one ever stops them, there is never a battle, or a front, or any evidence of war.

While I appreciate that female lead was meant to be the more elite soldier, she spent the whole book being girly—changing clothes, putting on perfume, angsting about her virginity, and eventually marrying and having babies. She could have been a baker or a politician and been far more believable. Her character was too shallow and simple to actually carry what it was supposed to.

Lastly, there’s the humans and kelsairans, who were less different from one another than the Americans are from the Chinese. They shared the same mores and values. Their languages must not have even been that different, because the characters learned to speak alien languages in months, in one case without anyone to even teach him. He picked it up from listening to the guards talk to one another. So again, the cultures and universe are simple and not as diverse as they need to be. 

I know I sound like I’ve trashed this book. I was admittedly disappointed to find it as flat as it is. But it is entertaining in it’s own ways, has a lovely theme, and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it. I’d even be willing to read another of Tran’s books.