Review: No Stress Space Express: A Cozy, Low-Stakes, Slice-of-Life Adventure

No Stress Space Express: A Cozy, Low-Stakes, Slice-of-Life Adventure by Jack Bodett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This isn't really SF. It's a gentle comedy with some SF set dressing for atmosphere. Kind of what you'd get if Douglas Adams had grown up in the southern US instead of England, only less so. Like its main character, it's kind of dumb, but so amiable that you don't care too much.

Two truckers break down by the side of the highway, and get accidentally abducted by aliens, who have ordered the load of whoopee cushions they are hauling in order to use them in a religious ceremony. On the alien ship, they meet a hot green Martian woman who was the victim of a similar misunderstanding, and ally with her to start a repair business for alien tech, which somehow they're able to figure out. Later on, another Martian woman joins the group.

The worldbuilding is often rudimentary; space is like the 21st-century USA a lot of the time, except when it's conforming to a well-worn sci-fi trope. Many people speak a language that's independently evolved on multiple planets that's almost indistinguishable from contemporary English except for a couple of amusing quirks, there's coffee, and it's served at a diner, where the robot waitress is very much like a stereotypical southern US diner waitress. Spaceship engines are also almost indistinguishable from truck engines; they have liquid fuel in lines which can be bled without special precautions, you can idle them, and they roar. There's a bit at the beginning where the alien written language (or, at least, an alien written language) is incomprehensible, but later on, the alphabets for the English-equivalent languages have apparently evolved to be the same as ours as well, because Rusty, the narrator, has no issues reading a manual for a spaceship engine. (view spoiler)[The wedding conforms absolutely 100% to what a contemporary US wedding would be like, and the Martian women expect it to be exactly that way, never inserting any specifically Martian customs, until near the end the author seems to finally remember there should be some cultural differences and has three Earth wedding customs be unfamiliar to the aliens. (hide spoiler)]

Funnily enough, I recently read an early work of SF ( A Honeymoon in Space by George Chetwynd Griffith) in which there was also a Martian who spoke a language that had evolved to be exactly like English, only Griffith, being Griffith, managed to make it racist, or at least chauvinist; English, being the best language (as proved by how many people on Earth had adopted it), would naturally be the language that a hyperrational and optimised society would evolve, he says.

Having studied the process by which English came into being, I can tell you that it couldn't happen twice - once was unlikely enough (and if a hyperrational society evolved an optimised language, English would definitely not be it). But in this book, it's just a workaround to remove issues of communication between the characters, and it's in the context of a humourous setting that doesn't take its worldbuilding remotely seriously, so I'll let it slide with just a healthy dose of side-eye. To be fair, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everyone in space speaks English and nobody even remarks on it.

The editing is surprisingly good for this kind of book. Yes, there are too many hyphens (between an adjective and its noun sometimes, and in numbers that aren't between 21 and 99), and sometimes missing hyphens where only the first two words of a three-word adjectival phrase are hyphenated. Yes, there are a few too many commas between adjectives, but there are very few authors, even good ones, who don't make that mistake. It needs another scan for missing punctuation, like closing quotation marks. Otherwise, it's much cleaner than I'm used to. By sticking to his own vocabulary, the author has managed not to commit any vocab errors, for example, apart from "hear, hear" being spelled "here, here."

Apart from the almost aggressively undercooked worldbuilding, its big fault, from my point of view, is that it has no chapters - or rather, it has just one long chapter which rolls on from incident to incident without pausing. This isn't ideal when you don't have time to read it all in one sitting. It does finish up with some significant events that change the situation of the characters, ready for the next book in the series, so it isn't one of those serial stories that just arbitrarily stops at a word count.

The humour lies mostly in folksy imagery ("tugged in more directions than a dog walker at a squirrel convention") and good-natured banter. It manages to be funny without trying too hard, which is always a risk in humourous writing. All the aliens the characters meet are nice and helpful and generous, and it's exactly what the subtitle says it is: a cozy, low-stakes slice-of-life adventure (the subtitle also has a comma it doesn't require). It's a pleasant read, and I wouldn't mind reading more in the series, though it has enough faults that I wouldn't pay full price for them. It's pleasant, but the building of the world is so low-effort that it reduces my desire to spend time there.

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Review: A Honeymoon In Space

A Honeymoon In Space by George Chetwynd Griffith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A turn-of-last-century piece of early speculative fiction, offering a tour of the solar system as it was then conceived (more or less; the author's grasp on science, even the science of the day, was not always firm). This makes it a "planetary romance," like Barsoom, C.L. Moore's tales of Mars and Venus, or Lewis's Space Trilogy (the latter a very late example of the form). It wouldn't at all surprise me to learn that Lewis had read it, though his Martians are completely unlike Griffith's, and his Venus, while also an unspoiled Eden, is also significantly different.

The hero is an engineer who has built an interplanetary ship powered by basically Cavorite (though I don't think he was copying Wells, whose The First Men in the Moon came out the same year), and uses it to take his newlywed wife on a tour of the Solar System. In line with the author's first book, The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror , as the only possessor of the technology of flight, he's in a position to dominate the earth and make everyone behave themselves, and uses this to stop World War I from breaking out early (with different alliances) before departing for his honeymoon.

It's shot through with all the prejudices of its time and its author. The engineer-hero patronises his new wife (daughter of the scientist whose designs he has realized, a couple of years after the professor's death) abominably. He repeatedly calls her "little woman," even though it's established in one scene that she's almost as tall as he is, and he's a tall man. She's one of Griffith's educated women, who's both celebrated for her intelligence and put in her place, similarly to his The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension , which I read recently.

The British Empire is a jolly good thing, hurrah, and Englishmen are the best, with Americans only a little bit inferior (the wife is American). When they reach Mars, there's a lot of dialog about how the Martians, under the pressure of their dying world, have become super-rational and no doubt reduced their "lesser races" to servitude or else eliminated them, as will happen on Earth some day; both of the travellers are highly indignant that the first response of the Martians is to shoot at them, which of course English or American people would never do with strange visitors. The most ludicrous moment of the whole book is when they can understand the Martian leader because, since English is the best language, the Martians have naturally come to speak something almost exactly like it as part of their evolution towards rationality and optimisation.

They consider themselves fully justified in mowing down a bunch of the nasty Martians with Maxim machine guns, and depart for Venus.

The Venusians are unfallen angels of sorts, and although they'd love to stay there, even these two egotists recognize that they'd only spoil the place. One of Jupiter's moons has an advanced and friendly civilization - the humanoid form is, of course, what everything evolves into if it's going to be intelligent - and Saturn is full of monsters.

Finally, they barely make it home, through one of several coincidences that save their bacon by celestial bodies being in the right place at the right time to assist their antigravity drive.

Apart from his various storytelling weaknesses, the author makes two big scientific blunders. First, he assumes that because a (very slow-moving) balloon doesn't throw you around when you fly in it, nor will an extremely fast-moving spaceship. Before Einstein (or maybe before actual aeroplanes), people don't seem to have had much of a grasp of acceleration and how it worked. The other blunder is that as they approach one of the gas giants - I forget whether it's Jupiter or Saturn, I think Saturn - he gets phases completely wrong. As he presents it, the planet goes through its phases rapidly because of the rotation of the planet, whereas in fact it's the angle between the observer, the sun, and the celestial body that produces phases, as he ought to have known if he thought about the moon for even a minute.

In summary, it's not good, though interesting as a sample of how people thought about the Solar System (and humanity) a hundred and twenty-five years or so ago.

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Review: Lucian's True History

Lucian's True History by Lucian of Samosata
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Classic proto-SF, and a probable ancestor of many a fantastic voyage narrative, from St Brendan to Gulliver to Sinbad to the Dawn Treader - though it drew on earlier travellers' tales, and notably on Homer, who Lucian greatly admired and constantly referenced, and who is even a character in this story. It's also arguably among the first works of fiction, though, and the differentiation it explicitly makes between itself and those earlier tales is that the author states upfront that everything in it is made up and a complete lie. It's not presenting wild speculation as authentic chronicle, but as the fiction it always was.

And the speculation is wild. The travellers, led by the first-person narrator, sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic, and get caught up into the air by a freak wind, landing on the moon. The moon people are at war with the people of the sun over wanting to colonize Venus, and the travellers take part in the war, on what turns out to be the losing side (because of late reinforcements of centaurs). They're ransomed, though, and the king of the moon offers to marry the narrator to his son, which the narrator refuses. The people of the moon have no women; instead, the men under the age of 25 receive the seed of the older men in their thighs, where they gestate the children. (I assume this was satire on the then-common practice of older men having younger male lovers.)

They leave the moon, and have further adventures, including being swallowed by an immense whale, miles in length, and eventually killing it by setting the trees growing inside it on fire. They come to an island where the Elysian Fields (the Greek afterlife) can be found, and speak with famous people including Homer, some of whom are satirized. In this afterlife, men openly have sex with both men and women, and nobody thinks anything of it, and the women are "in common," but this doesn't stop some of the men being jealous about their wives.

The ruler of the realm of the dead tells them they have to leave, since it's not yet their time to be there, and they eventually make it back home, via Circe's island (the narrator carries a message from Odysseus to Circe, which he's careful not to let Penelope see).

The more you know about ancient Greek literature and culture, the more you'll get out of this, I'm sure, because there are a good few name-drops that I had to look up. But even a superficial knowledge will get you by, and it's interesting as an early example of fantastical fiction. I'm not quite ready to add it to my annual recommendation list, though; it's a bit niche for that.

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Review: The Land That Time Forgot

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The nonsense racist pseudoscience is strong with this one.

A dastardly World War I German U-boat commander attacks the hero's unarmed civilian passenger ship (with US registry, and I don't think they were in the war yet, so it's neutral shipping) and sinks it, shelling boats with women and children in. The hero survives and rescues his dog and also a young woman, and they are picked up by a British tug - which is then attacked by the same U-boat. The brave tug captain chooses to ram the U-boat and then his men fight the Germans hand-to-hand, capturing it at the cost of the lives of the captain and several crew.

It turns out that the young woman's fiancé is the U-boat commander, but it was an arranged marriage. Fortunately, the hero's father's business is building submarines, and they built this one, so he can take over command.

Then we get a long series of misadventures that end up taking them into the Pacific and all the way down almost to Antarctica, thanks to assorted villainy. (view spoiler)[There's a secondary antagonist who is a filthy Red and just hates people like the hero in general - he was sacked from the hero's father's firm, it's implied for union agitation - and he makes several more or less ineffective attempts to kill them all and/or cause internal dissention, before being killed. (hide spoiler)]

They are running low on fuel and water and well out of their course, and then (about halfway through the book) they come across the land of the title, a large volcanic island with unscalable cliffs all round and just one river discharge, through caves that can only be navigated by submarine. Fortunately, they have a submarine!

(view spoiler)[They trust the German commander's word, even though he's the kind of person who would attack an unarmed neutral civilian ship, and of course he betrays them and takes off with the sub, after discovering a source of crude oil to use for fuel. (hide spoiler)]

This isolated place has a tropical climate (from the volcanic heat, presumably) despite being near Antarctica, and was probably the model for the Marvel Universe's Savage Land. It's full of otherwise extinct creatures from every era and continent, dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, pteranodons, sabre-tooth tigers, cave hyenas, you name it. It's like the Swiss Family Robinson's island, but with palaeontology.

It also has various apes, ape-men, and primitive humans, which is where the racism comes in; the less developed ones, of course, are "negroid" in appearance, even though their skins are white, and that disappears as they become more advanced. This seems to happen in the lifetime of an individual, with people heading further north and adopting more technology as they evolve (or rather metamorphose) in the direction of modern homo sapiens. It also seems to have something to do with the pools in which they bathe - I bet it's radium, that would fit the science of the time. Piltdown Man gets a name-check, being still believed in at the time of publication (1918), and not exposed definitely as a hoax until the 1950s.

It's all a bunch of nonsense, of course, with the flimsiest scientific backing at best, but it's mainly there to be a backdrop for the adventure - and the romance, such as it is, between the hero and the woman he rescued.

There were a couple of sequels, which apparently follow very similar lines to the second part of this book, and it wasn't good enough for me to want to read them. I didn't expect much from Burroughs, a pulp writer among pulp writers, and I didn't get much. The adventure parts are the best parts, of course, and if you're just reading for that, it's OK, but nothing else is very good at all.

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Review: The Mummy and Miss Nitocris A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension

The Mummy and Miss Nitocris A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension by George Chetwynd Griffith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've recently loaded up my e-reader with a large selection of early science fiction and fantasy titles from Project Gutenberg, after a binge on classic mysteries from the same source. I've often steered clear of early SFF, because it has, let's say, very different strengths from current SFF - it might as well be a different genre in many ways. But there is some good stuff out there - I know, from having read some now and again - and I'm going to explore and see if I can find some more.

The thing about reading hundred-year-old fiction is that the preoccupations and the tropes and the stock characters are very different. (And the prevailing ideologies, naturally.) Anything involving science, too, is liable to involve what we would think of as pseudoscience. That's certainly true of this one.

The central characters are an English professor of mathematics and his daughter, who he named Nitocris after an ancient Egyptian queen, since he's a keen amateur Egyptologist. But it turns out that she is in fact the reincarnation of the ancient queen, and he is the reincarnation of a priest who fell in love with the queen (don't think too hard about them now being father and daughter, or things will become more like ancient Egyptian royalty than modern minds are generally comfortable with) and helped her avenge herself on the murderer of her husband. Of course, the murderer and his associate, another priest, have also been reincarnated, and set out to play their villainous role over again.

Meanwhile, though, the professor, musing on a proposition of Euclid, comes to a gnostic realization of the nature of the fourth dimension, which gives him superpowers. He can become invisible, see into the past and great distances away, and so forth. He confounds his learned peers and rivals by demonstrating three supposed impossibilities: trisecting the triangle, squaring the circle, and doubling the cube (all of which, by that point, had been proved to be impossible with the ancient tools of compass and straightedge, though mathematical cranks continued to try). And then Nitocris, his highly intelligent and well-educated daughter, is raised to a knowledge of her heritage and gets superpowers too, and they decide to use them to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a possible future elective Tsar of Russia, depending how the revolution goes (this is 1906, a couple of years before World War I and several more before the Bolshevik victory). Of course, one of the villains, the reincarnation of the murderer of original-Nitocris's husband, is involved in that disappearance; he's a rival for the imperial throne. His sidekick, the reincarnation of the wicked priest, performs wonders similar to those performed on the music hall stage of the period, some of which were rumoured to be performed by Indian fakirs, but does so out in the open and in the middle of a circle of scientific skeptics, to their extreme annoyance and puzzlement.

Meanwhile, Nitocris wants to marry a naval officer, which her father (who, like many intellectuals of the time, believes in eugenics) opposes, being bitterly opposed to war and warriors. She also manages to pair up an unsuccessful suitor of hers with her American friend, who's the daughter of the professor's chief rival - though the two academics are friends of a sort when they're not trying to tear down each other's arguments.

So, we have: reincarnation (presented by the author as if it was a pretty obvious truth), superpowers arising from the understanding of abstruse mathematics, mystery, international politics, academic politics, two romances, and the plot of the reincarnated villains against the reincarnated Nitocris and her priest, now father. All of these are intertwined like a ball of snakes.

It's a complex way to approach a plot, and should only be attempted by experienced authors. This one, I think, largely pulls it off; he was at the end of his life when he wrote it, and although critics considered his powers were waning (under the influence of alcoholism, which killed him), he does juggle and intertwine the various strands capably. Having so many of them does mean that some remain underdeveloped, notably the romance subplots, which barely get any time devoted to them - not only on the page, but in the lives of the participants. The disappearance and reappearance of the mummy of the title is never explained in any way whatsoever; it just falls under "a wizard did it".

He's not the greatest prose stylist, and his characters and descriptions can be thin and stereotyped. Nitocris, for instance, is simultaneously a nice early-20th-century Gibson girl from a prosperous English background and a ruthless ancient Egyptian, and the contrast is sometimes jarring, because neither side of her has much depth, and so it's simply a contradiction with no bridge in the middle. Griffith also shares the usual anti-foreign bias of his time; practically anyone who's not English is automatically and obviously a villain, with an exception granted for the Americans (who are, however, portrayed as odd people talking a slangy dialect). He conveys the distinct impression that simply by being born English, the professor had taken a big step up from his previous incarnations.

Overall, it's an interesting idea but a less-than-amazing execution, and just makes it into the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: My Big Goblin Space Program: An Astronaut Reincarnation LitRPG

My Big Goblin Space Program: An Astronaut Reincarnation LitRPG by Scott Warren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I keep forgetting that I've read books by Scott Warren before. The first was The Dragon's Banker , and the second Ought to be Dead . But wait! Before The Dragon's Banker I also partly read Devilbone , so this makes three and (nearly) three-quarters books by him that I've read. I'm happy to report that in this one, for the first time, he's got himself a really good editor and/or finally learned not to make so many mistakes in the first place, because the other three were spectacularly awful in this regard.

And that was a pity, because I otherwise enjoyed two of them (not Devilbone, which was way too dark for me), and thought they deserved much better editing to bring out their other excellent qualities, namely being well-plotted and original in concept.

This one is also well-plotted and original in concept, though it does remind me of a couple of things. One, of course, is isekai manga, where someone is reincarnated in another world, sometimes as a monster, and speed-runs technological development using the resources to hand. The other is Andy Weir, because of the astronaut aspect to this story. Yes, the reincarnator was an astronaut, who died in a rocket explosion, and now he's a goblin king. His ambition: to lift the tech level of his tribe of goblins to the point that he can finally visit the moon, albeit not Earth's moon but a larger and closer and quite likely inhabited one orbiting his new planet.

Since goblins are chaotic and accident-prone and not all that bright, but highly enthusiastic, this is something of a challenge, which he rises to. Aided by some evolved goblins who have specialist skills, he begins to develop various technologies, though (as is so often the case with these clever-engineer stories) he notably neglects technologies relating to food and cloth, which historically have been extremely important - but don't leave much archaeological evidence, and tend to be mainly "women's work" in a lot of societies.

This world is complete with a System, which has a personality but plays its cards close to its chest, and the usual trappings of a video game, like anything from the original Warcraft through Civilization or Sim City to Clash of Clans. As the isekaied first-person narrator notes, the rules of physics and, apparently, biology don't conform to those of our world. Goblins, for example, are not born through sexual reproduction, but spawn mysteriously overnight, while the existing goblins sleep. This neatly disposes of any messy relationship issues, leaving the narrator free to think about engineering (and the wellbeing of his tribe) all the time.

It's clearly some form of a simulation, which raises the question of whether the narrator's previous world was too, but he doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about it; he's an engineer, not a philosopher (dammit, Jim). He just gets on with climbing the Goblin Tech Tree in the direction of a moon landing.

This is only Volume 1 of a story that started life as a serial on Royal Road, and it ends at a fairly arbitrary point, rather than feeling complete in itself. Also, it's not the kind of book that has a plot, as such, being more in the manga or light novel style of being a series of challenges relatively easily overcome by an overpowered protagonist, though he does face some suspenseful moments. I enjoyed it, though, and found it funny, and was vastly relieved that it was better edited than the previous Scott Warren books I've read, so I will definitely be looking out for Volume 2.

It would make a good anime. The goblins are inherently cartoonish, for one thing.

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Review: Cicero James, Miracle Worker

Cicero James, Miracle Worker by Hal Emerson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is strong. It's the author's eleventh book, or so, and it shows. Very definite Dresden Files vibes, but from the point where Butcher had started to get a good handle on his craft, rather than the less successful early books.

The main character is a wizard-but-not-called-that (they're called "Miracle Workers" or just "Workers"), one of maybe a hundred thousand worldwide, who just wants a quiet life but ends up getting caught up in what amount to cosmic politics. He's snarky and in many ways immature, but whatever his faults, being on the side of evil, or even on the side of ignoring evil when he has the ability to oppose it, is not one of them.

There's swearing, not constant on every page, but in situations in which there would realistically be some. There's also torture, but it's not delighted in (the opposite, in fact), and it's not gratuitous - it's central to the plot.

The editing on the pre-publication review copy I had was good, with occasional small glitches such as might be left over after a skilled editor had gone over an average-quality manuscript (average-quality in terms of editing, I mean, not storytelling; that's excellent). The author covers himself with the fictional frame that this is a book written by an ordinary guy over a few days, so it may have some typos in it.

He also lampshades the fact that the whole scenario becomes reminiscent of the X-Men. There's a clear Magneto character, who I'd identified as such before the lampshade was hung, though I hadn't thought of the narrator's mentor as Professor X until he said it.

It's exciting and action-packed. There are chases and escapes and explosions and fights and monster encounters. There's a heist, or almost. There are emotional ups and downs, and if there are more downs than ups, it still manages not to be too dark in tone, and ends with an appeal for an attitude of hope, cooperation and mutual respect that I wholeheartedly endorse. There's intelligent observation about the state that San Francisco is in these days, without adopting either political extreme.

The worldbuilding is original, and well conveyed; we know pretty well what the magic can and can't do, so when it comes time to use some, the action isn't slowed down with explanations. It doesn't make it all the way to a fully realized "secret history", but it does the job it needs to.

The secondary characters are distinct and memorable, and each has a significant role to play. Their relationships have variety and feel real.

Even though it's not my usual fare (cozy secondary-world fantasy), I enjoyed it considerably, and will be looking forward to more in the series.

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