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Earthship
Our world will be destroyed. Only a chosen few can escape.
In the near future, a cataclysmic collision with a rogue planet destabilizes the sun, causing an exponential increase of its output. With the ever-increasing heat, life on earth will be extinguished within a decade.
As the global crisis deepens, it falls on a handful of individuals who will determine whether humanity survives. NASA scientist Dr. Olivia Quinn must outwit a corrupt government system and warn the public before it’s too late. Veteran astronaut Valerie McKinnon and her son Sawyer are in a race against time to build a space ark that could rescue countless lives. And Armand Balkan, a cutthroat trillionaire who seeks to maintain his empire by any means possible, could either save or doom them all.
In the near future, a cataclysmic collision with a rogue planet destabilizes the sun, causing an exponential increase of its output. With the ever-increasing heat, life on earth will be extinguished within a decade.
As the global crisis deepens, it falls on a handful of individuals who will determine whether humanity survives. NASA scientist Dr. Olivia Quinn must outwit a corrupt government system and warn the public before it’s too late. Veteran astronaut Valerie McKinnon and her son Sawyer are in a race against time to build a space ark that could rescue countless lives. And Armand Balkan, a cutthroat trillionaire who seeks to maintain his empire by any means possible, could either save or doom them all.
576 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 1, 2022
17 people are currently reading
18 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 19, 2023
Full thoughts for the SPSFC are up on my blog at https://onereadingnurse.com/2023/01/1...
I generally enjoyed reading Earthship and consider it a slightly above average self published work. It has super short chapters, lots of action, moves forward quickly, and covers a huge scope of storytelling through many different plotlines.
The thing with end of the world plots though is that there are only so many ways to tell that story, and this one took it on a global.scale. The downside is that there’s a verifiable metric ton of head hopping that left me confused at times. There are tons of names to keep track of, multiple big storylines, and at the end of the day there are many loose ends trailing off into space.
The characters are easy to root for but there are just way too many. This would have made a great movie but trying to compact it into a book would have been better served with a more streamlined plot. Each point of view added something to the story but definitely were not necessary. The first six, possibly 7 chapters were all from different perspectives and it made my head reel. Also towards the 3/4 mark they threw in a rather large religious cult storyline that changed the tune of the book and added even more complications. I have mixed feelings on it including that the book already had enough going on and that I couldn’t really believe how influential the cult got,
Regardless, I love a good end-of-the-world plot. 😆 Earthship tackles issues like the building of space stations and generation ships, who survives, who dies, what do the people remaining behind have to deal with? It doesn’t really go hard into moral debates though, just mentions these themes as a matter of fact. It’s equal parts exciting, gory, sad, and properly horrifying at times. I liked the characters but never had time to get attached to any of them and they were all 2-dimensionally static as this was a pure action flick. I am ok with that, I would rather read big disasters and military coups than character growth, but I also like having something to grab onto.
Technically speaking, the book has a fairly good presentation. It was at least spell checked although it had more than a few word placement errors. I like the cover. One of my biggest qualms was the passing of time not being shown except by character comments. I think if months or years are going to go by in between these short chapters, it’s best to show dates.
There’s a lot of inconsistency in character motivations too. With time passing randomly and no development it was often hard to place characters from one appearance to the next. He changed chapter styles too towards the end of the book, going to multiple points of view within one chapter. Again, an exciting read if you don’t follow details too closely.
Overall – the less you think about this one the better. For an action flick in book form it provided a proper amount of entertainment. The ending left a lot of loose ends as some space operas will, but I think we should have had a little more general closure. It’s been designated as a stand alone so I would have loved an epilogue. A good idea that ended up falling flat on execution.
I generally enjoyed reading Earthship and consider it a slightly above average self published work. It has super short chapters, lots of action, moves forward quickly, and covers a huge scope of storytelling through many different plotlines.
The thing with end of the world plots though is that there are only so many ways to tell that story, and this one took it on a global.scale. The downside is that there’s a verifiable metric ton of head hopping that left me confused at times. There are tons of names to keep track of, multiple big storylines, and at the end of the day there are many loose ends trailing off into space.
The characters are easy to root for but there are just way too many. This would have made a great movie but trying to compact it into a book would have been better served with a more streamlined plot. Each point of view added something to the story but definitely were not necessary. The first six, possibly 7 chapters were all from different perspectives and it made my head reel. Also towards the 3/4 mark they threw in a rather large religious cult storyline that changed the tune of the book and added even more complications. I have mixed feelings on it including that the book already had enough going on and that I couldn’t really believe how influential the cult got,
Regardless, I love a good end-of-the-world plot. 😆 Earthship tackles issues like the building of space stations and generation ships, who survives, who dies, what do the people remaining behind have to deal with? It doesn’t really go hard into moral debates though, just mentions these themes as a matter of fact. It’s equal parts exciting, gory, sad, and properly horrifying at times. I liked the characters but never had time to get attached to any of them and they were all 2-dimensionally static as this was a pure action flick. I am ok with that, I would rather read big disasters and military coups than character growth, but I also like having something to grab onto.
Technically speaking, the book has a fairly good presentation. It was at least spell checked although it had more than a few word placement errors. I like the cover. One of my biggest qualms was the passing of time not being shown except by character comments. I think if months or years are going to go by in between these short chapters, it’s best to show dates.
There’s a lot of inconsistency in character motivations too. With time passing randomly and no development it was often hard to place characters from one appearance to the next. He changed chapter styles too towards the end of the book, going to multiple points of view within one chapter. Again, an exciting read if you don’t follow details too closely.
Overall – the less you think about this one the better. For an action flick in book form it provided a proper amount of entertainment. The ending left a lot of loose ends as some space operas will, but I think we should have had a little more general closure. It’s been designated as a stand alone so I would have loved an epilogue. A good idea that ended up falling flat on execution.
May 2, 2023
SPSFC 2 Semi-Finalist Review.
My Rating: 3/10 (rounded to 2/5 on a 5 point scale)
This is my personal rating, as are all of my reviews. This is not a team or overall score for SPSFC 2.
That being said, I just didn't hit it off with this book, as you could probably gather from the score. I feel like the blurb was a bit of false advertising, though I could have forgiven that. None of the characters mentioned actually do the things advertised for their story arcs. Rather than truly telling the story of how to outwit the government(s) and rescue the people of Earth, presumably with the Earthship of the title, what this book really did was follow roughly a million points of view to narrate the political, religious, and scientific end of days.
Clearly well thought-out, the near future dystopian setting seemed to require an awful lot of political setup and explanation via infodump to detail the changes from the current situation and how new nations would form around corporations looking for greener pastures to exploit. The devil is in the details as they say, and I felt like I got way too much detail of the author's political world-building.
I also had a problem with the sheer number of character story lines that were introduced. In the first 10 chapters we have 7 different POVs introduced and that's not even all of the POVs we encounter throughout the book. I felt the plot and progression of the book really bogged down in continually rotating through all these characters one short chapter at a time. It also made it hard to get attached to a character or foster any empathy for them.
On a related note, I really struggled with the Chinese story line with Huang and Cheong. Perhaps the author's use of very formal language in those sections (though it did occasionally occur in other chapters as well) was an effort to emulate the Chinese dialect they are speaking in English, but it came off awkwardly to me. It made me think of the stilted language in bad RPGs or at a Renaissance Faire instead. Don't get me wrong, I love the Renaissance Faire, but I don't expect to see a lot of “My lords” and “shalls” in my sci-fi.
In my complaints section here I'll also mention that I think this book (or at least the version I read and reviewed) needed a trip through a strong copy editor's hands. There were a fair number of grammatical mistakes (mostly subject-verb disagreements) that could be easily corrected as well as some missing words or incorrectly used words. Lastly on my petty complaints, the author had a writing tic of using the phrasing “Character made an xyz” - for example “he made an obedient nod” instead of he nodded obediently and “She made a nervous giggle” instead of She giggled nervously which just didn't work for me.
The world-building on the political front was pretty solid but too many point of views and the slow plot development as a result did not make for a compelling read. I also found most of the characters fell a little flat or were completely unrelatable.
Recommended for: those who love the Dying Earth subgenre and lots of politics in their sci-fi
My Rating: 3/10 (rounded to 2/5 on a 5 point scale)
This is my personal rating, as are all of my reviews. This is not a team or overall score for SPSFC 2.
That being said, I just didn't hit it off with this book, as you could probably gather from the score. I feel like the blurb was a bit of false advertising, though I could have forgiven that. None of the characters mentioned actually do the things advertised for their story arcs. Rather than truly telling the story of how to outwit the government(s) and rescue the people of Earth, presumably with the Earthship of the title, what this book really did was follow roughly a million points of view to narrate the political, religious, and scientific end of days.
Clearly well thought-out, the near future dystopian setting seemed to require an awful lot of political setup and explanation via infodump to detail the changes from the current situation and how new nations would form around corporations looking for greener pastures to exploit. The devil is in the details as they say, and I felt like I got way too much detail of the author's political world-building.
I also had a problem with the sheer number of character story lines that were introduced. In the first 10 chapters we have 7 different POVs introduced and that's not even all of the POVs we encounter throughout the book. I felt the plot and progression of the book really bogged down in continually rotating through all these characters one short chapter at a time. It also made it hard to get attached to a character or foster any empathy for them.
On a related note, I really struggled with the Chinese story line with Huang and Cheong. Perhaps the author's use of very formal language in those sections (though it did occasionally occur in other chapters as well) was an effort to emulate the Chinese dialect they are speaking in English, but it came off awkwardly to me. It made me think of the stilted language in bad RPGs or at a Renaissance Faire instead. Don't get me wrong, I love the Renaissance Faire, but I don't expect to see a lot of “My lords” and “shalls” in my sci-fi.
In my complaints section here I'll also mention that I think this book (or at least the version I read and reviewed) needed a trip through a strong copy editor's hands. There were a fair number of grammatical mistakes (mostly subject-verb disagreements) that could be easily corrected as well as some missing words or incorrectly used words. Lastly on my petty complaints, the author had a writing tic of using the phrasing “Character made an xyz” - for example “he made an obedient nod” instead of he nodded obediently and “She made a nervous giggle” instead of She giggled nervously which just didn't work for me.
The world-building on the political front was pretty solid but too many point of views and the slow plot development as a result did not make for a compelling read. I also found most of the characters fell a little flat or were completely unrelatable.
Recommended for: those who love the Dying Earth subgenre and lots of politics in their sci-fi
July 29, 2022
🌏🚀😲A complex but captivating adventure.
As the Helios-64 satellite approaches, pilot astronaut Valerie McKinnon will decelerate her space shuttle.
It was her teammate Benny's very first flight.
Suddenly, an alarm sounded inside the spaceship: it was a bombardment of X-rays...
As Valerie faced off, Benny lost control of events...
-----------------
After a complex but poetic prologue, the book continued with a breathtaking first chapter and a crush on the main character of Valerie, excellent!
She will remain my favorite character, and by far, throughout the novel.
I found the character of Olivia too discreet and the character of Zack far too mysterious.
I had a hard time stringing the chapters together and linking them together, with all three stories happening at the same time.
However, the background plot (related to what happened in the prologue) is totally captivating!
To discover.
As the Helios-64 satellite approaches, pilot astronaut Valerie McKinnon will decelerate her space shuttle.
It was her teammate Benny's very first flight.
Suddenly, an alarm sounded inside the spaceship: it was a bombardment of X-rays...
As Valerie faced off, Benny lost control of events...
-----------------
After a complex but poetic prologue, the book continued with a breathtaking first chapter and a crush on the main character of Valerie, excellent!
She will remain my favorite character, and by far, throughout the novel.
I found the character of Olivia too discreet and the character of Zack far too mysterious.
I had a hard time stringing the chapters together and linking them together, with all three stories happening at the same time.
However, the background plot (related to what happened in the prologue) is totally captivating!
To discover.
July 20, 2022
I enjoyed this story with its doom is coming plot and good characters that were both trying to find a way to survive and help as many as they could and the opposite side because there always is one at these times. Good story, good characters and a time limit to get a lot done. Some action, intense and funny scenes and some characters doing their best. Good times had by them and me.
August 17, 2022
Lots of interesting characters, lots of action. Many parallel storylines. Short chapters. Enjoyable read. A little predictable. Maybe a sequel.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews