Mutationem

by Phoenix Jericho

Decades after World War III, nuclear war is decimating the planet. Amidst the turmoil and destruction lies one last drop of hope: the most ambitious space mission ever planned, to be executed by the largest earthly spacecraft. The goal? For the crew aboard IWSA-24 to be the first to colonize Alpha-64, located 100 Earth years away. The clock is ticking, with the launch only a few weeks out. But when the war takes a calamitous turn only minutes before the shuttle’s first flight simulation, suddenly the crew on board realize they are the planet’s only survivors. With minimal provisions, equipment, and astronauts, a new set of questions arise for Captain Kriss and her all-female crew: will IWSA-24 have enough fuel to make it to Alpha-64? Will they devise a plan to secure male DNA in time to save humanity? What mysteries and unknowns lurk on this faraway planet? What starts as an unlikely community of lovers, enemies, scientists, and spies evolves rapidly as the crew approaches Alpha-64.

Genres: Science Fiction

454 pages, Paperback

First published December 27, 2016

Reviews

[Anindita, A Bohemian Mind at Work · Rating 3 out of 5]

I requested an ARC of this book from Netgalley based on a smart cover and a compelling blurb.
Mutationem projects an all female cast, well, almost. The only male (as far as I have read, around three-fourth of the book) is a cat.
The introduction was good. The author introduced the characters well by giving us a short background with minimum exposition.
I thought what could go wrong with a story about a bunch of women survivors in a spaceship looking for a new home? A science fiction category, a mysterious and overprotective cat, and a super smart baby.
The intelligent cat and the terrifyingly progressing baby had some exciting moments. The cat had to protect her from the villain quite frequently, and those were the best scenes in the book. I almost liked the first few chapters.
Then the lesbian antagonist entered.
Dear readers, I believe in a justified portrayal of LGBTQS (added S for straight) romance. However, the purpose of the sex scenes (no romance as the character is an antagonist) in this book was lost somewhere between titillation and adding to the word count.
You don't need explicit scenes in every few pages of a science fiction novel to show the antagonist is a lesbian and very very naughty.
Suggestion: A warning for the explicit scenes should be added in the blurb/book cover/ anywhere relevant for potential underage readers.
One particular garden scene was well-written. The enemy's influence over some women of the ship and their response to her charm was so well portrayed that I went on for a few more pages.
That's how the book is. You get good moments, and then you wonder who wrote the next part. The dialogues felt artificial.
I am convinced that the idea of the story is excellent. However, uneven pace and style of narrative, numerous lesbian sex scenes bobbing up at regular intervals, long stretches of the story without much progress, this book wasn't of the standard I had expected.
This book had the possibility of becoming a fascinating read.
I assume the book has gone through beta reading. However, I suggest another round. There is so much potential. From the parts I have read (skipped quite a few pages, I admit), the concept is brilliant. A better execution is all it needs.
My review is based on an ARC, so there might be some changes before publishing the book.

I avoid posting reviews on books that haven't made the 3-star cut-off, but I am making an exception and rounding off 2.5 Bohostars to three for the concept, cover, and the cat.

[Warrengent · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a global nuclear war the crew of IWSA-24 escapes while in the process of a trail launch. After take off the commander Kriss ask for a full report of crew and supplies,thus begins a combination of problematic scenarios,i.e. there is only a quarter of the planned crew and of the near 100 crew members all are female,they have no weapons and no knowledge if there is enough fuel. How will the human race survive considering these women are the only survivors of earths demise. My favourite character by far was the chief science officer named Connie and under the captain Kriss they have to overcome one obstacle after another if they are to stand a chance of reaching there destination of Alpha-64. We get to know some of the characters back stories and life's which we learn through dreams and these dreams give some insight into there personalities while on board the IWSA-64. In places the content is really graphic and intriguing.The chapter when there is a space walk to do maintenance on a lens on the ships telescope was my favourite and so much happens I won't give anything more away but will say that Phoenix Jericho as a fantastic imagination which he use really well when he introduces us to future inventions and technology's I loved this book and would highly recommend it

[Nikki "The Crazie Betty" V. · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 Stars

The premise for this book sounded awesome! Hence the reason I requested this from NetGalley. However, after finishing it, I had to keep checking the book’s description page to see if it was being marketed as a satire and I just didn’t notice it. But, nope. This is just really, really poorly done sci-fi.

This review is going to be FILLED with spoilers, so don’t continue reading if you have any intention of reading this.

My review for this is basically going to be a list as to why I couldn’t give this book anything more than 2 stars. Those 2 stars are for very specific things:
1) cats
2) No real spelling or grammar errors.

Now for the list of things that didn’t bode well for this book.

1)No explanation for what happened to the Earth. In the book, everyone sets off their nuclear war heads and the Earth basically implodes on itself and disappears. This is not even remotely accurate. The Earth would not just disappear, it would end up in a state of nuclear winter and would kill off everything across the surface as the toxins made their way into our upper atmosphere, which would then end up travelling across the entire face of our planet due to our wind patterns. Just because humans die off doesn’t mean the Earth dies off. I just found this whole thing to be exceptionally lazy, like the author couldn’t be bothered to do any research on the subject matter being written about. This issue will come up again and again in the remainder of this review.

2)Every single person on the spaceship that is alive is female, and as they travel to their new destination, they are trying to figure out how they can extract DNA from the male corpse that is in frozen storage on their ship. This would also never work, unless you want a bunch of inbred genetically inferior humanoids that will in no way be able to continue with the human race. The fact that every person in the crew is female, and there is one dead male body on the ship, immediately let me know that they would need to find other males on the planet they are heading to, or the human race is doomed. You need at least 80 different genetics in order for there to be enough diversity in the humans to not force inbreeding.

3)The closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, that has been discussed as a a possibly viable system containing planets that could be used for humans to go to, would take at least 3 generations worth of people on a ship to get there. That’s even if the ship is going at light speed. I’m supposed to believe that this ship has travelled to a planet further away than Alpha Centauri star system, but got there in 6 months? Um, no.

4)The one person on the ship that isn’t heterosexual is portrayed as a sex-crazed lunatic. That’s just great. You have ship full of women, and only one is lesbian? And that one lesbian is the female equivalent of Charles Manson forming a cult of other women who believe she is just the greatest thing ever. She even somehow manages to get completely straight women to fall for her for no other reason that the fact she has a pretty singing voice? Is she the reincarnation of a Siren from The Odyssey? On top of all that, the one thing she cares about more than anything else, is trying to kill a cat because the cat scratched her face. And the reason why her face got scratched? She snuck into another person’s room and was going to just handle the little baby girl of another passenger without asking or caring about the consequences. The cat was guarding the little one and sensed the threat so he attacked. But rather than acknowledging the fact that she was in someone else’s room handling a kid that wasn’t hers, she chose to blame a cat for the trouble she got into. The remainder of the book for this character is her manipulating other characters to do what she wants, and to help her escape the ship. Oh, and constantly trying to kill this cat like some old-school Roadrunner vs. Wiley Coyote cartoon. Pathetic. I just really hate that the only diverse character was written as a sociopath. And really, who completed the psych evaluations for these passengers to determine they were fit for a long journey to another planet and wouldn’t be a lunatic? This wasn’t some ‘as time went on she went crazy’ scenario, she didn’t even hide how psychotic she was.

Ok, I’m done. There are multiple other points I could made on how this isn’t a sci-fi story, and how it has about as much science in it as Scientology does, but the rant I’ve already been on has worn me out and I can’t go on. Needless to say, I didn’t like this book. I did like the cats though. That is the ONE thing I actually did enjoy.

Copy received via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received a free copy via Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.

This was a really good idea, but unfortunately the story just loses its way and ends up as very poor science fiction.
The plot has massive holes and lacks cohesion.

[Sophia]

An intriguing spin on 'Venus, give us your women' becoming 'Mars, give us your men' was enough to snag my interest in this sci-fi by a new to me author. I've always enjoyed when a survival desperation element is present in a story and this one with a world-wide nuking that leaves only the partial crew of a deep-space colony ship (which all happen to be the women of the crew in one fluke accident), seemed a good bet to engage my interest.

I dove in with curiosity and excitement. I was brought up short by a different tone than I was expecting, but thought to give it some time to adjust to the author's style. A flippant and humorous tongue in cheek flavor can be a fun change up, but it was unexpected and had nuances to it that jabbed at me. I couldn't decide if this was a serious piece or utter comedy. Then it started flipping rapidly between narrators and again, though disoriented, I kept at it for a little while.

There are elements that I would love to explore further with the emerging story of the mother, her baby girl, and the baby's cat protector along with the overarcing dilemma of staying alive and keeping the human race going. And I had a giggle-snort moment when just as the crisis is hitting home, the story introduces a Lesbian character- yeah, that is handy on one level particularly for her, but just salt in the wound of all the women who just lost the male half of the race and are looking at a bleak future

But for now, the tone of the story and the loose, rapid shifts in perspective kept losing me and there was not enough to keep my interest for the moment. So I'm going to put this back on the stack as a 'maybe later' when I'm in the mood.

DNF at 6%

I rec'd this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

[Mackenzie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got an online arc from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I DNF'ed this book. I rarely don't finish books, but I couldn't force myself to read this book.

When I saw this book as an option on Netgalley I was very excited. It sounded very interesting and I was really looking forward to what was in store. The premise of the story is (dun-dun-duuun) a space ship that was supposed to travel to another planet to inhabit it left without all the crew. Problem is that all the crew members are female and the ones that would have to inhabit the planet would be their grandchildren.
Right when I started reading there were so many things about it that aggravated me. Personally I didn't like the writing style or the characters. At the beginning of the book the world disappears because of nuclear war. IT JUST DISAPPEARS! NOTHING EXCITING HAPPENS! NOPE IT IS THERE AND THEN GONE THE NEXT MINUTE!!!!!!! It isn't described in a way that makes it believable, it instantly makes it seem like a bad attempt at a sci-fi.
I have a lot of problems with the characters, but two that really stood out to me in the beginning were the Captain and the Scientific Research lady whose names I forget. The Captain is overly rude and vulgar for what seems like no reason. When everyone is introducing themselves she flips between hot and cold so quickly and after listening to almost everyone say their speech she randomly cuts this one lady off. Even though she didn't say very much! She seems very unstable, I wouldn't want to be around her. The Scientific Research lady (sorry I don't recall her name) is in charge of all the very important scientific research that needs to be done, but she is described as an immense slob and a pot head. It seems as though the author tried to make a very exaggerated characters, but in doing so she created a very immature group of people that are supposed to be in charge of a very important space mission. I wouldn't recommend this book and I wouldn't buy it.

[Jamie Moesser · Rating 1 out of 5]

Orson Scott Card, in his book "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy," instructs writers of works in those genres to "lead their readers into the strangeness, step by step." By using exposition sparingly, he says, naming some things and keeping others in abeyance, and providing enough details that the reader can relate to something and their interest is piqued but not overwhelmed, those writers can tell great tales, even of worlds or circumstances vastly different than our own. Mutationem, a recently published adult sci-fi by Phoenix Jericho, did not keep to those principles, at least in the first few chapters. Due to that and various other instances of less-than-stellar writing, I did not enjoy the book.

The book's premise is a vast one--a nuclear war that totally destroys Earth forces a spaceship crewed exclusively by females to launch prematurely with the goal of populating a planet 100 years away--that seems to be explained entirely in the first five chapters. There isn't enough information given before the ship takes off and the entire planet is obliterated by multiple simultaneous nuclear detonations to make such a scenario seem even remotely plausible. Additionally, the character's reactions, summed up in one sentence: "It's gone! My god, it's gone," don't come close to wrapping around the gravity of that situation.

Card also advises science fiction writers to write their stories from the perspective of the person who hurts the most in the story. Certainly it would've made sense to introduce the character most affected by Earth's obliteration and/or by the strain of the journey ahead somewhere in those first five chapters. No such character is introduced, and the reader is, in fact, bounced around like a gravity-less ball, disembodied, unable to identify with anyone or anything. That reader starts out being an observer in a featureless press room to floating outside of the launch pad without any context or environment. Even just a few words about the weather or the surrounding flora and fauna, or the expressions of the people watching would have helped ground the reader better.

The narrative was also pocked with discrepancies and descriptions that pulled me out of the story for seconds at a time. For instance, at location 201 (sorry, I don't know what page number that would be in the hard copy), a character drops a jar of peanut butter and then watches it float away. How can someone drop something in a zero-gravity environment?

For these reasons, as well as ones of personal taste (i.e., aversion to drug use and crude language), I did not enjoy Mutationem. Still, others may.

[Polly Krize · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Reading the description of this book on NetGalley, it seemed just right for me as a fan of dystopian fiction. The idea of a spaceship leaving a destroyed planet Earth in order to colonize far off planets is a good one. Unfortunately this author does not seem to have been able to develop anything, and the dialogue of the people on the ship is laughable to say the least. Only my opinion.

[Heath Henwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mutationem
by Phoenix Jericho
While I read a lot of Sci-fi, this book just didn’t flow well.

The story line, a deep space craft leaves earth on an emergency take off, as earth enters nuclear war. On board is a crew of only women. What follows is a list of challenges to overcome transportation and survival issues.

Along the way there is extensive and unnecessary sexual scenes in the story. While some of the references may have supported some character development, the majority were not required, and took away from the story.

Apart from that, the storyline and character development were good, however the story could do with some additional editing to help with cohesion.

[Nettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm sorry to say that this book just wasnt for me. The idea is brilliant but thats just the idea. The rest of the book just felt very meh for me.