Review of “The Folded Sky” by Elizabeth Bear
I’ll start with the easy part. The author has created an entire galaxy of worlds, which I assume define the “White Space Novel” series. There are even pirates, humans who want nothing to do with the modern world or aliens, which there are plenty of in this story. The action scenes aboard various spacecraft are well written and exciting.
The story is a mix of banal family drama and high-energy action scenes, all set to the backdrop of an imminent stellar explosion. The combination doesn’t work for me. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I finally decided that there are too many antagonists. The story gets convoluted and it is hard to know who or what is an actual threat. The family scenes took up most of the first third of the book; I think the author realized they had lost track of the plot and jammed all the action they could into the last third.
At least twenty percent of the book is wisecracks by the first-person narrator. They used every simile and metaphor in the TWENTIETH CENTURY books. Maybe this is because the central character studies ancient civilizations, but her family had left earth only a few generations before the story takes place. It was very difficult to remember that they are a serious scientist with all the supercilious comments. Overall, this unnecessary self-reflection seriously detracts from the story, and adds a lot of pages.
There’s too much going on…but nothing. Once it became obvious that the pirates were just background noise, the book reduced to a whodunnit about a couple of attempted murders. Every seemingly hopeless situation is miraculously overcome with more fantastical alien powers. In other words, the story is contrived to fit the author’s predetermined ending. All authors do that to some degree, but it was a little too obvious in this book.
If you like space operas you’ll probably enjoy this book.
Review of “ALL THE DARK WE WILL NOT SEE” by Michael B. Neff
If only my sore eyes, bloodshot from pollen, stress, and lack of sleep, had noticed the first ill omen, waving like a red flag on Waimea beach when surf’s up, on the scintillating cover of this book. A list of names that reads like the playbill for Superman, after he had saved the world yet again, whose meaning I didn’t grasp until my mind had been dulled by drinking in this tale of star-crossed lovers swimming in a shark-infested bay connected to an ocean filled by prehistoric behemoths, a vast chasm only glimpsed by their perspicacious intellects, unobserved by unsuspecting mental midgets like myself. The forbidding cover, a vigilant guardian of truth and their giant eagle, reached into the depths of my soul, like a Stephen King novel on a stormy night, and warned me as clearly as a sunny day, to go no further. Yet I was driven by the will of Vishnu …
Enough of that. My point is that this book is written like poetry, filled with allegory and metaphors. At first I thought this was a great way to reveal Edison Eden’s tragicomic perspective, but the author used it for the narrator … pretty much everyone whose point of view is displayed in this tragic tale of deception, manipulation, betrayal and outright insanity. The feelings of the characters are amplified wildly by the writing style. It was a bit much for me.
This is a well-written book with some annoying grammatical errors, e.g., systematic missing possessive apostrophes in the same person’s name. Almost like a machine wrote it. Probably the publisher’s editing software.
This is a work of fiction, so the Office of Special Counsel and several other whistleblower protection agencies, were replaced by the fictitious Office of Whistleblower Counsel in the novel. The author weaves a believable imaginary world around this dim space in a concrete bastion erected on K Street, populate by gods, demons, acolytes, and other celestial beings.
It isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s a good read if you like metaphorical writing …
Timothy R. Keen 
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