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All posts for the month April, 2013

BLOPE

Posted by Daniel on April 29, 2013

Posted in: SF/FANTASY, Uncategorized. Tagged: Book Reviews, Books, Reviews, SF/Fantasy. 2 Comments

This is one of the most original science fiction books I’ve read in years!

Imagine Philip K. Dick and Franz Kafka and John Norman and Henry Miller writing a story together in a world created by Tim Burton, Ridley Scott, and Quentin Tarantino, and you come close to the strange normalcy that is Blope.

Author Sean Benham starts his book with the ending, confusing the heck out of the reader, with body-part transplants and a description of characters that doesn’t seem real. But staying with the book pays off, and I’d be surprised if anyone didn’t go back and read the beginning once reaching the end. I know I did, and I ‘m sure I’ve never done that before.

Benham gives us just enough background to understand that in another version of history, the American Southwest becomes part of a Taiwan and its ageless ruler uses it as an experiment, segregating the territory into hexagonally shaped Prefectures — the citizens of each sent based on the pigment of their skin — the darkest to Prefecture A, the lightest to ‘M’ and a variety in between.

Our hero, Billy Lopez manages to live first in ‘F’ Prefecture, and then ‘M,’ where he realizes his first and only love (the prostitute/porn-slut Mona) and the worst that humanity can deliver. The citizens of ‘M’ are dying out — slaving away at mindless factory jobs and trading their meager wages for porn VCR tapes from a business which Billy inherits.

I was constantly surprised at each little curve that Benham throws at the reader. From the invented drug to the Frankenstein-like plastic surgery. But because this is some strange, skewed form of alternative history, and not future sci-fi, per se, there’s a weird (ie, ‘nice’) juxtaposition of new and old. New: full body transplants. Old: VCRs.

Even once I got used to this world and didn’t think there were any more curves that would surprise me, Benham wallops the reader with still more (for me, it was information about Dr. Timothy).

I can’t recommend this highly original, dystopic, fantastic world enough. If you want to read sci-fi that is different than the rest of what’s on the bookshelves, then click on the photo above, go straight to Amazon, and don’t leave until you’ve ordered your copy. You won’t be disappointed. Fair warning, though: this book is not for the weakly constituted or faint-of-heart.

Looking for a good book? Look no further…it’s here.

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Blope

author: Sean Benham

publisher: lulu.com

ISBN: 0991675525

paperback, 300 pages

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Son of Satan and Grandson of the Messiah, Billy Lopez was born with a sordid lineage, an ancestry that has been veiled since birth. Now, he’s a wanted man, forced into a harrowing world of extreme plastic surgery, black market pornography and organized religion gone horribly awry. BLOPE is a classic ‘Coming of Age’ story turned on its ear and shoved to the ground.

Blope is Sean Benham’s first novel, and available for purchase in both paperback and e-book formats via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu, Kobo, iTunes, Sony and Smashwords.

Website: http://seanbenham.biz / http://www.blopenovel.com

PAS DE DEATH

Posted by Daniel on April 27, 2013

Posted in: MYSTERY, YA. Tagged: Book Reviews, Books, Mystery, Reviews, Young Adult. Leave a comment

Clearly, as an older male, I am not the target audience for a book like this, but: 1) I really enjoy YA literature; 2) I like a good mystery; and 3) I studied dance, specifically ballet, in my younger days and still work in the entertainment industry. Maybe that makes me part of the target audience after all?

This was a quick, easy read. Perhaps a little too easy for my tastes.

First, I never got a sense of urgency or impending death, despite the constant danger that our heroine, Dani Spevak, was in. From finding the dead body, to hiding from the police, to carrying a live bomb, to a death threat tossed through a window, to the nearly impending death at the very end… it all flowed so smoothly and evenly that I never once worried that this might be the last book in the Dani Spevak series. And without feeling a sense of danger, it was nearly impossible to be emotionally tied to the characters.

Early on I consciously was reminded of my early writing teachers’ lessons of “show, don’t tell” and how this seemed to violate that rule. It was because I was being told the story that I wasn’t caught up in it directly.

Plotwise, I have to admit that I’ve always taken issue with characters that make astounding leaps in deductive logic… or buck authority because adult professionals are too stupid to understand. Yes, I’ve been a fifteen year old (have three teens in my house now, one 15), but any character brave and bold enough to be the focus of a series of mysteries needs to rely less on luck and more on making smart choices. This, above all, was the biggest strike against the book, to me.

However, because of it’s true target audience, I’ve given it a bit of lattitude. I can understand that there IS an audience out there that really wants mysteries in an arts setting and that would find this extremely attractive. There’s enough story, enough mystery, enough dance for a quick fun read for the right audience.

Looking for a good book? For the right audience, this might work.

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Pas De Death

author: Amanda Brice

publisher: Createspace

ISBN: 1470052741

paperback, 140 pages

How do YOU find your next favorite author?

Posted by Daniel on April 26, 2013

Posted in: Thoughts. Tagged: random thoughts, Reviews. Leave a comment

If you consider yourself a reader… someone who truly enjoys a good book … then you undoubtedly have a favorite author or two. I sure do.

But what happens when that author stops producing? Or if your favorite author is from a by-gone era and hasn’t written anything in decades? You probably scrabble and claw for those scraps of writing that some relative or agent uncovers and releases. But after that … well, sometimes the outlook is bleak.

For years I was an avid sci-fi reader (back in the days when the term ‘sci-fi’ was considered insulting). Most of my true favorites were writing in that genre, but more and more, the output is less and less. And then I felt that the sci-fi market was glutted with hackneyed writing and nothing but serials. Serials and series’. Really? Does no one write just a book any more?! But let’s be honest… most of that probably came from publishers, trying to capitalize, not from the writers themselves.

So how do you find a new favorite?

For me, it’s just a matter of reading a lot. If I read a short story I like, I search the author’s name on Amazon and Goodreads and wishlist their books. Sometimes I discover the new author through recommendations of friends. And of course there are the blogs… reading posts by other readers has been a great way for me to find new favorite authors.

And sometimes you get lucky and chance upon a book or story that wows you and you want to read everything they output. That happened to me recently when I was reading the nominees for the Hugo Award (science fiction’s fan-based reader awards).

And now I may have run across a new favorite. You’ll hear more about him in the coming days. Watch for a few new reviews and see if you can figure out who my new favorite is. In the meantime, tell me…how do you find your new favorite author?!

Looking for a good book? …Always!

WILLIAM AND THE LOST SPIRIT

Posted by Daniel on April 22, 2013

Posted in: GRAPHIC NOVEL, MAGIC, MYTHOLOGY, SF/FANTASY, YA. Tagged: Book Reviews, Books, Graphic Novels, Magic, Mythology/Legend. Leave a comment

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this graphic novel. At times it was strong; at times weak. Sometimes it was intriguing; other times dull.

My first impression upon finishing was actually, “Hmm…that didn’t seem typically ‘American.'” It didn’t read like most of the graphic novels that I’ve seen today. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But I couldn’t place just what it was that made it slightly unusual. Mythological aspect of the story seemed more ‘old-fashioned’ (and again, I don’t mean that in a bad way). It read like Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Robert E. Howard, or the Tales of King Arthur or Robin Hood, or … like something someone from France might write? Ok…so I didn’t immediately pick ‘French’ as the flavor for this book, but it didn’t surprise me to learn that the author and artist are French.

Let’s start with the art … it’s exactly right for a graphic novel. More than just comic book art, but not full-out paintings for each panel. The art tells a story … you could probably tell most of the tale without words, based on these visuals … and it’s never embarassing (please… there IS art in comic books and graphic novels that I find embarassingly bad). The story needs the art to become complete.

And so the story…. A simple journey. A boy in medieval England (?) decides to leave home to follow his sister, who doesn’t believe their father is actually dead, but trapped between the Earthly realm and another world. Along the way, the young boy encounters unusual characters and magical beasts. Unfortunately it too often feels like the boy is about to wake up from a dream, or he faces another unusual fantasy and you can’t help but wonder what the purpose of it is.

I wanted to like this more than I did. I stopped and started from the very beginning when the journey wasn’t making a lot of sense to me. it still didn’t make a lot of sense, but I did get to the decision that maybe that was okay.

The story needed the art to be complete. Without the art, purely as a story, this would have been too fantastical and childish to appeal to most. With the art, it became almost fun, but at the close of the back cover, I’m still left thinking I didn’t get much out of this, nor did I relish my time here.

Looking for a good book? If you like your stories full of art, this might work for you.

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William and the Lost Spirit

author: Gwen De Bonneval

artist: Matthieu Bonhomme

publisher: Graphic Universe

ISBN: 1467708070

paperback, 152 pages

HAPPY!

Posted by Daniel on April 7, 2013

Posted in: GRAPHIC NOVEL. Tagged: Book Reviews, Books, Graphic Novels, Picture books, Reviews. Leave a comment

**WARNING — GRAPHIC LANGUAGE USED IN THE REVIEW BELOW**

If you are not familiar with the genre of graphic novels, this is probably not the place for you to start. This is not a comic book. This is a dark, dirty, depressing, distressing, gruesome, gritty, gory story that can actually make you laugh and maybe even feel a little good. Really.

Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, and I’m starting to sound like the type of person I used to complain about, but really…do we really need a constant barrage of “fuck” in our literature … even our graphic novels? This one crossed the line and over-did it. I was beginning to think that David Mamet might be embarrassed by the number of fuck-bombs here.

I mean…we get it. Right? These are low-life scum and this is how low-life scum talk. I know it’s true. I hear it too often on the streets and in the stores. I know it’s how people talk. But if it were used once or twice, i think we’d still get the picture and it wouldn’t take away from the story.

So…back to the review… I was ready to give up and not read any further because I don’t care to associate with the low-life scum who talk like this and I don’t really enjoy reading about low-life scum who talk with such cursing … when there suddenly appeared a cartoon blue pony/unicorn.

Yeah, for real.

And suddenly I get it. When you want to contrast sappy cartoon happiness with scum, you want extremes, and Grant Morrison gives it to us in puking, blood-bath bucket-fulls.

Only our sleazy anti-hero can see the My Little Pony Wannabee, and our happiness-embodied cartoon (named “Happy”) saves our anti-hero’s life and tries to get him, in turn, to help save a little girl’s life. It’s kind of a brilliant story, and it’s the kind of story that can only be told as a graphic novel (with thanks, in large part, to artist Darick Robertson). Even another visual medium (film or television) would likely ruin either the uber-dark reality world of Nick Sax, or the cutesy cute world of Happy the Fucking Hors-icorn.

The were a couple of twists in the story, one which I should have seen coming, but didn’t.

If you like the genre, or know Grant Morrison’s work, then you’re sure to enjoy this. If you aren’t familiar with graphic novels, go read a few before you come to this one…but do come to this one when you’re ready.

Looking for a good book? If you like the genre…this will do.

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Happy!

author: Grant Morrison

artist: Darick Robertson

publisher: Image Comics

ISBN: 1607066777

paperback, 96 pages

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Posted by Daniel on April 6, 2013

Posted in: SF/FANTASY. Tagged: Book Reviews, Books, Reviews, SF/Fantasy. Leave a comment

There was a time in my life when I read every Star Trek novel that came out. That time has long passed. I think I stopped when I couldn’t keep up, and when Star Trek: The Next Generation started putting out a couple of novels a month, I stopped buying the books altogether.

What I like about reading a TV-tie-in novel is that you don’t have to work too hard as a reader. You are already familiar with the characters and the basic settings, so it’s all about plot and adventure.

The down side, of course, is that the author has to be very ‘spot-on’ with the characters. If a character in a novel says or does something that seems out of character to what the reader is already familiar with, it’s easy for the reader to lose interest.

I have to admit that despite being an out-of-the-closet Trekkie, I am not uber-familiar with the Next Generation series. I remember watching the first few seasons when they first came out, but i don’t know that I’ve seen them all (which I suppose a true Trekker would never admit). That said, there were times that I felt like someone (specifically Worf) said or did things in this book that didn’t seem in character at times. Not often, but enough for me to re-read a passage or two to try to hear his voice.

Tying this novel (or novella) to an incident that most of us remember because it was a movie moment, definitely helps bring the theme in to focus. And as with nearly any sci-fi book that treads in timeline history, it poses problems that can make the mind reel.

Despite being a short novel, it took me some time to get involved in the story (in large part due to my feeling that the was out-of-character action), but maybe half way through, it got much more interesting and onvolving.

For ‘escapist’ fiction (which is how I see a TV-tie-in book), this served its purpose and I mostly enjoyed my time with the familiar characters.

Looking for a good book? This might work if you want to get away with some old ‘friends’ for a bit.

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Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Stuff of Dreams

author: James Swallow

publisher: Pocket Books

ISBN: 1451696612

ebook, 94 pages

SPACEWALKER: MY JOURNEY IN SPACE…

Posted by Daniel on April 6, 2013

Posted in: MEMOIR, NON-FICTION. Tagged: Book Reviews, Books, Memoir, non-fiction, Reviews. Leave a comment

For those of us who grew up in the ‘space age’ with rockets and moon landings and space walks, it’s hard to imagine a world where this no longer takes place. Unfortunately, with the current space policy, that is what is happening.

Books like this, Spacewalker, by and about our astronauts, are important historical records of a rare breed of explorers. Astronaut Jerry L. Ross was one of those fortunate explorer/adventurers.

Ross starts his book informing the reader that he had dreams of going to space at a very early age and that most of his life was spent with his goal of going to space in mind. He details what appears to be an honest account of what he sacrificed and missed out on in his single-focussed goal of being an astronaut; family life. Yet, probably due more to his wife’s understanding and patience, he was able to retire from his career and still have a devoted family.

I found much of the first half of the book a bit slow and ‘simple.’ Too often I felt that the author (whether Jerry L. Ross or John Norberg I don’t know) was talking down to the reader. Explaining simple facts in too much detail while missing out on some of the more opportune moments to give the reader a little insight. (And I think we get it… many astronauts came out of Purdue University … I think we were told that many times.) I’ve seen other reviewers comment that the book has a very conversational tone, which is true, but I do feel it was conversational to a middle school student. This is not a bad thing. It IS our youth we need to get invested in the space program after all.

Once Ross gets to NASA and works with other astronauts, the book really picked up interest for me. I enjoyed seeing the ‘back-end’ of missions through the eyes of someone who was there. And when he gets the opportunity to fly himself, I didn’t want to put the book down.

Experiencing lift-off, viewing the Earth from space, putting on a space-walking suit, working with tools wearing gloves that don’t have a lot of flexibility, all through Ross’s eyes was a delight. Even his part of the Shuttle Challenger disaster (his job was to be with the families of the people aboard the shuttle as it came back to Earth) was interesting to experience.

Despite what I felt was a slow, or simple start, I really enjoyed this refreshing and honest look at the space program from a man who was devoted both to the scientific cause of space exploration, and to his Christian faith — two subjects that don’t always seem to go together (or at least are not typically expressed together too often). I enjoyed it enough that once I was done reading my review copy, I purchased a hard-cover edition and gave it to my fifteen year old son who seems equally focussed on working for NASA and exploring Mars. I’m hoping that my son can see Ross’s drive and apply some of his own toward his goals.

Thank you Jerry L. Ross for the work and the experience.

Looking for a good book? You’ve found one here!