Future Adventures, Various, 2019
The collection features eight novels totaling 2200 pages. The wide variation in their styles, target audience and approach to story telling speaks to the challenge faced by the curator of any collection. All are apparently independent or self-published, and the quality -- or at least my experience and perception of (trying) to read them -- varied pretty widely. I rated the individual novels between 2 and 5 stars on Goodreads, averaging out to 3 stars out of 5 for the collection as a whole. Some of these were pretty old when published in the collection and I’m interested in revisiting all of the authors to see how their later work compares. I did find it definitely worthwhile to peruse the collection for the exposure to authors who I hadn't read before.
Watcher’s Web (Return of the Aghyrians #1), Patty Jansen, 2011. Awkward Outback Australian with odd powers unexpectedly becomes an awkward exile in a strange almost-Earth. I made it about 30-35% through this, then skipped to the end. 15 chapters in I still wasn’t sure who the Aghyrians were or why they were returning. Neat premise and decent writing, but it dragged and had some odd plot choices. Goodreads: 3 stars (avg. 3.42 from 788 ratings)
Europa (Taxyon Space #1), Aurora Springer, 2017. Semi-hard SF crossed with romance, with Europa’s icy seas as a backdrop. Slow to get going and a slightly turgid plot killed my interest fairly quickly, although the premise sounded promising. I read about 20-25% in, then skipped to the last few chapters and found little sense of a dramatic denouement. Goodreads: 2 stars (avg. 3.77 from 102 ratings)
Few Are Chosen (K'Barthan #1), M.T. McGuire, 2010. I took two shots at this, coming back to it after rolling my eyes about five chapters in -- and was glad I did. Mostly. This is funny, packed with (maybe over-packed with) touches of the absurd and leavened with just a little bit of romance and some completely comic book-worthy main characters. The second best of the collection, after The Ares Weapon. Goodreads: 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. (Avg. 3.94 from 229 ratings)
The Truth Beyond The Sky (The Epic of Aravinda #1), Andrew M. Crusoe, 2012. Zahn is haunted by his mother’s mysterious disappearance. 12 years later is contacted by an alien, and after that...I'm sorry to report I lost interest. Not much “epic” here: the writing, characters and plot were all muted. I gave up at what should have been an intense moment of drama that was rendered in flat beige midway through chapter 8 of 38. Goodreads: 2 stars (avg. 3.81 from 198 ratings)
Generation (Shadows of the Void #1), J.J. Green, 2016. Life is tough for interstellar prospectors, and gets tougher when a greedy captain doesn’t listen to his security officer’s misgivings. Unpleasantness follows on various levels. This fell in the middle of the collection: readable and well-edited, reasonable characters and a conventional plot that was interesting but not ground-breaking. Goodreads: 3 stars (avg. 3.77 from 522 ratings)
The Girl Who Twisted Fate’s Arm, George Saoulidis, 2016. Cyberpunk dystopia with a Greek mythological twist. In retrospect, it was a bad sign that the best part of this was the slyly hilarious “Warning” section at the beginning. This catered to those triggered by the metric system, Greek mythology reboots, and a variety of other “sins”. The actual start is an assault by a girl gang on motorcycles on a small schoolbus, but it fades quickly into teen angst and the promised (slash threatened) coming of age story. Not bad, and an interesting premise, but Aura’s struggle to connect to better/worse role models after her operatic career doesn’t work out was not my thing. Goodreads: 2 stars (avg. 3.33 from 33 ratings)
The Ares Weapon (Mars Ascendant #1), D.M. Pruden, 2016. For my money, the best in the collection. Melanie Destin has a history that is...complex, but nothing has prepared her for the danger she falls into when her job disappears and a long-lost friend offers her a gig which seems a little too good to be true -- and won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. This is an intricate, well-plotted and fast-paced story loaded with intrigue and adventure. It grabbed and kept my attention from the beginning, and I enjoyed it all the way through. Goodreads: 5 stars (avg. 4.02 from 202 ratings)
Exodus (Dead Planet #1) by Drew Avera, 2013. The story follows the career of an assassin in a dystopian Mars of the far future, whose career intersects violently with the hidden threat that will end all life on the planet. I wasn’t enamored by the book, finding it hard to maintain my interest and immersion and so skipped quite a bit. This may not have been just me -- looking around on Goodreads, I found a much shorter version or excerpt from 2014 called The Policeman, clocking in at 27 pages and a 3.97 star average -- a third of a star higher than the 198 page version I didn’t completely read. Goodreads: 3 stars (avg. 3.66 from 178 ratings)
Overall rating:
Smirk factor: Above acceptable: 1.5 pts (13 smirks of widely-varying quality, but 8 authors and books, so...)
Immersion factor: Shallow: 1 pt (Girl lost me 12 pages in, Ares Weapon had me reaching for the rest of the series the second I finished. Everything else was somewhere in the middle.)
Writing quality: Average: 1 pt (Again, averaging from a very wide spread.)
Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5 pts (It was all interesting. How well it all was written...YMMV)
Total: 6/10
Goodreads: 3 stars (avg 3.93 from 226 ratings)
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