Star Justice: Eye of the Tiger Michael-Scott Earle

Star Justice: Eye of the Tiger
Michael-Scott Earle

Michael Scott Earle was first introduced to fantasy and science fiction in the late 1980s, claiming the Palladium RPG Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other strangeness as his first influence.  He would branch out to a variety of other tabletop games when he reached high school and found other table top gamers.  Afterward he headed to college and while he was originally aiming at a degree in the performance arts, he switched over to finance and got an MBA.  Getting a job in accounting, he worked his way up the corporate ranks until he was director of sales. He liked the job but was away from his family, traveling on average 40 hours a week.  Upon reading Name of the Wind, he decided he could write a novel just as good but in his own words “it would be for adults, with lots of bad ass violence and detailed sex.”  I include the quote because, I admit,  I find it puzzling because if there's one thing the fantasy and science fiction genre aren't lacking, it's violence.  I mean even authors who prefer to write for younger readers include a heap of it in their stories, C.S. Lewis had a bunch of violence in his stories for Pete's sake.  As for sex, well, I'll admit that fantasy had a bit of a prudish phase, which is famously blamed on J.R.R Tolkien but... Seriously have you seen A Song of Ice and Fire, aka Game of Thrones?  Even that series is not as groundbreaking as you might think as you'll find that sex scenes and rather detailed one's are all over the place and have been for awhile.  Sex was firmly brought back into fantasy at least a decade before I was born (not sure it ever left science fiction) but I should move on before I devolve into slapping someone with a copy of “Kushiel's Dart” or something.  Mr. Earle started publishing in February of 2016 and has since published over 22 books (keep this in mind I'm coming back to this) and founded his own publishing company.  His first book The Destroyer, a dark fantasy is free on Amazon, I'm reviewing his science fiction work instead.

Star Justice EoT, set in the far future where humanity has settled at least part of the galaxy, is the escape attempt of Adam a former Jupitian Marine (Can’t even get Jovian right), Yakuza enforcer, and genetic experiment; and Eve the telepathic, telekinetic, immortal vampire who spent 3 generations in a tube waiting for Adam to come along and break her out (a telepath who is telekinetic cannot escape the damn tube?  Really?).  Together they must escape the corporation dominated planet they are stuck on by stealing the super top secret prototype starship that Eve knows about because she can read minds.  This is somewhat complicated by the fact that the corporation knows who they are, is offering a massive bounty for their heads, and is pretty sure they have to go through corporate holdings to escape.  All Adam and Eve have going for them are their superpowers, willingness to mow down any mook who gets in their way and the help of super hacker Z, who they picked up on the way.  Let me take a bit to discuss each the characters individually.

Adam (who has no last name given because... Reasons) was a super badass Marine in the Jupiter Marine Corps until he deserted to join the Yakuza, but wait!  He only joined the Yaks because the heartless commanding officers of the JMC wouldn't let him resign to care for his little sister who was stricken with cancer! I gotta note that I am dissatisfied with this, because it looks like Mr. Earle couldn’t  commit to what kind of character Adam was.  So we get “Yes, he joined a group known for selling drugs and people but only because of a sick little sister!”  Adam is captured and jailed for crimes he totally did commit and thrown into a privately owned prison, who sells him off to a mysterious secret outfit who subjects him to brutal, sadistic (because there no other kind in this book) genetic experiments turning him into an even more super bad ass weretiger with the regenerative powers of Wolverine and super senses that are honestly kinda par for the course for these situations.  Outside of his origin and his powers... There's really not much more to Adam.  He's super stoic and justifiably angry but at the same time I'm really left questioning his origin.  Even in the bad old days of the late 1800s and 1900s there were options for troops with sick family members who needed medical bills paid (never mind that in an increasingly long list of modern nations that wouldn't even come up), today there are more options and you can even make your parents military dependents if they meet the qualifications, which gives them access to government subsidized medical care.  Since Adam volunteered for military service, that means that there's a certain level of care and treatment that has to go into enlisted personnel to keep the military life attractive enough to keep troops in.  Because frankly if you treat them like shit, they can just leave after their contract is up and often find money elsewhere.  Especially if corporations are looking for triggermen to police entire planets and overthrow governments!    Moving on, Adam is kinda two dimensional in other ways, he has no hobbies or other interests besides murder, bragging that even in the Marines instead of enjoying his liberty time, he was constantly practicing his killing skills.  I've complained about this before especially in my review of Master Sergeant by Mel Odom.  We don't act this way guys.  We're people, not meat killing machines.  The blunt fact is that if we don't blow off steam in our down time and have outside interests, the vast overwhelming majority of us go insane.  Plus there's only so much training you can do in a stretch before you actually just start hurting yourself, diminishing returns is a thing. For the Love of God, please, please give your uber badass of doom some outside interests and hobbies!  Music!  Art! Dance!  Stamps! I don't care! (Get back to the book Frigid.  I am the only one allowed to indulge in off-topic ramblings.)

Right moving on, Adam also suffers from not displaying a lot of character traits beyond being a badass and being stoic.  We're told he's honorable (because honorable people always join organized crime!) repeatedly but we never see him in a position where breaking his word would be all that beneficial (Technically he violated his oath to the Jovian military/government when he deserted… so not that honorable.  Oh wait, sick little sister the Jovian military wouldn’t let him care for… eh, they broke their obligations first.  Carry on.).  I mean sure he could double cross the telepathic blood drinking immortal who freed him but why trust the corporation he would have to turn her into not to enslave him?  Not to mention he doesn't speak the local language anyways.  He dislikes feeling feelings but he struggles with feeling possessive and jealous of anyone Eve pays attention to.  Now to Adam's credit, he realizes these feelings aren't good ones or justified and tries his best to keep a handle on them.  Also I do have to give points for Adam and Eve actually talking out this problem like adults!  There's no fake drama from silly relationship stuff here; of course the book only takes place over a couple of days or so, so there's not a lot of time for a relationship to organically develop.  Adam also tends to speak in a pseudo military speech that grates on me a bit because it doesn't feel real just forced.  For example Adam never says yes, or yeah, or you bet.  He always, always says confirmed even when it just makes things awkward and leaves me wondering if the extra mass for his weretiger form comes from a giant stick rammed up his rear but now I'm just being picky.

Eve isn't much better, she states that she was in the tube long enough that the grandson of the man who caught her had grown up to adulthood and taken over studying her.  During that whole time she read everyone's mind and when they brought by people who were important harvested a legion of secrets from them.  Yet somehow she was not able to use the fact that she can read minds and communicate telepathically to escape a tube!  I mean the security system is impressive and full of guns and robots of death but... Look loyal readers, I'm pretty sure if I stuck any of y'all into such a situation and gave you 3 whole lifetimes to figure out an escape plan, you could do better then “I will wait for a passing stoic, tormented weretiger to sweep me off my feet and do my bidding.”.  Eve's escape was sheer luck; she had no way of knowing that Adam would be sent by the mysterious organization that ruthlessly altered him and that she could destroy the means they were using to keep him prisoner (I mean what if instead of a collar they had injected him with something?).  That said, she swiftly becomes the driving force of the plot as it's her decision to escape with Adam when he shows up, she directs him every step of the way and it's her plan they use to make their escape from the planet.  Despite this Eve keeps insisting that Adam is in charge, which is honestly strange to me but maybe she just wants to be sure Adam will keep throwing himself between her and all the bullets (I mean, if I were a strangely inept vampire psionicist, who suddenly finds a stoic tormented weretiger who is unaccountably obsessed with me, I might well use that obsession to make my escape...oh wait.  If I were that calculating I wouldn’t be inept and would have escaped decades ago.  Maybe she just doesn’t know what she wants out of the relationship?).  Beyond her powers, beauty and immortality we really don't know much else about her.  Which is less of a problem since this story is suppose to be about Adam... Although there are points where I'm wondering why isn't it about Eve?  

The last character present in this story is Z.  Z is a pretty, blonde, super hacker (because ugly girls aren't allowed in this story!), who is hired by Adam to hack the corporation's personal files so they can find someone to kidnap.  When she’s inevitable double crossed by the non-Adam people she foolishly trusted she is forced to throw in with Adam and Eve and pray to her heathen gods that they can actually get her off the planet.  Z is the one person in the story with a bit of a personality even if it is expressed mostly in her howling in terror when she realizes she's stuck with a weretiger and a vampire and being hunted by an army or complaining at a number of super dangerous or just degrading things she has to do to make this plan work.  Normally she would be annoying but at this point I was glad to have someone who reacted like a human being.  Plus she was plotting to use the money Adam was paying her to buy a pet cat so she can't be completely terrible.  Another bit of realism in this story that I actually liked is that Z used a lot of social hacking as opposed to muttering about double encrypted firewalls.  There's one scene where she literally calls up a member of the enemy tech support scene and sweet talks him into giving her a password into the system.  Which is kind of how this stuff works and why you should always force your callers to follow security procedures.  

The action in this book is rather predictable and honestly gets a bit samey as you reach the end of the book.  Adam mows down wave after wave of faceless enemy soldiers who honestly aren't very good at their jobs nor seemingly possessed of a strong desire to live.  For that matter despite this being in the far flung future, technology doesn't seem to have changed much outside of a very specific areas like FTL spaceships and the ability to turn people into magic were-tigers.  Beyond that people are still using rifles, shotguns and grenades against men with body armor. There are more advanced weapons but they're not very present in the plot.  Although remote pilot drones do show up for a couple of action scenes to provide an enemy that actually gives Adam trouble.   The book moves quickly and cleanly but without any time to pause and take a breath we're not left a lot to give us any attachment to the characters; nor did I feel any suspense or investment in the stakes.  That said there are realistic moments in the book and parts that are handled well enough that I feel like Mr. Earle was honestly trying to tell a good story but was either to rushed to give it the time it needed to be told (which is very possible since he's pumped out something like 2 books a month) or wrote it many years ago (sitting on a pile of rejected books is fairly normal for a lot of writers and when you get big enough, people will often pay you for those books, so choose your own adventure here).  That said, there's not enough work done to develop the characters and the conflict is rather devoid of tension so I feel like I read someone's first draft instead of a finished book.  This is reinforced by the ending in which the book just kinda stops.  So I find myself giving Star Justice Eye of the Tiger by Michael-Scott Earle D+.  I didn't expect to give this book an A grade by any means but I do wish I could grade it higher.  That said I am hopeful that Mr. Earle will improve with time.  

Next week, we're going to review another book with a Tiger main character, join us for Forests of Night!  Keep reading!

This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.