Review of “Raft” by Stephen Baxter
This is a review that I’m glad to write because, despite my often scathing criticism of what I consider half-finished books, Stephen Baxter finished the job. I don’t particularly like science fiction that borders on fantasy, but he keeps his wildly speculative physics consistent to the end; of course, he has a lot of leeway. The cover photo gives the reader a hint of what’s coming–flying trees?
The story that unwinds checks all the boxes: simple plot with plenty of action; good character arcs that aren’t too extreme; exposition written into dialogue in a very believable way; no extraneous characters or side plots confusing the story; a romantic subplot; a surprising ending, despite the reader knowing what’s coming; and, best of all, he does it in 245 pages.
The writing style is solid and the story is easy to follow. Furthermore, the author doesn’t seem to grow tired of the story after the half-way point, probably because he kept the length reasonable. Science fiction doesn’t have to require 400 pages to be understandable and believable. This reminds me of books written in the 60s and 70s; tell the story with enough background to make it comprehensible, but don’t share all of the notes that went into the final draft.
I recommend this novel to anyone who is willing to see what others can imagine.
Review of “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything” by Ervin Laszlo
I’m not sure how to review this book. I bought it used because I’m interested in physics and the apparent deadlock it has reached; everyone admits that the Standard Model of Physics, as well as the Standard Cosmological Model, are facing challenges from a scarcity and plethora of new observations, respectively. The pioneers of modern physics acknowledged that they weren’t looking deep enough. We have developed a very solid model of physics, but it is based on high-energy, collisional experiments; it is very accurate in predicting the behavior of subatomic particles. Every physicists knows that particles do not exist, but are only the result of interacting quantum fields.
Cosmologists, astronomers, and astrophysicists are facing a crisis because of the incredible power of modern instruments like the JWST. Nothing adds up the way it should. We either can’t look deep enough (particle physics) or we’ve looked too deep (astrophysics). It is a conundrum. There is mounting evidence, collected by reputable physicists and other scientists, that we are missing something.
Ervin Laszlo died in June of this year, after a long career as a philosopher with a metaphysical interest. That would explain why this book reads like a wish list rather than a proposed research program. His lack of a formal scientific education could explain why this book sounds like nonsense at first glance. However, if taken with a grain of salt, it is an excellent generalization of the characteristics of a theory of everything. What it lacks is a systematic, skeptical presentation of the data; he seems to accept a large amount of paranormal data at face value.
I would caution anyone who reads this to be more skeptical than the author. Scientific inquiry requires an open mind, a trait more common to philosophers than physicists–probably because philosophers don’t have to work so hard to comprehend what has already been learned. Progress is slow most of the time, but this book and the concepts it presents is a step in the right direction.
I recommend it as a primer on what may come in the future, but don’t expect Laszlo’s New Physics to become real anytime soon.
Review of “Eyeless in Gaza” by Aldous Huxley
This was a difficult review.
Gaza is never mentioned in the book, but apparently (according to ChatGPT) it is taken from rom Milton’s Samson Agonistes. How appropriate. I never read Milton, but its fundamental influence supports the theory that this book is a pseudo-autobiography. I admit to bias when I saw Huxley’s picture, in his thirties (maybe?) on the back cover. He looks like the central character … let’s get to it.
This is a troubling story about a young man who is a member of the British elite in the 1930s. Anthony Beavis is an intellectual who finds hedonistic pleasure in reading and seducing women. He is not pleased with his lifestyle, but it satisfies his urges, so he sees no reason to change. The conflict arises as he recognizes the dissatisfaction he feels from this lifestyle. That’s where the story begins to fall apart.
The story of Anthony’s self-realization is one of disillusionment in his social status. The story is told, not in actions, but rather by inaction. He can never act, not because he doesn’t know the proper response to events, but because he is encased in concrete — social and personal. The entire novel is about his struggle with recognizing other people as being human and not objects to be avoided or exploited. This makes the author’s job more difficult because he must try to change Anthony without invoking supernatural effects.
He fails in this primary objective, in my humble opinion. The protagonist (Anthony) never truly confronts the obvious problems with his social behavior.
Anthony himself says that divine intervention caused him to meet Dr. James Miller, a physician who just happened to be approaching the hamlet where Mark was dying of gangrene. I have seen this kind of writing time and again. How do I transform this incorrigible person into the saint I want them to be? No problem. Invoke a miracle. Voila! Anthony is a new man, except …
The story ends with the same old Anthony, but with a slight adjustment: he is willing to risk his life for something he doesn’t really believe in.
The grammar is okay but relies, to an excessive level, on commas. I think Huxley lost track of some of his prepositionally dominated sentences. I’ve seen that before.
This is a story that follows a meandering path through the past to lead to a present that is no different from the past. Maybe that was the author’s intent. We struggle with our thoughts but fail to control them, barely managing, if we’re lucky, to nudge them in a slightly different direction.
I recommend this novel to anyone who has ever wondered if other people are as confused and misinformed as them.
Review of “Across the Sand” by Hugh Howey
After seeing all the series of books written by the author, I was worried this was going to be a piece of a larger puzzle. I was glad to see that this is a standalone novel, albeit it occurs in the same world featured in his other books. Nevertheless, there were plenty of clues that this is one story from an entire world Howey has created.
The story takes place sometime in the future, mostly in eastern Colorado. However, the landscape is so drastically altered that it reads more like a fantasy, e.g. the Dune series by Frank Herbert. I think the author wrote a fantasy/sci-fi story and added some distorted, but familiar, place names to make it read like a postapocalyptic story. The world is so altered that it would take thousands of years, and that isn’t postapocalyptic–that’s the inevitable fate of all civilizations.
The central characters are children who take matters into their own hands to find their destinies. Overall it reads like a story for teenagers because the prose slows down and accelerates with the action; short, punchy sentences when something’s happening, and more refined writing for less dramatic scenes. Keeping that in mind, the writing is okay if uninspired. The erratic writing style is intentional because the story is told through multiple perspectives; however, the author keeps slipping up and reading everyone’s mind in several scenes. Another annoying habit the narrator had was referring to parents as “her father” and such, then using their name in unexpected situations. This dichotomy led to several passages I had to reread several times, and finally interpret it to what I thought the author meant.
It isn’t nice to confuse your readers.
The plot is well crafted, telling two stories through several perspectives (mostly children and young adults), eventually merging them in a climactic ending. The reason for the main conflict is never explained or even mentioned, so I was left feeling like this was a clever story written around a neat idea with no consideration of plausibility or realism. I’ve read enough science fiction to suspend disbelief for a few hundred pages.
As modern science fiction goes, this is a good story–but it shows signs of being rushed and not carefully edited. The premise is great but it was removed from the oven before it was finished.
Review of “Our American Israel” by Amy Kaplan
This book is an objective, if potentially disturbing, history of America’s relationship with Israel. The author does a good job explaining a lot of what I witnessed during my life, but she ties all those disparate news stories into a coherent picture of the myriad special interests and fantasies comprising America’s global perspective. Kaplan is a professor of English, so the writing and punctuation are very good and mostly readable. However, I started finding cut-and-paste errors in the last third–better than most authors accomplish.
A lot of the public perception of the American-Israeli relationship is told through detailed descriptions of Israel as presented in movies and newspapers, including short quotes from cited sources listed in the appendix. This got a little excessive in my opinion. Nevertheless, it served as the cement that bound the news into an accurate depiction of this complex relationship.
The picture is presented in a balanced approach for every aspect of this alliance, leaving the reader to make up their own mind; however, I suspect that Kaplan is skeptical of the mainstream story as portrayed in the press and government statements. I applaud her discipline in not saying what I voice daily; but this book was published in 2018, and a lot has happened since then.
I definitely recommend this as background for anyone trying to understand what the hell is going on in the Middle East, and America’s role in this unstable part of the world. While I was reading this book, I stumbled on a YouTube video by Andrei Jikh about recent events in this region and their potential impact on the global economic system, which proposes an economic reason for America’s support for Israel–the root cause for instability in the region.
This book should be treated as a primer for understanding why U.S. presidents have reaffirmed America’s unwavering support for Israel, no matter how the rest of the world interprets its actions.
Review of “The Break Down” by B. A. Parks
It’s difficult to avoid comparisons between this mystery novel and one I reviewed recently because they are so similar, even though this book was written in 2017 whereas You Don’t Want to Know was written in 2025. I don’t want to give away the plot, so I’ll only say that they could have been written from the same outline. I guess that means that gaslighting has become a standard tool in mystery novels.
The author does a good job presenting the break-down of the central character’s mental state as the days go by. The reader is reminded of passing time by chapter headings using the date. The victim is the first-person narrator, so the story involves a lot of introspection. Sometimes this internal dialogue gets more than a little repetitive. The lack of another perspective also means that the reader only knows what Cass (the protagonist) thinks about explicitly, which requires a clever gimmick to avoid the antagonist telling all in Act III. The author pulls this off very well.
The suspense is somewhat downgraded because we know that Cass is losing her mind, so whatever boogey man she’s imagining isn’t really there. However, her state of mind, including fear and paranoia, is presented in a believable way. I could sympathize with her apprehension about a murderer being on the loose in her remote neighborhood, given her disintegrating sanity.
This is a decent story that kept my attention enough to read a few pages every day. Some books feel like a homework assignment. I have to admit, however, that I wasn’t surprised by the ending because I had just finished You Don’t Want to Know. I greatly prefer this story because it has fewer meaningless characters and subplots, and it is 300 pages shorter.
I found the narration and general tone pleasant enough, so I don’t have any major complaints.
I recommend reading The Break Down if you stumble across it.
Review of “You Don’t Want to Know” by Lisa Jackson
The title says it all.
I bought this book because the back cover suggested that this is a story about a woman who had a mental breakdown and finds herself doubting her own sanity after attempting suicide and hallucinating her missing son’s presence after two years. The author does a great job on the character arc. I had to keep reminding myself that the central character’s self-destructive behavior was due to her mental condition. That’s where my interest ended.
I don’t read mysteries in general because they are formulaic. The reader can’t help trying to figure who did what, which is a waste of time because the author can do anything they want to spice up the story and maintain interest. One of the comments read, “Multiple red herrings and a host of sinister characters help keep the pages turning.” I guess I don’t know what makes a good red herring because I was tabulating points for/against each character’s likelihood of being the bad guy, rather than jumping at every insult and personal snub.
I don’t think a 604-page book can be a page turner. More than 200 pages passed in boredom before anything happened, partly because the author kept repeating the biographies of the many characters. Things sped up after that, but I’d already lost interest. I truly didn’t want to know who did what to Ava Garrison.
The author used a technique I’ve used myself, which unfortunately paints the narrative into a corner. Many of the chapters begin in a scene and then summarize an event from the past, which requires use of the past perfect tense (e.g., she had gone to work). This is great until it isn’t. This book abuses it, often relating pages of past events and overusing the past perfect, sometimes with two phrases like the example above in one sentence. I don’t know if there are any rules about this, but I use readability as my guide; the author pushes this well past that point.
There were some well-written scenes with “nail-biter” tension. I guess that’s what Jackson is known for. Overall the book is okay, but way too long and repetitive. It’s too long to be a quick read and the subject isn’t worth 600 pages–maybe 350.
I think that authors/editors don’t read books from the reader’s perspective.
Review of “Delights and Shadows” by Ted Kooser
There isn’t much for me to add to Ted Kooser’s critical acclaim for this well-named book of poetry. His skill with words, metaphors, and creating imagery is remarkable, even to someone like me. You don’t have to be a poetry lover to appreciate the tapestry he weaves with simple words in this impressive work.
It could be that this particular collection is mostly upbeat and doesn’t languish over the past or the future. From memories as a child to the observations of an elderly man, these poems present at most a melancholy side that never ventures into the depths of despair some poets wallow in. Maybe the difference is like preferring action novels over romances. Whatever you call this style of poetry, it really hits the spot with me.
There isn’t much to say about grammar and punctuation; I don’t understand how poets decide where to break lines, even if they don’t use commas. Thus, I never know exactly how to read them; sometimes I treat each line break as a pause, even if it has no punctuation. Other times I read right through and only pause at commas or semicolons, but sometimes his multi-line sentences are pretty long. I’ll get a chance to practice because this author has convinced me to continue reading poetry.
I don’t keep the books I read after writing my reviews, but I think I’ll keep this one handy to bring some delight or shadows into a moment of my day…occasionally.
I definitely recommend this book of poetry.
Trinity House
Trinity House was written during the Covid pandemic and thus expresses my frustration with the divisions I was watching grow within American society. I didn’t want to write a dramatic story but that’s probably what it is. As the author I accept full responsibility for this dark comedy that attempts to explore the relationship between superstition and innate human behavior.
The professionally done cover encapsulates what is wrong with extreme religious beliefs. One side of the church’s lawn is well kept while the other is overgrown with weeds, the tree dying, yet the gardener is waving as if there were nothing wrong, oblivious of the damage he has done by his own acts. But he isn’t happy, far from it; his demons are haunting him.
I tried to capture the complex social environment of deeply conservative Christians torn between their dogma and the reality of life, the neighbors they are equally capable of loving or hating. I personally love the ending, but then I’m an agnostic, maybe an atheist. At any rate, it felt good to get yet another burden off my chest.
Publications: Deep Dives into Science Fiction
I’m not reposting these book descriptions in chronological order. They were originally written as my interest changed through time and in response to the news. This post focuses on four science fiction novels inspired by the news, and my visceral reaction to the simplified reality portrayed in pop culture. Thus, my attention turned to early reports of Artificial Intelligence, as Large Language Models were presented to the public. All the hype about deep-learning algorithms becoming intelligent after being trained on vast amounts of publicly available books, movies, images, etc. bothered me because, if the objective (intentional or not) is Artificial General Intelligence, these programs all missed the boat. For example, a human brain isn’t fed a stream of data to become the cognitive wonder we claim to be; it spends years processing and assimilating sensory data–touch, hearing, smell, sight, taste. So I imagined what might be occurring in a private lab somewhere, an event so profound it would change the course of civilization. It remains entirely possible that a scenario like that portrayed in Aida is actually playing out below the radar of mainstream media attention.
AIDA is an acronym for Artificial Intelligence Daughter Algorithm. It is the story of a heartbroken computer scientist who decides to create a daughter to replace the one he lost, along with his wife, during childbirth. But his creation exceeds his wildest expectations. The simple cover encapsulates the central theme of the book. Look at the picture closely and you will find that the beautiful woman depicted in the left side of the face is matched by an evil countenance on the right. There is no purpose in issuing warnings about unintended consequences because humans never look beyond the immediate horizon.
Writing Aida got me to thinking about AI and robotics so, naturally, I wrote another book on the subject. I wondered what would happen if an AGI hooked up with an advanced humanoid robot. One possibility is encapsulated in the title of this novel: it would be a Black Dawn for humanity if the wrong people got their hands on it. I wanted to call this book, AMANDA, the name of the central character. As you might have guessed that is an acronym–AMANDA is an Autonomous Mobile Anthropomorphic Neural-synthetic Deep-learning Architecture that has spent 16 years being raised as the daughter of a couple of computer scientists.
The naive Amanda needs a guide for her intellectual and emotional journey when her family is murdered and her body stolen. To add an interesting twist to the tale, I reintroduced the elderly writer from A Change of Pace as the author of the novel that influenced her parents: Aida not only impacted AMANDA’s creators, it also leads to its author (Jim Walsh) being pursued by the bad guys. Naturally, Amanda and Jim become unlikely partners in a quest of personal importance to both of them.
This is an adventure that doesn’t slow down until the end.
Apparently, I needed more adventure after writing Black Dawn, so I wrote a what-if novel about what might happen if the basic laws of physics, or the constants we take for granted, were to change. The result is Broken Symmetry, a story about a graduate student who finds herself the locus of a bizarre chain of correlated events–personal, social, and even geological–with no obvious causation.
The action in this story is too cataclysmic to keep under wraps, not when the San Andreas fault ruptures and Yellowstone caldera explodes, but that’s only the geological story. People begin to change and someone wants to stop the contagion. (Don’t they always?)
The Edge of Space was my response to a news story about Voyager One having communications problems after exiting the solar system. The story is told through the eyes of several characters with different perspectives. Their interactions are rife with speculation about what is occurring, from a young woman from Thailand to the president of the United States. As the story unfolds, these characters move in and out of each other’s lives.
I have written an outline for a sequel to this story of First Contact…
Timothy R. Keen 
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