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The Clockwork Chimera #1
Daisy's Run
Alternate cover edition of ASIN B07LFP3JHM
Life in deep space could be a drag sometimes, but Daisy supposed things could have been worse. They were still alive, after all, which was always a plus in her book. Now if only she could figure out who, or what, was endangering her return home, things would be just peachy.
It had been one hell of a way to start the day––being rudely snapped from a deep cryo-sleep, and in the middle of a ship-wide crisis to boot––but Daisy was pleased to note that the ship had not decompressed, the crew hadn’t been blasted into space, and, most importantly, they hadn’t simply blown up. At least not yet. So, they had that going for them, but being stuck on a damaged ship in the inky depths of space as it limped toward Earth was not exactly the relaxing trip home she’d imagined.
With the powerful AI supercomputer guiding the craft beginning to show some disconcerting quirks of its own, and its unsettling cyborg assistant nosing into her affairs, Daisy’s unease was rapidly growing. Add to the mix a crew of mechanically-enhanced humans, any one of whom she suspected might not be what they seemed, and Daisy found herself with a sense of pending dread tickling the periphery of her mind.
Something was very much not right––she could feel it in her bones. The tricky part now was going to be figuring out what the threat was, before it could manifest from a mere sinking feeling in her gut into a potentially deadly reality.
Life in deep space could be a drag sometimes, but Daisy supposed things could have been worse. They were still alive, after all, which was always a plus in her book. Now if only she could figure out who, or what, was endangering her return home, things would be just peachy.
It had been one hell of a way to start the day––being rudely snapped from a deep cryo-sleep, and in the middle of a ship-wide crisis to boot––but Daisy was pleased to note that the ship had not decompressed, the crew hadn’t been blasted into space, and, most importantly, they hadn’t simply blown up. At least not yet. So, they had that going for them, but being stuck on a damaged ship in the inky depths of space as it limped toward Earth was not exactly the relaxing trip home she’d imagined.
With the powerful AI supercomputer guiding the craft beginning to show some disconcerting quirks of its own, and its unsettling cyborg assistant nosing into her affairs, Daisy’s unease was rapidly growing. Add to the mix a crew of mechanically-enhanced humans, any one of whom she suspected might not be what they seemed, and Daisy found herself with a sense of pending dread tickling the periphery of her mind.
Something was very much not right––she could feel it in her bones. The tricky part now was going to be figuring out what the threat was, before it could manifest from a mere sinking feeling in her gut into a potentially deadly reality.
361 pages, ebook
First published November 14, 2018
762 people are currently reading
884 people want to read
About the author
Scott Baron
55 books291 followersScott Baron is an American author with a penchant for oddball stories with O. Henry-esque twists.
Born in Hollywood, Baron credits growing up in Los Angeles with skewing his humor towards the offbeat and absurd. He studied abroad in Italy during his college years, returning to Los Angeles to work in the film industry as an on-set medic. In addition to writing shorts and novels, Baron is also a screenwriter of both feature and television scripts.
Born in Hollywood, Baron credits growing up in Los Angeles with skewing his humor towards the offbeat and absurd. He studied abroad in Italy during his college years, returning to Los Angeles to work in the film industry as an on-set medic. In addition to writing shorts and novels, Baron is also a screenwriter of both feature and television scripts.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 170 reviews
August 16, 2019
I wasn't especially surprised to find out, at the end of this book, that the author works in Hollywood (as an on-set doctor). A lot of it only makes sense if you apply Hollywood logic; consists of Hollywood cliches; or makes mistakes that Hollywood makes.
For example, people in real life don't sit bolt upright after they wake from a nightmare. It's a Hollywood cliche, to convey an internal experience in a visual medium.
The far side of the moon is constantly referred to as the "dark side"; anyone who knows any actual astrophysics knows that both sides of the moon get light, in a cycle that produces the phases of the moon. There's even the old myth of human brains using only a fraction of their processing and storage capacity, which a doctor should know is not true.
Things sometimes work in a way that those things simply wouldn't work, because plot and/or cliche. This includes a device that somehow gets more energy out of a system than was put in, covered over by some technobabble. Lights dim when the AI does a complex calculation.
No popular culture is referred to that originates after the book is written, which is a very common fault of this kind of book.
About halfway through I also started to notice that nobody seemed to have any backstory, and the ship was coming from a vague place for vague reasons, without apparently having any cargo or other raison d'etre. That eventually turned out to be kind of a feature, but... well, let me talk about the most annoying thing.
The most annoying thing is a protagonist who seems to go out of her way to cut off anyone who's about to explain what's going on. After she's done this a couple of times, it becomes painfully obvious that the author is doing it to maintain the tension. When she is finally cornered and has to listen to the explanation, at the 90% mark in the book, it turns out that the reason she wasn't told the secret in the first place is... weak.
"Weak" is a good description of a number of plot points, in fact. At one point, people have to travel physically across the solar system to take a message because their electronic systems have been compromised and they might transmit a virus if they used radio. So why not blink a laser on and off in Morse code?
"One millionth of one percent of the population" have a particular feature - which, if you work it out, means 10 people in a billion, so probably fewer than 100 people in all. That seems too few for what it is.
An electronic tablet has wires inside that can be physically rewired with no tools for a different purpose. Have you ever seen inside one of those? No wires.
Most of the book is in tight third person, following the protagonist; and then we get a few random paragraphs in someone else's POV, before returning to our regularly scheduled viewpoint.
Meanwhile, it's become evident that the genre I thought I was getting is not the actual genre (because secret), and the actual genre is one I strongly dislike.
The protagonist is ridiculously over-powered, possessing every conceivable skill that could help her; there is (eventually, at that 90% mark) an explanation for this, but even then it's clear that she's done things she ought not to be able to do, for vague reasons.
She's also prejudiced, against machines and people who have machine parts (which nearly all her shipmates do). Making your viewpoint character irrationally prejudiced is not a good way to endear her to the reader, even if you feel you have to do so to drive the plot.
A lot of convenient plot points are not foreshadowed until immediately before they become relevant, which (added to everything else) makes me suspect that the book wasn't plotted in advance, but discovery-written, with the author not knowing for a long time what was going on either. Now, discovery-written books can be just as good as plotted books, but only if you put the work in afterwards to do your foreshadowing and make everything make sense, as if you'd plotted it from the start. It shouldn't be possible to tell the difference. (Of course, now that I've said that, the author will probably tell me that I'm wrong and he did plot it through from the start. It doesn't read that way, though.)
There are some pluses. The action keeps moving (apart from some repetitive infodumping near the beginning). The author contrives - and it is a bit contrived - to give the protagonist another woman to talk to, even though she's physically on her own for most of the book. But on the whole, the weaknesses outweighed the strengths for me. The plot is a thin skin over an obtrusive skeleton, and is forced along by one unlikely thing after another, hitting a bunch of stupid cliches on the way through.
I received a copy via Netgalley for review.
For example, people in real life don't sit bolt upright after they wake from a nightmare. It's a Hollywood cliche, to convey an internal experience in a visual medium.
The far side of the moon is constantly referred to as the "dark side"; anyone who knows any actual astrophysics knows that both sides of the moon get light, in a cycle that produces the phases of the moon. There's even the old myth of human brains using only a fraction of their processing and storage capacity, which a doctor should know is not true.
Things sometimes work in a way that those things simply wouldn't work, because plot and/or cliche. This includes a device that somehow gets more energy out of a system than was put in, covered over by some technobabble. Lights dim when the AI does a complex calculation.
No popular culture is referred to that originates after the book is written, which is a very common fault of this kind of book.
About halfway through I also started to notice that nobody seemed to have any backstory, and the ship was coming from a vague place for vague reasons, without apparently having any cargo or other raison d'etre. That eventually turned out to be kind of a feature, but... well, let me talk about the most annoying thing.
The most annoying thing is a protagonist who seems to go out of her way to cut off anyone who's about to explain what's going on. After she's done this a couple of times, it becomes painfully obvious that the author is doing it to maintain the tension. When she is finally cornered and has to listen to the explanation, at the 90% mark in the book, it turns out that the reason she wasn't told the secret in the first place is... weak.
"Weak" is a good description of a number of plot points, in fact. At one point, people have to travel physically across the solar system to take a message because their electronic systems have been compromised and they might transmit a virus if they used radio. So why not blink a laser on and off in Morse code?
"One millionth of one percent of the population" have a particular feature - which, if you work it out, means 10 people in a billion, so probably fewer than 100 people in all. That seems too few for what it is.
An electronic tablet has wires inside that can be physically rewired with no tools for a different purpose. Have you ever seen inside one of those? No wires.
Most of the book is in tight third person, following the protagonist; and then we get a few random paragraphs in someone else's POV, before returning to our regularly scheduled viewpoint.
Meanwhile, it's become evident that the genre I thought I was getting is not the actual genre (because secret), and the actual genre is one I strongly dislike.
The protagonist is ridiculously over-powered, possessing every conceivable skill that could help her; there is (eventually, at that 90% mark) an explanation for this, but even then it's clear that she's done things she ought not to be able to do, for vague reasons.
She's also prejudiced, against machines and people who have machine parts (which nearly all her shipmates do). Making your viewpoint character irrationally prejudiced is not a good way to endear her to the reader, even if you feel you have to do so to drive the plot.
A lot of convenient plot points are not foreshadowed until immediately before they become relevant, which (added to everything else) makes me suspect that the book wasn't plotted in advance, but discovery-written, with the author not knowing for a long time what was going on either. Now, discovery-written books can be just as good as plotted books, but only if you put the work in afterwards to do your foreshadowing and make everything make sense, as if you'd plotted it from the start. It shouldn't be possible to tell the difference. (Of course, now that I've said that, the author will probably tell me that I'm wrong and he did plot it through from the start. It doesn't read that way, though.)
There are some pluses. The action keeps moving (apart from some repetitive infodumping near the beginning). The author contrives - and it is a bit contrived - to give the protagonist another woman to talk to, even though she's physically on her own for most of the book. But on the whole, the weaknesses outweighed the strengths for me. The plot is a thin skin over an obtrusive skeleton, and is forced along by one unlikely thing after another, hitting a bunch of stupid cliches on the way through.
I received a copy via Netgalley for review.
November 1, 2018
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review
This book is incredibly confusing to review because every single chapter in the first 50 per cent was a struggle to get through. I seriously considered DNF’ing after the first sex scene because it made me cringe so, so hard.
And it’s not just that it was badly written either. I mean, it was terribly written but in addition, every single thing Daisy does, ends in badly written, cringeworthy sex.
However, after you get past the first half of the book (it’s a struggle) the plot develops, and gets really interesting. The scientific explanations are thorough and easy to understand without making the dialogue boring, and the concept in general is pretty cool. I just wish the book had been this was from inception.
Overall though, what I couldn’t shake off was this deep-rooted prejudice that seemed to run through the book, and though it can be written off as the main characters inherent prejudice/racism/stereotyping(?) it felt like more than that, and it was uncomfortable.
I doubt I’d continue with this series.
This book is incredibly confusing to review because every single chapter in the first 50 per cent was a struggle to get through. I seriously considered DNF’ing after the first sex scene because it made me cringe so, so hard.
And it’s not just that it was badly written either. I mean, it was terribly written but in addition, every single thing Daisy does, ends in badly written, cringeworthy sex.
However, after you get past the first half of the book (it’s a struggle) the plot develops, and gets really interesting. The scientific explanations are thorough and easy to understand without making the dialogue boring, and the concept in general is pretty cool. I just wish the book had been this was from inception.
Overall though, what I couldn’t shake off was this deep-rooted prejudice that seemed to run through the book, and though it can be written off as the main characters inherent prejudice/racism/stereotyping(?) it felt like more than that, and it was uncomfortable.
I doubt I’d continue with this series.
March 31, 2020
Daisy's Run
(The Clockwork Chimera #1)
by Scott Baron
This was a great book! Daisy is the main character and she is a tech aboard a ship headed home to Earth. The opening scene has the cyborg waking everyone up because the ship was hit by debris and there are several fires he can't find. They don't go back to cryosleep but all stay up and fix things and do maintenance. Daisy and the other tech Sarah notice small differences in data that they get and the ship's AI. Things get real bad, Daisy knows she has to get off the ship. This is where it gets super crazy! What a wild space ride! What an ending!!!
I love this new book cover!
(The Clockwork Chimera #1)
by Scott Baron
This was a great book! Daisy is the main character and she is a tech aboard a ship headed home to Earth. The opening scene has the cyborg waking everyone up because the ship was hit by debris and there are several fires he can't find. They don't go back to cryosleep but all stay up and fix things and do maintenance. Daisy and the other tech Sarah notice small differences in data that they get and the ship's AI. Things get real bad, Daisy knows she has to get off the ship. This is where it gets super crazy! What a wild space ride! What an ending!!!
I love this new book cover!
July 22, 2021
I'm doing the BookTube thing now: Niki Hawkes - The Obsessive Bookseller!!
[2.5/5 stars] This was almost a DNF.
I put the book down around the 45% mark, and it was only a random set of circumstances that had me picking it back up again about a week later. And what good fortune that I did, because only a few minutes into the revisit, the plot suddenly turned on its head and went from a basic scifi space story to an interestingly original take.
The book had a lot of good setup, but IMO it took way too long to get to the section where the author starting inputting his original ideas. I mean, I lost patience with it long before it hit that point but kept pushing through before finally giving up on it. Sure, the prose had a good flow and the dialogue was witty and fast-paced, but it wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t seen a million times before… until the midway point. Then it offered a bunch of interesting twists, nice world building, and a good variety of settings. Ultimately, I’m glad the reading gods intervened and kept me reading.
Aside from it being what I thought was a highly predictable read initially, one of the reasons I felt okay putting it down was that I didn’t like the main character as much as I could have. Her dialogue was incredibly unrelatable, sounding more like a male character than female, especially in regards to the sex scenes. It seemed like it was more a conjuring of how some men wish women sounded rather than an organic depiction of a woman with more masculine speech, if that makes sense. Women don’t usually high five each other and use phrases like “I just got laid.” It conflicted with my paradigm. And it made the character seem forced.
There’s a specific tool many storytellers use in books and films to perpetuate plot that I just cannot stand: a misunderstanding between two characters that could be cleared up with a two minute conversation, but is dragged out because the main character is just too distraught ::high drama!!:: to hear anything else on the matter. It drives me crazy. It’s easier to pull off in books because you can only have one character speaking at a time, but it’s not realistic. How hard is it to talk over someone? This book used that tool not only once, but a couple of times to perpetuate the conflict. I realize this is a very personal peeve, so if that trope doesn’t bother you at all (and you can make it to the halfway point), the rest of the components are all there for a good story.
Series status: I probably won’t be continuing the series at this time, although I can see why it has gained some favor with other readers on Goodreads.
Recommendations: this scifi took a long while to get to the selling point of the novel. The great unique spin on things was perhaps a big enough payoff to warrant the wait, so if you pick it up, give it at least until the halfway mark before making the call.
This was almost a DNF.
I put the book down around the 45% mark, and it was only a random set of circumstances that had me picking it back up again about a week later. And what good fortune that I did, because only a few minutes into the revisit, the plot suddenly turned on its head and went from a basic scifi space story to an interestingly original take.
The book had a lot of good setup, but IMO it took way too long to get to the section where the author starting inputting his original ideas. I mean, I lost patience with it long before it hit that point but kept pushing through before finally giving up on it. Sure, the prose had a good flow and the dialogue was witty and fast-paced, but it wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t seen a million times before… until the midway point. Then it offered a bunch of interesting twists, nice world building, and a good variety of settings. Ultimately, I’m glad the reading gods intervened and kept me reading.
Aside from it being what I thought was a highly predictable read initially, one of the reasons I felt okay putting it down was that I didn’t like the main character as much as I could have. Her dialogue was incredibly unrelatable, sounding more like a male character than female, especially in regards to the sex scenes. It seemed like it was more a conjuring of how some men wish women sounded rather than an organic depiction of a woman with more masculine speech, if that makes sense. Women don’t usually high five each other and use phrases like “I just got laid.” It conflicted with my paradigm. And it made the character seem forced.
There’s a specific tool many storytellers use in books and films to perpetuate plot that I just cannot stand: a misunderstanding between two characters that could be cleared up with a two minute conversation, but is dragged out because the main character is just too distraught ::high drama!!:: to hear anything else on the matter. It drives me crazy. It’s easier to pull off in books because you can only have one character speaking at a time, but it’s not realistic. How hard is it to talk over someone? This book used that tool not only once, but a couple of times to perpetuate the conflict. I realize this is a very personal peeve, so if that trope doesn’t bother you at all (and you can make it to the halfway point), the rest of the components are all there for a good story.
Series status: I probably won’t be continuing the series at this time, although I can see why it has gained some favor with other readers on Goodreads.
Recommendations: this scifi took a long while to get to the selling point of the novel. The great unique spin on things was perhaps a big enough payoff to warrant the wait, so if you pick it up, give it at least until the halfway mark before making the call.
Via The Obsessive Bookseller at www.NikiHawkes.com
Other books you might like:
[2.5/5 stars] This was almost a DNF.
I put the book down around the 45% mark, and it was only a random set of circumstances that had me picking it back up again about a week later. And what good fortune that I did, because only a few minutes into the revisit, the plot suddenly turned on its head and went from a basic scifi space story to an interestingly original take.
The book had a lot of good setup, but IMO it took way too long to get to the section where the author starting inputting his original ideas. I mean, I lost patience with it long before it hit that point but kept pushing through before finally giving up on it. Sure, the prose had a good flow and the dialogue was witty and fast-paced, but it wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t seen a million times before… until the midway point. Then it offered a bunch of interesting twists, nice world building, and a good variety of settings. Ultimately, I’m glad the reading gods intervened and kept me reading.
Aside from it being what I thought was a highly predictable read initially, one of the reasons I felt okay putting it down was that I didn’t like the main character as much as I could have. Her dialogue was incredibly unrelatable, sounding more like a male character than female, especially in regards to the sex scenes. It seemed like it was more a conjuring of how some men wish women sounded rather than an organic depiction of a woman with more masculine speech, if that makes sense. Women don’t usually high five each other and use phrases like “I just got laid.” It conflicted with my paradigm. And it made the character seem forced.
There’s a specific tool many storytellers use in books and films to perpetuate plot that I just cannot stand: a misunderstanding between two characters that could be cleared up with a two minute conversation, but is dragged out because the main character is just too distraught ::high drama!!:: to hear anything else on the matter. It drives me crazy. It’s easier to pull off in books because you can only have one character speaking at a time, but it’s not realistic. How hard is it to talk over someone? This book used that tool not only once, but a couple of times to perpetuate the conflict. I realize this is a very personal peeve, so if that trope doesn’t bother you at all (and you can make it to the halfway point), the rest of the components are all there for a good story.
Series status: I probably won’t be continuing the series at this time, although I can see why it has gained some favor with other readers on Goodreads.
Recommendations: this scifi took a long while to get to the selling point of the novel. The great unique spin on things was perhaps a big enough payoff to warrant the wait, so if you pick it up, give it at least until the halfway mark before making the call.
This was almost a DNF.
I put the book down around the 45% mark, and it was only a random set of circumstances that had me picking it back up again about a week later. And what good fortune that I did, because only a few minutes into the revisit, the plot suddenly turned on its head and went from a basic scifi space story to an interestingly original take.
The book had a lot of good setup, but IMO it took way too long to get to the section where the author starting inputting his original ideas. I mean, I lost patience with it long before it hit that point but kept pushing through before finally giving up on it. Sure, the prose had a good flow and the dialogue was witty and fast-paced, but it wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t seen a million times before… until the midway point. Then it offered a bunch of interesting twists, nice world building, and a good variety of settings. Ultimately, I’m glad the reading gods intervened and kept me reading.
Aside from it being what I thought was a highly predictable read initially, one of the reasons I felt okay putting it down was that I didn’t like the main character as much as I could have. Her dialogue was incredibly unrelatable, sounding more like a male character than female, especially in regards to the sex scenes. It seemed like it was more a conjuring of how some men wish women sounded rather than an organic depiction of a woman with more masculine speech, if that makes sense. Women don’t usually high five each other and use phrases like “I just got laid.” It conflicted with my paradigm. And it made the character seem forced.
There’s a specific tool many storytellers use in books and films to perpetuate plot that I just cannot stand: a misunderstanding between two characters that could be cleared up with a two minute conversation, but is dragged out because the main character is just too distraught ::high drama!!:: to hear anything else on the matter. It drives me crazy. It’s easier to pull off in books because you can only have one character speaking at a time, but it’s not realistic. How hard is it to talk over someone? This book used that tool not only once, but a couple of times to perpetuate the conflict. I realize this is a very personal peeve, so if that trope doesn’t bother you at all (and you can make it to the halfway point), the rest of the components are all there for a good story.
Series status: I probably won’t be continuing the series at this time, although I can see why it has gained some favor with other readers on Goodreads.
Recommendations: this scifi took a long while to get to the selling point of the novel. The great unique spin on things was perhaps a big enough payoff to warrant the wait, so if you pick it up, give it at least until the halfway mark before making the call.
Via The Obsessive Bookseller at www.NikiHawkes.com
Other books you might like:
May 12, 2020
A ball of cliches wrapped in cringe
It has been a while since i've read a book bad enough to inspire me to write a review. But Daisy's Run has achieved that dubious honour.
When writing a book it can be hard to avoid cliche, so much has already been done it is difficult to come up with a truly original idea. This doesn't mean however that you shouldn't try to avoid cliche. It most certainly doesn't mean you can use all the cliches you want as long as your characters point them out, almost as if to camera and say "man this is like...". I honestly lost track of how many different properties were blatantly ripped off then "excused" like this. But for sure Firefly, Alien, Terminator, 2001, Archer, Macgiver, Lucy, Dexter. And these aren't subtle allusions. These are "Hey look at this cool knife game i learned watching that old movie Aliens". These are constant and made my eyes roll so hard at times i feared they might leave my head.
Likewise it can be difficult to write from the perspective of the opposite gender. Particularly men writing women. A few ways to get insight might be to really try putting yourself in their shoes or talking to a real life woman. If these are too hard then at a bare minimum try writing the character as male and then flip it. It won't feel authentic but at least it won't be whatever the hell this is.
The protagonist feels like a mashup of the author's impressions of women, a collection of tropes and the product of several nights surfing porn sites. The book includes several sex scenes graphic enough to make the reader die of cringing but short enough for me to question if the author has actually had any experience outside of porn. Its not my central complaint but Jesus dude.
A few smaller points, the narrative perspective occasionally slides between people for a few sentences in a way that is confusing and just makes me think the author didn't know how to articulate other characters thoughts any other way. Occasionally the time jumps ahead in a way that is also confusing. Three times we have "character awakes in a new situation only to realize it was a dream" sequences. The author seems to think Yoga = magical control over your body, maybe that's a California thing.
But the largest point looming like a colossal tidal wave of garbage over the book is the protagonist's personality. Setting aside all of the weird male flourishes that make her seem about as female as a sex doll. She is a titanic, truly titanic asshole. Smug, self-centered, bigoted, mean and borderline psychopathic. Now it's fine to have unlikable protagonists as long as their motives are relatable and the story acknowledges that they are assholes. Neither of these things happen. The author seems to think that this murderous egoist is charmingly sassy and relatable. And the story strives to make it seem like everyone else is in the wrong most of the time.
*Spoilers ahead*
Sarah, Daisy's friend deserves special mention. Picture a stereotype of a yoga instructor. Done? Good don't change anything. Because character is hard and stereotype is easy. Sarah is a yoga instructor and Daisy's obligatory girlfriend to gossip about men and vibrating cyborg dicks with (a joke the author apparently found so funny they brought it up FIVE MORE TIMES). Every line she has made me want to gouge out part of my brain. She quips. Oh does she quip. Like a Marvel character but with all the charm and wit surgically removed. And the best part is that even after she dies Daisy continues to hear her in her head and interact with her. So even death won't stop her insufferable quipping.
Tamara is the "antagonist" for much of the first third of the book because she is the only person to call Daisy on her insane bullshit. For this we are supposed to hate her. When Daisy disables the safeties on a device that pumps information into her brain Tamara rightly points out that this is a bad idea. In response Daisy basically tells her to f*** off and play with her swiss army arm.
The theme of augmentation and cybernetics run throughout the book and has the protagonist react to people with robotic replacement parts. Daisy showing as much empathy and tolerance as a Nazi in a Synagogue hates AIs, Cyborgs and even people with mechanical enhancements. She briefly, internally wonders if hating people who have had missing limbs replaced is a bad thing but confidently reassures herself that no its fine because its not natural. I kid you not. She goes from mildly uncomfortable with cybernetics to waving a "God hates robots" flag figuratively throughout the book.
The entire middle third of the book is stupid. Daisy, donning her anti-robot SS uniform decides the entire crew is trying to kill her and her boyfriend who is actually a cyborg is the first in the firing line. Despite trying to explain the situation Daisy throws him out and cuts off his arm with a door. Does this disturb her? Of course not because you see cyborgs aren't people. Despite the fact that until that point she was interested in him, he displays emotions, bleeds, feels pain and about every other criteria of being "alive". Nope metal bones means Untermensch. Then when the crew reasonably try to talk to her to explain whats going on she cuts them off everytime just before they explain then complains no-one explains things to her. While attempting to non-lethally subdue her, she knows they are trying non-lethally Furher Daisy fires Tamara out an airlock cause you know fuck her for being all offended when Daisy called her inhuman scum. Hilariously later in the book we discover that Tamara survived the attempted murder and she confronts Daisy in understandably very angry way. "You spaced me" Tamara says angrily "Well you had stun-rifles" replies Furher Daisy "Stun-rifles" replies Tamara emphasizing the stun "Yeah well get over it already" replies Daisy goosestepping in zero-g.
Obviously i have embellished this but it is essentially how the conversation goes. And the author feels it is required to slide to Tamara's perspective for two lines to explain how she doesn't really hold it against Daisy. WTF. If someone tried to kill me for trying to knock them out i'd be pretty justifiably angry.
Of course the "shocking" third act twist is that the AIs and Cyborgs were actually good this whole time and its Daisy's genocidal fury that is wrong. But this "twist" only works if we were in lockstep with the character all along. We are constantly show that AIs and Cyborgs are capable of human emotion, that they are working in her interest and its only her own hatred that keeps her from seeing that. There was one bit on Earth where she meets an eccentric but harmless AI obsessed with fashion (because of course your female character has to go shopping at some point) who is unfailingly polite, helpful and nice. But because Daisy is an anti-robot Nazi she immediately plots an escape that causes the death of some the robots working for the AI. Any other character might have used this moment to perhaps reflect on how all these supposedly evil robots keep helping her. But i got the strong impression that Daisy was just sad she couldn't lead a death squad back through the area to wipe out the rest. Truly a relatable character for us to sympathize with. But other characters lied to her so that excuses all of the lying, stealing, sabotage, assault and murder that she can inflict.
So to summarize an utterly unlikable protagonist lurches through a series of obvious and sometimes disjointed cliches spouting dialogue so smug and hateable you've be forgiven wishing someone would encase her in concrete and fire her into the sun. But i suspect she come back as ghost to quip and spread anti-cybernetic hate speech. This book is bad, really really bad. In fact Daisy and Sarah quipping back and forth might just be the soundtrack to my own personal hell.
It has been a while since i've read a book bad enough to inspire me to write a review. But Daisy's Run has achieved that dubious honour.
When writing a book it can be hard to avoid cliche, so much has already been done it is difficult to come up with a truly original idea. This doesn't mean however that you shouldn't try to avoid cliche. It most certainly doesn't mean you can use all the cliches you want as long as your characters point them out, almost as if to camera and say "man this is like...". I honestly lost track of how many different properties were blatantly ripped off then "excused" like this. But for sure Firefly, Alien, Terminator, 2001, Archer, Macgiver, Lucy, Dexter. And these aren't subtle allusions. These are "Hey look at this cool knife game i learned watching that old movie Aliens". These are constant and made my eyes roll so hard at times i feared they might leave my head.
Likewise it can be difficult to write from the perspective of the opposite gender. Particularly men writing women. A few ways to get insight might be to really try putting yourself in their shoes or talking to a real life woman. If these are too hard then at a bare minimum try writing the character as male and then flip it. It won't feel authentic but at least it won't be whatever the hell this is.
The protagonist feels like a mashup of the author's impressions of women, a collection of tropes and the product of several nights surfing porn sites. The book includes several sex scenes graphic enough to make the reader die of cringing but short enough for me to question if the author has actually had any experience outside of porn. Its not my central complaint but Jesus dude.
A few smaller points, the narrative perspective occasionally slides between people for a few sentences in a way that is confusing and just makes me think the author didn't know how to articulate other characters thoughts any other way. Occasionally the time jumps ahead in a way that is also confusing. Three times we have "character awakes in a new situation only to realize it was a dream" sequences. The author seems to think Yoga = magical control over your body, maybe that's a California thing.
But the largest point looming like a colossal tidal wave of garbage over the book is the protagonist's personality. Setting aside all of the weird male flourishes that make her seem about as female as a sex doll. She is a titanic, truly titanic asshole. Smug, self-centered, bigoted, mean and borderline psychopathic. Now it's fine to have unlikable protagonists as long as their motives are relatable and the story acknowledges that they are assholes. Neither of these things happen. The author seems to think that this murderous egoist is charmingly sassy and relatable. And the story strives to make it seem like everyone else is in the wrong most of the time.
*Spoilers ahead*
Sarah, Daisy's friend deserves special mention. Picture a stereotype of a yoga instructor. Done? Good don't change anything. Because character is hard and stereotype is easy. Sarah is a yoga instructor and Daisy's obligatory girlfriend to gossip about men and vibrating cyborg dicks with (a joke the author apparently found so funny they brought it up FIVE MORE TIMES). Every line she has made me want to gouge out part of my brain. She quips. Oh does she quip. Like a Marvel character but with all the charm and wit surgically removed. And the best part is that even after she dies Daisy continues to hear her in her head and interact with her. So even death won't stop her insufferable quipping.
Tamara is the "antagonist" for much of the first third of the book because she is the only person to call Daisy on her insane bullshit. For this we are supposed to hate her. When Daisy disables the safeties on a device that pumps information into her brain Tamara rightly points out that this is a bad idea. In response Daisy basically tells her to f*** off and play with her swiss army arm.
The theme of augmentation and cybernetics run throughout the book and has the protagonist react to people with robotic replacement parts. Daisy showing as much empathy and tolerance as a Nazi in a Synagogue hates AIs, Cyborgs and even people with mechanical enhancements. She briefly, internally wonders if hating people who have had missing limbs replaced is a bad thing but confidently reassures herself that no its fine because its not natural. I kid you not. She goes from mildly uncomfortable with cybernetics to waving a "God hates robots" flag figuratively throughout the book.
The entire middle third of the book is stupid. Daisy, donning her anti-robot SS uniform decides the entire crew is trying to kill her and her boyfriend who is actually a cyborg is the first in the firing line. Despite trying to explain the situation Daisy throws him out and cuts off his arm with a door. Does this disturb her? Of course not because you see cyborgs aren't people. Despite the fact that until that point she was interested in him, he displays emotions, bleeds, feels pain and about every other criteria of being "alive". Nope metal bones means Untermensch. Then when the crew reasonably try to talk to her to explain whats going on she cuts them off everytime just before they explain then complains no-one explains things to her. While attempting to non-lethally subdue her, she knows they are trying non-lethally Furher Daisy fires Tamara out an airlock cause you know fuck her for being all offended when Daisy called her inhuman scum. Hilariously later in the book we discover that Tamara survived the attempted murder and she confronts Daisy in understandably very angry way. "You spaced me" Tamara says angrily "Well you had stun-rifles" replies Furher Daisy "Stun-rifles" replies Tamara emphasizing the stun "Yeah well get over it already" replies Daisy goosestepping in zero-g.
Obviously i have embellished this but it is essentially how the conversation goes. And the author feels it is required to slide to Tamara's perspective for two lines to explain how she doesn't really hold it against Daisy. WTF. If someone tried to kill me for trying to knock them out i'd be pretty justifiably angry.
Of course the "shocking" third act twist is that the AIs and Cyborgs were actually good this whole time and its Daisy's genocidal fury that is wrong. But this "twist" only works if we were in lockstep with the character all along. We are constantly show that AIs and Cyborgs are capable of human emotion, that they are working in her interest and its only her own hatred that keeps her from seeing that. There was one bit on Earth where she meets an eccentric but harmless AI obsessed with fashion (because of course your female character has to go shopping at some point) who is unfailingly polite, helpful and nice. But because Daisy is an anti-robot Nazi she immediately plots an escape that causes the death of some the robots working for the AI. Any other character might have used this moment to perhaps reflect on how all these supposedly evil robots keep helping her. But i got the strong impression that Daisy was just sad she couldn't lead a death squad back through the area to wipe out the rest. Truly a relatable character for us to sympathize with. But other characters lied to her so that excuses all of the lying, stealing, sabotage, assault and murder that she can inflict.
So to summarize an utterly unlikable protagonist lurches through a series of obvious and sometimes disjointed cliches spouting dialogue so smug and hateable you've be forgiven wishing someone would encase her in concrete and fire her into the sun. But i suspect she come back as ghost to quip and spread anti-cybernetic hate speech. This book is bad, really really bad. In fact Daisy and Sarah quipping back and forth might just be the soundtrack to my own personal hell.
March 20, 2023
First, a big thank you to NetGalley and Scott Baron for the eARC in exhange for an honest review!
As their spaceship is damaged and the crew is awoken early from stasis, we meet Daisy and company. Enter a world of technology and artificial intelligence, mystery, conspiracy, friendship and some bluntly described romance. Daisy and her shipmate Sarah are likeable characters and a big part of the hook was the development of our feelings towards the rest of the crew - for good or for worse.
The most interesting point to me is that the book bluntly asks the question: How do you feel about artificial intelligence? Daisy has to do a lot of self-reflection regarding her views on cyborgs, technology, and humanity in general. Baron adds a great but short passage about how Earth looked before current events, including how with overseas travel becoming cheaper and quicker, xenophobia was all but gone as cultures mixed and erased old misguided prejudices. Speaking of misguided assumptions - that plot twist!!!
The majority of the novel takes place as Daisy runs from potential captors on her ship and learns their secrets. The conclusion rushes in and smacks the reader in the face with a baseball bat. I feel like that is intentional though; we can palpably feel Daisy's shock and it sets up the next novel well. I didn't quite grasp the full extent of what happened though so I wish he had drawn it out a bit more at the end with more background.
The book is fairly well edited with a few passages that seem repetitive, such as when Sarah was described later on. There is plenty of tech-speak reminiscent of Star Trek, which I love but some may end up skimming over
Summary: 4/5 stars. I would recommend this fully to any Sci-Fi fans, and only caution for some coarse sexual language. Thank you again to NetGalley and Scott Baron!
As their spaceship is damaged and the crew is awoken early from stasis, we meet Daisy and company. Enter a world of technology and artificial intelligence, mystery, conspiracy, friendship and some bluntly described romance. Daisy and her shipmate Sarah are likeable characters and a big part of the hook was the development of our feelings towards the rest of the crew - for good or for worse.
The most interesting point to me is that the book bluntly asks the question: How do you feel about artificial intelligence? Daisy has to do a lot of self-reflection regarding her views on cyborgs, technology, and humanity in general. Baron adds a great but short passage about how Earth looked before current events, including how with overseas travel becoming cheaper and quicker, xenophobia was all but gone as cultures mixed and erased old misguided prejudices. Speaking of misguided assumptions - that plot twist!!!
The majority of the novel takes place as Daisy runs from potential captors on her ship and learns their secrets. The conclusion rushes in and smacks the reader in the face with a baseball bat. I feel like that is intentional though; we can palpably feel Daisy's shock and it sets up the next novel well. I didn't quite grasp the full extent of what happened though so I wish he had drawn it out a bit more at the end with more background.
The book is fairly well edited with a few passages that seem repetitive, such as when Sarah was described later on. There is plenty of tech-speak reminiscent of Star Trek, which I love but some may end up skimming over
Summary: 4/5 stars. I would recommend this fully to any Sci-Fi fans, and only caution for some coarse sexual language. Thank you again to NetGalley and Scott Baron!
November 13, 2018
Even as a kid growing up in the 80's with all the "firsts" of space exploration, I never dreamed about being an astronaut. Oh, sure, I'm a TNG Star Trek fan but beyond that, I can't say there's anything about space or science fiction that I really geek about. (And I'm not so sure that I'm not just a Patrick Stewart fan, because, c'mon, it's Patrick Stewart.) Ya'll are probably tired of hearing me say "I'm not that big of a sci-fi fan", yet I still keep reading it, don't I? Well, here are some reasons I couldn't say no to Daisy's Run.
First and foremost, Daisy is a strong, yet flawed, female protagonist and boy, is she snarky, which I love. You get this sense of her somehow being the underdog from the start and I always like to root for the underdog. Occasionally her internal dialogue and prejudices against AI and her more mechanically enhanced shipmates got a bit dreary, but overall, she was a lot of fun. The rest of the characters are equally delightful, even the ones that are a bit more stoic and aloof. While there wasn't necessarily a lot of time spent on character growth, I enjoyed the characters' interactions. The exception to that was the inelegantly phrased "romance" scenes. Egad, those were painfully awkward. Ahem. Moving on...
Read more at Cats Luv Coffee
First and foremost, Daisy is a strong, yet flawed, female protagonist and boy, is she snarky, which I love. You get this sense of her somehow being the underdog from the start and I always like to root for the underdog. Occasionally her internal dialogue and prejudices against AI and her more mechanically enhanced shipmates got a bit dreary, but overall, she was a lot of fun. The rest of the characters are equally delightful, even the ones that are a bit more stoic and aloof. While there wasn't necessarily a lot of time spent on character growth, I enjoyed the characters' interactions. The exception to that was the inelegantly phrased "romance" scenes. Egad, those were painfully awkward. Ahem. Moving on...
Read more at Cats Luv Coffee
dnf
November 16, 2018Didn't finish. This isn't a science fiction novel, it's a treatment for a scifi movie or TV show. Not a particularly up-to-date one, either: all the characters seem to be white (e.g. distinguished by hair color) with similarly Anglo names. These days, that's a kind of future uniformity that needs to be explained, not assumed as "normal": it made me feel as though this was a Retro Hugo candidate.
Further, the space ship is run by an AI (as per current SF standard), but there don't seem to be the usual assortment of bots or drones, just a disconcertingly handsome robot. I also gather it's supposed to be creepy & disconcerting that most of the crew (except our Plucky Heroine) have some obvious replacement parts or enhancements. And that's not getting into the scenes that might be exciting but make no sense (you don't repair spaceships that way), or the way late-20th-C pop culture is shoehorned in so the characters can make references the audience will think are funny. But when I realized that they're heading for a base on the "dark side" of Earth's moon, I bailed.
I received a free e-ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Further, the space ship is run by an AI (as per current SF standard), but there don't seem to be the usual assortment of bots or drones, just a disconcertingly handsome robot. I also gather it's supposed to be creepy & disconcerting that most of the crew (except our Plucky Heroine) have some obvious replacement parts or enhancements. And that's not getting into the scenes that might be exciting but make no sense (you don't repair spaceships that way), or the way late-20th-C pop culture is shoehorned in so the characters can make references the audience will think are funny. But when I realized that they're heading for a base on the "dark side" of Earth's moon, I bailed.
I received a free e-ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
October 19, 2018
Publishing Date: November 2018
Publisher: Curiouser Publishing
ISBN: 9781945996184
Genre: SciFi
Rating: 3.6/5
Publisher’s Description: It had been one hell of a way to start the day––being rudely snapped from a deep cryo-sleep, and in the middle of a ship-wide crisis to boot––but Daisy was pleased to note that the ship had not decompressed, the crew hadn’t been blasted into space, and, most importantly, they hadn’t simply blown up. At least not yet. So, they had that going for them, but being stuck on a damaged ship in the inky depths of space as it limped toward Earth was not exactly the relaxing trip home she’d imagined.
Review:
The Good: This was a pretty dam good scifi novel. Think of an updated “2001: A Space Odyssey” that moves into a “Star Wars” Lea meme with a strange dystopian Earth ending.
Daisy is hotter than a half fuked fox in a February forest fire and has this latent genius developing within, due to her abuse of mental downloads (or is it?). Her development is not a coincidence as the ship she is troubleshooting continues to glitch as does the resident AI. Without giving too much away, Daisy continues to develop as a real solid character as the movement intensifies. The story line takes many surprising turns and is really what drives the novel in interesting directions.
The Meh: Daisy and hunky guy, Biggus Dickus', lust affair gets a little long winded and over-used. No surprise that I am not a fan of romance due to it’s ability to detract from the characters and story line if not executed with perfection. In this case, it got a little too sloppy with the graphic rendering. Additionally, Daisy’s constant disbelief about her abilities wore pretty thin after awhile. “Like, wow gee, I had no idea I could make an EMP bomb while running from cyborgs and knitting stockings at the same time!”
Conclusion: As much as Daisy was a great character, she could be a total asshat as well. Would I get the next in the series? Fuk yeah, as I loves the space operatic.
Publisher: Curiouser Publishing
ISBN: 9781945996184
Genre: SciFi
Rating: 3.6/5
Publisher’s Description: It had been one hell of a way to start the day––being rudely snapped from a deep cryo-sleep, and in the middle of a ship-wide crisis to boot––but Daisy was pleased to note that the ship had not decompressed, the crew hadn’t been blasted into space, and, most importantly, they hadn’t simply blown up. At least not yet. So, they had that going for them, but being stuck on a damaged ship in the inky depths of space as it limped toward Earth was not exactly the relaxing trip home she’d imagined.
Review:
The Good: This was a pretty dam good scifi novel. Think of an updated “2001: A Space Odyssey” that moves into a “Star Wars” Lea meme with a strange dystopian Earth ending.
Daisy is hotter than a half fuked fox in a February forest fire and has this latent genius developing within, due to her abuse of mental downloads (or is it?). Her development is not a coincidence as the ship she is troubleshooting continues to glitch as does the resident AI. Without giving too much away, Daisy continues to develop as a real solid character as the movement intensifies. The story line takes many surprising turns and is really what drives the novel in interesting directions.
The Meh: Daisy and hunky guy, Biggus Dickus', lust affair gets a little long winded and over-used. No surprise that I am not a fan of romance due to it’s ability to detract from the characters and story line if not executed with perfection. In this case, it got a little too sloppy with the graphic rendering. Additionally, Daisy’s constant disbelief about her abilities wore pretty thin after awhile. “Like, wow gee, I had no idea I could make an EMP bomb while running from cyborgs and knitting stockings at the same time!”
Conclusion: As much as Daisy was a great character, she could be a total asshat as well. Would I get the next in the series? Fuk yeah, as I loves the space operatic.
July 4, 2019
"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has already got there first and is waiting for it."
Daisy is a typical snarky tech guru who wakes up to find to the ship she's serving on in need of emergency repairs. Those seem to be the least of her worries. I mean just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
This was a really fun ride. There was snark, aliens, handsome cyborgs and a big giant twist I did not see coming! I knew there'd be a twist, I was on guard for the twist, and the twist still blindsided me. I love that about his stories! I can't wait for book number two!
Daisy is a typical snarky tech guru who wakes up to find to the ship she's serving on in need of emergency repairs. Those seem to be the least of her worries. I mean just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
This was a really fun ride. There was snark, aliens, handsome cyborgs and a big giant twist I did not see coming! I knew there'd be a twist, I was on guard for the twist, and the twist still blindsided me. I love that about his stories! I can't wait for book number two!
March 28, 2019
As someone who is a very big science fiction fan, when I was offered a chance to read Daisy’s Run, I jumped at the opportunity. It isn’t often that you come across a sci-fi book where the lead character is a female. And especially one who is as strong and snarky as Daisy.
Daisy’s Run is one of those books that hits the proverbial ground running. Right from the first page we are thrust in to a dangerous, and possibly deadly, situation. The space ship has been damaged by debris and if repairs are not done it could spell catastrophe.
At first everything seems to be running smoothly, but when one of the crew is inexplicably sucked out in to space, what was supposed to be a quiet trip back to Earth takes on a more dangerous tone. It doesn’t help that aside from Daisy, almost every other crew member is augmented in some way, and it seems that every one of them has a secret they’re hiding.
As the story continues and Daisy tries to figure out what is happening, it becomes harder and harder for her to know who to trust. She becomes incredibly paranoid and the reader is left to wonder if all these dangers she is seeing are all in her head.
As Daisy becomes more and more paranoid, the story itself begins to feel frenetic. The pace almost becomes as frantic as Daisy’s mind is, only slowing down towards the end when things begin to be explained.
Baron does a very good job of making us wonder just who is telling the truth. Small clues are dropped through words and actions that hint at bigger plots behind the scenes.
While the story itself is a bit slow to start, I encourage readers to hang in there and keep going. When the story picks up, it picks up fast and pulls you along with it. And personally, I cannot wait to see what happens next.
August 7, 2020
There is certainly an interesting start to the book, but it doesn’t take long to develop into a mediocre soap opera, which just happens to be set in a spaceship.
I also struggled to develop any empathy for the characters and I especially found Daisy quite aggravating. The author doesn’t provide any back-story so the main characters are quite anonymous. Also the rubbish sex scenes don’t help.
About a third of the way through the nature of the story changes and it becomes more of a mystery and investigation. I hoped this would add a bit more interest, but the author had ambitions to also make it a bit of a psychological thriller, which didn’t really work for me. Part of the problem was someone seems to have given the author 'the book of 101 mystery novel clichés'. I hate it when something important is about to be revealed and then there is a last second interruption, when this keeps happening it just becomes annoying. It appears the author wants the big reveal at the end of the book, but it makes it a very frustrating read.
At some point the situation on the ship is described as "a Comedy of Errors" unfortunately that is an apt description, except it wasn't amusing. Overall it was an interesting idea not that well executed. By the end of the book the story just about makes sense and I was thinking I might read the next book, until the epilogue.
I also struggled to develop any empathy for the characters and I especially found Daisy quite aggravating. The author doesn’t provide any back-story so the main characters are quite anonymous. Also the rubbish sex scenes don’t help.
About a third of the way through the nature of the story changes and it becomes more of a mystery and investigation. I hoped this would add a bit more interest, but the author had ambitions to also make it a bit of a psychological thriller, which didn’t really work for me. Part of the problem was someone seems to have given the author 'the book of 101 mystery novel clichés'. I hate it when something important is about to be revealed and then there is a last second interruption, when this keeps happening it just becomes annoying. It appears the author wants the big reveal at the end of the book, but it makes it a very frustrating read.
At some point the situation on the ship is described as "a Comedy of Errors" unfortunately that is an apt description, except it wasn't amusing. Overall it was an interesting idea not that well executed. By the end of the book the story just about makes sense and I was thinking I might read the next book, until the epilogue.
July 20, 2020
One day I saw that „Daisy's Run” written by Scott Baron was free on Amazon. Not only this one book, but three in „The Clockwork Chimera” series were free. I downloaded all of them and I read the first installment of this series yeasterday.
And I really need this book on my bookshelf!
Daisy is a redhair, electronics engineer gril, which was in deep cyro-sleep. One day all crew were awakened because something was wrong with their ship and it needs repairs. Daisy and her crewmembers started fixing the ship, when strange events are beginning to take place.
What's a book! I am a huge fan of science- fiction and when I was reading „Daisy's run” Scott Baron shocked me in every chapter! These plot twists! These secrets! This space! Totally love every moment in this book and I really need to read a book number two. And of course all the series!
Daisy is my girl. I like her so much! She is brave and clever. All crewmembers are different but Daisy and her best friend Sarah are the best. Of course we have here a little romance, which is perfect in the plot of this story.
I also love both covers of this book. The old one and the new one. They don't say what is inside „Daisy's Run” and this is totally good!
Be prepared for wild space ride and phenomenal ending!
And I really need this book on my bookshelf!
Daisy is a redhair, electronics engineer gril, which was in deep cyro-sleep. One day all crew were awakened because something was wrong with their ship and it needs repairs. Daisy and her crewmembers started fixing the ship, when strange events are beginning to take place.
What's a book! I am a huge fan of science- fiction and when I was reading „Daisy's run” Scott Baron shocked me in every chapter! These plot twists! These secrets! This space! Totally love every moment in this book and I really need to read a book number two. And of course all the series!
Daisy is my girl. I like her so much! She is brave and clever. All crewmembers are different but Daisy and her best friend Sarah are the best. Of course we have here a little romance, which is perfect in the plot of this story.
I also love both covers of this book. The old one and the new one. They don't say what is inside „Daisy's Run” and this is totally good!
Be prepared for wild space ride and phenomenal ending!
September 19, 2018
It’s been a bit since I’ve read a complete female led sci-fi story. I really enjoyed this world building the author took in this book, I sensed part the way through this would be a series and look forward to the next one.
The lead character is fun and frustrating and just interesting to read. The book itself has a lot of technical reference peppered throughout the story, which for me added to the telling.
I look forward to book 2!
Thanks NetGalley for the ARC.
The lead character is fun and frustrating and just interesting to read. The book itself has a lot of technical reference peppered throughout the story, which for me added to the telling.
I look forward to book 2!
Thanks NetGalley for the ARC.
November 23, 2018
There were a few fiddly incongruities in Daisy’s Run (it's a 4.5 rounded up) but I don’t think I should be too critical about those because I enjoyed the adventure overall. I did wonder if it had been published in the wrong media as the sets and type of work it has been influenced by are all televisual; 2001 A Space Odyssey, Red Dwarf and the first Alien movie spring to mind, but I suppose Deepwater Black was the most comparable and that started as a novelisation (trilogy) and then morphed into television.
The protagonist, named Daisy, isn’t a wallflower or shrinking violet and is therefore clearly far removed from Deepwater’s Yuna in that previously mentioned book, or the film (played by the china doll Nicole de Boer, pre-DS9), because Daisy is super-athletic and strong, super-smart from implants, highly adaptable to new situations, so capable, match-winningly unstoppable and has boosted her mental capacity, analytical reasoning and genetic physiology. Even her bones are denser, despite living entirely in outer space, which could be expected to have the opposite effect. In fact, she has every capability I can think of except breathing in a vacuum and changing her toenail colour with a twitch of the nose.
Doing this to a character, building them too far up, can be self-defeating for two reasons. (1) Think about cheats in gaming. If your friend plays the same game as you, with the same rules, but they have a full set of cheats giving them invincibility or extra lives, unlimited credits, unlocks all goodies or tools and, in summary, there is no way to stop them winning… there’s no point playing them ever again. It’s no longer interesting. This is why credible villains should always have a ten percent fatal flaw. Credible heroes should be just as useless as everyone else, but have a ten percent redeeming quality or ability which combines with luck or wits or friendship to only just win the day. That’s my view anyway. You don’t play the Devil at chess for your soul because he knows all the cheats. God has all the cheats too, which defines the role. (2) Characters should develop as they progress through a story, working around their flaws and gaining a sort of maturity. Yes, Daisy changes but mostly resulting from plug-in upgrades, so I think the bar was set a touch too high and too early. Now she can only change by tiny increments – or accept her fate, drag on the nylon yellow skirt and be Superwoman. That was too critical, labouring the point, but really it didn’t bother me that much and she was outnumbered in quite a long series of situations.
So, is it all about Daisy? Not necessarily. She is the main person of interest but thought has gone into the rest of the gang and, especially, the emergent mechanoid civilisation she encounters when she makes planet-fall. There are creatures too, which had a back story and did their thing, adding a new element to help explain a gradually revealing mystery.
Always that was there, pervading the novel, the rolling and unanswered question of what is really going on. The author doesn’t make the full answer easy to guess BUT I have to claim that it was soon obvious to me that the author was using a misdirection ploy on the reader and that Daisy had based her logic on partial evidence and leaped fully-committed and with spectacular abandon to the wrong conclusion. When other characters tried to put her right, she did the equivalent of putting her fingers in her ears and running away from them. I can see this was necessary for the author to do, as hearing what they had to say would trash the big surprise and further action would become unnecessary. Even so, Daisy of the enhanced brain didn’t want to consider other hypotheses and I sensed that was less realistic, so must be a plot twist, so I wasn’t surprised when that came.
Some emotions and instabilities work quite well in this story. The main one is paranoia or lack of trust, where someone believes there’s a conspiracy and everyone’s out to get them. That is of course heavily amplified greatly if the character thinks people are not people and she may be the last human on-board. There was plenty of good suspense around that. Then there’s loss, for a colleague and also around the concept of home. Hope featured too, both for the success of a relationship and in the sense of rebuilding and emerging from a struggle into a happier place. There’s also a kind of subconscious and unstated rage, which grows from the character not comprehending what’s happening to the world around them and so they feel like running until they can find somewhere quiet to sit down and process it all.
Daisy is strong, a YA kick-ass heroine. The scenario is good enough and the sense of mystery draws you into good engagement, where the reader buys into the unfolding story and cares what happens to (mainly) Daisy. The fate of home is worth exploring, as we all understand an affinity to that concept and it’s a big world so can’t all be in the bin. In short, this is a sci-fi mystery adventure with a character who can run and run, faster and farther than you. It may be a little late to tweak her power down from the 11/10 setting but otherwise this story is a blast and I’m glad I got into it.
The protagonist, named Daisy, isn’t a wallflower or shrinking violet and is therefore clearly far removed from Deepwater’s Yuna in that previously mentioned book, or the film (played by the china doll Nicole de Boer, pre-DS9), because Daisy is super-athletic and strong, super-smart from implants, highly adaptable to new situations, so capable, match-winningly unstoppable and has boosted her mental capacity, analytical reasoning and genetic physiology. Even her bones are denser, despite living entirely in outer space, which could be expected to have the opposite effect. In fact, she has every capability I can think of except breathing in a vacuum and changing her toenail colour with a twitch of the nose.
Doing this to a character, building them too far up, can be self-defeating for two reasons. (1) Think about cheats in gaming. If your friend plays the same game as you, with the same rules, but they have a full set of cheats giving them invincibility or extra lives, unlimited credits, unlocks all goodies or tools and, in summary, there is no way to stop them winning… there’s no point playing them ever again. It’s no longer interesting. This is why credible villains should always have a ten percent fatal flaw. Credible heroes should be just as useless as everyone else, but have a ten percent redeeming quality or ability which combines with luck or wits or friendship to only just win the day. That’s my view anyway. You don’t play the Devil at chess for your soul because he knows all the cheats. God has all the cheats too, which defines the role. (2) Characters should develop as they progress through a story, working around their flaws and gaining a sort of maturity. Yes, Daisy changes but mostly resulting from plug-in upgrades, so I think the bar was set a touch too high and too early. Now she can only change by tiny increments – or accept her fate, drag on the nylon yellow skirt and be Superwoman. That was too critical, labouring the point, but really it didn’t bother me that much and she was outnumbered in quite a long series of situations.
So, is it all about Daisy? Not necessarily. She is the main person of interest but thought has gone into the rest of the gang and, especially, the emergent mechanoid civilisation she encounters when she makes planet-fall. There are creatures too, which had a back story and did their thing, adding a new element to help explain a gradually revealing mystery.
Always that was there, pervading the novel, the rolling and unanswered question of what is really going on. The author doesn’t make the full answer easy to guess BUT I have to claim that it was soon obvious to me that the author was using a misdirection ploy on the reader and that Daisy had based her logic on partial evidence and leaped fully-committed and with spectacular abandon to the wrong conclusion. When other characters tried to put her right, she did the equivalent of putting her fingers in her ears and running away from them. I can see this was necessary for the author to do, as hearing what they had to say would trash the big surprise and further action would become unnecessary. Even so, Daisy of the enhanced brain didn’t want to consider other hypotheses and I sensed that was less realistic, so must be a plot twist, so I wasn’t surprised when that came.
Some emotions and instabilities work quite well in this story. The main one is paranoia or lack of trust, where someone believes there’s a conspiracy and everyone’s out to get them. That is of course heavily amplified greatly if the character thinks people are not people and she may be the last human on-board. There was plenty of good suspense around that. Then there’s loss, for a colleague and also around the concept of home. Hope featured too, both for the success of a relationship and in the sense of rebuilding and emerging from a struggle into a happier place. There’s also a kind of subconscious and unstated rage, which grows from the character not comprehending what’s happening to the world around them and so they feel like running until they can find somewhere quiet to sit down and process it all.
Daisy is strong, a YA kick-ass heroine. The scenario is good enough and the sense of mystery draws you into good engagement, where the reader buys into the unfolding story and cares what happens to (mainly) Daisy. The fate of home is worth exploring, as we all understand an affinity to that concept and it’s a big world so can’t all be in the bin. In short, this is a sci-fi mystery adventure with a character who can run and run, faster and farther than you. It may be a little late to tweak her power down from the 11/10 setting but otherwise this story is a blast and I’m glad I got into it.
November 11, 2018
Having previously read other works by Scott Baron, I was excited to pick this one up. This one feels a bit distinct from the ones I've read in the past, as it has a lot more sci-fi elements to it. The main plot focuses on Daisy, who has just been awoken from a cryogenic sleep on a spacecraft headed to earth.
I think the highlight of this book is definitely the amount of attention and imagination that went into world-building. There's a very futuristic spin on all of the technology present in this book, but it was generally described well enough that I never really felt lost. I was fascinated by the descriptions of cyborgs and fully integrated cybernetic limbs and I think the concept of a world where not all "people" are necessarily human is kind of fascinating.
That being said, there were a couple of aspects of this book that I didn't enjoy as much:
1. The excessive sex scenes. Don't get me wrong, an occasional sex scene would have been fine -- but in this book, they felt a bit forced and awkward. More than once I found myself skimming ahead to skip over these scenes.
2. The exceeeeeessively long build-up to the explanation of what has transpired to humankind. I think Daisy spends about half the book actively running away from the other characters who are trying to explain the state of things, and then once the explanation occurs, it's a very hefty info dump at the end. The problem that goes hand-in-hand with this is that, by the time you reach the end, the explanation is not surprising. In fact, I was probably no more than a quarter of the way through the book before I guessed at some of the major details, and by the time Daisy lands on earth, it was fairly clear... but it was still frustrating having to wait until the end to get some greater context.
Overall, the plot pulled together some compelling ideas for a storyline, and I found the setting really intriguing. Though I do think some tweaks would improve the overall novel, I enjoyed this one.
I received a copy of this title from Netgalley for review.
I think the highlight of this book is definitely the amount of attention and imagination that went into world-building. There's a very futuristic spin on all of the technology present in this book, but it was generally described well enough that I never really felt lost. I was fascinated by the descriptions of cyborgs and fully integrated cybernetic limbs and I think the concept of a world where not all "people" are necessarily human is kind of fascinating.
That being said, there were a couple of aspects of this book that I didn't enjoy as much:
1. The excessive sex scenes. Don't get me wrong, an occasional sex scene would have been fine -- but in this book, they felt a bit forced and awkward. More than once I found myself skimming ahead to skip over these scenes.
2. The exceeeeeessively long build-up to the explanation of what has transpired to humankind. I think Daisy spends about half the book actively running away from the other characters who are trying to explain the state of things, and then once the explanation occurs, it's a very hefty info dump at the end. The problem that goes hand-in-hand with this is that, by the time you reach the end, the explanation is not surprising. In fact, I was probably no more than a quarter of the way through the book before I guessed at some of the major details, and by the time Daisy lands on earth, it was fairly clear... but it was still frustrating having to wait until the end to get some greater context.
Overall, the plot pulled together some compelling ideas for a storyline, and I found the setting really intriguing. Though I do think some tweaks would improve the overall novel, I enjoyed this one.
I received a copy of this title from Netgalley for review.
January 5, 2019
Daisy's Run: With a Slow Start, yet a Solid Sprint toward Future Tales
Daisy's Run immediately thrusts readers into a harrowing tale of the perils of space. Through twists and turns, readers will learn there is much more to Daisy than meets the eye. And not only is there more to Daisy, every character has their secrets to hide. As Daisy tries to unravel the truth, new discoveries meet her at every corner, and the story's final revelation surprised me, even as my skepticism meter had increasingly grown throughout the journey.
Other than the first chapter, the story starts a bit slow for my tastes, and I think that's the first element that lost it points in my mind. After thrusting characters into danger (and a poorly written sex scene), Daisy spends the next few chapters adjusting to life on a space ship traveling for six months. It took just a bit too long for the novel to progress through this first act.
Generally speaking, I enjoyed the author's voice, though there are moments where the dialogue feels a tad wooden (though given the overarching plot of the story, I could argue that was intentional). More importantly, there are plenty of moments throughout this story where I scratched my head at the "science" thrown around by the author (a fireball flying through the air without gravity? I asked a physicist friend of mine, and he said that was entirely impossible). So if you're looking for a hard science fiction tale, do not read this book. If you're looking for an action-packed sci-fi thriller that reads like a movie, consider its pages.
Now this story begins a much larger series, titled "The Clockwork Chimera." From what I can tell, four other books in the series are already available. After reading Daisy's Run, I'd say I'm intrigued, and if the second book shows up on my Kindle for 99 cents, I might pick it up.
Final Score: 7/10. I've given it four stars, but it earned that fourth star just because of its compelling finish.
NOTE: I voluntarily reviewed Daisy's Run after receiving a free copy.
Daisy's Run immediately thrusts readers into a harrowing tale of the perils of space. Through twists and turns, readers will learn there is much more to Daisy than meets the eye. And not only is there more to Daisy, every character has their secrets to hide. As Daisy tries to unravel the truth, new discoveries meet her at every corner, and the story's final revelation surprised me, even as my skepticism meter had increasingly grown throughout the journey.
Other than the first chapter, the story starts a bit slow for my tastes, and I think that's the first element that lost it points in my mind. After thrusting characters into danger (and a poorly written sex scene), Daisy spends the next few chapters adjusting to life on a space ship traveling for six months. It took just a bit too long for the novel to progress through this first act.
Generally speaking, I enjoyed the author's voice, though there are moments where the dialogue feels a tad wooden (though given the overarching plot of the story, I could argue that was intentional). More importantly, there are plenty of moments throughout this story where I scratched my head at the "science" thrown around by the author (a fireball flying through the air without gravity? I asked a physicist friend of mine, and he said that was entirely impossible). So if you're looking for a hard science fiction tale, do not read this book. If you're looking for an action-packed sci-fi thriller that reads like a movie, consider its pages.
Now this story begins a much larger series, titled "The Clockwork Chimera." From what I can tell, four other books in the series are already available. After reading Daisy's Run, I'd say I'm intrigued, and if the second book shows up on my Kindle for 99 cents, I might pick it up.
Final Score: 7/10. I've given it four stars, but it earned that fourth star just because of its compelling finish.
NOTE: I voluntarily reviewed Daisy's Run after receiving a free copy.
January 13, 2019
"Daisy's Run" eBook was published in 2018 and was written by Scott Baron (https://scottbaron.blog). Mr. Baron has published six novels. This is the first novel in his "Clockwork Chimera" series.
I received an ARC of this novel through https://www.netgalley.com in return for a fair and honest review. I categorize this novel as ‘R’ because it contains scenes of Violence, Mature Situations, and Mature Language. The story is set in the future. The primary character is Daisy Swarthmore, a twenty-five-year-old redheaded communications and electronics expert aboard the spacecraft Váli.
Swarthmore is part of the small crew that is taking the vessel back to Earth. They are all awoken prematurely from cryo-sleep when their ship is struck by debris. Swarthmore is relatively new to the crew but gets along well with most of them. The ship is controlled by Mal, an advanced AI.
Swarthmore begins to have doubts about the AI, fearing that it is attempting a take-over. As the story progresses, one crew member 'accidentally' dies making Swarthmore even more paranoid. She soon finds herself on the run aboard the small ship. She hopes she can make it to the Moon's Dark Side base or to Earth in time to counter what she sees as a threat from the AI. While she is pursued by the crew, she ultimately discovers that things are far from what she had expected.
I thoroughly enjoyed the 7.5 hours I spent reading this 361-page science fiction novel. I like the character of Swarthmore as well as the plot. Having unexpected plot twists make the novel feel fresh. I like the selected cover art. I give this novel a 4.5 (rounded up to a 5) out of 5.
Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.
I received an ARC of this novel through https://www.netgalley.com in return for a fair and honest review. I categorize this novel as ‘R’ because it contains scenes of Violence, Mature Situations, and Mature Language. The story is set in the future. The primary character is Daisy Swarthmore, a twenty-five-year-old redheaded communications and electronics expert aboard the spacecraft Váli.
Swarthmore is part of the small crew that is taking the vessel back to Earth. They are all awoken prematurely from cryo-sleep when their ship is struck by debris. Swarthmore is relatively new to the crew but gets along well with most of them. The ship is controlled by Mal, an advanced AI.
Swarthmore begins to have doubts about the AI, fearing that it is attempting a take-over. As the story progresses, one crew member 'accidentally' dies making Swarthmore even more paranoid. She soon finds herself on the run aboard the small ship. She hopes she can make it to the Moon's Dark Side base or to Earth in time to counter what she sees as a threat from the AI. While she is pursued by the crew, she ultimately discovers that things are far from what she had expected.
I thoroughly enjoyed the 7.5 hours I spent reading this 361-page science fiction novel. I like the character of Swarthmore as well as the plot. Having unexpected plot twists make the novel feel fresh. I like the selected cover art. I give this novel a 4.5 (rounded up to a 5) out of 5.
Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.
May 16, 2020
Damn, so given that I had no idea what I was in for when I started this, it was a bloody fun ride! Definitely reading the next one in the series because while it didn't end on a cliffhanger as such, I really want to know more about this world and the about how Daisy will tackle the problems given to her in the last 10% of the book.
September 23, 2018
I will admit this is my first adventure with this genre of book - and the reason I chose it - I am shallow and my daughters name is Daisy, but I am absolutely hooked. Forgive me if this is off base, and I am by no means big on sci-fi usually but it put me in mind of a cross between Lost in Space and Star Trek (the tv one with Captain Jane, admittedly the only one I've seen!). You can absolutely tell that Scott Baron works in the movie industry - this book has "big screen adaptation" written all over it - I could literally see it playing out in front of me page my page! Unexpected, and keeping you guessing right until the last page this book will keep you up well into the night. I can't wait for the second instalment. If you've never been drawn to this genre before get yourself out of your comfort zone and jump right in. I guarantee you will not be disappointed!
November 18, 2018
Daisy wakes up from cryo-sleep early to help her ship's crew fight an unexpected hazard from external impact. With all she has to deal with, not being to remember her past properly gets put on the shelf until one of the crew gets sucked out an airlock while tracking an oxygen leak-- and ends up inside Daisy's head!
It turns out that there is more going on than she understands, and this run to Darkside lunar base for repairs is not at all routine. What's more, she has simply got to get over her prejudice against the cyborgs on board before she dooms what's left of the human race.
This tale is a great way to examine the nature of what it means to be human, when humans are not the species in charge of the universe and have to use every trick in the book to persist in any way at all. Also, it's often really funny.
It turns out that there is more going on than she understands, and this run to Darkside lunar base for repairs is not at all routine. What's more, she has simply got to get over her prejudice against the cyborgs on board before she dooms what's left of the human race.
This tale is a great way to examine the nature of what it means to be human, when humans are not the species in charge of the universe and have to use every trick in the book to persist in any way at all. Also, it's often really funny.
April 9, 2020
Different
I just read Scott Baron's short biography. Being a Californian, I can agree that California is like another world - especially Hollywood - and begins to explain his inspiration for Daisy. Having dual personalities in California is almost required! Kudos for Baron for raising the Sci/Fi bar, which is not an easy thing to do. There are thousands of Sci/Fi and Fantasy writers and rising above the herd takes a special talent. Baron has that. I saw few, if any, serious grammatical errors, the story is tight, the characters descriptive, the bad guys really bad, and the good guys really good. (I fell in love with Daisy almost immediately!) Then, I read the title of his next book in the series, Pushing Daisy, and cracked up. I can't wait....
I just read Scott Baron's short biography. Being a Californian, I can agree that California is like another world - especially Hollywood - and begins to explain his inspiration for Daisy. Having dual personalities in California is almost required! Kudos for Baron for raising the Sci/Fi bar, which is not an easy thing to do. There are thousands of Sci/Fi and Fantasy writers and rising above the herd takes a special talent. Baron has that. I saw few, if any, serious grammatical errors, the story is tight, the characters descriptive, the bad guys really bad, and the good guys really good. (I fell in love with Daisy almost immediately!) Then, I read the title of his next book in the series, Pushing Daisy, and cracked up. I can't wait....
September 20, 2018
First things first, I normally stay away from spacey sci-fi stuff. It gets all technical and makes me feel stupid. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I enjoyed the Cowboy Bebop and Star Wars references. And for some reason Final Fantasy VII kept popping in my head when certain characters were mentioned (Sid, Barry). I did get a bit lost on the technical jargon, but it wasn't overwhelming. I was excited to see what Daisy would do next; which systems she would change on the ship, what her thought process was on the cyborgs, and what would happen when she got to Earth. Very surprising ending and the cliffhanger annoys me. I definitely want to read the next book!
July 27, 2022
Good fun.
Just go with it like you do a mainstream Hollywood sci-fi action movie with a heroine who says “fuck” a lot.
I’m thinking any editing that was done by others, who like the author work in film in Hollywood, and mix up effect and affect, and who cares about the laws of physics or how tech actually works anyway?
Just go with it like you do a mainstream Hollywood sci-fi action movie with a heroine who says “fuck” a lot.
I’m thinking any editing that was done by others, who like the author work in film in Hollywood, and mix up effect and affect, and who cares about the laws of physics or how tech actually works anyway?
May 9, 2020
Absolutely Brilliant
What an amazing start to a series,Awesome characters literally leap of the page,a storyline that is totally immersive interwoven with numerous subplots to keep you turning pages this book has it all .Innumerable twists and turns to keep you guessing and a final revelation that you definitely won't see coming,I'm off to read the next in this astonishing series can't wait,Highly recommended a must read,Baz
What an amazing start to a series,Awesome characters literally leap of the page,a storyline that is totally immersive interwoven with numerous subplots to keep you turning pages this book has it all .Innumerable twists and turns to keep you guessing and a final revelation that you definitely won't see coming,I'm off to read the next in this astonishing series can't wait,Highly recommended a must read,Baz
September 21, 2018
Definitely kept my attention the entire time. It was hard to put this book down as I was continuously rooting for Daisy to do everything she has to complete in this book. I could not believe the direction it took and what we find out at the end. I recommend this book to any and all. Just be prepared to be shocked in the end. Can't wait for the second book.
April 24, 2020
Space Journey Ahead!
I must admit that I got taken by surprise several times while reading Daisy's Run, by Scott Baron. This eBook is the first volume in Scott's "The Clockwork Chimera" series. As I got deeper into the book, the book got deeper in me. You can look forward to great characters, fast action, and thought provoking themes.
I have read several space novels that started out with a human crew being awakened from cryogenic stasis due to some onboard emergency. Was this just another one? Well, no! The subsequent story turned out to explore much deeper themes than that. Daisy's Run is more than a typical space Opera.
While I was initially amused by some of the characters, I soon discovered that Daisy's Run was far more than just a comedy. Yes, you will find some good humor in Baron's novel, but the plot immediately thickens and gets richer. The action intensifies and the characters soon attract your full attention, exposing complex personalities and presenting you with questions that will keep you engrossed to the very end.
Scott Baron has mastered one art which I consider highly important for series writing. When you finish the last page, Baron will have given you a complete story but will also have told that there is more to come, if you choose to continue to the next volume. He leaves you satisfied but eager for more. That makes him a master storyteller in my book!
Strongly recommended!
I must admit that I got taken by surprise several times while reading Daisy's Run, by Scott Baron. This eBook is the first volume in Scott's "The Clockwork Chimera" series. As I got deeper into the book, the book got deeper in me. You can look forward to great characters, fast action, and thought provoking themes.
I have read several space novels that started out with a human crew being awakened from cryogenic stasis due to some onboard emergency. Was this just another one? Well, no! The subsequent story turned out to explore much deeper themes than that. Daisy's Run is more than a typical space Opera.
While I was initially amused by some of the characters, I soon discovered that Daisy's Run was far more than just a comedy. Yes, you will find some good humor in Baron's novel, but the plot immediately thickens and gets richer. The action intensifies and the characters soon attract your full attention, exposing complex personalities and presenting you with questions that will keep you engrossed to the very end.
Scott Baron has mastered one art which I consider highly important for series writing. When you finish the last page, Baron will have given you a complete story but will also have told that there is more to come, if you choose to continue to the next volume. He leaves you satisfied but eager for more. That makes him a master storyteller in my book!
Strongly recommended!
September 19, 2018
I’m still thinking about this book. I stayed up until about two in the morning to finish it (couldn’t sleep anyway, so why not read a book if you’re tossing and turning?), and was left wanting more due to it cutting off rather abruptly at the end. The book is set in the future, there’s some romance going on, and there’s lots of action, conspiracies, and general futuristic “how can this have happened” type of stuff going on.
Warnings/slightly spoilers sorry: romantic relationships with cyborgs, death of a main character, dismemberment of an arm via a door, swearing, graphic detailed descriptions of the end of the world, AI’s vs. Humans…uh-can’t really think of what else to add.
I liked the characters. While Daisy was the main character that I was rooting for, I also really liked Vince and Finn-Finn, because he seemed like the sort that I would really like due to his sarcastic nature and being an incredible chef. Vince was also an interesting figure, and not one that I normally go for, but towards the end of the book he moves mountains to get Daisy back safe and sound and doesn’t hold a grudge for some spoiler or another.
There were a couple of issues that I had with this book. I think another editor could look it over, because some of the conversations seemed a bit jarring, and confusing. I’ll have to go through it again and find my highlights for examples, but I think most readers will be able to push through it fine.
I’m giving this a 4/5 stars. The book wasn’t perfect, it was a bit of a slow build up into a ‘wow I did not see that coming’ kind of read, and some of the characters were a bit off-putting. I hope the second book gets to be even better than the first, and definitely look forward to reading it!
{Review also posted on my blog.}
Warnings/slightly spoilers sorry: romantic relationships with cyborgs, death of a main character, dismemberment of an arm via a door, swearing, graphic detailed descriptions of the end of the world, AI’s vs. Humans…uh-can’t really think of what else to add.
I liked the characters. While Daisy was the main character that I was rooting for, I also really liked Vince and Finn-Finn, because he seemed like the sort that I would really like due to his sarcastic nature and being an incredible chef. Vince was also an interesting figure, and not one that I normally go for, but towards the end of the book he moves mountains to get Daisy back safe and sound and doesn’t hold a grudge for some spoiler or another.
There were a couple of issues that I had with this book. I think another editor could look it over, because some of the conversations seemed a bit jarring, and confusing. I’ll have to go through it again and find my highlights for examples, but I think most readers will be able to push through it fine.
I’m giving this a 4/5 stars. The book wasn’t perfect, it was a bit of a slow build up into a ‘wow I did not see that coming’ kind of read, and some of the characters were a bit off-putting. I hope the second book gets to be even better than the first, and definitely look forward to reading it!
{Review also posted on my blog.}
January 6, 2019
Something Scary👹 This Way Comes!
Adult Sci-fi Suspense with Adult Romance!
Human spacers are on their way back to the moon base near earth from deep space, in their ship VALI. All of the crew is in cryo sleep except for Harry, a cyborg, and the ship AI, Mal. Some sort of tiny space junk or object hits the ship, goes through the shields, and causes decompression and small fires in one pod section of the ship. The crew is woken up to make repairs.
The ship begins to exhibit small malfunctions months after repairs are made. Only a week out from the moon base where they will dock for the major repairs, the ship's technology starts malfunctioning strangely and the AI is even acting weird. Over half of the small crew have artificial mechanical limbs and they start malfunctioning, too! EEK!
ARC Received from Hidden 💎Gems
I also got the book with KU.
This is a really exciting sci-fi pageturner, the best I've read in the last year. I was totally immersed in this techno thriller of deceit and betrayal! Mr. Baron's book is a must read for adult sci-fi fans! Recommend!
This book does end in a cliffhanger but the entire series has been published, so readers can go on to the next book seamlessly.
Adult Sci-fi Suspense with Adult Romance!
Human spacers are on their way back to the moon base near earth from deep space, in their ship VALI. All of the crew is in cryo sleep except for Harry, a cyborg, and the ship AI, Mal. Some sort of tiny space junk or object hits the ship, goes through the shields, and causes decompression and small fires in one pod section of the ship. The crew is woken up to make repairs.
The ship begins to exhibit small malfunctions months after repairs are made. Only a week out from the moon base where they will dock for the major repairs, the ship's technology starts malfunctioning strangely and the AI is even acting weird. Over half of the small crew have artificial mechanical limbs and they start malfunctioning, too! EEK!
ARC Received from Hidden 💎Gems
I also got the book with KU.
This is a really exciting sci-fi pageturner, the best I've read in the last year. I was totally immersed in this techno thriller of deceit and betrayal! Mr. Baron's book is a must read for adult sci-fi fans! Recommend!
This book does end in a cliffhanger but the entire series has been published, so readers can go on to the next book seamlessly.
September 16, 2018
I'm a huge sci-fi/fantasy geek, and really enjoy female protagonist-driven stories.
Daisy's Earth was invaded by aliens and the humans were annihilated. Some of the AIs managed to escape with the hope of saving humanity. There are some interesting hiccups along the way, of course.
The AIs are well-developed characters, and do everything from running communities to piloting ships and planning military ops. There are also cybernetic replacement parts for humans.
The characters are well-crafted, engaging, and likeable. There wasn't a lot of world-building required since the story takes place on the ship, Earth, and the Moon; however, the futuristic aspects are believable, and he throws a few curveballs in that are really cool. He also does this thing, but... Spoilers, Sweetie! Lol
If you like strong female characters, like River Song (Doctor Who) and Zoe (Firefly), or have read the Honor Harrington series by David Weber and enjoyed it, then this is a must-read for you.
I highly recommend this book.
Daisy's Earth was invaded by aliens and the humans were annihilated. Some of the AIs managed to escape with the hope of saving humanity. There are some interesting hiccups along the way, of course.
The AIs are well-developed characters, and do everything from running communities to piloting ships and planning military ops. There are also cybernetic replacement parts for humans.
The characters are well-crafted, engaging, and likeable. There wasn't a lot of world-building required since the story takes place on the ship, Earth, and the Moon; however, the futuristic aspects are believable, and he throws a few curveballs in that are really cool. He also does this thing, but... Spoilers, Sweetie! Lol
If you like strong female characters, like River Song (Doctor Who) and Zoe (Firefly), or have read the Honor Harrington series by David Weber and enjoyed it, then this is a must-read for you.
I highly recommend this book.
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