Review: Down Below Beyond

Down Below Beyond by T.A. Bruno
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

DNF.

A very old-school space opera, populated with rubber-suit aliens that physically are reminiscent of Earth animals of various kinds, mostly, and psychologically are completely indistinguishable from humans. The planets seem to have single biomes in many cases, and the spaceships don't appear to require any fuel. It's definitely way up the trope end of the trope-to-actual-science spectrum; what little original worldbuilding there is doesn't make any attempt at plausibility.

But how about the story?

Observing from afar, I'm starting to think that it's increasingly difficult for an author living in today's USA not to write dystopian fiction, which is a pity, because I'm not a fan of it. This is a corporate dystopia, with an obviously evil corporate overlord who's rewritten history to remove or demonize the courageous and generous Beyonders, who want everyone to have access to their utopian tech. Instead, characters like the protagonist are stuck in dead-end jobs which exploit their labour for the benefit of the corporation and force them into increasing debt. He was sold by his parents as a child because of debt, and worked in a sweatshop growing up; sweatshops have, inexplicably, since been abolished (there's no sign of any government that could make the corporation improve its policies, at least as far as I read). When he finds a piece of Beyonder tech while scavenging a post-apocalyptic world, he ends up on the run, using a Beyonder device which opens portals to random places (though always ones that are survivable), in a way that, for reasons that seem more story-related than realistic, can't be predicted or controlled. Fortunately for him, it's almost impossible for a named character to die in this setting (you basically have to be shot at close range; even firing superheated plasma at someone just pushes them away, for some reason, and falling a long distance or being shot only once or from a distance generally leaves the characters just fine).

His one friend is an Enforcer, a member of the corporation's private security, who befriended him when they were children together, but he's a company man and believes the obviously evil boss's disinformation about the Beyonders being a dangerous cult, so the friends end up on opposite sides. In fact, the enforcer, coerced into heinous acts by the evil boss, falls down the slippery slope and becomes a bit of a psychopath, with no sign of the compassion that made the two friends in the first place. At the point I stopped reading, he had just captured his old friend, and since convenient coincidence had played a bit of a role up to that point, I found myself unwilling to wade through whatever dystopian scenes were to come to get to what I assumed would be a convenient coincidence enabling the plot to be resolved.

None of the characters had much depth, even the protagonist; they had, at most, one simple motivation and a plot role.

Very few authors seem to know how (or at least when) to use the past perfect tense these days, and this author is not one of those who do, though at least most of the other mechanical issues are minor and could be cleaned up relatively easily by a good editor.

I'm willing to give undercooked worldbuilding and mediocre mechanics a bit of a pass if the emotional arc of the characters is working for me, but this wasn't, certainly not well enough for me to wade through the dystopian bits. For someone with different tastes, it may well work better.

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