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Review: Obelisks: Ashes, by Ari Marmell

Review: Obelisks: Ashes, by Ari Marmell

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Obelisks: Ashes by Ari Marmell

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Obelisks: Ashes is the second volume of a duology, set after the world falls into a very unusual apocalypse.

In the previous volume, Obelisks: Dust, the crew of the International Space Station awakened one day to find themselves orbiting a shockingly changed Earth. Making their way back to the surface, they find most of the human species is simply gone, driven to madness and suicide by the mysterious obelisks which have suddenly appeared throughout the landscape. Even to catch a glimpse of one of the obelisks is to risk losing one’s mind, or worse. Only a few people have managed to survive in the wasteland that was once the state of Texas.

Our protagonist, once again, is Flight Engineer Cynthia Han. In the first book, Cynthia struggled simply to survive and help a few others, while fighting through a steadily progressing terminal illness. Now she has found other groups of survivors, including a large (and very well-armed) group which has its own sinister plans for the transformed world. With her own personal clock running out, Cynthia and her friends must solve the mystery of the obelisks, and see if they can secure a future for any human beings at all.

The first volume of this story was pegged as horror, but this second volume ventures into cosmic horror of Lovecraftian scope. Cynthia is a clever and determined woman, but she’s up against a plot billions of years deep that stretches far out into the depths of space. Her story remains difficult and bleak, and it’s not one that promises easy victories.

The first volume was mostly about setting up mysteries and plots, and this volume is mostly about resolving them. The suspense remains at a high level throughout, with reversals and surprises every few scenes. The conclusion is satisfying and wraps up all of the relevant plot threads, although it leaves the door cracked open for a sequel.

The prose style here is very clean. I caught one or two minor copy-editing errors this time, but not enough to pull me out of the narrative. Viewpoint discipline is good; there is a bit more shifting of viewpoint than in the first volume, but it’s all clear and well-marked. There’s a bit more exposition as well, but by and large it’s still embedded in dialogue and character action. Mr. Marmell’s form remains very good.

The story merits one clear content warning, over and above the general bleakness and violence of the plot. A supporting character proves to be in the grip of a pedophilic disorder, an element of his character that was foreshadowed in the first volume, but not made clear until now. His scenes in this volume can be disturbing to read, although – to be clear – they are not sexually explicit. Also, to be fair, the author isn’t using this narrative move simply for shock value; it does play a clear role in the plot.

As with the first volume, I tore through this story in a single sitting, and now I’m interested to see what else Mr. Marmell might be working on in the future. Very highly recommended.

Review: Quantum Radio, by A. G. Riddle

Review: Quantum Radio, by A. G. Riddle

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Quantum Radio by A. G. Riddle

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Quantum Radio is science fiction set in the present day, the first in what appears to be a planned series dealing with the “multiverse” concept.

Dr. Tyson Klein (“Ty” to his friends and family) is a scientist working at CERN, the European center for high-energy physics research. At the beginning of the story, he has made a remarkable discovery. The experiments running on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, are producing unexpected particles. What’s more, there appears to be a non-random pattern to these particles – as if someone, somewhere else in the universe, is sending a message.

Ty presents his findings to fellow scientists at CERN (and thus to the reader), hoping for funding and help to investigate further. Instead, when he returns home that evening, his apartment is bombed and he finds himself on the run from shadowy forces bent on killing him. Clearly his work has attracted attention from the wrong people, but who and why?

He soon finds allies, some unexpectedly familiar. With their help, he studies the LHC message and finds a way to interpret it. When they act upon the message, the story takes a sharp and rather unexpected turn . . .

Mr. Riddle’s prose style is immaculately clean, and he clearly had attention from a good editor; I didn’t notice a single copy-editing problem anywhere in the story. Exposition isn’t obtrusive, there’s no problem with tense or viewpoint discipline, both quiet scenes and action sequences flow very nicely. This is a very competent writer working at the top of his form. The story itself is certainly readable and fun, and I didn’t have any trouble getting through the novel in a couple of sittings.

Yet I also left the story mildly disappointed. The premise of mysterious messages from somewhere else in time and space, possibly leaning on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, isn’t a new one. Stories such as Greg Benford’s Timescape and James P. Hogan’s Thrice Upon a Time have walked this path before . . . and honestly, I couldn’t help but think that those classics did more with the premise than Mr. Riddle does here. The stakes here don’t seem as high, and the sense of wonder that can come from the best hard science fiction never quite materializes.

To me, Quantum Radio never managed to rise above the level of a simple adventure novel, sticking firmly to tropes that would be familiar to any Star Trek or Marvel Cinematic Universe fan. In fact, I suspect the purpose of this novel is to set up a series of similar adventure stories, taking advantage of recent audience awareness of the “multiverse” concept as driven by popular films.

So in general, I did enjoy Quantum Radio, finding it a fun adventure novel. I’ll certainly be interested to look for the sequels if and when Mr. Riddle releases those. On the other hand, if you’re looking for truly high-concept hard science fiction, with the sense of wonder such stories can provoke, you might want to manage your expectations with this one.

Review: Grimm Diagnosis, by Matt Golec

Review: Grimm Diagnosis, by Matt Golec

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Grimm Diagnosis by Matt Golec

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Grimm Diagnosis is the flawed but entertaining story of a present-day doctor, caught up in a land of fables and folktales.

Robert Lang is an American physician, who at the beginning of the story has somehow found himself in another world and is doing his best to adapt.

It’s a strange place! It looks like a medieval German village, with the appropriate level of technology (and personal hygiene). On the other hand, many of the inhabitants are odd to the point of eccentricity, there’s a plethora of princes and princesses about, and everyone seems to speak idiomatic 21st century American English. Strangest of all, Dr. Lang can match many of the villagers with characters out of German (and other) folk tales. His office assistant is a young man named Hans with a sister named Greta, he has dealings with a ruthless guild-mistress called the Godmother of the Fair . . . and the girlfriend he has acquired since arriving seems to be a grown-up Red Riding Hood.

Dr. Lang struggles to make a place for himself, offering what little medical care he can without modern reference books or tools. At first, his biggest worries seem to be competition from the local guild of barber-surgeons, and a spell that has every eligible girl in town competing for his attention. Then the world he came from begins to intrude further, first as simple stray objects, then in the form of people. Soon it becomes obvious that the contact between worlds is expanding, and the results may be disastrous.

Mr. Golec’s prose is fairly clean, although I thought the story could have used some editorial attention. I caught a few grammatical stumbles and other minor problems that a careful copy-editing pass might have fixed. This wasn’t enough to pull me out of the story, but it was noticeable.

The biggest problem I had with Grimm Diagnosis was an oddity of its story structure. Dr. Lang, our viewpoint character, is an oddly passive protagonist. He doesn’t solve the mystery of what’s happening around him. Indeed, he seems barely to notice some aspects of it until other characters call them to his attention. His decisions and actions seem to have little effect on the conflicts of the story. Even his relationship troubles with his girlfriend seem to be resolved more on her initiative than his.

Dr. Lang is certainly a sympathetic character. He has plenty of moral integrity, and his devotion to the well-being of his patients and his adopted community is admirable. Still, he’s not a very active character. Some of this is likely due to the fact that most of the story is framed as a comedy; a comedic protagonist can often be more the victim than the instigator of the plot. Still, I occasionally found myself wishing for him to do something about his situation, rather than letting everyone else in the story do all the hard work of advancing the narrative.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed Grimm Diagnosis, and found it a light and entertaining read. Highly recommended if you enjoy light-hearted portal fantasy.

Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

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Augment Nation by Scott Overton

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Augment Nation is a science-fiction novel of the old school, portraying the collision of all-too-human characters with plausible new technology, along the way serving as a chilling cautionary tale.

Our story begins about a decade from now. David Leiter is a fourteen-year-old boy, critically injured in an automobile accident. He suffers serious brain injury, and develops a condition called visual agnosia, an inability to process or recognize visual stimuli. He can still see, but he has lost the ability to interpret what he sees, identifying objects or recognizing faces. Luckily, he is selected to receive a radically experimental treatment – a computerized implant to augment his brain’s natural functions.

At first the implant only operates to mitigate David’s agnosia, but over time he learns to use it for other purposes: logging into wireless networks, browsing the Internet, mastering computational skills, and so on. Unfortunately, these new abilities also come with a heaping dose of alienation. His peers notice his social awkwardness, missteps with young women earn him a poor reputation, and authority figures punish him for suspected unfair advantages.

Only once David graduates from high school – taking some revenge against the worst of his tormentors on the way out – is he able to start building a worthwhile life of his own. He moves to university, taking the new name of Damon and setting aside his miserable adolescence, and life begins to improve dramatically for him. His implants are upgraded with new hardware and software, providing him with still more new abilities. His skills turn out to be a boon in academia and employment, he becomes less socially inept, he even finds ways to build healthy relationships with women. For a few years, he moves from success to success.

Yet slowly, Damon realizes that the gift of his computer implants has not come without a price. Someone is watching his progress, even after he has taken steps to avoid being monitored. Technology that was tested on him is being deployed to more and more people . . . and it becomes plain that shadowy corporate and government interests do not have any individual’s best interests at heart.

Mr. Overton’s prose style is very clean; I noticed one or two formatting issues in my e-book copy, but nothing to pull me out of the story. He exercises very good viewpoint discipline. The story does need quite a lot of exposition, but none of it is clumsy or obtrusive, almost entirely arising through Damon’s understanding of the world. This is a very well-crafted novel as far as the mechanics are concerned.

David (Damon) has a compelling story with some very credible challenges. Augment Nation isn’t just an exploration of plausible future technology, it’s a story about individuals caught up in the machinations of unscrupulous power. There are those in the story who would gladly use the new technology to lie and manipulate the public, and Damon’s confrontations with them are downright frightening. In the end, the story isn’t just recounting a personal odyssey, it’s describing a potential failure mode for civilization itself. Once I finished this novel, I found myself much more skeptical about the prospect of brain-machine interface technology than I was before I began.

One minor advisory for the reader. Augment Nation is about, among other things, a teenage boy discovering the potentials of new technology. As we might expect, some of the applications he finds have to do with sex, with all the awkwardness any young man might experience! The story is often frank, although never explicit. I found none of this material offensive, although some of Damon’s experiences were mildly uncomfortable to read about; your mileage may vary.

I thoroughly enjoyed Augment Nation, and it left me wanting to read more of Mr. Overton’s work. Very highly recommended if you enjoy believable near-future science fiction with some rather disturbing implications.

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

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Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget by Stant Litore

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

This is a rather different review than my usual. The book in question isn’t a work of fiction, it’s a coaching toolkit for would-be authors who want to write fiction.

I first came across Stant Litore when I read his book on Scriptural exegesis, Lives of Unforgetting. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was also a genre author, and that he has written a lengthy series of “toolkits” for writers. Many of these have titles of the form “Write [X] Your Readers Won’t Forget,” and for the most recent book in the series, the “X” is magic systems.

I’ll confess that when I write fantasy fiction, the notion of developing a “magic system” mildly repels me. I think of magic as wonder-working and miracle, not the kind of formal, rule-based endeavor that ought to be governed by a “system.” To my delight, this book addressed exactly that tension on the very first page, which was enough to pull me into the rest of the text.

The book is organized in a very workmanlike manner. Each section addresses a single question that the writer needs to think about when developing a magic-infused world. What is magic like, how do people in the world experience it? How do magicians experience it, and how is that different from everyone else’s understanding? How do magicians fit into the community, if they do at all? What are the personal and other costs of magic? And so on.

In each section, Stant Litore discusses the issue at hand, explaining why it’s crucial to the author’s vision for their fantasy world. He provides plenty of options and examples, quoting from well-known works of fantasy fiction. Then the section is closed out by one or more writing exercises, encouraging the reader to work through the details for their own fantasy setting. The book closes with a sample worksheet, collecting in one place all the considerations discussed throughout.

I don’t normally find books of this kind to be all that useful, but I suspect Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget is going to be an exception. I’m considering formally working through it to help flesh out the two fantasy settings in which I work. If I have any quarrel with the book in its current state, it might be that it’s too short. Just on first reading, I can see several ways to expand on what Stant Litore has done here.

Still, I suspect anyone interested in developing a fantasy setting, whether for gaming or literary purposes, will find this a useful resource. And if the quality of this book is any indication, I would seriously consider checking out the rest of the Litore Toolkits for Fiction Writers. Very highly recommended.

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

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Obelisks: Dust by Ari Marmell

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Obelisks: Dust is the first volume of what appears to be a planned duology, set after the world falls into a very unusual apocalypse.

At the beginning of this story, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are engaged in normal operations. Flight Engineer Cynthia Han, our protagonist, is a member of the current six-person crew. When we first meet Cynthia, she is helping to welcome several guests aboard the ISS, while also concealing a growing medical problem that she fears will end her spaceflight career.

After a difficult day, Cynthia retires to her bunk. When she awakens, everything has changed. Even a quick glance out the ports shows that Earth has changed drastically. The planet’s surface is invisible, shrouded in a thick layer of airborne dust. Meanwhile, the ISS has lost contact with the ground; only a few radio stations are still on, and those are broadcasting nothing but noise.

The astronauts and their guests wait a while, to see if the situation changes, but eventually they are forced to make an emergency return to Earth. They soon find most of the human population missing, the environment harsh and hostile. Strangest of all, mysterious obelisks have appeared throughout the landscape . . . and to even glance at one of them from a distance is to risk madness and death.

Cynthia and her colleagues struggle to deal with conflicts among their own group, while surviving in the hostile landscape, searching for other survivors, and trying to figure out just what has happened to the world. The story that follows is bleak, with plenty of moments of horror, but it also promises a glimmer of hope.

Mr. Marmell’s world-building and plotting are well-done, with a fast-moving and suspenseful plot. He’s adept at ratcheting the tension upward; every time the audience thinks we’ve gotten a handle on the strangeness of the situation, another wild card gets dealt. The story is framed as “horror,” and there are certainly a lot of very ugly moments in the narrative. Yet the focus is always on Cynthia and her colleagues, using their wits and skills to survive. Despite their flaws, the characters are sympathetic and resourceful people, and I found myself rooting for them to resolve their differences and push forward.

The prose style here is very clean, with high-quality copy- and line-editing. I didn’t find myself being distracted by editing errors. Viewpoint discipline is good, with the story told almost entirely from Cynthia’s perspective. Exposition is subtle and clear. This is an accomplished writer working in good form.

If I found anything to quarrel with here, it’s that the book is a bit short – it was clearly written as the first half of a longer narrative. Nevertheless, this story does work as a stand-alone novel, with a number of subplots resolved as of the end of the book.

I found myself pushing through this story in a single sitting, unable to put Obelisks: Dust down, and I really do want to see the sequel. Very highly recommended.

Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

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The New Empire by Alison McBain

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The New Empire is a novel of alternate history, telling the story of a young man caught between worlds and struggling with the contradictions of his life.

In the prologue of The New Empire, we see what appears to be the final minutes of a young man named Jiangxi. He confronts an older man named Onas, with whom he clearly has a complicated relationship, but they share only a brief moment and have little to say to one another. Then Jiangxi goes out to meet the firing squad which is there to carry out his execution. The rest of the story is about who Jiangxi is, and how he got to be in such a fix.

When next we see Jiangxi, he is a young boy, a slave, being shipped across the ocean to a distant land. American readers may think they already recognize the narrative, but it turns out that Jiangxi is Chinese, and that the land to which he is being sent is somewhere in what we would call California.

This isn’t the world we know, but one in which the Ming Dynasty “treasure fleets” discovered the Americas in the early 15th century. Three centuries later, contact between China and the peoples of North America has led to the formation of a “new empire,” a loose confederation of peoples that spans the continent. Influenced by Chinese culture and technology, the confederation is putting up strong resistance against the encroachment of European colonialists. The story later mentions armed conflict against the Europeans, especially the Spanish, led by a real-world historical figure (the missionary Junípero Serra). Yet we never see any of them, and the only part they play in the story is as distant barbarians who threaten the order of the confederation.

Jiangxi is purchased by Onas, an influential religious leader and statesman among the Ohlone peoples of the California coast. At first it seems that Jiangxi is going to be treated as a common slave, assigned menial tasks and brutally punished when he disobeys. Soon, however, Onas begins to educate him, teaching him skills he might need to be more than a simple slave. It becomes clear that Onas has something specific in mind for Jiangxi . . . but the Chinese boy develops ideas of his own, which may wreck all of Onas’s plans for him.

The alternate-historical setting of The New Empire is extremely well done. Chinese and Native American history are not my specialties, but what little research I was able to do while reading this novel seemed to support what we see in the story. It’s a very plausible setting. In particular, alternate-history authors often make the mistake of idealizing the cultures they write about, but there is none of that here. These are slave-holding cultures, backed by ruthless violence, and even sympathetic characters seem reluctant to condemn this.

Only Jiangxi is an eternal rebel against the injustices of his setting, and this is a key to understanding his character. He’s a mass of contradictions – originating from the very highest family in China, sold into slavery, forced to adapt to an alien civilization, eventually granted a position of privilege there. He lives in several different worlds and is at home in none of them, and the contradiction eventually drives his tragedy to its conclusion.

If there’s one aspect of The New Empire that didn’t quite work for me on first reading, it was the ending. Jiangxi’s story comes to a conclusion that feels very abrupt at first, and it’s not at all a happy one. On further reflection, I suspect that was intentional. It’s Jiangxi’s well-established character traits that lead him to his fate – this is a tragedy very much in the classical mode.

The prose style here is very clean, and the copy- and line-editing is quite good. One or two errors did catch my eye, but these never quite pulled me out of the story. Viewpoint discipline is good; the story is told very strictly from Jiangxi’s perspective. Exposition is done almost entirely through character action and dialogue, with no big clumsy blocks in authorial voice, and the reader is trusted to figure out the details of the setting on their own.

I very much enjoyed immersing myself in the world of The New Empire, and I would be interested in seeing what else Ms. McBain might attempt in this genre. Very highly recommended.

Review: The Welsh Dragon, by K. M. Butler

Review: The Welsh Dragon, by K. M. Butler

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The Welsh Dragon by K. M. Butler

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Welsh Dragon is a historical novel with a dash of romance, telling the tale of one of England’s most remarkable monarchs in the days before he came to rule.

When our tale begins, Henry Tudor is a very young man, still in his teens, in the midst of that English civil conflict that we call the Wars of the Roses. His uncle – King Henry VI of England – has just been deposed and imprisoned by the House of York. The Lancastrian cause seems all but lost, and Henry is forced to flee England or face arrest and possible execution. He sails with his protector, his uncle Jasper Tudor, hoping to reach France. Unfortunately, an untimely storm washes the Tudors up in independent Brittany, where Henry is forced to live in exile.

At first, Henry has little ambition for his own sake. He has lost lands and title in England, but he is safe under the protection of the powerful Duke of Brittany, and he finds happiness in the arms of a wealthy widow. His tenuous claim to the English throne seems almost irrelevant. The House of York is firmly in command back home, and there are several other men with better claims. Yet Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, is striving to regain a position in England for her son. Meanwhile, the Yorkists refuse to let him live quietly in exile, constantly scheming to seize him or have him killed.

In the end, Henry is forced to give up the woman and the peaceful life he has come to love, and contend for the English throne in his own right.

Unlike Mr. Butler’s previous novel, The Raven and the Dove, this one is set in a much better-documented period. It’s a foregone conclusion that Henry Tudor will return to England, establish one of the most brilliant royal dynasties that country ever knew, and begin leading his kingdom into the modern era.

Mr. Butler’s gift is bringing historical figures to vivid life while he tells the well-known story. Henry himself is a conflicted man, torn between his happy life in Brittany and the ambition he feels compelled to pursue. He matures considerably in the course of the story, growing from an awkward youth to an admirable contender for the crown. Some of Mr. Butler’s more speculative elements – especially Henry’s fictional love interest, the Breton merchant Jehana de Rousson – offer an interesting perspective into how one of England’s more unusual kings might have been shaped.

Mr. Butler has a very clean prose style, and the editing here is very good; I saw only a few copy- or line-editing issues, and these never pulled me out of the story. Action scenes are easy to follow and very exciting. The story alternates among several viewpoint characters, but each section is labeled, and the story is strict in its close third-person perspective.

Mr. Butler is deft in the art of dropping needed exposition into character dialogue or internal reflection, and that’s very useful here. The reader gets to watch characters as they engage in very sophisticated political intrigue, but it’s always clear why they act as they do. The mindset of late-medieval English aristocracy is often alien to us, but the author makes it very compelling.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Welsh Dragon, and I’m definitely looking forward to Mr. Butler’s next venture into historical fiction. Very highly recommended.

Review: The Rings of Power (First Two Episodes)

Review: The Rings of Power (First Two Episodes)

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Okay, I stayed up way too late last night binge-watching the first two episodes of “The Rings of Power.” Here’s a snap review based on my first impressions.

Initial reaction: I’m sold. A few potential spoilers to follow, so be careful scrolling down.

As a Tolkien geek, I had to be a little concerned that the studio didn’t have the rights to anything but the trilogy itself. There’s a lot of material for a story set in the Second Age that they don’t have available. On the other hand, there are the Appendices to the trilogy – more than enough material to tell a good Second Age story, even if one would have to fill in a lot of details.

What matters is whether the end result is recognizably rooted in the legendarium, and so far I have to say I’m very pleased. I’m already seeing some very interesting takes on known characters and cultures. Our introductions to Galadriel, Elrond, Gil-galad, and Celebrimbor are all superb. The other cultures we get to see – societies of men in “the Southlands,” the Dwarves of a living Khazad-dum, and especially a tribe of proto-Hobbits – all strike the right notes.

They are taking some liberties with the canon timeline. For example, they’re clearly going to be compressing a couple thousand years of Second Age history down into a single human lifetime. I suspect they’re also going to be rearranging a few events and making up a few out of whole cloth for the sake of the story.

(Meanwhile, yes, there are several roles cast with actors of color. I have absolutely no problem with that, and the idiots review-bombing the series on that basis can piss right the fuck off, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve long since reached the limits of my patience with that nonsense.)

A couple of bits of business did have me scratching my head. There’s a whole sequence with Galadriel in the second episode that struck me as just weird. No, I don’t think even a first-rank Noldo Elf can expect to be able to swim the Atlantic.

There’s also a character, identified so far only as “the Stranger,” whose role is a complete mystery. Putting down my bet right now: what we’re seeing is the first arrival of Gandalf in Middle-earth, several thousand years before he first appears in canon. Which is going to be a surprising but very neat bit of story, if I’m right about what’s going on there.

None of that was sufficient to pull me out of the story for more than a moment or two at a time. The story is otherwise superb, the character acting and development are very good, and the visual spectacle of the thing is just gorgeous. I suspect they’ve got a long-running success here, if they can keep up the pace and the audience doesn’t prove to have pre-judged the thing before it gets a chance.

Review: Out of Time, by Chris Adams Ward

Review: Out of Time, by Chris Adams Ward

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Out of Time by Chris Adams Ward

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Out of Time presents itself as a speculative fiction story, but at its heart it’s a novelistic appreciation for some of the greatest American music.

Henry “Slim” Tucker is a young African-American journalist, working in Chicago in the early 1920s. Although he is no musician, he loves the vibrant music, the jazz and blues, being played in the city’s bars and clubs. He writes about singers and performers for the Chicago newspapers. Once in a while, he also gets indisputable premonitions about what some of those artists must do, to further their careers and shape the musical world.

Brian Saxon is a successful British businessman, living in the modern day. After suffering a serious head injury in an auto accident, Brian awakens to find the world terribly changed. His beloved wife is now a stranger, and a completely different woman claims to have been his partner. Even worse, the American music Brian has loved all his life – the jazz, blues, swing, and rock-and-roll that he has listened to since childhood – has somehow vanished. The situation is intolerable . . . but soon, against all odds, Brian discovers that there may be something he can do about it.

Out of Time is outwardly the story of these two men, each unaware of the other’s existence, each struggling to survive and find happiness against an ever-changing background of great music. Neither of them understands their relationship, but over time they come to terms with it, and along the way they play a critical part in the evolution of American music. The true leading character in the novel, though, is the music itself, growing and changing, eventually becoming the global cultural phenomenon that it is today.

It’s clear that Mr. Adams, like his British protagonist, loves the music about which he writes. The book is well-researched, and although there are more than a few expository passages, the author uses some clever techniques to keep them from dragging down the story. Meanwhile, meeting so many of the great artists in the pages of this novel never got stale.

The mechanics of the novel work reasonably well. Mr. Adams has a clean prose style, although this novel needed at least one more careful copy-editing pass.

Out of Time spends most of its plot with African-American characters, during a time when casual bigotry and racism were commonplace. The characters constantly deal with and remark on the effects of that racism as they go about their lives. They don’t get to forget about it, and neither does the reader. Mr. Adams works hard to capture the experience of living in those times, but I’m not in a position to say whether he was entirely successful.

The story also gives a 21st century White British character an essential role in the evolution of African-American music throughout the 20th century, an implication some readers may struggle with. To be fair, neither of the story’s protagonists ever become aware of what’s truly happening to them – the story itself leaves much of this a mystery – and the African-American characters are never robbed of agency. In the end, is Brian Saxon causing changes in the history of music? Or is he simply voyaging, by force of will, across multiple alternate worlds until he finds his way home? The reader can never be sure, right up to the ambiguous ending.

I found the story in Out of Time very engaging, the characters sympathetic and easy to like. Possibly more important, the novel inspired me with a great deal of curiosity about a period of musical history, a set of musical genres, that I’ve never before spent much time with. I found myself wanting to go out and find recordings of the performances Mr. Adams refers to throughout the novel. In fact, I understand he’s compiled a list of real-world recordings to go with the narrative!

Recommended as an appealing story about two men’s relationship with some of the greatest music of the past century.