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Extrahumans #4
Extrahumans
Being "The Sampler" isn't easy. As the weakest member of the Extrahuman Union, Jill is overlooked by just about everyone. After all, no one cares about an Extrahuman who possesses every possible superpower, but can barely use any of them. Jill is a nobody, on the run and out of a job, with no home and barely any friends to her name.
To make ends meet, Jill turns back to one of her favorite jobs: stealing. When her latest job goes terribly wrong, Jill is left with a mysterious alien artifact—one that starts whispers to her, unlocks impossible powers, and shows her incredible things.
Now Jill is on a quest for answers that will take her from the high mountains of Valen to the depths of interstellar space; from a bizarre prison planet where old friends and enemies are held captive, to the roots of St. Val's mysterious letters and decade-spanning plans. The fate of her friends, her world, a vanished alien species, and the entire Confederation will rest on Jill's shoulders.
Extrahumans is a tale of superpowers and long-forgotten mysteries, and the fourth and final book in the critically acclaimed Extrahuman Union series
“Come for the superheroes, stay for the characters and world-building.” — A Fantastical Librarian
To make ends meet, Jill turns back to one of her favorite jobs: stealing. When her latest job goes terribly wrong, Jill is left with a mysterious alien artifact—one that starts whispers to her, unlocks impossible powers, and shows her incredible things.
Now Jill is on a quest for answers that will take her from the high mountains of Valen to the depths of interstellar space; from a bizarre prison planet where old friends and enemies are held captive, to the roots of St. Val's mysterious letters and decade-spanning plans. The fate of her friends, her world, a vanished alien species, and the entire Confederation will rest on Jill's shoulders.
Extrahumans is a tale of superpowers and long-forgotten mysteries, and the fourth and final book in the critically acclaimed Extrahuman Union series
“Come for the superheroes, stay for the characters and world-building.” — A Fantastical Librarian
- GenresScience FictionFiction
350 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2016
1 person is currently reading
204 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 8, 2022
Not gonna lie, normally I find sci-fi incredibly boring and couldn't be bothered with it, and then Extrahumans came into my life.
The plot of this book is essentially: closing up a story about superheroes living among us in a dystopian world. Jill is trying to survive, and somehow gets the team back together in the process. There will be love, loss and lots of fighting in this epic finale. It felt like a cool mix of Star Wars, Star Trek, the beautiful landscapes and colours of Jupiter Ascending and a pinch of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It took all the best things of my favourite sci-fi movies and mashed them together in the best possible way (in book form, of course).
There's something about this book that makes it fun and engaging, and I could barely put it down. It's packed full of fun character (with real flaws - they're not perfect!), there's lots of action and adventure, superpowers galore, dystopian landscapes, a Pakistani woman lead and a little LGBT representation!
I found it a tiny bit difficult jumping into the last book of this series, but I think Susan Jane Bigelow did an excellent job of filling in the blanks within the book. I would have enjoyed understanding the past relationships and struggles the characters had before, but I was still able to fully throw myself into this book. Either way, I'd love to read more by Susan now because she is just a really good writer! Any writer who can make me love a genre I typically don't is totally worth reading.
I also did not enjoy Jill's character in the beginning. I found her super annoying and childish, but then she started growing and changing as the events of the novel took place. And, at least for me, the surprises about her in this book were welcome and absolutely lovely. I was very happy to see her character develop into someone I could actually respect instead of dramatically roll my eyes at.
Overall, I would highly recommend this series! It's a fun, sci-fi adventure with an excellent writing style. If you love sci-fi, I'm sure you'll love it more than I did!
Four out of five stars.
i received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
The plot of this book is essentially: closing up a story about superheroes living among us in a dystopian world. Jill is trying to survive, and somehow gets the team back together in the process. There will be love, loss and lots of fighting in this epic finale. It felt like a cool mix of Star Wars, Star Trek, the beautiful landscapes and colours of Jupiter Ascending and a pinch of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It took all the best things of my favourite sci-fi movies and mashed them together in the best possible way (in book form, of course).
There's something about this book that makes it fun and engaging, and I could barely put it down. It's packed full of fun character (with real flaws - they're not perfect!), there's lots of action and adventure, superpowers galore, dystopian landscapes, a Pakistani woman lead and a little LGBT representation!
I found it a tiny bit difficult jumping into the last book of this series, but I think Susan Jane Bigelow did an excellent job of filling in the blanks within the book. I would have enjoyed understanding the past relationships and struggles the characters had before, but I was still able to fully throw myself into this book. Either way, I'd love to read more by Susan now because she is just a really good writer! Any writer who can make me love a genre I typically don't is totally worth reading.
I also did not enjoy Jill's character in the beginning. I found her super annoying and childish, but then she started growing and changing as the events of the novel took place. And, at least for me, the surprises about her in this book were welcome and absolutely lovely. I was very happy to see her character develop into someone I could actually respect instead of dramatically roll my eyes at.
Overall, I would highly recommend this series! It's a fun, sci-fi adventure with an excellent writing style. If you love sci-fi, I'm sure you'll love it more than I did!
Four out of five stars.
i received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
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October 17, 2016We are the publishers!
December 23, 2016
Upon finishing Susan Jane Bigelow’s latest, the Extrahumans, I honestly didn’t know what to think. I enjoyed it, but I also found myself wanting more, which depending on one’s perspective could be either good or bad. In that vein, Bigelow’s latest, Extrahumans functions as an ending of sorts to her Extrahuman series, a series of novels detailing a futuristic world where superhumans live among us. This series has always been a favorite of mine in how it shows, almost presciently I might add, how fear, bigotry and mistrust of the other can be twisted by those in power to nefarious ends. Four books later, Extrahumans concludes the saga begun in Broken, but the author leaves the door wide open for additional stories to take place in this universe should she choose to go that route. I enjoyed this novel as Extrahumans is a decent end to the series, tying up numerous loose ends and giving our heroes an appropriate send-off. What makes this story so compelling is that Bigelow wisely takes a series which at its core is about dangers of xenophobia, bigotry, fear and condenses it into a personal saga of family, self-discovery and actualization amidst the backdrop of galactic turmoil.
Family, identity, a place to belong, a safe space to be loved and protected are key themes in this book, ideas personified by our protagonist Jill, an extrahuman of Pakistani origin. At the onset of the story, the surviving extrahumans (beings with superpowers ala the Xmen) are spread across space, some such as Jill are hiding, others rotting on a prison planet while others are taking refuge with a religious order that is in a sort of détente with the oppressive ruling order. The Union is broken, the family split, extrahumans living singly or in disparate groups doing their best to simply survive. The story is set afoot when Jill, a former thief and extrahuman, detached from the rest of her people is suddenly outed as an extrahuman and fired from her job at a local bar. In desperation she takes a heist job to support herself for the local resistance where she comes across an alien artifact that both awakens and enhances her disparate abilities to levels she’s never seen before. After the raid, Jill with nowhere else to go, seeks out her old friends for companionship and protection, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to a road of self-discovery and actualization that will also reveal the origins of her people as well as sow the seeds of the downfall of the oppressive Confederation.
And that in a nutshell is the beauty of this work, Bigelow wisely keeps the struggle against the Confederacy in the background opting for a more personal, intimate story between Jill and her fellow extrahumans. The oppressive confederacy is there, one can feel its weight and its thumb on our characters as it dictating our heroes’ actions and guiding their lives. However rather than focus on grand gestures to overthrow the confederacy Bigelow instead keeps the focus intimate, the resistance growing as the extrahumans embrace who they are and what they have to offer to the universe. I won’t spoil it, but this acceptance leads to a couple powerful moments in the novel that show the power of trust and acceptance to inspire hope in oppressed masses. Identity also plays a key part in one of the more tragic portions of the novel, a message about the dangers self-delusion and the brokenness that comes with perceived failed identity. In short, the nature of heroism and how that is tied to family, self-worth and identity is actively explored in the novel and is one of the novel's highlights.
At the beginning of the novel, I found the Jill main character’s characterization to be fairly weak. She was childish, annoying and petulant, the book actually getting better when she wasn’t on the page. However, toward the end of the novel I found myself actually rooting for the character to succeed, truly invested in her success, detailing her growth. Jill’s character arc in the book is actually quite good, her temperament and character growth mirroring the maturation of her powers, going from estranged and unloved extrahuman to the centerpiece of the new freedom and sense of belonging the Extrahumans achieve at the end of the novel. This was well done. Jill also develops a romantic relationship with another character in the novel which I thought was handled just ok. The romance was written fairly well but there was never really any compelling reason why these two had to get together other than the author wanted them too. It wasn’t a weakness in the novel by any means, but nor was it a plus.
***SPOILER***
***SPOILER*** The intimate nature of the novel works but it also doesn’t work for me. I would have personally liked to see the Confederacy fall on page, in some final battle or some great uprising, but that doesn’t happen on page in the novel, it is just hinted at in the closing epilogue. This speaks to one of the main weakness of the novel, in that at times it seems maybe a little too intimate and small scale as it would have been nice to have a little more action in that regards. Likewise, the first book in the series was centered on the chosen one, this special child that will topple the confederacy but other than a few run-ins we never see this character nor do we ever see him get close to his goal. Once again this is all handled off page in the epilogue which I found mildly annoying. Although to be fair, scenes showing the fall of the confederacy may not have jived with the themes the author worked so hard to achieve in the finished work. **END SPOILER**
***END SPOILER***
As the author readily admits endings of any series are hard, fraught with peril an easily screwed up. Bigelow’s last novel, Extrahumans is a decent send off for this universe, closing the chapter on these characters while leaving the universe open for more exploration. If Mrs. Bigelow opted for more books in this universe, I for one would gladly gobble it up. Thanks for sharing.
Family, identity, a place to belong, a safe space to be loved and protected are key themes in this book, ideas personified by our protagonist Jill, an extrahuman of Pakistani origin. At the onset of the story, the surviving extrahumans (beings with superpowers ala the Xmen) are spread across space, some such as Jill are hiding, others rotting on a prison planet while others are taking refuge with a religious order that is in a sort of détente with the oppressive ruling order. The Union is broken, the family split, extrahumans living singly or in disparate groups doing their best to simply survive. The story is set afoot when Jill, a former thief and extrahuman, detached from the rest of her people is suddenly outed as an extrahuman and fired from her job at a local bar. In desperation she takes a heist job to support herself for the local resistance where she comes across an alien artifact that both awakens and enhances her disparate abilities to levels she’s never seen before. After the raid, Jill with nowhere else to go, seeks out her old friends for companionship and protection, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to a road of self-discovery and actualization that will also reveal the origins of her people as well as sow the seeds of the downfall of the oppressive Confederation.
And that in a nutshell is the beauty of this work, Bigelow wisely keeps the struggle against the Confederacy in the background opting for a more personal, intimate story between Jill and her fellow extrahumans. The oppressive confederacy is there, one can feel its weight and its thumb on our characters as it dictating our heroes’ actions and guiding their lives. However rather than focus on grand gestures to overthrow the confederacy Bigelow instead keeps the focus intimate, the resistance growing as the extrahumans embrace who they are and what they have to offer to the universe. I won’t spoil it, but this acceptance leads to a couple powerful moments in the novel that show the power of trust and acceptance to inspire hope in oppressed masses. Identity also plays a key part in one of the more tragic portions of the novel, a message about the dangers self-delusion and the brokenness that comes with perceived failed identity. In short, the nature of heroism and how that is tied to family, self-worth and identity is actively explored in the novel and is one of the novel's highlights.
At the beginning of the novel, I found the Jill main character’s characterization to be fairly weak. She was childish, annoying and petulant, the book actually getting better when she wasn’t on the page. However, toward the end of the novel I found myself actually rooting for the character to succeed, truly invested in her success, detailing her growth. Jill’s character arc in the book is actually quite good, her temperament and character growth mirroring the maturation of her powers, going from estranged and unloved extrahuman to the centerpiece of the new freedom and sense of belonging the Extrahumans achieve at the end of the novel. This was well done. Jill also develops a romantic relationship with another character in the novel which I thought was handled just ok. The romance was written fairly well but there was never really any compelling reason why these two had to get together other than the author wanted them too. It wasn’t a weakness in the novel by any means, but nor was it a plus.
***SPOILER***
***SPOILER*** The intimate nature of the novel works but it also doesn’t work for me. I would have personally liked to see the Confederacy fall on page, in some final battle or some great uprising, but that doesn’t happen on page in the novel, it is just hinted at in the closing epilogue. This speaks to one of the main weakness of the novel, in that at times it seems maybe a little too intimate and small scale as it would have been nice to have a little more action in that regards. Likewise, the first book in the series was centered on the chosen one, this special child that will topple the confederacy but other than a few run-ins we never see this character nor do we ever see him get close to his goal. Once again this is all handled off page in the epilogue which I found mildly annoying. Although to be fair, scenes showing the fall of the confederacy may not have jived with the themes the author worked so hard to achieve in the finished work. **END SPOILER**
***END SPOILER***
As the author readily admits endings of any series are hard, fraught with peril an easily screwed up. Bigelow’s last novel, Extrahumans is a decent send off for this universe, closing the chapter on these characters while leaving the universe open for more exploration. If Mrs. Bigelow opted for more books in this universe, I for one would gladly gobble it up. Thanks for sharing.
November 28, 2016
Goodreads WIn Copy
In the final book of the series, we are focus on Jill the weakest member of the group known as “The Sampler”. Despite her superpowers that she can barely use, she finds herself trying to survive among her enemies without friends, a job for food and shelter.
Jill is force to steal as it is one of her jobs that she is actually good at. zwhen a job goes wrong which a mysterious artifact which shows her interesting things as it whispers to her as it unlocks her powers.
As she goes on her quest looking for answers, she finds long lost friends and enemies she has forgotten, In a world where she is a part of a plot that has now awaken. An interesting storyline.
In the final book of the series, we are focus on Jill the weakest member of the group known as “The Sampler”. Despite her superpowers that she can barely use, she finds herself trying to survive among her enemies without friends, a job for food and shelter.
Jill is force to steal as it is one of her jobs that she is actually good at. zwhen a job goes wrong which a mysterious artifact which shows her interesting things as it whispers to her as it unlocks her powers.
As she goes on her quest looking for answers, she finds long lost friends and enemies she has forgotten, In a world where she is a part of a plot that has now awaken. An interesting storyline.
May 26, 2017
i was the lucky winner of a copy of this novel through a goodreads win. it is the 4th and last story in the series. it is about a girl named jill who has extra powers, so many that they call her the sampler. she doesn't know how to use them very well.she turns to what she can do well- stealing, and comes into possession of an artifact which unlocks her potential.the novel is set around space and intergalactic travels and it has many themes running through it- friendship, hope, enemies. it can be read as a standalone, but i would have liked to know more about the background. definitely want to read the whole series. syndi
May 5, 2018
Amazing. This entire series was soooo good, and so unexpected! And to find such quality on kindle unlimited was an additional surprise. Susan Jane Bigelow is now added to my list of favorite authors.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews