Mini-Reviews of Books #34…
[Note from Steve: I’ve augmented my book-buying algorithm. Yes, I still avoid a book’s reviews, especially those zero-content ones on Amazon. Yes, I will study the blurb and “peek inside” to see if the author can write. But now I also peruse small presses’ catalogs! The following three books I found doing just that for two small presses, Black Opal Books and EDGE Publishing. Try it. My algorithm now takes a bit longer, but it’s nice to weed out all the dregs on Amazon, so a lot of time is saved!]
Poseidon’s Eye. Trisha O’Keefe, author (Black Opal Books, 2016). Alex is a hot-shot Hispanic when all hell breaks loose after his bachelors’ party. He goes from being engage to the boss’ daughter to being a hunted man, framed for a murder he didn’t commit. He sets out to prove his innocence, not knowing Murray, a detective, already thinks he’s been framed. There’s a parallel story as she tries to prove that as well as prove herself to the men in her department.
Set in SoCal—Alex is from LA; Murray’s based in Bakersfield—the reader will get a glimpse of the Golden State’s area I grew up in, which stretches from the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific Ocean (the last action scene takes place on U.S. 101). The portrayal of the life of migrant workers is all too real, and the picture painted of actions taken against Hispanics and Native Americans by white haters and bigots is tragic.
The major theme here, though, is the duplicity at the highest levels of government and greedy corporate interests. Alex has to cover a lot of ground here to prove he’s innocent; dangerous roadblocks are in the way, as well as many twists and turns in the road.
There are some editing errors, including punctuation, and incorrect Spanish, but a reader will find it worthwhile to work through them. There’s some questionable technology too: “Thermonuclear-accelerated light”? I don’t think so. You can’t accelerate light. But the readers won’t find the errors in tech any more objectionable than what you see from Hollywood.
The date of publication shows that it behooves readers to examine small press’s back catalogs. Books with copyright dates from more than a year ago are now considered “old,” which is absurd. In fact, readers should never look at copyright dates for their book purchases, unless they are collectors of first editions. All said and done, this is a very enjoyable novel I would have missed if I even considered copyright dates.
The God Machine. Ken Newman, author (Black Opal Books, 2016). Kieran is, a young wannabe writer, is transported to a planet far, far away, where he meets a group of German paratroopers from WWII. He’s from 2014 while they’re from 1944. They team up to fight ETs there who have become savages after the destruction of their civilization, except for one evil scientist. There are some nasty humans too, grifters from 1944, whom Kieran saves from the ETs…a big mistake.
This reads like some wild cross between a video game and Heinlein’s Glory Road. There’s not a serious moment here, but it’s a lot of fun. Time travel is used as a plot device here with its usual paradoxes. (On 8/23, I posted an article about why I don’t write about time travel.) No explanation of why the ETs, who evolved 30,000 light-years from Earth, are humanoid, or any of their fancy technology, which, for the humans, seems like magic, precisely as Clarke said it would.
This is another book from the Black Opal Books catalog. Readers should check it out. Small presses have unusual and interesting books that you might not be aware of. This is a recent book, so a reader has to watch for new ones too. By the way, a lot fewer errors in this one, and I don’t know German well enough to check Mr. Newman’s.
The Bathwater Conspiracy. Janet Kellough, author (EDGE-lite, 2018). Definitely the strangest SF book I’ve read in a while. It sounds so conventional—a police procedural, mystery, suspense, and thriller novel. It’s also post-apocalyptic sci-fi, though, although that’s more the setting than the plot, so let me start with the plot: A young college student is brutally gang-raped and murdered. Neither the ME Jo nor the hard-boiled cop Mac buy the federal police’s determination that she was pushed off a building. Mac sets out to prove the ME and her interpretation is the correct one. In the process, Mac discovers a bigger crime than just rape and murder.
So why is this book strange? The setting brought P. D. James’s The Children of Men to mind for me, but the author goes beyond James (her previous books, like James’s, are mysteries). The Y-chromosome has disappeared from the human population! All the principal characters are women. I’ve often wished women would run the world, thinking we’d probably be better off without all the testosterone messing up world affairs, but I never envisioned it like this. No men around. Zilch. The apocalypse was more a slow whisper than a big bang, and it destroyed the Y-chromosome. The post-apocalyptic world isn’t so bad, but it still has the same problems. If you find this interesting, read the book, and then we’ll make a toast to the author for this original concept. The book should keep you thinking for a while.
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The Last Humans. The apocalypse kills billions—numbers so large that most survivors’ minds snap shut. Foes of the U.S. have attacked with a bioengineered contagion that spreads around the world. One of only a few survivors, Penny Castro, ex-USN diver and L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy, reacts differently. She fights back and creates a life for herself where death is the common denominator. On a forensic dive, she is interrupted. When she surfaces, she finds all her colleagues dead, so she has to battle starvation, thirst, and gangs of feral humans until she ends up in a USAF refugee camp. A post-apocalyptic thriller for our times coming to you from Black Opal Books in 2019, Penny’s adventures will entertain and shock you into asking, “Could this really happen?” (You can see a pre-release excerpt in my blog category of that name, filed under Oasis Redux, which was my working title.)
In libris libertas!
