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Voids by Tim Jeffreys
In a future society suffering crippling over-population and food crises, Danny Seraphine works as a Sterilization Agent tracking down men who sire children and then desert them. Caught between a violent faction that wants to kill him and a wife desperate to have a child Danny struggles to understand the meaning of a ghostly void that haunts his days and invades his dreams.Voids is a compelling and thought-provoking tale of one man walking a tightrope between his personal and professional life. When the fists start to fly and the betrayals and accusations pile up, will Danny discover what it really takes to be a man?
- GenresScience Fiction
Paperback
First published February 14, 2015
57 people want to read
About the author
Tim Jeffreys
111 books46 followersTim Jeffreys is a horror weird fiction writer, originally from Manchester, UK.
His short fiction has been published in various international anthologies and magazines. He also edits and compiles the Dark Lane Anthologies where he gets to publish talented writers from all over the world. In his own work he incorporates elements of horror, fantasy, absurdist humour, science-fiction and anything else he wants to toss into the pot to create his own brand of weird fiction. Tim is also a talented artist and gained a university honours degree in Graphic Arts and Design in 2000.
His short fiction has been published in various international anthologies and magazines. He also edits and compiles the Dark Lane Anthologies where he gets to publish talented writers from all over the world. In his own work he incorporates elements of horror, fantasy, absurdist humour, science-fiction and anything else he wants to toss into the pot to create his own brand of weird fiction. Tim is also a talented artist and gained a university honours degree in Graphic Arts and Design in 2000.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 17, 2016
Voids is a very good SF novella set in the dystopian future where overpopulation and hunger rules the day. I won’t give away any more plot than the synopsis already has. While there were no huge revelations in this one, Jeffreys and Greaves did a very good job of developing the main character and painting a pretty bleak picture of the future in a short page count.
While not a big fan of this particular genre, I do like the occasional Sci-Fi read and this one was not too heavy on the tech speak and I didn’t get lost in a lot of complicated science. Well done.
*I received an advanced copy of this work from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
While not a big fan of this particular genre, I do like the occasional Sci-Fi read and this one was not too heavy on the tech speak and I didn’t get lost in a lot of complicated science. Well done.
*I received an advanced copy of this work from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
January 28, 2016
This is a thought provoking and emotionally engaging read. In a near dystopian future society is struggling under the burden of over population. But in a startling twist the Man decides to stick it to the men, and it's irresponsible fathers who feel the wrath of the state. The story follows Danny, a government enforcer as he struggles with the demons of his past. It's a fast-paced story of ideas with a satisfying emotional whammy.
February 2, 2016
Against a backdrop of pollution, food shortages and over population, Danny Seraphine struggles with the past and the morality of his job as a Sterilization Agent. Filled with great little dystopian details - Solarspheres, Want-O-Marts, Mesmerichannels et al - it deftly manages to balance cold technology against the eternal primitive longings of the human heart. The only fault I could find with this is its brevity. Original, tense, and darker than the inside of a Hellhound's belly. Loved it.
February 25, 2016
Science fiction novella Voids by Tim Jeffreys and Martin Greaves isn't a cheery read. The title says it all - this is a story about the absences in people's lives, the chasms left when something of value is lost. Yet it's not hard going, the pace and writing carrying you through a sad but worthwhile tale.
Population problems are a common feature of social science fiction, as we face the fear of an over-crowded planet (Public Enemy's less well-received follow-up album). The sort of laws society might use to tackle this come up, and often appear draconian. Voids handles things more subtley.
Danny Seraphine is a sterilisation agent. He hunts down runaway fathers who are dropping kids left right and centre then not taking responsibility for them. Once he finds them he stops them carrying on that way, courtesy of his sterilisation gun.
When I started reading the story, I feared this was going to turn into a preachy story about individual liberty, in which Danny learns the error of his ways and joins the resistance. Instead, the subject is tackled more obliquely. Danny just gets on with his job. We see political opponents, and they don't come across well, but neither are the sterilisations left unchallenged. I didn't feel like the novel was passing judgement on this way of tackling social problems. It just put it out there and explored some of the consequences.
The exposition wasn't perfectly smooth - I'm not a big fan of the big exposition dump - and used a few longer paragraphs of dialogue unconvincing enough to annoy me. But it's rare for any story to avoid a red mark on my anti-exposition meter, I've read books from big names that were worse for this, and the few exposition problems stopped once the story got into its stride.
That might make this sound like a cold, abstract story, which it isn't. Part of the reason the setting's morality isn't grappled with directly is that Danny faces more personal problems. His marriage is falling apart. He's haunted by the memory of their stillborn child. His wife desperately wants a child, but Danny's reticence and fear of sterility hang over them. And then there's the fear behind that reticence, as Danny considers his own past and how it has shaped him.
All of this hit me right in the feels. I've dealt with similar problems, and so a lot about Danny's life struck a chord with me. I felt that it was handled sensitively, not exploiting the emotions these things bring, but teasing them out for readers to explore.
As a result, I can't guarantee that this novella will strike the same emotional chord with others that it did with me. But personally, I thought that Danny's experiences made for a compelling and moving story. By making the story personal, Greaves and Jeffreys were able to open up the theme of their setting without beating readers over the head with it.
As a novella, Voids was the perfect length for the story it had to tell - long enough to go into depth and have real emotional punch, but not so long that it out-stayed its welcome. It opens up emotional issues that society often sweeps under the carpet, handling them with great deftness. At eighty pages long, it's well worth the time it takes to read.
Population problems are a common feature of social science fiction, as we face the fear of an over-crowded planet (Public Enemy's less well-received follow-up album). The sort of laws society might use to tackle this come up, and often appear draconian. Voids handles things more subtley.
Danny Seraphine is a sterilisation agent. He hunts down runaway fathers who are dropping kids left right and centre then not taking responsibility for them. Once he finds them he stops them carrying on that way, courtesy of his sterilisation gun.
When I started reading the story, I feared this was going to turn into a preachy story about individual liberty, in which Danny learns the error of his ways and joins the resistance. Instead, the subject is tackled more obliquely. Danny just gets on with his job. We see political opponents, and they don't come across well, but neither are the sterilisations left unchallenged. I didn't feel like the novel was passing judgement on this way of tackling social problems. It just put it out there and explored some of the consequences.
The exposition wasn't perfectly smooth - I'm not a big fan of the big exposition dump - and used a few longer paragraphs of dialogue unconvincing enough to annoy me. But it's rare for any story to avoid a red mark on my anti-exposition meter, I've read books from big names that were worse for this, and the few exposition problems stopped once the story got into its stride.
That might make this sound like a cold, abstract story, which it isn't. Part of the reason the setting's morality isn't grappled with directly is that Danny faces more personal problems. His marriage is falling apart. He's haunted by the memory of their stillborn child. His wife desperately wants a child, but Danny's reticence and fear of sterility hang over them. And then there's the fear behind that reticence, as Danny considers his own past and how it has shaped him.
All of this hit me right in the feels. I've dealt with similar problems, and so a lot about Danny's life struck a chord with me. I felt that it was handled sensitively, not exploiting the emotions these things bring, but teasing them out for readers to explore.
As a result, I can't guarantee that this novella will strike the same emotional chord with others that it did with me. But personally, I thought that Danny's experiences made for a compelling and moving story. By making the story personal, Greaves and Jeffreys were able to open up the theme of their setting without beating readers over the head with it.
As a novella, Voids was the perfect length for the story it had to tell - long enough to go into depth and have real emotional punch, but not so long that it out-stayed its welcome. It opens up emotional issues that society often sweeps under the carpet, handling them with great deftness. At eighty pages long, it's well worth the time it takes to read.
January 26, 2016
Science fiction is not a genre I naturally gravitate towards for fear the text will be heavy with inventive but tedious descriptions of the technical or mechanical, and more than that— be set in that awful place called space. However, having read Voids, I now understand that just because a story is set in future time doesn’t mean it’s going to be emotionless and full of machines or even be called Science Fiction for that matter. Voids is set around the year 2050 when there are eleven billion humans on earth — set when, according to the main character Danny Seraphine, ‘one out of every six people …. goes to bed hungry….pollution’s endemic and all the resources are running out.’
Fatherhood is the central theme in the story, and there are little surprises that drift into the scenes that help the reader to keep focussed on this not too distant time in the future and that are also plausible enough that they don’t demand too much of a leap of faith, but instead allow the reader to easily imagine living there alongside Danny’s increasingly difficult life. He has a job, you see, that leaves this reader at least, both slightly shocked and grimly happy for him at first. However turmoil enters the story fairly quickly and Danny has an all too present-day tension in his relationship with his girlfriend, Emily.
I really did find this book quite riveting, and I very much appreciated the well positioned moments of delicious atmospheric detail such as:- ‘Broad collars of brown sludge hung from every window, advertising the place as a veritable guest house for all manner of slime moulds and damp spores that might care to take up residence.’
This is a gritty and tense story that draws you in relentlessly until you become very afraid for Danny Seraphine and what will become of him.
Fatherhood is the central theme in the story, and there are little surprises that drift into the scenes that help the reader to keep focussed on this not too distant time in the future and that are also plausible enough that they don’t demand too much of a leap of faith, but instead allow the reader to easily imagine living there alongside Danny’s increasingly difficult life. He has a job, you see, that leaves this reader at least, both slightly shocked and grimly happy for him at first. However turmoil enters the story fairly quickly and Danny has an all too present-day tension in his relationship with his girlfriend, Emily.
I really did find this book quite riveting, and I very much appreciated the well positioned moments of delicious atmospheric detail such as:- ‘Broad collars of brown sludge hung from every window, advertising the place as a veritable guest house for all manner of slime moulds and damp spores that might care to take up residence.’
This is a gritty and tense story that draws you in relentlessly until you become very afraid for Danny Seraphine and what will become of him.
February 1, 2016
In the near future, overpopulation is dealt with by a special force of individuals known as Sterilization Agents. Each one is tasked with tracking down deadbeat fathers and ensuring (legally) that these men no longer procreate by zapping them in the groin with a special gun that effectively neuters them. Danny Seraphine is one such agent who finds particular satisfaction in his job, perhaps due to the fact that his own father left his family when Seraphine was only 9 years old.
Aside from his job, Seraphine leads a somewhat normal life, though not without complications. Seraphine and his wife, Emily, are having pregnancy issues. After their first child, Marnie, was stillborn, Seraphine isn't sure if he wants another, despite Emily's eagerness. Also, Seraphine's little brother, Zack, is in prison, known as The Farm, and Seraphine has yet to visit. And then there's the little matter of the ethereal transparent shapes Seraphine keeps seeing wherever he goes, the mysterious, titular voids.
Add to the above mix an introduction to a future society and its various technologies and you've got a recipe for an enjoyable read. Voids is also a quick read, and not just because it's a novella. The prose sings as it leaps from the page, urging the reader on to the next. And by the time the reader reaches the end, all of the plot threads have been neatly resolved. I highly recommend Voids to anyone who reads Science Fiction or to anyone with any kind of experience (be it firsthand or otherwise) with deadbeat dads.
Aside from his job, Seraphine leads a somewhat normal life, though not without complications. Seraphine and his wife, Emily, are having pregnancy issues. After their first child, Marnie, was stillborn, Seraphine isn't sure if he wants another, despite Emily's eagerness. Also, Seraphine's little brother, Zack, is in prison, known as The Farm, and Seraphine has yet to visit. And then there's the little matter of the ethereal transparent shapes Seraphine keeps seeing wherever he goes, the mysterious, titular voids.
Add to the above mix an introduction to a future society and its various technologies and you've got a recipe for an enjoyable read. Voids is also a quick read, and not just because it's a novella. The prose sings as it leaps from the page, urging the reader on to the next. And by the time the reader reaches the end, all of the plot threads have been neatly resolved. I highly recommend Voids to anyone who reads Science Fiction or to anyone with any kind of experience (be it firsthand or otherwise) with deadbeat dads.
February 15, 2016
For a novella there is a lot going on in Voids: the world building of an overpopulated near future dystopia as well as the story of a man in crisis who realizes he has made all the wrong decisions in life and doesn't know how to fix them. Ultimately the science fiction trappings are just the backdrop for the very human story that Voids tells, but it is detailed and intriguing enough that I wished to learn more. Hopefully the author will return to it in another work.
I enjoyed reading about the relationship between Danny and his wife. I think we can all identify with the frustration of being in a situation gone bad and being unable to make things better.
In closing, Voids surprised me with its human element, and it was a welcome surprise. Recommended for all speculative fiction fans, 4 stars.
I enjoyed reading about the relationship between Danny and his wife. I think we can all identify with the frustration of being in a situation gone bad and being unable to make things better.
In closing, Voids surprised me with its human element, and it was a welcome surprise. Recommended for all speculative fiction fans, 4 stars.
January 25, 2016
I received this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.
The book was well written, but I'm not sure exactly what the author was going for with the plot. The synopsis suggests than the hero is working for a government sanctioned organisation that has men that leave behind children they've sired neutered. Going about his business he also sees a strange floating object he calls the void every now and then.
Firstly, I'm really confused about the main concept. Fair enough, fathers who abandon their children are scum, and the world is over-populated, I get it. But what about mothers who abandon their kids? This isn't even mentioned. Do the authors think that only men can be dreadful parents? And what about extenuating situations? What happens when people get divorced and start a new family? Or get amnesia, or some other mental illness? It leaves a lot of loose ends that never get fully explained.
And that leads us onto the Void. Our hero tends to see it mostly at times of stress, and he's a very stressed man. It seems to get bigger as the book progresses, and has a vague ominous feeling to it. What could it be? A hallucination? A portal into an alternative world? Well, your guess is as good as mine. I still don't know. At one point in the book it says, 'and now he knew what it was'.
That was it. It was never mentioned again. So, what was it? Confused.com
The main character, Danny, is not just an anti-hero, but incredibly unlikable. He thinks of nobody but himself through the entire novelette. He seems utterly baffled when other character express any semblance of emotion, and cannot fathom people having an opinion that differs from his own. I hated him.
I will however, repeat the fact that the story is well written. Easy enough to read and it's clear the authors have ability. Unfortunately, I did not see it showcased in this book.
The book was well written, but I'm not sure exactly what the author was going for with the plot. The synopsis suggests than the hero is working for a government sanctioned organisation that has men that leave behind children they've sired neutered. Going about his business he also sees a strange floating object he calls the void every now and then.
Firstly, I'm really confused about the main concept. Fair enough, fathers who abandon their children are scum, and the world is over-populated, I get it. But what about mothers who abandon their kids? This isn't even mentioned. Do the authors think that only men can be dreadful parents? And what about extenuating situations? What happens when people get divorced and start a new family? Or get amnesia, or some other mental illness? It leaves a lot of loose ends that never get fully explained.
And that leads us onto the Void. Our hero tends to see it mostly at times of stress, and he's a very stressed man. It seems to get bigger as the book progresses, and has a vague ominous feeling to it. What could it be? A hallucination? A portal into an alternative world? Well, your guess is as good as mine. I still don't know. At one point in the book it says, 'and now he knew what it was'.
That was it. It was never mentioned again. So, what was it? Confused.com
The main character, Danny, is not just an anti-hero, but incredibly unlikable. He thinks of nobody but himself through the entire novelette. He seems utterly baffled when other character express any semblance of emotion, and cannot fathom people having an opinion that differs from his own. I hated him.
I will however, repeat the fact that the story is well written. Easy enough to read and it's clear the authors have ability. Unfortunately, I did not see it showcased in this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 31, 2016
Voids is an well written short story set in the near future. Human overpopulation has become a problem and the world needs answers. The future painted blends the bleakness of a society that knows it's faltering with the ability to ignore it all with technological advances - not a new idea, but one that seems more realistic and grounded in the world we currently know.
It's all just a backdrop though, this is a story that looks at hurt and betrayal. Danny, Emily, and Zack have all known hurt, they've just found different ways to cope. Jeffreys lays their psyches out before you in a slow reveal that keeps you hanging on for more. All three carry scars from their suffering, we see how these things have changed them, yet also we see glimmers of who they've always been, their core identity lingering inside them despite everything.
It's a dark and powerful read. It pokes at emotions many people have felt, it possibly even needs a trigger warning for some, but there are glimpses of light too. As much as it shows the abyss, it also shows a way out. This is a book for people that like poking around inside brains, especially in the shadowy corners.
I received a preview copy from the author.
It's all just a backdrop though, this is a story that looks at hurt and betrayal. Danny, Emily, and Zack have all known hurt, they've just found different ways to cope. Jeffreys lays their psyches out before you in a slow reveal that keeps you hanging on for more. All three carry scars from their suffering, we see how these things have changed them, yet also we see glimmers of who they've always been, their core identity lingering inside them despite everything.
It's a dark and powerful read. It pokes at emotions many people have felt, it possibly even needs a trigger warning for some, but there are glimpses of light too. As much as it shows the abyss, it also shows a way out. This is a book for people that like poking around inside brains, especially in the shadowy corners.
I received a preview copy from the author.
March 24, 2016
This is a fantastic little novella that packs a lot in to its 80 odd pages, from love and betrayal to global food shortages, over population and the cold hard effects of too much technology. We follow Danny Seraphine, a sterilization agent whose job it is to find those who are contributing to over population and to stop them adding to it further, more than a thankless task. Meanwhile his personal life is not going brilliantly either as his marriage is strained by his wife's desire to have a child and his lack of enthusiasm for being a father. And so we have a story that combines good and bad on all fronts and poses the question of how dark our futures may really be and how much control we really have over them. An excellent little read that packs a punch and a half.
November 29, 2016
A good dystopian/scifi read. I think we also need sterilization agents in our world.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews