Issui Ogawa: The Lord of the Sands of Time

A stand-alone science fiction book.

Translator (from Japanese): Jim Hubbert
Publication year: 2009
Format: print
Page count: 196
Publisher: Haikasoru

Miyo is the shaman Queen of a part of ancient Japan (248 AD). However, she’s very constricted in her role and she sometimes wants to escape it. One day, when she’s sneaked outside for a walk, she and her ten-year-old slave/defender Kan are attacked by a mononoke, a monster from legend. Kan is grievously wounded but he and Miyo are saved by a man whom Miyo believes to be a messenger from heaven. Later, the man tells his tale to Miyo.

The man is Messenger O, a cyborg from the year 2598. Humanity is in a desperate battle with a mechanical enemy and the only way to stop humanity from being wiped out of existence is to send an army of cyborgs to the past. The enemy has also sent their machines to the past and the cyborgs will have to rally the humans in defense.

Messenger O, who chose his name as Orville, is just one of the cyborgs sent to the past. However, since the cyborgs will have to change the past in order to destroy the enemy, he can never go home. He fell in love with a human woman in 2598 and they had a brief relationship. Orville knows that most likely he will never see her again.

Every other chapter is set in ancient Japan and follows the characters battle against the insect like machines. The other chapters are set first in the future and then follow Orville when travels to further and further to the past. The time travelers don’t have time to be subtle and they have to alter the past in order to fight the enemy.

Orville feels like a human character. He doesn’t keep himself apart from humanity or “explore” feelings or any of the other things which artificial human characters usually do. He knows that he’s faster and stronger and heals quickly but he doesn’t dwell on it. He’s grimly determined to keep humanity alive. At first, he wants to do this by working with humanity but when it becomes increasingly clear that humans are petty, unreliable, suspicious, and prone to squabbling with each other (ah, the humanity!), Orville wants to save humanity no matter what the cost. He and the other cyborgs are aided by an AI with a lot of resources. She’s called Cutty Sark.

Miyo knows that she’s a figure head but she does what she can, mostly to organize things and to keep up the soldiers’ morals. She also has to try to make the various faction leaders work together instead of trying to outmaneuver each other.

I really liked this approach to time travel where everything is out in the open and the travelers have to change to past in fundamental ways instead of trying to preserve it. However, because the book covers a lot of years, many things are just glossed over instead of shown. Of course, if that wasn’t done, the book would have been a lot longer.

The enemies were a bit disappointing to me. They are non-changing machines. Their masters don’t communicate with humans, so the humans don’t know why they are attacking.

I was really impressed with the translation. To my eyes it feels like the book was written in English and doesn’t have any awkward sentences or word choices.

 

Paul Byers: Act of God

A collection of seven science fiction short stories.

Publication year: 2013
Format: ebook, Kindle

The writer describes his stories as similar to Twilight Zone episodes, and I agree. All of them have twists, and not necessarily just in the end, and a few of them are pretty brutal. Most of them feel like they are short and the endings can be abrupt. They aren’t connected and seem to be set in different story universes.

In the first story, “Shooting Star”, Captain Evan Grant is supposed to go on a routine research run around the Earth. Instead, he’s persuaded to try to rescue an automated cargo ship which is returning from Mars with a valuable cargo. The ship has stopped transmitting and Grant has to try to board it and fix it.

Grant is a devoted father and husband, and he wants to do the right thing. Unfortunately, that turns out to be quite difficult.

The set up for “Rescue Mission” is pretty familiar. The Commander of a space ship is sent on a plant to rescue downed pilots. The planet has rich supplies but also a native population who are considered low-tech barbarians. The Commander’s second-in-command is young and impatient and wants to just wipe out any natives who come too close. This is a problem, of course. There’s a nice contrast between the older and more experienced Commander who is tired of wars and the gung-ho youngster.

“The Journal” was quite different from the previous two. In it, a group of young male students steal a journal from one of their student buddies and find out much more than they thought. Unfortunately, the story also left a lot of unanswered questions in favor of quick twists.

In “All that Glitters…” the crew of a mining star ship finds a previously unknown planet which is rich in minerals, especially gold. The Captain wants to take full advantage of the clueless natives in order to further his own fortunes and career.

This story also has a conflict with the captain and his second-in-command but it’s otherwise different from the second story.

“Annihilation” is set on a submarine which is sent to a long mission.

“Act of God” is perhaps the most chilling of the stories. A colony far away from everyone else has encountered a disaster which destroyed most of the food supply. The administrator has to resort to drastic actions to keep people alive.

In “Eye of the Beholder” two history buffs are looking for ancient treasure.

All of the stories can be read without any knowledge about other science fiction stories or concepts.

Even though the stories are short, the characters are mostly established well and quickly. Of course, that means that the conflicts between them aren’t terribly nuanced, but they are dramatic and so entertaining. The stories are designed to be uncomfortable and not comfort reads. Some of them have also minor horror elements. I think that if you’ve read similar stories before they might not be surprising – I was genuinely surprised by only one of the stories. However, they were still quite entertaining. The last two, “Act of God” and “Eye of the Beholder” are my favorites. The last one teases us with just when and where the two main characters are and what they are actually looking for.

The ebook has also samples of Byers’ two other books, “Arctic Fire” and “Catalyst”.

 

Sean Ferrell: Man in the Empty Suit

A stand-alone time travel story.

Publication year: 2013
Format: Audio
Publisher: AudioGO
Narrator: Mauro Hantman
Running Time: 9 hrs and 4 minutes

The main character (MC), who isn’t named, has invented time travel and he’s decided to have a yearly convention for himself. He has made convention rules which are designed to keep time flowing the same way that he remembered it. However, one time when he comes to the convention, he’s confronted with the awful realization that not only has events changed from what he remembered before, but they’ve changed drastically: someone has killed on of his older selves.

Most of the characters are the narrator from different timelines. He gives them nicknames to keep them straight: Yellow for a man with a yellow shirt, The Inventor for the year when he invented time travel. I was fascinated by the concept; the MC was able to see his older selves from the future and his younger selves from the past. Sometimes he marvels at how callous his younger selves were and now paranoid his older selves will be. When the mystery deepens, he has to wonder if one of his selves is a murderer.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book but unfortunately, I didn’t like the second half as much. I had the feeling that some of the things the MC described doing during his travels were more interesting that the second half of the book.

The convention is set in New York City in 2071, a hundred years after his birth. We don’t really get much information about the city until the second half of the book.

The book is written in first person and it was easy to listen to.

 

Kage Baker: The Graveyard Game

The fourth book in the series.

Publication year: 2001
Page count: 298
Format: print
Publisher: TOR

Lots of spoilers for the previous book, Mendoza in Hollywood!

At the end of the previous book the Botanist Mendoza was sent far away. Two other immoral cyborgs, Joseph and Lewis, are searching for her. Joseph recruited Mendoza from the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition and Lewis has apparently fallen in love with her. In addition to having some fatherly feelings toward Mendoza, Joseph is driven by guilt. For a long time, he has known that something is wrong. The cyborg who recruited him, one of the really old ones named Budu, has also disappeared but Budu gave Joseph a file first. Joseph has been too afraid to access it but now he’s forced to do so and he’s afraid of the information he finds there.

The story starts in Hollywood 1996. In the previous book Mendoza and another cyborg, Einar, were thrown forward in time from 1863 to 1996. This should be impossible but it turns out that Mendoza produces Crome particles which enable time travel. But she can’t control it.

Lewis witnesses Mendoza and Einar being sent back to 1863 where they are suppose to be. The Company doesn’t tell Lewis much about it but he investigates on his own. This is dangerous because he’s defying Company’s orders not to do so and the Company can and does monitor the cyborgs all the time: they have been engineered to send a continuous data stream to the Company. Lewis contacts Joseph who has accidentally gotten on his hands a device that can short circuit the data stream for a day. Joseph and Lewis question the last immortal who saw Mendoza. Later, Joseph questions another of the group who was stationed with Mendoza.

However, it takes a long to find out any clues about where Mendoza is and what else the Company is hiding, especially because it has to be in secret. The story takes place in 2025, 2142, 2225, and 2275. Lewis and Joseph meet and compare notes. We also find out a lot about the changes in the world. By the way, while the story jumps forward in time, the characters live through the years normally (if that’s the word for immortal cyborgs).

Between each jump forward in time, there’s an interlude called “Joseph in Darkness” where he talks about the search, about his motives and feelings and about the changes in the world. To other people they probably feel like infodumps but I was fascinated. We don’t, of course, know the details about how most of the world became vegetarian, for example, but I enjoyed the broad strokes, too.

Lewis is a Literature Specialist, not a secret agent. He becomes fascinated with the mortal man, Edward, who looks just like Mendoza’s first (and only) mortal love. Who was burned at the stake in 1554. In 1863 Mendoza left her post and killed mortals because of Edward. Lewis becomes convinced that Edward is some sort of Company tool, somehow living for centuries even though he’s suppose to just a mortal. Eventually, Lewis starts to write a book where Edward is one of the central characters. We also get to know his back story.

Joseph is a more serious character. He doesn’t actually want to be in danger but in the end, he feels too guilty about not find Mendoza and Budu earlier. He’s lived a long time and he doesn’t have a high opinion on humans.

The book has quite a lot of humor. In the future alcohol, tobacco, chocolate, and animal products have been made illegal and so the cyborgs do their best to indulge while they can. They can’t actually get drunk but chocolate produces the same kind of effect. So, there’s a scene where Lewis and Joseph are in a chocolate bar, drinking hot chocolate and eating chocolate, and the waiters wonder why they behave like they’re drunk. Lewis even snorts chocolate powder up his nose.

The previous books have hinted that the Company is doing pretty awful things but here we witness some of them first hand. Apparently, they’ve even taken a hand in human evolution. When humans still lived in caves, there was a large cult who killed anyone who tried to invent anything new. The Company decided that the cult should be exterminated and created a race of huge, aggressive cyborgs to essentially kill other people. Unfortunately, after a while they became too inconspicuous and the Company couldn’t have that. Unfortunately for the Company, the cyborgs can’t be killed so the Company had to something else with them. It seems that the Company don’t value the cyborgs as individuals but just for the work they do.

And then there’s the ominous year of 2355 when the silence starts.

The Graveyard Game advances the big plot a lot which was great. Mendoza isn’t seen in the book at all.

 

Lois McMaster Bujold: Barrayar

The second book in the Vorkosigan series, in the internal chronological order when Falling Free is considered a prequel novel. Part of Cordelia’s Honor omnibus.

Publication year: 1991
Format: Audio
Narrator: Grover Gardner
Running Time: 11 hours 40 minutes

The Vorkosigan series is one of my favorite series ever and Barryar is one of my favorites in the series. I strongly recommend reading “Shards of Honor” first where Aral and Cordelia meet, and their worlds are introduced.

Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan is a former exploration ship captain from Beta Colony but is now married to Admiral Lord Aral Vorkosigan who has been appointed the Regent of planet Barrayar. Cordelia comes from a very different culture and she’s still trying to navigate the strange Barrayaran culture. She’s especially lost among the high military caste Vor who have some pretty strange attitudes and customs, from Cordelia’s point-of-view.

She’s pregnant with their first child. Aral is attacked with a soltoxin in their bedroom and Cordelia is exposed to the gas, too. Unfortunately, the toxin deforms the unborn child and Aral’s father wants them to abort the child and try again. However, Cordelia doesn’t give up. Over her father-in-law’s loud objections, but backed by her husband, she has the fetus transferred to a uterine replicator, an artificial womb. In the UR, the doctors can try to correct the damage done to the fetus. At the same time, a civil war breaks out on the planet and the UR becomes one of the hostages.

The start of the book is pretty leisurely with Cordelia trying to figure out Barrayaran culture and getting to know the dowager Empress Kareen and her five-year-old son Gregor. The poor boy is already a pawn in political games but he isn’t spoiled or coddled. Kareen is also a pawn, but she knows it and she’s determined to protect her son and herself. Some of the recurring characters in the series are introduced here: Cordelia’s bodyguard and a very good friend Droushnakovi and Lady Alys Vorpatril who is Cordelia’s guide in the Barrayarn culture and etiquette. It was also a bit strange to see how Aral’s father Count Piotr treated Cordelia before the soltoxin attack. He was one of her guides to the Barrayaran mindset and very kind towards her. Then, after the attack his attitude changes completely, which is sad.

I’m an unabashed fan of Cordelia: her anthropological attitude towards the Barrayarans, her wry humor, and her fierce loyalty to her family. She’s also ruthless when she has to be, to protect her unborn son in any way she can. She’s very resourceful but that could be because she’s grown up in a society where she could be whatever she wanted to be. She doesn’t know that on Barrayar she should be constrained by her gender, and so she isn’t. Of course, being the wife of the most powerful man on the planet helps, too.

Aral is also one of my favorite characters ever. He’s an honorable man who was put into a very dishonorable situation in “Shards of Honor”. Here, he’s still loyally serving his Emperor as a Regent to a five-year-old Emperor. He has every intention of serving well and giving the empire back to Gregor when the time comes, but his enemies are convinced that Aral will take over. So, they launch an attack first.

Both Cordelia and Aral are good people, trying to do the right thing with circumstances and culture which is making it very hard.

I also adore the secondary characters. Count Piotr has lived a turbulent life, earning his Generalship during the fight (with horse cavalry!) against the Cetagandan invaders, making the transition to space flight, and seeing Mad Emperor Yuri kill his wife and eldest son. He surely knows how bloody Barrayaran wars can be. Lieutenant Kou who was wounded during the previous war and has to walk with a cane for the rest of his life in a society where cripples are expected to kill themselves. Cordelia’s bodyguard Drou who would have made an excellent officer, but who lives on planet with males only military. She always thinks that she isn’t as good as the “real officers” because of her gender. And tortured Sergeant Bothari who was used and abused by men with the power to do so.

The book has lots and lots of lovely passages:
“You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain”
“Check your assumptions. In fact, check your assumptions at the door.”
“What a strange mix Barryar was: at one moment homey and familiar, the next terrifying and alien.”
“Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We’re not giving up. We’re waiting for a better opportunity to win.”
“I don’t want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.”
“Betan experience [with URs] suggests it doesn’t matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.”

 

Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

French original: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
Finnish translation: Kapteeni Nemo merten syvyyksissä
Publication year of the original: 1870
Publication year of the Finnish translation: 2011
Finnish translator: Kristina Haataja
Format: print
Page count: 287

In 1866 many people on sailing ships have seen a mysterious sea monster and it has even damaged some ships. People in many countries are speculating what the strange, gigantic creature could be. Soon, the US sends a ship to end the creature’s threat to the ship lines. The ship’s captain invites professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and a famous Canadian harpooner Ned Land.

The ship Abraham Lincoln searches the seas for months until it finds the monster. At first the creature astonishes the men with its speed, because no matter how fast the ships goes, it can’t reach the monster. However, when the ship’s captain fires on the beast, it turns out to be bulletproof, too.

During the battle professor, his servant, and Ned Land are washed over board. After drifting for a night, they end up on the beast’s back and realize that it’s not an animal but a man made submarine. They are taken prisoner and taken into the gigantic submarine. They are locked into a small room, but given a good meal. After a day and night, they meet the ship’s captain: Captain Nemo is handsome, tall fellow and he allows the professor to have full access to his wondrous ship, the Nautilus. Aronnax is a scientist and he’s immediately fascinated by the many exploration opportunities Nautilus represents. He’s also curious about Nemo but the captain doesn’t answer any questions about himself. He just says that he has abandoned humanity and that the three men will be his guests for as long as they shall live.

Nautilus begins a long voyage under the seas of all the Earth’s oceans and Aronnax witnesses eagerly all of the wonders Nemo shows to him. They range from fish to underwater ruins and wrecks.

The characters have more personalities than in “From Earth to the Moon” or “Around the Moon”. They aren’t complete archetypes but I still feel that they are quite detached from the reader and they are still more a vehicle for moving the story along than real characters. Aronnax is happy to study everything outside the Nautilus but he doesn’t think even once about the people who might be missing him nor about the world and career he has left behind. He’s not even dismayed at the thought of being cut off from the rest of the humanity. Instead, when Ned Land comes up with escape plans, Aronnax is dismayed at the thought of leaving Nautilus. Conseil is even more of an archetype: he seems to have no life or thought beyond serving his master or cataloging animals. Ned Land seems to me to be the most human of the trio. Right when we meet him, he’s described as hot-blooded and indeed he yells and bellows and demands to be let out. He’s also very interested in hunting and is constantly trying to escape the submarine. Yet, even he doesn’t mention a family or friends in the outside world.

Captain Nemo seems to be a very cold and rational man, except for this hatred of mankind. However, right at the start he says that he’s no longer part of mankind and has no interest in them. Then, he does little things that show the reader that he isn’t an uncaring man. However, in the end we don’t find out his real name, just a hint of the great tragedy which shadows his life.

Like the previous two books I’ve read from Verne, this isn’t a modern adventure tale. It’s more like a travel book where the professor gapes at the fish and the undersea beauties of corals rather than the strange customs of other cultures.

 

Elizabeth Bear: Hammered

The first book in the SF trilogy set in the year 2062.

Publication year: 2005
Page count: 324 + a preview of Scardown
Format: print
Publisher: Bantam Spectra

Genevieve, Jenny, Casey is a veteran of the Canadian Army. Twenty-five years ago she was in a helicopter accident which should have killed her. Instead, the army replaced her left arm with a metal arm, replaced her left eye with a targeting scope, and put first generation cybernetics into her. She still has flashbacks and nightmares about the accident.

Now, she lives in Hartford, runs a small mechanics shop, and goes by the name Maker. The local gangster boss, Razorface, is a good friend and when he brings in one of his boys who has taken tainted drugs, Jenny realizes that the drugs come from the Canadian Army and shouldn’t be on the streets in the first place. She starts to look into who had brought the drug to US and why. Also, her implants are starting to break down. She’s in constant pain and her neurologist is saying that she might have only five years left to live. However, what she finds out is that her former boss, Valens, wants her back, doing something that’s more dangerous than anything else she’s ever done. It might have something to do with a spaceship that the Canadians found on Mars ten years ago.

The plot follows a lot of other people and a bit fragmentary at first. Doctor Elspeth Dunsany has just been released from jail where she has been for the past 16 years because of her work with artificial intelligences. One of the AIs has become independent and is roaming the net, looking for information.
The AI has been modeled after the physicist Richard Feynman. Elspeth is also pressured into working for Valens on a top-secret project.

A 12-year old kid is playing a virtual reality game in the hopes of getting the grand prize: a full paid scholarship. The object of the game is to become a pilot.

Casey’s other friend is a cop who whose girlfriend has just been murdered and he’s looking into it even though it might cost him his badge.

Unfortunately, many of the characters start as clichés, especially the gangster boss who just wants what’s best for the people in his neighborhood. However, most of them evolve into more than a bag of clichés and become characters who the reader might care about. Unfortunately, the cop and the gangster boss never engaged me but apparently other readers liked them. However, for me Jenny and Elspeth are the most interesting characters.

Jenny is almost fifty and she feels that she has no business still being alive. People she cares about are dead and she isn’t really interested in living anymore. She thinks of herself as a cripple and when her old boss gives her a chance to upgrade the failing implants, she doesn’t want to do that. She’s trying to help Razorface and his boys, and is mostly interested in finding dirt about her former boss so that he can be brought to justice.

Elspeth is a scientist who is more interested in science than morals, mostly. She made several AIs based on famous scientists (one of the others was Nikola Tesla) but she was then a bit dismayed when she found out that one of them has grown to independence. She had a lot of time to think about in jail and now she’s working for the same people again.

The writing style is a bit choppy. The book doesn’t have chapters, just POV changes which are prefaced by time and date. Each POV is usually just a couple of pages long, resulting in really short scenes and then going to the next one. Jenny’s POV is in first person, present tense and the rest are in third person, past tense which didn’t really work for me because they drew too much attention to the tense and first/third person shifts and made the complex plot seem a little bit more convoluted.

Still, the pace is quick and we soon find out that the VR game is something more and that everyone is connected to each other. I liked figuring out the SF references and influences. The world feels very similar to BladeRunner and Casey lives in Sigourney Street and Canada has Clarke Station in orbit.

The world seems to be a dystopia. The weather patterns have changed and so the world has changed, too. US is no longer a world power but more isolationist. Canada has been more or less taken over by a big corporation which runs the country. Canada is in a space race with the Chinese who are presented as a threat.

Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of the cyperpunk style: a setting were everything is miserable and you’re going to die young, anyway. I was actually more interested in the side plot of the spaceship than the scheming. It seems like the sequel will have far more space travel.

 

Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris: The Janus Affair: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel

My newest review: The Janus Affair: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris.

It’s the second book in the lighthearted steampunk series and I liked it more than the first book, Phoenix Rising. I really hope they will continue with the series.

 

Jules Verne: Around the Moon

French original: Autour de la lune
Finnish translation: Maasta kuuhun
Publication year of the original: 1870
Publication year of the Finnish translation: 1977
Finnish translator: Edwin Hagfors
Format: print
Page count: 179 (in an omnibus of From Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon), illustrated

I didn’t much care for “From Earth to the Moon” but it ended in a cliffhanger so after I fortified myself with various comics and tie-in books, I finally picked up the sequel. Happily, it ended up being more to my taste.

In the previous book a huge projectile was launched towards the Moon with the intention of hitting the Moon. In the end, three men decided to get into the projectile: the Gun Club’s president Barbicane, his enemy Captain Nicholls, and an adventurous Frenchman Michel Ardan. They want to be the first Earth men on the Moon and establish contact with any humans living on the Moon. They bring with them food, two dogs, and various seeds to plant on the Moon. They are supposed to make the trip in five days.

During the voyage, they actively talk about what they are likely to find on the Moon and make observations. They even encounter a comet. However, they soon find out that something has gone wrong with their projected path and instead of landing on the Moon, they are going to just go around it, perhaps infinitely. Even so, they are determined to make observations and calculations rather than succumb to despair.

I felt that the book was less technical than the previous book which had a lot of details about building the huge gun, where the put it, who would finance it etc. The book still has a couple of chapters devoted to maths and the history of Moon knowledge. Still, I thought the pace was far faster than in the previous book and there was a lot of actual interaction between the characters. Of course, the cast of characters is pretty limited.

The book was written in 1870 so many of the details of space travel are wrong. For example, at one point the characters open one of their windows and are not blown into space or significantly chilled. In a less science oriented book this would have been less noticeable but here the “errors” (this is fiction after all) jump out.

The three men are archtypical of the time: adventurous, bold, rarely even nervous. They are more interested in scientific study than if they will survive the trip. Arden is more talkative and less knowledgeable than the others and I had a feeling that he’s there because it’s a convenient way to explain things to the readers, when Barbicane and Nicholls explain things to Arden. In fact, the Moon and the voyage itself are the main features of the book, not the characters.

 

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Blowback

A new Retrieval Artist story!

Publication year: 2012
Format: Audio
Publisher: Audible
Narrator: Jay Snider
Running Time: 10 hrs and 3 minutes

The story starts three years before the rest of the story on Callisto, Jupiter’s moon, with detective Iniko Zagrando whom we met in a previous book, the Retrieval Man. He’s actually working as a spy for the Earth Intelligence and his handler Ike Jarvis wants to send him to another assignment. Zagrando disagrees but Jarvis arranges for Zagrando’s death, using his clone so the former detective has no choice. He’s sent to infiltrate the Black Fleet, the most notorious and feared criminal organization operating currently.

Six months has gone by since the domes on the Moon were bombed during the Anniversary Day, but people investigating the terrorist act aren’t any closer to finding the people responsible. Even the investigators from the Earth Alliance haven’t found anything significant. Also, the bombings were done by clones of a famous murderer and people’s opinion has turned against all clones.

Noelle DeRicci is the chief of security for the United Domes of the Moon doesn’t like the Earth Alliance investigators and doesn’t want to deal with them at all. She also has to deal with the local political fallout from the bombing.

The Retrieval Artist Miles Flint is in DeRicci’s small group of investigators but even he has found mostly dead ends. However, then he’s contacted by one of the Moon’s criminal bosses who has information and possible leads. Flint knows that DeRicci wouldn’t want to work with the suspected criminal but Flint thinks that their time to solve the bombing is running out. He’s ready to do almost anything to keep his daughter safe.

Flint’s daughter Talia is a clone. Flint’s wife cloned her without Flint’s knowledge and she came to his life recently. Talia is still recovering from her mother’s death and adjusting to living with her father whom she’s known for only a short time. She’s intelligent and is bored by her school work. She’d much rather help her father investigate the bombing. In her school, kids are accusing twins of being terrorists and bullying them. Talia is terrified that they will find out that she’s a clone.

Meanwhile, a scientist on Payla might have some answers to the investigators.

Like in the previous books in this series, the book has a lot of different point-of-view characters and situations which at first look very different from each other. However, they’re very much related to each other. The plot is fast paced and has lots of twist and turns.

Most of the plots deal with the terrorist act and the investigators who try to uncover the people responsible. However, Talia’s part of the story tell the way that the bombing has affected the people living on the Moon. They are more suspicious of outsiders and laws against clones have become harsher, even though only specific clones were involved with the bombing. That’s a very realistic reaction.

I’ve enjoyed this series a lot with the great combination of Moon habitats, very unhuman like aliens, and the very human human characters. Blowback is a very satisfying continuation to the series. I’ve really enjoyed the books which center on a different alien race, such as the Disty in “Buried Deep”. This time we get to know more about Payty (spelling? Peyty? Payti?) who are very rules bound and non-violent. Currently.

I recommend starting the series with the first book: “the Disappeared”.

The author’s site has an excerpt: http://kriswrites.com/2012/11/20/monthly-novel-excerpt-blowback-a-retrieval-artist-novel/