Gurmukh

A very fun read

Revisado: 10-30-19

When I first started this series I didn't think I would enjoy it as much as I have. The characters are well written and very memorable, the world building is imaginative and fascinating, and the story is very engrossing.

This fourth book in the series is no exception, filled with surprise twists and lots of delightful, darkly humorous situations. If you've enjoyed Boxy's adventures so far, you won't find this book to be an exception.

I do have one niggling issue with the book though. I won't give anything away, but there's a role Boxy plays in this book that I just think it pulls off way too well. It shapeshifts into a certain role during the story and manages to pull it off absolutely flawlessly, which is very weird for a character who up until this point has had a lot of trouble handling social situations. The book even specifically says that even though Boxy's gotten a lot better at handling social situations, it's only been through extensive coaching, and that this coaching has only allowed it to handle the situations it's been coached on. According to the book, Boxy still has absolutely no common sense when it comes to social situations, and if situations come up that it hasn't been coached on Boxy still has a tendency to flounder.

However, there's absolutely no evidence of that in Boxy's performance. Lots of social encounters occur that Boxy couldn't have possibly prepared for, yet it handles every single one of these flawlessly in character, with the full social common sense that you'd expect from a character who's grown up dealing with social situations.

I have trouble even thinking of this character that Boxy plays as anything but a new character in its own right. I do appreciate the dissonance of having a fictional character that you develop feelings about which isn't even "real" in the fictional universe you're reading, that's a very interesting way of messing with your readers' minds. But it just doesn't make sense in the context of the story, and that's a flaw.

Overall though, it was a really good book, and the ending was absolutely perfect for the type of story this is!

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A Good First Novel

Revisado: 07-22-19

I liked this book. The characters were fun, the story was engaging, and I'm interested to see what happens in the next book.

There's been some mention that the main character is overpowered, and he is. There's nothing wrong with overpowered characters. I think Shad could have done a better job in giving him proper challenges though. Giving him the ability to heal back from death was probably a mistake I think.

I was also a little annoyed when characters used modern Earth colloquialisms. For example, using the word "retarded" to refer to someone unintelligent. I'm not talking about the objectionable nature of the word in general, but just the fact that this word seems like a glaring anachronism in the society that Shad is postulating. That's just one example, I noticed other colloquially modern words and phrases being thrown around. It grated on me a little, but it's not a big thing.

I also thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on the main character's internal struggle. It almost seemed like regret porn at certain points. I found myself thinking "Okay, I get it, this guy's full of self-loathing. Do I have to hear his every stray thought on the subject?"

I think it would have made a better story if his realization of his crimes was precipitated by a shocking event that forced him to confront his image of who he thought he was with reality. Gradually coming to realizations about yourself is certainly something that can happen through introspection, but it makes for a less compelling character's turning point.

Anyway, these minor gripes are made up for by how fun and interesting the story is. It's a completely new and imaginative type of world and system of magic. The amount of effort he put into figuring it all out really shows and places the book as an instant classic for me. The characters are well done and the action is well paced. I recommend it!

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Went Full Harem In This One!

Revisado: 02-05-19

I really love all the aspects of these books about playing with powers and technology and how different kinds of magic relate to each other. I also really like some of the characters. I'd like them even more if they weren't all in love with Felix and have to constantly tell him how much they admire his mind and his management skills.

It seems like they're giving him the same speech every 5 minutes about how great he is with people and how he really sees through to the heart of what drives people and he really cares about his people and they all really appreciate that.... I mean, it's nice to be told that you're appreciated, but how much validation does this guy need??

The harem aspects are almost to Michael-Scott-Earle levels, the only thing that prevents it from going that far is that the sex scenes are far less spelled out than for Earle.

This book ramps up the aspects of this story that I like the least. The ones that make my eyes feel like they're rolling out of their sockets. I can only recommend this book if you have a tolerance for that kind of thing.

Also, a lot of the story aspects just don't make sense. Like, apparently he's bought off enough of the government that he can just gerrymander districts at will but his control is so tenuous that he's in fear of legal challenges and has to go to extreme measures like pulling out of all contracts in order to set people in their place? I think Arand just wants to keep portraying Legion as the underdog no matter how much power he gives them, which just means that there's no real meaningful growth. I consider this the weakest of the three books in the series.

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A bit too much of an adolescent sexual fantasy

Revisado: 09-05-18

Here's what I liked about the book: The struggle to survive in a new and dangerous land was very well done, and I loved the breakdowns of what they did to fashion tools and make progress. The dinosaur encounters are also very exciting and suspenseful. I like the situation, and the mystery of why aliens are abducting people to essentially place them in the real life equivalent of a game of "Don't Starve" (an actual video game, which has many similarities to the situation in this book causing me to wonder if it, or a game like it, inspired the story)

But oh my god, the sexual tension in this book was so cringe worthy!! Every girl the main character, Victor, meets develops a thing for him... and he tends to meet only girls. There were two guys when he first arrived, but wouldn't you know it, they both died almost immediately. What a shame, purely luck of the draw... I'm sure that was an unintentional coincidence on the author, Michael-Scott Earle's part.

Also, there's so much time spent describing how sexy the girls are and how Victor is always fighting his sexual urges around them which makes him stare and drool distractedly a lot of the time... and also makes me want to slap him. Repeatedly. Dude, you're not 12 years old and just discovering your interest in girls! Did you never grow up and learn how to handle yourself around the opposite sex??

I get it - I've also had adolescent male fantasies about being the center of attention of a harem of women. In my own private imagination, I will indulge these fantasies very blatantly. But these fantasies don't make good stories to tell to other people, because they're all about me just being the sexual desire of attractive women. Nobody else is interested in my cliche and self-serving sexual fantasies. I know this, and I accept it.

Michael-Scott Earle appears not to know this, because he just blatantly throws it out there without caring the slightest whit for subtlety. Every time one of the girls fawns over Victor to tell him how amazing he is, I cringe and roll my eyes. You could probably make a drinking game out of it! It's just too much!

Micheal-Scott Earle - If you dialed back that aspect of the story even just a little, the story would be a WHOLE lot better! I'm considering purchasing the second book, because I'm curious about many of the details that haven't been explained yet and I want to see what they come up with next... but I'm debating with myself whether it's worth it with with all the cringing it's going to cause me.

If you have a low tolerance for this kind of thing, don't buy this book. If you have a higher tolerance, though, you might find this book fun.

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Enjoyable, but could have used some revision

Revisado: 04-28-17

Another space opera by Nuttall. A lot of the same predictable themes that he really likes to use - inexperienced officer thrust into a position they weren't prepared for; young officers compromised and either blackmailed into betrayal or given an intervention by a fatherly "tough love" minded superior officer; lots of talk about military etiquette and personal relationships.

Oh yes, and the really harsh military justice he likes to imagine in future space navies. At one point there was a brief comment that talking disrespectfully about a superior officer behind his or her back was a court martial offense! I imagine that more than half of any army could be court martialed on that premise!

There's a lot of awkward writing that I had to go over a few times before realizing what was going on. It definitely could have used some revision and editing.

Here's an interesting plot hole for you, which is a minor spoiler if you care about that kind of thing: They sneak up on the system where the enemy is staging their invasion fleet in order to get proof that they're preparing for war. The enemy detects them and they run. As they do, the main character laments that there's no such thing as ship-based faster than light communications, and have to make their way into friendly space to spread the word using their big sciencey communication thingy.

The only thing is that the enemy manages to send a signal ahead of them to sabotage the big sciencey communication thingy, so they were thwarted.

What???

How did the enemy get the signal ahead of them when Nuttall had just finished specifically saying that such a thing was impossible? If the crew of the Lightning couldn't get a signal into friendly space before coming into the system, how could the enemy do it?

Nobody suspected the enemy of having some sort of better FTL communications. Everybody just shrugged their shoulders, like, "Damn! They sent a signal ahead of us! We should have thought of that possibility!!"

The one thing happened right after the other. Nuttall just invented a technological limiting factor for his universe and then completely ignored it right afterwards!

Regarding the narrator, I have to agree with others that she wasn't great. She wasn't a deal breaker for me, but if you have low tolerance for that kind of thing you might find yourself annoyed by her.

Overall, I liked the book. It's rough, and the story isn't spectacular, but it's a serviceable space opera and Nuttall mixes things up bu exploring different ways that space travel and space battles work in this universe.

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Not as good as the previous books, but passable.

Revisado: 08-06-16

I give this series a little bit of extra leeway when criticizing it because it's more of a fun and light sci-fi novel, and I think it can be taken a little less seriously. But there were several things that kind of grated on me. For example:

- A love triangle that was completely manufactured out of thin air. Captain Burke brings aboard his old girlfriend and immediately she's all hot for him! No awkward trying to figure out their relationship or get to grips with old wounds or anything like that, just "let's get naked and have sexy fun times!!"

Problem is that this causes jealousy with the only other female character in the story that has any kind of speaking lines... even though it seems like there's nothing actually between her and Captain Burke other than some light flirtation.

- An implausible misunderstanding that causes tension between Burke and Kristoff. It makes zero sense that Kristoff thought that Burke attacked a mine. There would be no reason for him to think such a thing. Why would a report about an attack on a mine even involve his team in a mention when they were nowhere near the place?

Not to mention that this is the exact same kind of misunderstanding that happened in the last book... just as implausibly, I might add. There are some serious matters of incompetence going on in this organization!!

- A Captain Burke who becomes way less likable in this book as most of the time he seems either like a bumbling idiot who has no idea what he's doing, or a fiery hothead who shoots first and asks questions later and has zero control over his temper. For example, he flies his ship into passenger vehicle traffic in order to chase down his enemy, which is unsurprisingly unsuccessful. What did he think he'd be able to do before the authorities stopped him?

- Alien fanatics that are WAAAYY too easy to convince of the error of their ways, and to turn themselves over to the authorities.

*
It seems like throughout the book, elements are added for the sole purpose of causing tension or bringing the story to a certain place, but there is very little effort made to make those elements make any kind of sense. That's just lazy writing. You've got to do the leg work to make your story feel real to your audience.

But I did enjoy the book, in spite of its flaws. I give it a pass mostly because I feel like this series doesn't need to take itself too seriously... but there's still a point where you can take this writing not seriously enough, and Joshua Dalzelle is really skirting that line!

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A fun book.

Revisado: 12-14-14

I enjoyed this book in general. The whole series is a fun bit of fluff Sc-Fi. The reason I wanted to write this review, though, is to pick on a couple of things that annoyed me, though not enough to remove more than one star from the overall picture.

The completely unnessary, tacked-on love story should have just been removed. Eric (Two-Gun) goes back home for a visit and starts catching the eye of this girl. They go on one date, and all of a sudden she's promising to not date other men and to wait for him to come home in spite of the odds against his survival.

Okay, it's not too unrealistic for something like that to happen. Teenage girls (and boys too) often get swept up in their feelings of the moment and all that. But nobody else in the story seems to think it's a little too much. After she receives a message from Eric, Eric's mother asks her if she's going to be her mother in law soon, and she replies "I hope so!".

Seriously? Nobody's saying, "Hey, you two have basically just met each other and been on ony one date! Don't you think you should slow things down a bit?"

And the scenes where she's pining for him and watching a video montage to a song from the war on terror... kind of cringe-inducing. I guess it's just some video that gave the author the feels and he felt he needed to work it in. He should have reconsidered.

By the way, spoiler alert, though not by any means a big one, he asks her to marry him when he gets back and she says yes.

*SIGH*

Also, the dig against France at the end there was completely unnecessary and historically innacurate. It was just the authors feelings on the subject being thrown in ham-fisted.

But like I said, it was an entertaining bit of sci-fi fluff overall. I'm just the kind of guy who loves to nit-pick.

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Not what I was expecting

Revisado: 11-06-13

I'll say up front that this wasn't a terrible book, but it was certainly a puzzling one. I think it has a certain appeal to it, but I wouldn't consider it to be a "must read". In fact, I think you should probably understand the nature of this book a little better before you buy it, because if you expect it to be something other than what it is you're bound to be disappointed.

One thing this book is most decidedly *not* is a good detective story. Every single case in this book is completely straightforward. There are absolutely no red herrings, surprise twists, clever maneuvers, or brilliant feats of deduction. All that ever happens is that Ramotswe gets a case, she makes some inquiries, figures out the truth, and solves the case.

She's apparently smart and hard working, but a little amateurish - she gets caught twice while she's tailing a suspect, and at one point is even outsmarted by a teenage girl. The last case, the one revolving around the missing boy, was particularly silly since the clue that lead her to the conclusion turned out to have nothing to do with the boy whatsoever.

The story starts out by talking a little bit about Ramotswe and her father and the situation that lead to her opening the detective agency. Then it narrates a certain case that she took up regarding a question of identity. After that, the book takes a puzzling turn and starts narrating the life story of Ramotswe father. Then that leads into the life story of Ramotswe herself. This goes on for quite some time.

This part of the story wasn't completely uninteresting, but it did really throw me for a loop. I wasn't expecting something like that in a book that was supposed to be about a ladies' detective agency.

After this the book settles down to narrate how Ramotswe set up her business, gets her first case, and how she builds her business through time.

In spite of what some other people have said, this book is not character driven. The characters, for the most part, are completely flat and uninteresting. There's a little bit of depth to Ramotswe which comes from some of the things she went through as narrated in her life story, but during the rest of the book she experiences almost no character development. I think there may be some character development at the very end, which I won't reveal except to say that she changes her mind about something. But if felt abrupt, like it just suddenly happened without anything leading into it.

What this book is, is a story about Botswana. Ramotswe is just there to be the eyes through which to observe the story of this land and culture. Her detective agency is the vehicle that moves the story along by allowing her to interact with all different sorts of people who make up Botswana society. It's a story about understanding life in this foreign country through the concerns of the people who visit Ramotswe to ask for her help.

I think there's a ring of authenticity to the account, though I'd have to ask a Botswanan to be certain. The author isn't a native of Botswana, though he did live there for some years. Whether the story would sound authentic to a native's ears I cannot say, but it's certainly an interesting impression of the land and culture from somebody who has actually been there.

If you're expecting a riveting detective novel, an intricate plot, or a cast of memorable characters, you're bound to be disappointed with this book. Don't buy it. But if you want to hear an interesting story about the life and times of the people of Botswana, then I think you'll get a good deal of enjoyment out of this book, and you certainly *should* buy it. It's easy to see that the book has a dedicated following of readers who've enjoyed it tremendously.

Just know what you're getting into, and don't expect more from the book than it offers.

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I Was Disappointed

Revisado: 01-29-13

When I downloaded the first book, I got the impression that these were self contained episodes. The first one was over 2 hours in length, and the story seemed to stand on its own.

I foolishly didn't take notice of the length when I downloaded the second. I figured that if these were episodes in the vein of television series' that they would all be of similar length. I was wrong. Not only is this "episode" only 39 minutes long, it doesn't tie in with the first episode in any way at all! There's no context for what's going on here, and it just ends abruptly. It's abundantly clear that this episode DOESN'T stand on its own.

Now, I'm sure that future "episodes" will tie these two incidents together, but that's not how episodes work! These aren't episodes at all, it's all just one continuous book that has been broken down into sections. It's a cheap trick which I imagine is intended to build anticipation but it ends up just being annoying.

Sure, other books often require a continuation of the story, but in those cases they tend to end at some properly dramatic point. They don't just end in the middle of some minor challenge.

There's no way I can give this story high marks - it's incomplete. If I'm a teacher and you hand me an incomplete essay, you'll fail. Same here. The performance was pretty good though, I found no fault with William Dufris.

This may be a riveting story when it's complete, but right now it's not. Cutting up the story into sections like this really ruins the flow. It's complete nonsense.

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Interesting, But A Little Confusing

Revisado: 02-03-09

I want to say upfront that I enjoyed this story overall. The technological concepts were very interesting, the plot was engaging, and the depiction of alternate modes of human existence was very provocative.

That being said, there are some distracting flaws that really lowered my enjoyment of this story.

First of all, while Mr. Williams made a good start on setting up this universe with technologies and alternative modes of human existence, he neglected to flesh it all out and explain it properly. It leaves the audience confused and bewildered at all the terms being thrown around.

For example, how is a gestalt like the Jinc different from a Fort, which is also a group mind? How is it that Fort minds can span the entire galaxy when they can only communicate at the speed of light and there are only a few hundred "frags" altogether to cover that distance? How is Q-looping more desirable than other forms of communication for Forts?

A lot of other details are glossed over as well, leaving only vague references for the imagination to work with. It makes a lot of the characters' motives and actions very hard to understand.

And the character who speaks only in Gary Newman lyrics? That was a terrible idea! In the introduction, Mr. Williams said that he didn't want to reveal which character it was... but it becomes extremely obvious.

Not to mention extremely annoying! Seriously, the guy drones on and on in nothing but reconstituted song lyrics... it adds nothing to the story except for the threat of a headache! If Mr. Williams was trying to be clever and profound, he failed.

Because of these flaws, I took two stars off of my rating. But I still feel that this was a worthwhile buy for the reasons I mentioned earlier. I plan on buying the next book in the series and would recommend others listen to this book for themselves.

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