Andrew Hindle's Blog

Got a ton going on lately and the coming week is going to be a lot, but I had a bit of time this morning and since I won’t have time to actually write, I figured what the heck. Why not throw up a sketch I thought up last night?

This is a rough MS Paint scribble of some comparative depths of different structures in my current book’s world. Just to show how they stack up against each other.

I didn’t put actual measurements yet, might do a proper version of this later, but just out of interest here are some key bits for you to enjoy. A lot of this doesn’t really make it into the story itself – you know, that’s why they call it worldbuilding and not plot, I guess. But you never know.

I’m not sure if the picture will be legible, it’s pretty large so if you can open it full-size it should be readable at least.

Anyway, just a bit of fun. Hoping to get some more work done this evening but it’s doubtful.

This month I decided to take part in a little indie book promotion, which saw me donating one of my many book reviews to the cause of boosting the visibility of some deserving authors. The promo is called A Month of Rain and Reads, because it’s rainy and chilly up in the northern hemisphere at least, so it’s time to curl up with a good book.

Anyway, today was my turn to give an interview! I’m also taking part in an e-book give-away but I am not sure what that’s going to look like yet. As my social media presence is very limited these days, I am happy to show up wherever I’m invited.

AMoRaR Interview – Andrew Hindle

Regulars to this blog will be shocked – shocked! – to hear I waffle on at considerable length during this ostensibly short and punchy interview. But I appreciated being included and urge you to check out some of the recommendations that are coming up as a result of this promo.

Some of the other authors being interviewed or having their books reviewed are esteemed peers of mine from the SPSFC and elsewhere. They are all most excellent.

So here’s a thing.

The year was 2015. Mrs. Hatboy and I were in Australia on holiday with Wump and Toop (they were … I want to say five and one at the time?). On this particular day, though, the kids were off with the grandparents, and it was just me and Mrs. Hatboy and a friend of ours at the old Hatboy family beach house.

Our friend was reading an article, or relating some kind of long-winded anecdote to us but I wasn’t really paying attention. I think I already knew the conclusion to the story, and I was distracted by this amazing moth that I’d spotted in the living room. It was kind of bee-formed, but even furrier and with more regular moth-wings and moth-antennae. It was striped black and purple and I’d never seen anything like it before. Oh yeah and it was about the length of my hand, which is big even by Australian standards.

Of course, this being Australia I didn’t need the bee-shape or the striped patterning to tell me it was probably dangerous, so I kept my distance as I checked it out and tried to get a picture of it. I had to interrupt my friend’s monologue to tell them and Mrs. Hatboy that this was some weird shit and they should check it out. Our friend, incidentally, was also just visiting Australia so I wouldn’t have expected her to know what type of moth it was either.

Anyway, the moth flapped around the room, pretty aimlessly, and I was trying to figure out a way of getting it back outside without being stung or bitten or having my skin assaulted by venomous burning fur-fibres (that’s a thing. Australia.). At one point I lost track of it, but then it came back. I thought I’d misjudged its size at first, because it seemed to be barely the size of a dust-mote – but then the mote settled on the wall and the moth backed out into full size again as though it was emerging end-first from a hole in the wall. Also not impossible, since all kinds of creepy crawlies can make nests inside walls. Still, it was kind of weird the way it was behaving.

I kept following it and it ended up at the windows and the glass front doors leading out onto our beach house’s front verandah. I opened the windows and door for it and it looked at me – I always liked to think it was surprise and gratitude – before flying out into the yard. Then, when it didn’t seem like it was going to fly away, I stepped out onto the verandah to watch it some more. There was a girl, maybe five or six years old, standing in our yard. Like some kind of weird fae-folk child, she was just standing there like she’d been the moth all along, and was now showing her true form. Had I heard voices while the moth was flying around our beach house? I don’t know. Probably not. But she was speaking, asking if I knew where she was, if I was going to go with her.

I tried to talk to her, find out where she had come from or what her name was, but she seemed too young or confused to have a coherent conversation with. That was when I was reminded of something, and I looked it up on my phone. Now, my phone wasn’t particularly great back in 2015 (was I still on Mopho Cake I or II? A very early smartphone anyway, maybe one I’d received from No*ia back in the day … wait, I can actually track this through the blog! I had given up Mopho Cake II in 2014, and welcomed Mopho Cake III [ironically with an autofill poem that Mr. dreameling suggested in the comments might have had A.I. involved, although he was talking about actual A.I., because we knew the difference between autofill and artificial intelligence back then] the same year, before Mopho Cake III finally met its end by BRKN archery firing squad in 2017 … but I digress), but … what was I saying? Right, my phone wasn’t that great so it took some digging for the article but I eventually found it.

So these twin girls, Poli and Poni Dwyer, had disappeared while swimming in an old quarry. And no, it hadn’t been a shark or a crocodile. There were some pictures of them that didn’t look very much like the girl out in our front yard, but there was also a grainy low-res video of the two of them at the swimming hole, splashing around and laughing. That one did look like the girl in the yard.

They’d disappeared six years previously, in 2009.

I told Mrs. Hatboy about the missing girls and when they had gone missing, and she was appropriately spooked out by it all. The creepy little girl in our yard, you see, was still the exact same age Poli and Poni had been when they’d disappeared.

I attempted to find the video again, just to confirm what I was seeing, but all I could find was a bunch of makeup-and-photoshop-enhanced Instagram pictures and a lot of mean comments about the missing girls and their parents being attention-seekers, followed by a strange ream of “A.I.” slop videos featuring an army troop sitting in front of a burned-out school bus with a battered blue robot as part of their unit.

It became clear to me that the three of us who’d actually seen the moth, and the girl in the yard, would be dismissed as hoaxers. The moth hadn’t looked real, after all. “Poli and Poni” was destined to go from a sad story of two missing girls to one of the first big fake mystery memes of the misinformation age. Enhanced and enabled with obvious “A.I.”, of course.

Anyway that was when I woke up this morning. The entire thing, including the tenth anniversary article with the exact title of this blog post, was in fact a dream.

So, I just finished reading The Elitist Supremacy, book 1 of The Elites and the Rogues series, by Niranjan. This one isn’t SPSFC related, although the author is a Friend of the Competition.

In short (*pause for laughter*), The Elitist Supremacy is a sci-fi espionage thriller with some nice interweaving of future tech and future history with human storylines. What does that mean? Well, in the distant future of 2936, people are still very much people. And having a bunch of new toys to play with doesn’t change that. It just changes the way the same old primitive dance is performed. It is nothing if not a story about the lengths people will go to in protection of those they love, whether that is a child, a partner, or … well, themselves.

Warning: There may be random spoilers throughout the rest of this review, mainly because I just don’t know how to discuss half of what happened here without spoiling something.

In 2241 an execution goes awry, and from that interesting opening we jump forward 695 years to find that humanity has gone interplanetary and is now ruled by “the State” (or “Cynfor”), and the “Elites” at its core. The Elites, led by the shadowy Cesar Thaxter, are immortals and practically indestructible, because of the thing we sort of saw happening in the prologue. It’s actually a pretty cool concept, there’s no shortage of them in this book. A lot of these immortals are sealed up in stasis prison, but the ruling class is basically above the law. And there is a Resistance, with more Elites (or “Rogues”, hence the name of the series) at its core.

This is the set-up, and a lot of the book is dedicated to establishing this in preparation for the rest of the series. The story in this book is a little bit all-over-the-place as a result, as we skip from group to group and planet to planet getting all our pieces in position. The Resistance is looking to find a safe base of operations out from under the all-seeing and all-knowing technocracy of the State, and there is a lot of manoeuvring to allow that to happen. Against this backdrop, the very human stories of love and trauma unfold quite nicely in their simplicity. Families torn apart and brought together, political and corporate intrigue, and some good old-fashioned technobabble and action sequences keep it all bubbling along nicely and give the world (worlds) good depth and texture.

Where I really had trouble was the characters.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel like the two main guys – Alexander Selwood and (by the end) Nolan Patrick – are compelling and I knew where they stood and who they were. They have backstories that demand exploration, as one would expect from (at least in Alexander’s case) immortals whose origins (or family origins, in Nolan’s case) are scattered through almost seven hundred years of future history, but they were put together well enough to make me want to explore that.

Other than those two, there was one character I was expecting to be used more. There’s this kid, Paige, with a little bit of a neurodivergent superpower that enables her to tell when someone is good or bad. That was a really interesting hook and made me remember the character … but then she appeared like one time after her intro in chapters 5 to 7, to deliver a little exposition about aliens which was the only time that was mentioned, and that was it. And yeah, I have notes about that. But okay.

The rest of the characters and their relationships, motivations and interwoven stories are extremely convoluted and it’s not helped by a lot of them having what I felt were very generic names and (if even mentioned at all) appearances. And that a lot of them have different names and identities at different points in history, as one would expect from shadowy immortals. This is at once an excellent part of the story, and a frustratingly confusing element. Sometimes it is treated as a plot revelation (to reader and characters alike), and at other times it is hard to tell if it has just appeared that way because that’s how the story is structured.

I’m just going to list a bunch of characters and the relationships I think I figured out, and put it in spoilertext in case you don’t want to know.

Marvin Griffel (2241) is Lucas Hendricks, the man who invented the immortality drug in the first place and father of Niek.Gerald Lane (2241) a hacker, is Alexander Selwood, the dude being executed at the start and is now looking after Marvin’s / Lucas’s kid Niek.Mason Davis (old world, former head of Elites) is John Patrick, Nolan’s father. Are the children of Elites also Elites? I am not sure if that was ever covered, but Niek and Nolan would qualify.Cesar Thaxter is the big bad, one of the initial Elites who started the whole thing and now runs the State. Alexander / Marvin went to him and told him about the immortality drug back in the old world.Shayla Lambert is kind of Alexander’s girlfriend for a minute there but she’s not in it long.David Flett, his (sick) wife Ellen, and their daughter Paige – the one I thought was going to be more of a thing in the story. Flett might have more to do but I was kind of at a loss about him.Kaylee Ashton is hired as a tutor for Paige. Also not really a thing. Colin Blythe is her uncle but so what? Her parents had died and she’d stolen come money from her uncle so she could get away. May also end up being more of a thing later.Carmine? No, that’s just Sergio’s car.George Savin is a rising star reporter / journalist who sniffs around at the main plot for the duration of the book, and has a thing with Alexander / Marvin late in the story.Nolan Patrick is Alexander’s assistant, he has a twin brother Dylan (a painter) and a younger sister Ashley, their dad is Mason / John, their mother Aria.Raul Beltram is also a character. His fiancé Isabel Duran is described physically (a lot of the female characters are, the males not so much for some reason) but we don’t get much insight into their story.Niek Hendricks – now Niek, I also liked. He didn’t have a huge role either but his story – as son of one character (Marvin / Lucas) required to live as ward to another character (first Ruben “uncle Ruben” Dekker, but he was a creep and Niek ended up with Alexander / Marvin) and conflicted over his place in things and with political and legal savvy beyond his years – was an interesting one. My dumb arse at least understood it.Elliott Houghton is legal counsel for McManus Corp – not really important.Sergio Martinez (67) and his assistant Kaya Richards. Sergio dies. He turns out to be Felipe Diaz, the son of Pablo Diaz, an “executed traitor” of the past … now, as to whether Pablo was an Elite and whether this means elderly and infirm Sergio (who, as stated, later dies) is evidence that Elites’ offspring don’t inherit immortality, I can’t say. I also didn’t really follow the death and whether it was actually meant to be a murder mystery or part of the plot.Then there’s Zain Baako, Amir Rahal (characterised as the son Sergio never had), Ania (head of tech security), Eva Costas (Resistance), Davu and Niki (Resistance?), the Ansari brothers Ibrahim and Hassan (Elite Defenders?) Valeria Chernova (head of Enforcers, Investigators and Defenders, also an Elite), Saito? Toshi? His dead wife Misaki, because of Mason / John?…

Dear God. So, anyway, that’s a lot, is what I’m saying. And there should maybe be some better way of contextualising it all. If not a dramatis personae, or some more memorable names or character quirks or descriptions, I don’t know. All I know is I remembered Alexander because he was the main character, and Nolan because he had interesting characteristics and was connected to the main story, and Paige and Niek because they had stuff going on, and all the rest were kind of a blur.

I liked the future history as laid out, and the technological advances we get to see. The teleportation tech, stasis tech, the A.I.s and the Nishati dimension (which was kind of related to the teleportation, teleportation had existed before but since Nishati was discovered teleportation had improved), Zhidium and DNA tracking, teleportation blockers and the various weapons they’d come up with to battle Elites … it was all very cool, and I think it should have been forefronted more. Especially as the Elites (I am using this as a shorthand for all the assorted immortal characters) had a first-hand connection to a lot of those developments and discoveries. There’s so much potential to explore there!

Oh yeah, and speaking of the A.I. assistants (the Sentients), they all have very normal names and are sometimes easy to confuse with people in the way they are referred to and talked about – again, a potentially cool idea that risked being frustrating and confusing at times. April, Miley, Quinn, June, I think Martin might also be one but it’s only mentioned once in the first chapter … Niek says he thought all Sentients were named April at one point. And the Sentients have bots, and manage teleportation and other conveniences. There’s a lot to unpack there too.

The setting is also endlessly fascinating, with interplanetary civilisation apparently made possible by teleportation but not really fully info-dumped in a way probably only I would have wanted to see. There’s Ignis, a hot and inhospitable planet with habitats … we don’t get a really good idea of what most of these worlds are like and how the systems are set up, is it a local group of systems or spread across the galaxy? Multiple galaxies? Like I say, farther systems and aliens are mentioned one time and that’s it. The Nishati dimension is used for the transportation of stuff, but the characters are planning some use of the technology that could mess Ignis up, but also aid in their transport of habitat materials and water or whatever to make the planet profitable … it’s difficult to track. There are other planets mentioned as well. Ytres, Nizhoni, Aeras, Hafi, Prith … and Earth is mentioned once in passing, as the origin world but there isn’t any clue as to whether it is now gone or where these all relate to each other.

Our setup ends on a cliffhanger as Thaxter calls Nolan and they start to make a deal about Nolan’s father. I’ve gone on way too long here, let’s take a look at the meters real quick.

Sex-o-meter

George and Alexander have one tasteful off-screen doink and that’s about it. Aside from that, and a lot of flirting and mooning and amusingly awkward don’t-they-realise-I’m-gay discomfort from Nolan, this is a pretty tame one.

I’m not sorry.

One mutually bristly yet warmly comforting cologne-scented firm-bicep’d man-kiss out of a possible five for The Elitist Supremacy.

Gore-o-meter

No gore to speak of. The spikes are a bit nasty (especially in the final scenes), the Elites are immortal so they can take a bit of damage but we don’t see much of it, and all in all I’m giving this one a mere half a flesh-gobbet out of a possible five.

WTF-o-meter

There is some good old-fashioned espionage-mystery in here, and the fuzzy line between “past” (still the future, for us) and “present” (distant future) is fascinating and I hope it’s further explored in the rest of the trilogy. And the Nishati dimension and of course the aliens are great WTF fodder. There’s just not enough of it to feed a growing boy, that’s all. A “concept of WTF as a kind of food stuffed into a nose-bag for readers to chew on” out of a possible “aliens walk into an exposition scene in a secret room in Nishati and say ‘what the fuck are you upright apes doing in our cloud storage’ in alien at the expositioning characters” for this one, if you follow my convoluted grammatical logic. And if you don’t, tough.

My Final Verdict

I didn’t spot a character named Garth in here. But I had a good time reading it and it left me thinking about a lot of stuff, so even if the character tangle left me feeling dumb, I came away with a positive vibe. Give it a try, maybe! Three stars, I say.

Day 11,680. 660 pages, 223,134 words. Finished .

Friends, I am really not certain about this book.

In case it wasn’t obvious from this introduction, and because I haven’t done a book-metrics post since .. ooh, I think since the heady days of The Final Fall of Man … let me just remind you how it looked when I finished, I want to say, Damorak. Back in 2016.

Yeah, so.

I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek about the book-metrics here, because I started writing this story for the first time about thirty-two years back, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I’ve been writing it, and re-writing it, and putting it away, and bringing it back out, from the days of hand-scrawling in exercise books through the electric typewriter phase, to my first PC.

If my calculations are correct, I have written this book at a rate of a solid 19 words a day since 1993.

It’s about twice the size of Damorak. It is not in fact as big as Bad Cow, which according to Calibre weighs in at 232,411 words. But damn it, it felt bigger as I was putting it together.

In fact, for anyone paying attention to this crap, Bad Cow fits neatly in between The Hound of Greyvor and reigning champion Iron Truth on the chonk-o-gram.

Anyway. It’s huge. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy (The War of Mortal Aggression), and it is nine chapters long and half of the chapters are as long as whole books.

It’s high fantasy (with a B-plot that is pure grimdark) and has world-building on a scale at once more microscopically intimate than The Final Fall of Man, and massively more extensive. I’m not sure yet whether I will release it once the editing is done (oh my God, my poor editors), or if I will set it aside until the whole trilogy is complete. Because as well as the world-building, there is interlocking story-parts and more, and I don’t want to have to retcon the first book if I fuck something up.

The main character is a self-insert farmhand-who-becomes-a-wizard I wrote when I was a teenager. She’s nothing like me (as the pronouns may have given away and a sneak peek at the cover certainly will once we get there), except she is the inheritor of a world-dominating power that she comes to realise the more she sees, may in fact be the villain of the story. Which doesn’t necessarily make them bad, but it is a truth that invites grappling.

It has a timeline and history and prehistory that covers millions of years. Its civilisations register on evolutionary timescales.  And it ties into the rest of the books I have written so far in a dozen small and large ways that I can’t wait for someone – anyone – to actually pick up on. And I dread the very real possibility that nobody will.

But … I’m probably not going to stop.

In fact, on reflection, I have decided I will become worse.

Book two (The Reaper Named Dredna) will probably be smaller. It will hopefully take less than thirty years to come out. It will, I assure you, be a lot.

Recently I picked up and read Shadecursed, book 1 of The Bestiary series, by Aeryn E. Christie. This isn’t SPSFC related, I just interacted briefly with the author on social media and decided her book sounded interesting.

And interesting it certainly was! As one would expect from an author who is also a pretty darn impressive visual artist, Shadecursed is a rich and insanely colourful tapestry of worldbuilding, characters and creatures. The series is well-named, because Kyrnis is filled with flora and fauna (no pun intended, there are fauns) of every fantastical kind, and they are all reimagined by the artist. Banshees and liori (liori are manticores [male] and sphinxes [female]), trolls and gnolls, gods and magic, and so much more. This is a huge story and it is crammed cover to cover with the sort of reckless, delighted creativity I crave.

Part of what took me so long to actually read this book wasn’t just its epic-level chonkiness, it was the pure enjoyment I took in finding something I wish there was more of – and it’s why I love indie books so much! Intricate world-creation and species backgrounds aren’t for everyone, and neither is the sort of combined fantasy and sci-fi on display here (it is an old world, but it’s had its technological revolution and feels like it’s found a balance … the mandatory bygone disasters and assorted gods notwithstanding), but for me it was just grand. When people complain that The Lord of the Rings is just people walking across a country and telling random stories about its prehistory, I’m usually the one who’s like, “yeah! I know! …why are you making that face?”

Am I comparing this book to The Lord of the Rings? I mean look, it’s not controversial to point out they’re both books, right? And you know what The Lord of the Rings didn’t have? A sick guitar solo, there I said it.

But imagine.

In short, Meadow the faun and his literal band of friends set out on a road trip to get their musical fame and fortune started, and also save the world because there’s a dread god-slaying force afoot in the mystical plane and it’s making the plants manky. And it’s impressive how seamlessly those two levels of story work together.

It has a map (made by the author)! We love a map. On this map, I’ve scrawled a red line to show more or less where this book takes our adventurers. As you can see, there’s so much more to explore!

The story is interspersed with songs, not in a distracting or clunky way but as separate little chapters to break up the monotony of the table of contents. And they’re good songs! Could this author be the elusive triple threat? Writer, artist, songwriter? I mean, that’s a rhetorical question, she literally is. Anyway, that’s the synopsis, this was meant to be a quick review. Let’s check the meters.

Sex-o-meter

There isn’t really explicit sex in the story (mainly because all the characters are different species, not that that’s necessarily an issue), for all that there are definitely interpersonal relationships and admiration, and soupçon of horny. It’s fine. It’s not the point. Three fauns out of a possible three satyrs (if you know what I mean) for Shadecursed.

Gore-o-meter

While I wouldn’t exactly call this a grimdark in faefic clothing, it’s pretty solid on the violence and body horror. From people being turned into “monsters” against their will to an assortment of dismemberments and poisonings, it’s enough to register at three flesh-gobbets out of a possible five on the gore-o-meter, which is three and a half more gobbets than I would expect from a book with a main character named Meadow the faun.

WTF-o-meter

The WTF is strong with this one, and I love it. The world is so deliciously bizarre, and so lovingly detailed, I could picture it in my mind as the characters travelled through it. It was weirder without the map, which I only really took note of after I’d finished reading – and it really can’t do the world justice anyway (although it is an excellent map). The magic systems, the creature lifecycles, the spheres of mortals and gods and dreams, it is all extremely strange, alien and yet well-told so the reader doesn’t feel out of their depth. There is a ton of unanswered questions here and I look forward to seeing where the series takes us.

My Final Verdict

Four stars! Check this book out if you ever wondered how much of a fucking flake Mister Tumnus would be if he had a smartphone, or how a cross-country road trip can be improved by adding a large A.I. mechanical truffle pig (spoiler: it improves it by about 17%), or what Middle Earth’s central energy grid would look like if Saruman had gotten his military industrial complex off the ground without those eco-terrorist ents wrecking his shit. It’s my blog I’ll say what I like.

Back in the closing years of the 20th Century, there was an odd little corner of Usenet called alt.fan.robert-jordan, or “the monkeyhouse” to its members and detractors alike. It was one of the first online communities I ever entered, approximately a week after upgrading from an electric typewriter to a PC. I’ve talked about the group fairly frequently on this blog, since – well, I owe a lot to its existence.

There were a lot of people there, on and off over the years (most famous of them, on this blog, being Mister ThePatriot himself of course). Only a few of us stayed in touch after the feet death of Usenet and the onset of the social media age, and eventually a half-dozen or so of us settled on Discord.

I was saddened to hear, just this morning, of the passing of one of the great grandmonkeys of the community, Michael “KMA” Carey.

I never did actually ask him what “KMA” stood for. I always assumed it was “Kiss My Arse” and I guess now we’re never likely to find out.

Michael and I, as fellow Australian men of a Certain Age (although his Certain Age was a decade or two past my Certain Age), enjoyed a jocular mutual piss-taking type of a relationship that (like many Australian relationships seen from an outside lens) could have been mistaken for antagonistic. We had our disagreements and our healthy differences of opinion, but he was good people – a top bloke, one might even say.

Not pictured: whatever the opinion was that we were having a healthy difference of in August 2000 for example. Unless that’s German for “the Chucky, the”. Yes, I am Chucky in case that was unclear.

All told, it’s been a good quarter-Century or so and the world is a duller, sadder place for his leaving it. But you know what they say. GNU KMA, the Internet is not going anywhere (and will probably only keep getting worse).

KMA – Common names: KMA, KMA the Thief, The Thread Stealer, The Lowdown Thief, KMA the Lowdown Thread Stealing Thief. Well known for: His collection of prize-winning daffodils, what do you think? KMA arrived some time between website updates while I wasn’t paying attention, but fitted into the community like a peenie into a hole in the wall. He became a well-liked regular, sent his photographs to DEBS, participated in a number of parties, and generally put his feet up. He is Australian, so it is more or less understandable that thievery and evil runs in his veins…this was demonstrated applaudably one dark afternoon when he snuck into the Contro Party, resplendent in his balaclava and suction-cup booties, and made off with an entire party conversation topic stuffed into a big sack with a $ sign on it. He took the conversation topic back to his pad, re-painted it, and posted it up as a series of five or six new threads, none of which made two hundred posts. The 1700 post-long (at that time) Contro Party, meanwhile, deprived of its nutrients, began to wither and die. ST. CHUCKY went absolutely spare for a short time, then got sort of cold and sarcastic, and promised sweet revenge in the form of a Bestiary entry. Aside from that, KMA fitted in rather well in the group, wallowing in the smut, laughing at the schoolyard humour, and delighting in the porn. Appearance: In the words of Constable Eddie from The Simpsons, “Classic burglar.” KMA is tall, thickset, with stubble on his chin, a scar on his cheek, a wooden leg, an eyepatch, a striped singlet, hooks for hands, and carrying that trademark sack with a $ sign on it. Hat: Balaclava, or a plain black beanie when rolled up for less formal occasions. Distinguishing features: Those daffodils again, idiot. Status: Sporadic.

From the monkeyhouse bestiary. I really did make a big fuss over him poaching topics from a Usenet thread I made. It was a different time.

He has now joined our pal Morgoth’s Curse (gone these past ten years, and still loved and remembered) in the big monkeyhouse in the sky, probably. And he will be missed.

Unlike this hat.

The whole hat thing is probably too convoluted and silly to explain, but I guess it is ultimately central to this blog since it is Hatboy’s Hatstand and I am Hatboy (as well as Chucky, yes, and Edpool…), so … sure. This could be considered part of the blog’s very reason for being. At online parties back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, one was expected to wear a hat. Actually it was just one party really. The Contro Party. Yeah, that name is probably familiar too. It’s all connected, man.

I was privileged, in my capacity as Edpool the editor, to get first look at a lot of Michael’s strange and hilarious writing, which I edited on a very informal basis. I also did some fully professional work with him and his sister on a book, but it’s the mad rambling tales of Bernie Sanders and his cross-USA murder spree, and a little story called Reborn: An old tyre with new rubber that are going to stay with me. I shall cherish them in all their stupid, smile-inducing glory. His was a unique and quirky mind, and I will remember him fondly.

But yeah, what I guess I’ll mainly remember is that one time he stole a Usenet thread idea. What the fuck mate.

So long, fucker fucky. Ride again on the winds of time.

Hur hur hur, “winds”.

It’s like the heat death of the universe, but at once stinkier and mildly perverted. Like the monkeyhouse.

This review is part of my “after sales service” for the SPSFC, or SPSFCASS. Check out the most massively over-callbacked review on my blog if you need to know more.

So, I was given the opportunity to read an ARC (advance reader’s copy) of Beasts of Prey, The Preservation of Species series book 3, by Geoff Jones. Having read the first and second books in the series (Rule of Extinction and Struggle for Existence), I was very excited to … wow, hold on, are these all 2025 books? Looks like it. Damn, Jones! Anyway I was delighted to get the chance to read the next one in the series.

Beasts of Prey is the third book in The Preservation of Species series, and the series feels like it ends here, but who knows? I feel like we’ve seen a single weird little corner of a very strange universe, and there may be more to talk about. For now, though, I will call this a satisfying trilogy and look forward to whatever’s next.

As a quick refresher on the plot, the Earth has been hammered by a comet called the Ender. Just before it hit, a bunch of rather slapdash alien pods got dropped on the USA and a collection of people – good, bad and Randall – got on board. The pods took most of the people to cold storage and some of them to a strange alien menagerie where there were also dinosaurs, and a lot of human nature and dinosaur murders occurred. Or human murders and dinosaur nature. It’s all a rich interwoven tapestry.

Bit by bit, the unexpectedly intelligent (to the aliens) humans figured out where they were and that they were on a mostly-automated caretaker ship and a hundred or so years had passed while they were in the pods. Without spoiling too much of the story, they learned more about the aliens and their plans for Earth, and in this book started to make attempts to reclaim their home planet. The damage from the Ender had been enough to stagger Earthbound humanity but not necessarily wipe it out (the gorgers needed something to eat, after all). Full credit for humanity’s doom can be shared equally between the gorgers and that age-old and bitter enemy of humanity, humanity.

Anyway, in this “final” book we get the closure of a lot of story arcs, as well as (thanks to a really clever and endlessly impressive storytelling gimmick) the opening to a lot of arcs as well. By dropping the reader in the middle, then filling out what happens next and then putting in stories from the days leading up to the Ender’s impact, we are constantly forced to reframe our good guys and bad guys (except Randall), rethink our own knee-jerk reactions (except Randall), and God damn it, Reggie’s arc, I swear I was Team Reggie for a while in the middle there but wow.

We get some highly satisfying conclusions to Kevin’s storyline (fuck Kevin), Randall’s (Jesus fucking Christ fuck fucking Randall), and a whole buffet of great moral questions as the remains of the human race attempt to rebuild. Then Tyrell figures out there might be survivors down on Earth hidden in a deep, secure underground compound full of resources, and … let me tell you my friends, you think you know. You think, “I’ve read Wool. I’ve seen my share of Fallout content. I think I’m pretty familiar with the shit that happens in post-apocalyptic bunker scenarios, thank you very much.”

You might even treat yourself to a smug, knowing little smile as the characters just amble on in there. You think you know but you don’t.

Anyway, it’s fine. You know what you’re doing, just go ahead. Nothing bad happens. Why would Geoff Jones put something awful in his story? Sure, sure; thematic and narrative consistency. Why else though?

Yikes.

Sex-o-meter

There’s, let’s say a certain amount of sexes. Some people, I feel compelled to say after three of these books, need to actually see their spouse’s body and keep it in their fucking pants until they do (it, that is, not their spouse’s body … although maybe keeping that in their pants as well would be a good reminder for them, I don’t know). Sierra and Tyrell have a near-zero-gee alien-Zoom-call fuck, and Randall continues to be gross and rapey as only Randall can. There are C.H.U.D.s in the story and they’re not known for their social delicacy (that’s not a cannibalism joke … or is it?), so they do give Randall a run for his money. Frank, the fucked-up cocaine bro we are additionally blessed with in this book, is also rapey (but not as rapey as the dudes he was human trafficking for … he still doesn’t come out of it looking good though). All in all, this is as sexually charged as one would expect or reasonably want a post-apocalyptic alien invasion story to be. Three and a half manky C.H.U.D.-boners out of a possible five and a half. What can I say, the half is important.

Gore-o-meter

As always, we have plenty of gore to enjoy. The arc of Stewart the Homophobe was very therapeutic. I bet he did a lot of “just asking questions” and his closing defence was “why won’t anyone debate me?”. The healing goo introduced in this book does somewhat lower the stakes but not too much. I remain uncertain as to whether I approve of the death fake-out, but Jones has got me so many times by now I would feel as if he didn’t like me anymore if he didn’t do a death fake-out. The gore-o-meter gave this five gobbets out of a possible five, but then I put the meter into some alien goo and it came out at three and a half. Let’s call it four, there’s plenty of gore in this. It’s a Geoff Jones book.

WTF-o-meter

Well, we learn more about the gorgers and their life cycle and every new piece of information just makes the whole thing more confusing. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I was making notes as I read, wondering if there was some reason criminals couldn’t just be torpored, and it seemed as though they did solve that issue at some point. Zap-implants can be removed or put back in, and act as birth control as well as a handy way to get Voight out of everyone’s faces. Feels like a human rights headache that would turn into a full-blown migraine by the next book, and definitely by the next generation. Can they make more? Does everyone get one? Is it voluntary until they become a Voight? This all raises a lot of questions but none of them are necessarily “WTF”. Also, with as much biomass devoured as the Earth seemed to have had done to it, would the atmosphere still be breathable? Could it sustain (human) life, let alone dinosaur … you know what? It doesn’t matter. Evidently it could, and this whole gorger thing has been going on for a while. It was actually confirmed at some point that this was how the dinosaurs died out, right? The logistics of ten billion gorgers being picked up like kids from a soccer camp is another big question mark, but not one I feel really detracted from my enjoyment. Aliens are weird. This book gets a The Cage out of a possible Lost on the WTF-o-meter.

My Final Verdict

I loved it! The preservation of species that the series is named for is also a bit of a mystery, since I suppose any number of species represented in the series could be struggling to survive and preserve themselves, but all in all this was good alien megaengineering and apocalyptic human grossness at its paradoxical finest. Heartily recommend this whole trilogy. Five stars!

This review is part of my “after sales service” for the SPSFC, or SPSFCASS. Check out the most massively over-callbacked review on my blog if you need to know more.

Recently I was given the opportunity to read an ARC (advance reader’s copy) of A Dark Hole Darkly, by SPSFC veteran Drew Melbourne. I’ve previously reviewed his Percival Gynt series of books (and The Conspiracy of Days and and The Inevitability of Fire) and found them wonderful, so when he offered me an early look at this one, I jumped at it.

This book is really something different from Melbourne’s other works, although the skilled writing and the engaging, humorous feel is much the same. Readers who enjoyed the Percival Gynt books and followed them to this book will, I think, not be disappointed – and may even be a little awestruck. I know I was. Readers considering starting with this book might then be a little surprised by the Gynt books, but – again – hopefully not disappointed by either. I can’t actually imagine a situation in which a reader would be upset with this story, but you should be aware it is a real change in gears.

This one is a whole lot more serious, and whereas main protagonist Percival Gynt explored questions of psychological development and parental challenges in a fantastical sci-fi setting, Patrick Hinkle is almost entirely down to Earth.

So, what’s it about? Well, that’s simple. Patrick’s mother is murdered, and Patrick – haver of numerous neurodivergencies that we are really just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding in this, the close of Q1 of the 21st Century – decides to try to solve it. After all, having a special brain thing makes doctors like Gregory House and detectives like Adrian Monk into super-geniuses who see things that normals miss. So why wouldn’t he use his powers for good?

The result is a simultaneously hilarious, gut-wrenching, frustrating, and beautiful series of disjointed and irrelevant fuck-ups and tangents, as Patrick learns about his own life and his mother’s past and his own psychological makeup. Which, spoilers if you didn’t read any of the blurbs or other stuff surrounding this book (and in case it wasn’t already obvious from the initialism one can form from the title), makes him an absolutely useless investigator. But a pretty darn good outsider / everyman.

It also dives into the sci-fi convention and obscure fandom worlds in such a loving and intricate way, this filk-writin’ worldcon-goin’ cosplay-failin’ dork found himself blinking away happy tears, and is doing so again while writing this review. The story that unfolds as Patrick fights through his handicaps to confront his past and deal with awkward conversations with strangers and maybe – just maybe – catch a murderer, is magical in its normality. And in the end … was the real murderer the friends we made along the way? I guess you’ll have to read the book and find out.

Sex-o-meter

There’s a bit of sex, tastefully rendered. Patrick and his girlfriend have a sex or two, and the fandom folks are their usual assortment of sweaty and horny. Patrick’s mother fucked someone in order to end up pregnant with Patrick, that much is almost certain. He wasn’t spontaneously created by midichlorians. If he had been, he’d probably be able to remember where he put his note pad (and also pod race!). The sex-o-meter gives this a Sir Alexander Dane out of a possible D.C. Parlov, which makes sense if you’re a very specific subspecies of nerd.

Gore-o-meter

There’s a murder, less tastefully rendered. Not much else, although once we get into the nitty gritty of the whole murder explanation … yeah, there’s a bit of violence there. Not a gory one though, all in all. This story is grounded in what we will call “reality” until a better term for it comes along. One and a half flesh-gobbets out of a possible five for A Dark Hole Darkly.

WTF-o-meter

There’s … well, there’s an underlying story here that will make you think. It’s not the rich cosmic WTF that we’re used to, but it’s an inner WTF that is entirely our own. It’s the WTFs we made along the way. I already used that joke in the main review, didn’t I? Damn it, I’m using it twice. Plus, of course, the final sequence of chapters in the story are extremely odd and left me to wonder whether I was satisfied or frustrated by them. Then I realised that was the point. The WTF is the point. It’s the point we made along the way. I’m just going with the whole “along the way” thing now. A Dark Hole Darkly gets an Eon out of a possible Fastball on the WTF-o-meter, which makes sense if you’re a very specific subspecies of nerd again.

My Final Verdict

I’m going to be thinking about this one for a long time. I wholeheartedly recommend and enjoyed all of it, even when it was making me uncomfortable and especially when I was ranting to anyone who would listen about this crazy-arse book and the ending the crazy-arse author had decided to slap onto it like a giggling taxidermist inventing the platypus. Five stars.

Maybe you’re a neurodivergent person suffering from similar conditions, and you find the author’s lived experiences inapplicable to your own, or insensitive in their depiction. I honestly can’t say I find that likely, but I don’t know. I’m just a dude who reads books and has a bunch of neurodivergent and neurotypical friends (so many friends, seriously) to whom I would confidently recommend this book, and is himself an ’80s kid with one (1) experience with therapy where he was told his coping mechanisms seem pretty solid and to come back if he actually starts suicidally ideating. So ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Look, for someone who words for a living as well as a hobby, I’m still just a silly ol’ boy doing his best when it comes to the language surrounding neurodivergence and all the other still-developing issues of our time. I hope I can clarify that a psychological condition can literally handicap one’s ability to do things that neurotypical people seem to take for granted, without flatly declaring said sufferer is somehow broken and less useful to society. But then, many would openly agree that yeah, “broken” is in the ballpark and if there was a glowing green mildly radioactive pill they could take to fix themselves, just for example … look, just read the book. And stop reading my footnotes, they’re really not relevant.

This review is part of my “after sales service” for the SPSFC, or SPSFCASS. Check out the most massively over-callbacked review on my blog if you need to know more.

Recently I had the opportunity to read an ARC (advance reader’s copy) of On Impact, book 2 of the Reliance Sinclair space opera series, by Heather Texle. As is the ongoing gimmick in SPSFCASS, I read and reviewed the first book in the series On Impulse, for the SPSFC back in ’23, and so I was sent the next one to check out. Yay!

I enjoyed the first book in this series and was happy to come back to the team and the premise that had been set up there. I wanted to know what our heroes Reliance, Walnut, Felix and the rest (okay, Wright is fine too) had been up to, what was next for them in their struggle against the techno-corporate war machine, and maybe settle some old scores along the way.

Iko is a real cunt and if he doesn’t get his just desserts at the end I’m giving this book three stars … I know he was a plot device but he was a very irritating plot device, and I wanted him to face creative mob-honour justice for his crime of being a useless piece of shit.

– Edpool, during the previous book

I definitely did go in this time thinking I’d give the book three stars if Iko wasn’t kicked really hard in the balls, and this had become something of a running joke and I am a sucker for a well-drawn-out running joke. But anyway. That was my stance and I’m sticking to it.

In the previous installment of the series, Reliance Sinclair went up against a mad scientist and the sinister forces behind the mad scientist and ended up with a chip inserted in her, and a cute fuzzy hamster as a companion (which is better than getting a chip as a companion and … well). She also teamed up with Wright and the unit that were tracking her for the crime she didn’t commit, and – well I’ll try not to spoil this story or the previous one, but the Big Bad kind of got away with it (because sometimes blowing the lid off things just gets you scalded) and the mad scientist had a mad acolyte who wound up in a sci-fi bughouse. Cue the main driving points of this story, specifically:

Mad acolyte returns!Brain chip causing health problems!Forbidden weapons escalation!Quid pro quo, Clarice Reliance!

This story at once continues the setup of the first book, raises the stakes, and puts our protagonists into a new case together. There’s some friction, not only with Reliance and the fallout from her adventures in the previous story, but with the little complication of her brain chip causing neurological problems that hamper her ability to do her job, and ultimately drive her to make some pretty dangerous choices.

Were they they right choices? I’ll let you be the judge of that. But as is so often the case, with haunted pasts and dangerous choices come secrets, and it is the secrets – particularly between Reliance and Wright – that cause the real issues.

This is all handled nicely against a backdrop of an action/intrigue story that clips along nice and fast and has plenty of exciting little action pieces and some great character interactions. The team has to find some gnarly augmented bad guys, prevent a war from breaking out that will kill millions and make a ton of money for the corporate military industrial complex, and live to fight another day. Preferably while making sure Walnut has plenty of carrots and Felix doesn’t have to sic the cleaning robots on anyone for their own good.

I really enjoyed the story – none of it got in the way of itself, which is impressive when you’re spinning a set of trope-plates including a Stakes Could Not Be Higher, a Haunted Past, a couple of Keeping Secrets For Noble Reasons Kind Of, and a Chain ‘O Command Romance for good measure. I made most of those up but you know what I mean. Any one of these plot points had the potential to derail the whole story and make it drag, but they didn’t. They all worked together nicely. Which is more than I can say for Reliance and her pals, a lot of the time. But you know. They’ll get it. Maybe she can attach her blaster to her wrist with a loop of wool like a kid with mittens. That’ll solve, like, 90% of her problems right there!

There were a few other little things I noticed in the first book, such as the moderate but slightly heavy-handed ageism and the focus on wardrobe and appearance changes, that were toned right down in this part. It wasn’t like they needed to be fixed – indeed, I appreciated these things as statements in the first book – but they did not need to be repeated and their dialling-back left room for other themes and storytelling tricks to be fleshed out more. Reliance’s dilemma concerning the chip, of course, first and foremost – and most likely further facets of that will be explored as we continue.

And I for one can’t wait!

I also claim First Fan-Art Rights to the book, to add to my accolades.

Sex-o-meter

So what do we have on the ol’ sex-o-meter? Well, Reliance female gazes the shit out of Wright, so there’s that. For the most part they keep it in their pants and focus on the mission, though. I noted in the previous book that Reliance and Wright had a real will-they-won’t-they thing going on that would probably continue, and I was … Wright about that. Now the sex-o-meter is just mad about that pun, and is giving On Impact a single raised middle finger out of a bionically-enhanced seven-armed person giving the finger seven times. I think it secretly liked the pun.

Gore-o-meter

As in the last book, we have a bit of cyber-gore and body-modification, and a few killings, but all in all it’s not a particularly gory one. Two flesh-gobbets out of a possible five once again for this installment.

WTF-o-meter

On Impact is another very solid conspiracy / adventure / manhunt procedural with some intrigue and a couple of puzzles, but not much deep crazy WTF. The only truly un-answerable question in the book was whether you’d rather have a robot cat AI avatar, or a chip-enhanced super guinea pig as a pet. And that remains an open question, because both Felix and ol’ potato butt had some wonderful moments in this story. I am also uncertain what the “impact” was that the title refers to in its ongoing theme, but I don’t know if I’d call it “WTF”. The WTF-o-meter gives this a Nyif Nyif out of a possible Boo.

My Final Verdict

This was another great adventure in the Reliance Sinclair series. Lots of fun and easy to read, with a good clear plot and plenty of action and enjoyable characters and dialogue to keep it rolling along. I cared about what happened to all of them. Especially Iko. Four stars! Read into that what you will.

I’m defaulting to  the problematically gendered but theoretically gender-neutral “bad guys” here because “baddies” has also shifted in meaning and is also now weirdly gendered and I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, we’re talking about villains of various genders here and one of them has even bigger pecs than Wright although they’re really more off-putting than comforting and I would hesitate to acknowledge that this makes him what I’d call a baddie, but I digress. Disgracefully.