Reality Challenged

The Other Universes #1

by Ubiquitous Bubba

A young psionic is given an impossible Save the Multiverse. Fortunately, there's a 4 ton armored poet and his mercenary friend to help out. There's also a party of trans-universal dungeon explorers, a dragon, reluctant royalty, a girl with way too many heads, a pair of coffee drinkers, a rock band, and a man who has lost his mammal status. Not all universes are alike. Some might not be so easy to leave. That's the good news. This humorous sci-fi adventure is the first book of The Other Universes series.

Genres: Science Fiction

397 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 12, 2012

About the author

Ubiquitous Bubba (if that's his real name) spends a significant amount of time surrounded by imaginary characters from bizarre universes. He's been known to hold conversations with animals, inanimate objects, and food. These discussions frequently diverge into philosophy, speculations on Reality/Unreality, and the proper role of imagination in society.

Growing up in Texas, he studied the lore of the Storyteller, the mysterious art of the tall tale, and the pervasive universal existence of Bubbas. They're everywhere. As he wandered universes, he discovered that there's always a Bubba around when you need one.

Ubiquitous is also a drummer, who has somewhat narrow and specialized musical tastes. A fan of progressive and hard rock styles, he's also known to incorporate some funk just to keep himself entertained.

Ubiquitous Bubba enjoys relaxing at home with his wife and kids. He enjoys telling stories, eating refried beans, and holding the recliner down. It hasn't gotten away yet, but one can't be too careful.

Reviews

[Kathleen Garlock · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to describe the indescribable? You get a Bubba to do it for you. And not just any Bubba. You need Ubiquitous Bubba. Only he can trade your reality for any one of hundreds in the crazy chaos of the genuinely funny multiverse that is Reality Challenged (The Other Universes, #1)

The action in this novel is so fast and furious, it was hard for a linear minded reader like myself to keep up. Worlds and universes come and go, filled with strange creatures and odd people who jump from place to place at an almost jarring speed. At times it's hard to keep track of which character is in what world, because everything moves at such a frenetic pace. The only constant was humor. This is a very funny book, filled with absurd characters and laugh out loud dialogue. It's almost too funny, if there could be such a thing. At times I found myself wishing for the action to slow and center upon the principal characters so they could stop exchanging snappy repartee and reveal more about themselves. Oddly, I was more invested in peripheral characters like Numnel, Kenny and Mack than in Xorian or even Psychann. They somehow seemed more real.

I would highly recommend Reality Challenged to anyone who doesn't mind taking reality for a spin. But check your seatbelts; it's going to be a wild ride.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest and nonreciprocal review.

[Steph Bennion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this is certainly crammed with ideas. It read like something Terry Pratchett, Salvador Dali and Matt Groening may have concocted after a drunken night watching Time Bandits on a loop. I particularly liked the dialogue between Xorian and the Krazhdi (can I buy a book of the poetry anywhere?). The book does need a good editor to take it by the scruff of the neck and give it a shaking, particularly around point-of-view changes. However, Reality Challenged has some wonderfully-original ideas and characters; with a bit of tidying, this slice of the surreal could be something really special.

[Kevin Andrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

My summer reading schedule began with a delightfully humorous story called “Reality Challenged” by science fiction writer Ubiquitous Bubba. The story follows the lives and adventures of an interstellar smuggler-mercenary named Xorian and his companion known as the Krazhdi. The pair travels the “multiverse” in their ship the “Chaos Effect”, moving in an out of different realities each with its own delights, perils, and well, challenges. The relationship between these two principal characters is well established with the Krazhdi referring to himself as “One” and to Xorian as “Ones pet”. This sparks a witty and hilarious sequence of dialogs which continues throughout the novel. When the two encounter Psychann, a young girl with the power to invade minds and move object between realities of the multiverse, the action heats up.

The book is well written, with an intelligent narrative and good dialog. The humor is almost non-stop and the interaction between the multitudes of bizarre characters makes them quite memorable. I could easily see Lewis Black, starring as Xorian, reeling in pain as the Krazdhi pummels him with wave after wave of its unique style of poetry. From a scientific standpoint don’t be alarmed. The scientific terminology is basic and used quite well throughout the novel. My only issue was the sheer number of characters in the story was sometimes be a bit overwhelming.

This story is a little different than your run-of–the-mill science fiction read, but you’ll be delighted with this trek through the multiverse. As you read it I challenge you to stop smiling.

[Paul Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first started reading this book I didn't know what to expect. But this isn't the kind of story you can just classify and let it go at that. It has a shipload of very colorful and eccentric characters, including an enormous, armored alien with a passion for reciting bizarre poetry. A tough mercenary human he calls his pet, and a blue haired teen-age girl who has psychic abilities that make it possible to move between universes with her mind. Now all of this is colorful in itself, but there is a lot of story here, spread out over many universes and a lot of characters with separate story lines that all come together into a complete whole. I never play spoiler so I will leave out the details in favor of the overall impression that this book creates.
It is a funny, irreverent and witty book that has some laugh out loud moments and character interactions. At it's core is a pretty good science fiction yarn that has meat on the bone and more than enough depth to keep even the most demanding reader interested. I enjoyed the book and thought that it paid off very well at the end. There is enough material to spawn a whole series of novels and my understanding is that there are more in the offing. Good! I look forward to reading the next one.

[J.D. Tew · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a Multiverse where change occurs on the tail of the previous, a girl with a gift finds her way.

Reality Challenged is a story driven by the quirks and unique behaviors of its characters. The unlikely teenage hero Psychann has been given an interesting gift by this author: to Trade. Trading is a concept that is a wonderful innovation from Bubba. If it isn't for this ability and the goof-troop of characters she is associated with, Psychann would be lost.

At times I found myself turning back the pages to find what I missed. The story is jam-packed with action and sometimes left me thinking if I should slow down, but I never did. Bubba leaves you wondering: what is going to happen next? There were points in the quick transitions where I may have been lost, but just when I thought I was too far gone—I was reeled back by the clever and humorous characters.

Overall, Bubba offers entertaining well developed characters and fast paced action. I would recommend on that basis alone, because my daughter loves funny Science Fiction.

[Brian Burt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very entertaining read. The humor, in the the spirit of writers like Douglas Adams, is nonetheless unique. The characters are quirky, artfully imagined, and engaging. I especially enjoyed the "odd couple" sniping between Xorian and the Krazhdj, as well as the paranoid interactions between Zeke and his "real-imaginary" sidekicks and the sophomoric behavior of the WoW-derived cast of MMORPG adventurers questing for the Prime Universe.

Ultimately, this book is just plain fun. And how can you not love a pseudonym like Ubiquitous Bubba? Very nicely done!

[A.K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall: A great premise in need of some heavy handed developmental editing.

Review: I wanted to like this book, I really did. The premise sounded so cool and I love funny sci fi (a la H2G2). I tried, I really tried. Unfortunately, this book was just not for me.

First, I will mention the things I did like about the book:

The concept of the world was really cool. “Trading” was fantastic even though the rules the book laid out for it didn’t make any sense (a room of photons does not have the same mass as an entire meal; if you’re trading mass and the rule is that the universe can’t lose mass, why can’t you just trade within the same universe; etc). The Krazhdj was a fun character with great dialogue. His poetry was a clear allusion to Douglas Adams and the Vogons, and I laughed at “The Harbinger of Daisies” which is definitely a thing I’m going to say now. Some of the prose was clever and, again, slightly reminiscent of DA (such as calling a lava pool a “dry heat” and threating an alien with the torture of watching human cartoons). At times the story devolved into non sequiturs and dry satire (humorous exchanges between a flying warthog and a friendly seamonster; a man who loses his “mammal” status) and those moments are the ones to really live for in this story.

Unfortunately, One cannot overlook the improper pacing and plotting…

“Show don’t tell” is the old standard trope of literature. This story does nothing but tell. It reads like someone had a really crazy dream that didn’t make any sense but they’re sitting around the breakfast table trying to recount it to you in all its wonder and mystery, but every word they speak makes the tangibility of the thing slip further and further away until they just shake their head and say, “Well, it was a cool dream.” And then you just have to take their word for it.

Putting aside the myriad of grammar/punctuation mistakes and rather…creative…use of capitalization (which could have been really cool if there were any rhyme or reason for any of it, but it seemed completely random, as if the shift key were broken when the book was being typed), the book honestly just made no sense. At first I would go back and reread until I could figure out (kind of) what was going on, but then I just got so annoyed with that that I stopped doing it and just let myself be lost. It’s divided into short and frequently confusing POV subsections, but even within those it jumps from POV to POV randomly and haphazardly, sometimes using only pronouns so you have no way of knowing what is happening to who.

Things were often obnoxiously easy for our heroes. Captured by the government and turned over to an unsupervised brain surgeon robot who will implant pain chips in your head? No problem, just grab its exposed wires and unplug it. Because no one thought to, you know, build it without accessible power cords? Don’t have enough power in your ship to do the thing that you need to do? No problem, just do it anyway. Black market shipment of goods stolen by pirates and you must explain this to the alien bat queen who lost her money? No problem, just distract her by complimenting her hair. (And yes, I understand that the vanity of this alien race was a minor plot point, it was still obnoxiously easy.)

The plotting was incoherent. In Chapter 9 (of 13) is where you find out what the book is about. There are some books that sweep you in with multiple points of view, characters living in their own little worlds until some event brings them all together, and at the end you see how everything was connected. It seemed as if this is what this book was attempting, but unfortunately fell short. Instead of feeling like a collection of multiple unrelated events that would soon converge, it felt mildly schizophrenic.

Most of the dialogue was forced. Anything we needed to know about the characters we were told instead of shown, so it was hard to care about any of them or believe they were real. The characters and dialogue only existed to further the plot, which raced by too fast to be even called “fast paced”.

Here is an example:

“She caught the first six victims before they understood what was happening. Ert Traded three into deep space before the others were aware of his presence. Psychann teleported the next kidnapper deep below the surface, crushing him in the bedrock. Locked in a psionic struggle, Ert fought to retain his grip on the universe. In a desperate move, he teleported his assailant to the surface of the sun. Psychann crushed the skull of one man and seized the last in a vice-like mental grip.”

This is how the entire thing is written…like a book report. Told, not shown. Like someone recounting an event instead of you living it with them.

Overall, this story has an incredibly cool and unique concept that needs some serious heavy handed editing. I would read a second version if it had significant developmental work done. There is a ton of potential here.

[K.A. Krisko · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I’m a fan of Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett/Spider Robinson, and ‘Reality Challenged’ looked like it fell into the same category. And indeed, it starts out with the same irreverent, ridiculous humor. You are dropped right into the middle of the action in a bizarre set of alternate universes in which anything even remotely possible can, and does, happen. From then until the end, the action is non-stop, with the characters boomeranging from one crisis to the next at breakneck speed.

Several of the characters are well-drawn and unique: in particular, the over-sized alien who refers to itself as One and recites unintelligible poetry in every situation, and Xorian, a Han-Solo-type character and the pilot of a stolen pirate spaceship. There’s a plethora of other characters, including the female lead, a young teen named Psychann, who I unfortunately never felt much for, a large panicky guy named Zeke who I couldn’t figure out at all, and a guy who can make himself invisible, who was likable enough, but didn’t seem to have any family or backstory.

And then there are others - lots of others. In fact, I couldn’t keep track of them. The story switches point-of-view so rapidly and so many times that I was often hard-pressed to figure out who I was following, and I was a lot more hard-pressed to figure out why. There are huge side-tracks into the ongoing stories of multiple characters which in the end don’t seem to have any relationship to the resolution of the main plot. They’re just miniature adventures within the larger work, which can be fun, but is quite distracting, especially if you’re trying to track what’s going on in each one with the expectation that it matters (it doesn’t).

Unfortunately, the Adamsesque humor disappears after the first tenth of the book and doesn’t reappear until the side-stories begin in earnest, nearly halfway through. In between, it’s straight sci-fi. And speaking of halfway through - we’re more than halfway through (55%, according to my Kindle) before we find out the main theme of the book.

There were a few other things that bugged me, one of which was the overuse of the term ‘squealed’. Everybody squeals. Psychann squeals three times in the first 20% of the book. Rog squeals. The flying warthog squeals (unsurprisingly, but after everyone else squeals, it’s a bit much.) Psychann has skill-creep - she inexplicably develops incredible skills quickly until she’s virtually all-powerful. There are some misused words and a lot of punctuation errors. I don’t mention such errors if they’re few and far between - every book on the face of the planet has a few - but in this case, it’s as if the author has a pathological inability to correctly place commas within quotes. Proper punctuation sets up the visual flow of the page, and when that normal flow is disrupted, it’s distracting.

There are so many good things about this book. The idea of Trading is the best idea in it. Some of the characters are worth following. The author does have a handle on the humorous sci-fi genre and he’s got plenty of ideas, so many that there are too many stuffed into a single volume. This book needs streamlining and some editing and it could be a really good read. Even without editing, I'd recommend it to someone who's looking for a kind of 'wow!' trip through outer-space fantasy-land.

[David Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reality challenged was a fun read, though it does have some flaws. Xorian and company are thrust into a mission to save the multiverse, each contributing in their own reluctant way. The rules of the universes and the special abilities of some of the characters always kept things interesting. While the humor was sometimes reminiscent of a Douglas Adams novel or a Dr. Who episode, the story had it's own unique style. The characters were exotic, if naive and sometimes fickle. I loved the banter between Xorian and the Krazhdi and the D&D band, among others. At times I would have liked a more vivid mental picture of them and the places they traversed, however.

The plot was too loose to have much of a dramatic effect for me, and each conflict the characters faced seemed too easy to overcome in the end (e.g. Psychann's powers seemed to increase too rapidly). Some formatting and style problems, such as inappropriate line breaks and capitalization and ambiguous POVs and pronouns, have been covered in other reviews, and were a minor annoyance to me.

Overall, this story has some great ideas that could really shine with tighter plotting and writing.

[T.D. Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book definitely lived up to its name. At first, I was challenged to keep up with the different twists and turns as Xorian and his alien companion Krazhdi bounce between different realities. The book is fast paced and full of action. I struggled maintaining focus on the characters as the POV really moved around.

There were some really cool abilities brought to light in this book. I loved the "Trade". In a multi-reality setting, I think that would be one of the most useful abilities to have for any of the characters.

The banter between the characters, particularly Xorian and his friend reminded me of character dialogue in David Eddings' works. Cross that with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and you have Reality Challenged.

Reality Challenged could use a strong content/development editing hand to smooth over rough areas and bring about more of the richness of the background in the story. With so many realities, ultimate possibilities, and some great humor, this story could really become something special.

[Victoria Zigler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining, fantastic, hilarious, weird - these are all words that spring to mind to describe this book. This is a very well-written book, with extremely colourful characters, a plot that will keep you both guessing and laughing until the end, and a very appropriate title.

[Matt The · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book keep doin more lol