Short Book Reviews: Another Slightly Wacky Space Opera from Tim Pratt

The Fractured Void, A Twilight Imperium Novel, by Tim Pratt (Aconyte)

Imagine my surprise when I learned the space opera. The Fractured Void, was based on a strategic board game, Twilight Imperium. Game tie-in novels are common these days, but not those that are so well crafted as to stand on their own merits. I picked it up because I loved Tim Pratt’s other science fiction novels (and after reading it I still have no idea what Twilight Imperium is, nor do I particularly care as long as Pratt turns out books as good as this one).

Starship crews as family are a familiar, eternally attractive trope. Pratt brings his own slightly offbeat cast to the Temerarious: a human captain, his best friend, a ninja chameleon toad, and his leonine security officer. From the universe’s most boring patrol, they’re off to rescue the universe’s most obnoxious scientist, who just may have discovered a way to create worm holes and to control them. It turns out that the mysterious race known as the Ghosts has very strong opinions about why opening new worm holes is as Extremely Bad Idea, and are prepared to enforce or sabotage or otherwise nix the project. Throw in a ruthless but very sexy bounty hunter, a sentient squid who is the universe’s best engineer, a remarkably hidebound rival culture, and a host of plot twists, double-crosses, and one-step-ahead schemes, and the resulting adventure is nonstop entertainment.

My introduction to Pratt’s star-spanning bibliography was The Wrong Stars, and The Fractured Void features the same flowing prose, superb control over disparate story elements, wacky characters, plot tension, and supremely resourceful and competent characters. I look forward to gobbling up his next.

It's StoryBundle Time!

 Collaborators is one of the fantastic novels in the newest StoryBundle, available now. This curated collection is a great way to discover new authors. 

What's a StoryBundle and how I can get this one? Read below!

The Starting Hurricanes Bundle - Curated by Athena Andreadis

"Unhappy is the land that needs a hero." —Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

"This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great." —Elrond of Rivendell, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Starting Hurricanes StoryBundle offers eleven fascinating speculative works that explore the concept of great changes wrought by people who are not Chosen Ones nor have god-like powers. Science fiction and fantasy (henceforth SFF) rely too heavily on these two modes; as a result, "mundanes" are often belittled, too frequently shown bereft of agency, imagination, courage or any ethical/moral compass beyond narrow self-interest.

This goes hand-in-hand with the predilection of the genre for autocratic authority structures, too frequently headed by charismatic psychopaths who are given huge dollops of leeway, to say nothing of boasting "optimal" genes (which demonstrates most SFF authors' fundamental misunderstanding of genetics and evolution). Almost always ignored are the loyalty networks and the sense of collective investment that actually make cultures and societies function—but also malfunction, when manipulated by grifters or thugs.

Today's Wisdom from Middle Earth

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens"

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Rejection, Discouragement, and How a Few Loyal Readers Can Save an Author

Being discouraged is part and parcel of a working writer's life. Negative reviews, ditto. Some of us are naturally more thick-skinned about them than others, and most of us develop coping strategies over the years. This is where networking with other writers can be very helpful.  We say things like:

• If you're not accumulating rejection slips, you're not doing your job (taking risks, "pushing the envelope").
• Just file the slip (or email) and send the story out 
• Remember how many times A Wrinkle in Time was rejected.
• Editors are human, too; they have bad days, and it's no one's fault if your hero has the same name as their ex.
• Hey, I'm making progress from a form rejection to a personal note and invitation to submit again!

Even after many professional sales, a rejection can sting. The sting doesn't last as long as it might when we were first starting out, and we have tools (see above) and lots of writerly commiseration to help us. We know from experience that the sting will pass; we have acquired the habit of immediately diving back into the next project, so that we always have something fresh  and exciting in the pipeline.

Then there are the situations when a story or book is sold and the publisher goes out of business. The editor gets fired. I know authors this has happened to more than once. We find ourselves wondering if we killed the magazine. We didn't, but that laughter overlays the secret and utterly illogical fear that our writing careers are somehow jinxed. Then we sell something else and there are no thunderbolts from above. We carry on.

Two Book Reviews Demonstrate the Future is not What We Expect

The Apocalypse Seven, by Gene Doucette (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

My introduction to Gene Doucette’s witty style was his previous novel, The Spaceship Next Door, reviewed here. This newest adventure has all the charm, warmth, and thoughtfulness I’d come to expect.

One morning, a small and disparate group of people – college students, a hermit preacher, an astrophysicist, for example – wake up to find the world changed. Each seems to be utterly alone. Familiar buildings are more or less intact, but wildlife and vegetation has taken over the university town of Cambridge. There’s no electricity, and all the batteries are dead. The astrophysicist notices the stars are in subtly wrong positions. As the group makes contact with one another, gathering at the university, they support one another when they aren’t arguing, for each has a different understanding of what has happened. Touré, a twenty-ish Cambridge coder, calls it the whateverpocalypse. Just as they learn they are not the only humans alive and suspect around a century has elapsed while they were unconscious, they begin to suspect they are not the only intelligent species on the planet, but it’s anyone’s guess whether the ghosts or aliens or whatevertheyare mean the human survivors well or ill.

By far, the sneak star of the book is Norman, the coywolf (coyote-wolf hybrid) tamed by the blind character, Carol.

 

Tiny Time Machine, by John E Stith (Amazing Select from Amazing Stories)

I’ll read anything by John E. Stith, but somehow I missed this charming short novel. The description says it’s “for young adults,” but I disagree. While teens are going to love it, and it’s a novel featuring young characters, it’s so full of buoyancy and hope that adults will gobble it up, too. Meg describes herself as the daughter of an angry scientist dad, so angry that he in fact turns a smartphone into a time machine that not only peeks into a not-too-distant future but allows people to jump into it. Alas, it’s not a future anyone would want to live in. The planet is dying, and humanity along with it. The oceans have turned into a stiff jelly, reminiscent of ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Meg and her new friend Josh embark upon a quest to stop a billionaire technologist whose well-meaning attempts to clean up the ocean’s plastic garbage will lead to this bleak future. Soon they’re on the run from the police, as well.

One of the things I enjoy about Young Adult novels is how teens can have agency, not only in their own lives but in the world. Typically, parents are therefore absent or dead (in Meg’s case, both of them, her father recently so), and that frees the characters from supervision. In this story, not having a parent deprives Meg and Josh of the perspective and resources an adult ally could offer. They have internal challenges of growing up and learning to work together, deal with jealousy, and so forth, all within the limitations that minors face. This is while figuring out what happens in the future and how to stop it.

As a bonus, the book contains a piece of short fiction, “Redshift Runaway,” set in the same world as Redshift Rendezvous. When a sentient alien pet runs wild on a starship traveling a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the laws of ordinary physics no longer apply, chaos ensues, but also understanding. Nobody writes relativity-based science fiction better than Stith.