Mini-Reviews #7…
[Note from Steve: It’s been awhile. I thought I should review some of the books I casually read for broadening my horizons and entertainment, so I focused on Amazon reviews instead of writing mini-reviews (which are still longer than your average Amazon review). I’ll do that less in the future. Like my movie reviews, most of my book reviews will appear here or Bookpleasures, not Amazon. Writers—don’t bother to query. These reviews are for books I choose to read and like well enough to review. I won’t respond to queries.
For today, there’s something in the spring air, I guess. My new ebook, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, to be released soon, is about an ET virus changing Earth society. So are the two books reviewed here. The second review is an augmented version of what appeared in last week’s “News and Notices from the Writing Trenches.”]
Season of the Harvest. Michael R. Hicks, author; 2012. If you get by the anti-GMO rhetoric and rampant xenophobia manifest in the 1950s B-movie aliens, you’ll find an entertaining sci-fi thriller that’s like a fast marathon. The nasty aliens aren’t needed—human beings are quite capable of destroying themselves and Earth, and that would be more believable if it were the case in this story. And the GMO conspiracy theories are over the top—if you don’t like GMOs, get rid of your pet dogs and cats, snuff out that 3-year-old that just won horse racing’s Triple Crown, and forget about your corn flakes and fancy leather shoes.
Warning: This story is militaristic sci-fi that is violent and gory, even without the vicious aliens (i.e. the human beings are vicious enough). If someone can tell me how the handful of aliens arrived here on Earth, let me know, but they did and they’re making us do all sorts of horrible things we couldn’t possibly do to ourselves—just ask those ancient artifact lovers called ISIS. The author paints a corruption-riddled American society and then lets the bad guys weasel out and have their sins forgiven. “I had to save my child” or “I had an incurable illness” just doesn’t do it for me when the preservation of human beings and Earth as we know it are at stake. But what do I know?
The Atlantis Plague. A. G. Riddle, author; 2014. I read The Atlantis Gene, first ebook in the trilogy, and liked it. This one didn’t disappoint either. “Other” human beings came to Earth in the past and employed specially engineered viruses to select certain traits in Earth hominids (no obelisk needed), and they continue doing it to the present day. Some of the reasons are revealed here.
Both ebooks trend to militaristic sci-fi too and have enough action, suspense, and violence to keep the old adrenalin pumping—but not quite as much as the previous ebook. I haven’t figured out why there are other human beings out there in the galaxy who have been around a lot longer than we have. Maybe that puzzle is solved in the third book.
I’m a fan of sci-fi stories that “explain” myths in legends. It isn’t a spoiler to say here that the legend is in the title, but that’s only a small part of the story—yeah, the “other humans” are called Atlanteans. I still like these “aliens” better than the ones above. And maybe there just aren’t any non-human ETs (a la most of Star Trek and Mr. Asimov), or we’re all just vermin left over from when a huge intergalactic garbage scow passed through our galaxy. Who knows?
In elibris libertas….
