Barton

"What if" for "Contact"

Revisado: 03-25-25

A version of "Contact" with deeper, more realistic, and considuably more pertinent questions. Very enjoyable.

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A Good Start

Revisado: 03-05-24

This was enjoyable. I like the format of an idea too chew on. I look forward to the next installment.

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The Payoff

Revisado: 01-29-24

After 4 books of largely character building, we finally get book 1 of the payoff, and boy was it worth it! This series may be as close as most of its readers ever come to the real horrors of war, but also to the elation of having won over forces that would have otherwise killed you and destroyed everything you loved.

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Hunger Games for Adults

Revisado: 01-07-24

If you read books to escape reality, this one is not for you. Even though it takes place in a fictional fantastic future, it is way too real.

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Aptly Named “Failure Mode” Skips Denouement

Revisado: 03-20-23

I perused over five thousand pages to reach a point where strands of this plot would be drawn together, and matters would be explained or resolved, only to find that the Expeditionary Force sequence contains no denouement.

I have no problem with verbosity when it comes to audiobooks, as long as it supports the character and story development arcs, but the story and characters of the first fourteen books of Expeditionary Force were leading to an unavoidable ending conflict that was simply ignored in the finale.

Skippy and Joe had to become increasingly powerful to fight off progressively greater tiers of bad guys threatening Earth. That power did not go away when they ran out of bad guys. In the end, the monkey pirates and their AI had evolved into the most powerful single force in the galaxy. They were no longer accountable to anything or anyone. What did they do with that power? Did they continue increasing their despotic lying, coercion, and brute force control over others? That would be consistent with their past, and their stated intentions for the future. Or, did they somehow learn that deception, dominance, and other methods of disempowering everyone less capable reduces their ability and will to be innovative, rightly turning their energies against the source of that despotism?

Neither. The author simply ignored that the only thing keeping Skippy and Joe from being tyrants, throughout the entire sequence, was a series of forces more powerful than them. I kept slogging through book after book of unnecessary wordiness to discover what would happen when they no longer encountered anything more powerful. That was the big draw. That was the reason I bought fifteen books and one audio drama special. Upon reaching the final book, however, the author simply did not include a climax. He did not address, in any way, a resolution, or even the final conflict inevitable to the story and character arcs he had consistently built to that point.

Would a finale have damaged the merch? Was the author so distracted by his new series that he stopped caring about finishing the old one? Did he get hit on the head and suddenly change writing styles? Is he incapable of delivering a consistent ending? Or, did he always intend Skippy to be a tragically naïve sacrifice in the last book, and just couldn't go through with it, especially after GOT beat him to the punch?

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I'm running out of stars.

Revisado: 01-25-23

What started out as a fairly entertaining space opera has now evolved quite a steep story arc. Who knew?

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Wow, Just Wow

Revisado: 01-19-23

As we witness the evolution of both Bishop and Skippy, the quality of writing seems to be gaining confidence and strength too. Since most of the story is told from Bishop's point of view, this makes sense, but damn, one would have to be one hell of a clever writer to consciously play such a long game.

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Breaking the Fourth Wall was New

Revisado: 01-12-23

Irrespective of how entertained I am by a sequel, I am still taking away a star if the story fails to transcend to a new level. This one took chances, and those chances paid off. It earned my highest rating for a space opera.

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POV Superposition

Revisado: 01-10-23

Brave editors will let their writers tell the story from God mode: reporting not just the facts that a camera would pick up, but also thoughts of main characters. God would never adopt the personality of each character though. It's a little disconcerting to have most of this story told with Joe Bishop's personality, biases, and point of view, and then to have things thrown in that only an omnipotent being would know. In previous books, Bishop explains that he found out about some things later, but the author apparently gave up on that explan, and just switches from God mode to Joe's silly internal prejudices willy-nilly. My internal narrative wants to explain this as Joe having divine powers of perception, knowing what people and things were calculating before they were destroyed, but the author goes out of his way to show Joe's human weaknesses, and pop any bubble about Joe being a God.
I read that the author doesn't use an editor, which explains why the writing style does not adhere to any proper structure. It makes me wonder if proper structure inhibits writing creativity. Given the speed in which these books are churned out, is it possible that we're looking at a new genre: massive soap opera style content -- switching styles and POV to whatever provides the most drama at the moment -- in space? That would be exactly the opposite of the direction entertainment has been heading over the past few decades: fewer, tightly written, episodes in each year of a series.

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This book changed the world forever.

Revisado: 01-05-23

My team and I have been trying, for years, to figure out how to use spinors to produce energy. We finally had our breakthrough after I read this novel, and realized that energy production was not the biggest concern. Creating a fundamentally better battery is our primary energy challenge, and the characters in this book accomplished that by winding up springs. In largely the same way, we can store potential energy in spinors, making batteries for electric cars, for example, a thousandth the weight and size for the same energy storage. Years from now, you will hear of a breakthrough along these lines without any credit to the author of this book, but you will know the truth of what inspired this groundbreaking technology.

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