Poor Man's Fight By Elliott Kay

Poor Man's Fight

By Elliott Kay

Elliot Kay was born in the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He has since then lived in Phoenix (What is up with Phoenix? Is it the heat? Does it warp our brains and turn is into authors?), Seattle and various other places. Before turning to writing Mr. Kay served in the Coast Guard and taught High School, as well as managing to pick up a bachelors in History. He also managed to survive at least one motorcycle crash and several severe electric shocks. His first novel was the kind that can't be discussed on a review series trying to avoid an adults only rating (Give us the title at least come on! Probably straight smut though? Gross.), it was published on Amazon in 2011. Poor Man's Fight, the first of a five book series was his first science fiction novel and was published in 2015 under the Skyscape imprint of Amazon Publishing. It is one of fifteen such imprints that Amazon maintains. This has a been a mixed blessing for some as a number of bookstores flat out refuse to carry Amazon published books, seeing Amazon as a competitor and the publishing company is seen as under-performing in its first decade. I kinda see this as a good look at the radically changing world of writing and publishing, but we're here to talk about a specific novel.

In the far flung future, humanity has expanded to the stars and colonized hundreds of star systems in a grand expansion across the galaxy. We have found ways to extend the human life span and perhaps more importantly extend our youth for decades if not more. Advances in medicine, infrastructure, and computer technology have made life easier, longer, and better then they have ever been. Also? We have for some profoundly bizarre reason completely privatized our education system (GGAAAAAAAHHH!). As far as I can tell, every human government contracts its education system out to a multi-planetary corporation who in exchange provides education to every citizen and when you're 18 and have finished high school, you take a test. How well you do on the test determines your debt. Do extremely well and you can walk out completely debt free, do poorly and you could be in the kind of debt that only PhD students can tell you about (*Editor Weeps* I’m probably never buying a house. Also what the fuck kind of exploitative bullshit is this? Without reading any further, this is going to trap billions into a cycle of debt because the ones who do poorly in school get the crappy jobs, and as a result can’t pay off the debt.). There are ways to adjust your odds of course, if you're a good student whose parents can pay the monthly dues for a corporate sponsored honors society, why you can get the kind of study materials and tutors that will ensure a pleasant test taking experience, as well as a test tailored for you. If not, well your test will still be tailored to you, just not in a way that's beneficial to you. My good readers, if you are smelling a rodent here, it's because the system has been so infested with rats that they have built a society and are plotting our downfall from the shadows!

Enter our hero, Tanner Malone; intelligent, helpful, good natured, and an utter nerd. He also has parents that aren't wealthy, and have informed him the night before the biggest test of his life that they are moving out of system (Jesus Christ, they couldn’t wait a day?). So he'll have figure out his own living arrangements if he wants to stick around for the unpaid internship (yeah it's not bad enough you're in debt for your bloody high school education, but we still have unpaid internships in the future!?! This shit keeps up and I'll start singing the Internationale at this rate! [Hi there.  I’m here to tell you the good news about the most important economist and political philosopher in all of human history, Karl Marx.] At least Lenin would just shoot me and get it over with!) that will seal the deal on an academic future of success and glory. Tanner, being 18 and middle class handles this stress about as well you would think. Facing a test rigged against him, with no sleep and no breakfast... He's now always 70k in the hole, will have nowhere to live in a week and no way of supporting himself while laboring for free in a lab. Tanner of course calmly and coolly considers his options while being a nervous wreck and joins the military on the advice of a girl he has a crush on. I should note that I do actually like the relationship between Madelyn and Tanner, she knows that he has a crush on her but isn't interested in that way. He takes the rejection and moves on without being an entitled ass about it and as such leaves himself open to relationships with other girls who are actually interested in him. In other ways though Tanner has a lot of growing up to do (Well he is eighteen. He’s still a child no matter what the law says. He hasn’t even finished neural pruning yet.) and he doesn't handle stress very well. He also has trouble standing up for himself. To be fair, Tanner is a product of a system that doesn't do a good job teaching people how to handle stress, despite it making stress an everyday part of life. Put a pin in this because I'll come back to that.

This book also spends a good amount of time with our villain. The Space Pirate Captain Casey. (Really? Because it looks like the Villain is the entire society in which this poor kid lives.{Yes, but Captain Casey throws children out of airlocks, it's hard to top that}) Unlike modern media, which has a tendency to whitewash what pirates actually do, Casey is the kind of guy who attacks a luxury liner and tortures the passengers and officers for their money and then throws them out an airlock, including the children. In short, while Captain Casey uses rhetoric about the awfulness of the corporate system, he's honestly just a faster, less restrained, more charismatic version of it. Mr. Kay actually shows his history chops here as the pirates in his book operate a lot like the actual factual historical pirates. The ship crews are democratic, with the Captain only having authority when they're on a combat operation, the loot is divided fairly and they're as likely to attack a port or city as they are a ship in the void. Mr. Kay takes us through the process of recruitment and how the pirates operate actually letting us get to know the pirates. The result of this is when Tanner and the pirates end up fighting each other for their very lives, it's not Tanner Malone versus a bunch of faceless mooks, it's Tanner Malone versus a group of villainous viewpoint characters that we've spent chapters with. This actually is a pretty good twist, as it increases the weight of the confrontation and brings home rather vividly the human costs of violence. That said I can't sympathize with the pirates too much here. This is because the story makes it clear that the pirates aren't rebels against the system, they are parasites on that system; using the excesses and abuses of the corporations as a recruiting tool while never actually doing anything to undermine or overthrow the system because they're too busy criminally profiting from it. This is also something that real life pirates and bandits would do; claim to be heroically resisting very real oppression while in fact just using it as a cover for their own benefit. Ironically in doing so they help the forces they claim to be against by providing a justification for their oppression. In this case the corporations can claim that increased costs are necessary for greater security because of pirates, who use the great costs to claim their own aroticities as heroism and thus we go around and around.

Ironically, if there are any rebels to be found here, it's in Tanner's own government. Throughout the book, we see the elected government of Archangel pushing back against corporate power and abuse. We see the President and his staff privately and publicly maneuvering to provide services and protection to their citizens over the objections of foreign states and the multi-planetary corporations who see them as just another revenue stream. While they're not angels, they do come off as authority figures who are actually interested in serving the interests of the people who elected them. In fiction with super powerful corporations that's a rare thing to see. More often it's that the corporations have captured the government and turned it into a lackey (although I should point out that Max Florschutz's book Colony also had government/corporate conflict). So Mr. Kay presents us an honestly good elected government led by thoughtful people struggling to do right by the common voter in a complex and dangerous system.  Even when doing so arrays them against powerful actors who are willing to operate on several fronts to destroy this resistance. I honestly enjoyed seeing this for a change, as all to often the power of a national government or the desire of elected leaders to do well by their voters is often cynically dismissed as mere posturing. This book also doesn't glorify or villainize the military, we’re shown that the ship that Tanner serves on isn't full of good people, in fact a number of them are jerks. However, we do see good people in the military trying to do a demanding and dangerous job under circumstances that they have no control over. Speaking from experience that's pretty much true to life, you'll find good people, you'll find terrible people, and every kind of person in between while serving in uniform. By presenting a military full of human beings Mr. Kay gives us a balanced view of what the service is like.

Which leads me to the system itself which is really just an exaggeration of our own system in a lot ways (I say looking at my college debts, that I racked up despite having the GI Bill, which isn't nearly as generous as y'all might think). Tanner lives in Archangel, a religiously founded colony system that has turned into a more or less secular nation state where the population is wracked by heavy debate over the role of corporations in their public life. He's driven by economic necessity and an ambition to better his life to enlist in the military despite his misgivings about the role the military plays in politics. If you're an American, you might be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja vu on reading that, as Poor Man Fight's is not only a good adventure story about a young man coming of age but a really pointed commentary in a lot of ways on our own system. Tanner emerged from a schooling system that did not really prepare him for the test that would determine his life's direction nor did it prepare him for dealing with stress. (Something that the school system is very likely systematically designed for.) It's also a system that provides advantages to people who already have them and disadvantages to those who are already struggling. Poor Man's Fight uses an action adventure set in space to hold up a mirror to elements of the modern day and ask us if we really care for what we see. That's something that science fiction can do really well and while this wasn't a story of deep political thought, preferring to focus on things happening on the front lines, it still pulled off its commentary rather well.

Poor Man's Fight is basically the story of Tanner Malone coming to age in some of the worse possible circumstances and then he has to fight pirates. It's a fun story with plenty of action, good characters, and fairly solid world building. Mr. Kay's choice to follow along with the pirates and giving us a peek at what is going on in the corridors of power provides us with a wider view of Tanner's world and gives us context for his actions. I honestly recommend this to anyone interested in science fiction or anyone just interested in a good book. Poor Man's Fight by Elliott Kay gets an A. I’ve got high hopes for the other four books in the series.  I'd also for no reason what so ever would like to remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editors comments, nor do I always agree with his statements.

Next week, I'm kinda feeling good about this streak of self published books and it is Halloween, so I suppose we should get spooky. So next week, we examine The People's Necromancer by Rex Jameson. Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor, Dr. Ben Allen. 

Black text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders.

The Editor's Chair I

Hello everyone. This is your editor Dr. Allen speaking, and we need to talk. No, I’m not going to bemoan my never-ending war to keep the reviews readable. No, today we need to talk about biology in speculative fiction. You’ve all been subject to my screaming red-inked rants lately, and for good reason. You see, physics in speculative fiction often gets discarded in the interests of storytelling. You see, in space nobody can hear you scream and writing space combat at a light-second remove is boring. Plus Faster than Light Travel is necessary. These are deliberate choices the authors make, and that’s okay. Biology though, it just gets forgotten, or mistakes are made in absolute ignorance because the authors just don’t care to look something up. This is unacceptable.

Don’t believe me? Gaze upon some of the recent reviews for evidence of it. The Noble Ark? What is this? Let’s leave the half-human/half-alien out of it for a moment, at least there probably is some explanation for that in subsequent books even if it’s bad. But why do the aliens have a craving for human CSF? If they need it so much they’re willing to torture people to death, how did they survive without it? Why not just make their own? It’s mostly electrolytes with a very low concentration of extremely common proteins like albumin. There is absolutely nothing there that couldn’t be synthesized! Then there’s the inbreeding. Everyone always forgets the inbreeding.

This problem goes far beyond relatively obscure science fiction novels and extends into extremely popular works as well. Let’s leave out the fact that raptors in Jurassic Park should have feathers and can’t bend their wrists the way they’re portrayed. The novel and movie have problems going down to the very core of the narrative; specifically that all the dinosaurs would be female. No. Reptiles don’t develop the same way mammals do. Denying a reptile the hormonal signals for sex differentiation will result in males because in reptiles, it’s high levels of the hormone aromatase that create females. With birds, we don’t even know for sure whether males or females are the developmental default, and it’s entirely possible that sex is determined at the cellular level before morphogenesis even progresses beyond a hollow sphere of cells. That whole thing is just wrong. Also, no biologist in the history of humanity would fill in the gaps with DNA from amphibians. They’d use the nearest relatives like crocodiles or birds to minimize the chance of genetic interactions leading to embryonic death. And the author is an MD for hell’s sake! Then there’s Interstellar. Don’t even get me started on Interstellar and the “blight” that somehow metabolizes nitrogen and yet somehow kills plants. Or how all the crops are dying but the trees and grass are somehow not completely denuded from the face of the Earth.

Do not despair. There are those who do their homework. Hambone (the person who writes Deathworlders) actually did do his homework. He thought through the consequences of different species growing up in different environmental regimes, not just biologically but psychologically and culturally. Even better, he thought through the consequences of certain exotic pharmaceuticals and what their mechanisms would be; then what the consequences of those mechanisms were. He never actually laid it out verbally, but those side effects are plainly obvious. Basically, there’s an anti-agapic/regenerative drug that works by messing around with some cell signaling pathways. However, the consequence of doing it that way is that people (special forces) on this drug are basically psychologically stuck in their late teens to early twenties. It is magnificent. Honestly, the whole thing is magnificent as far as I am concerned and it’s recommended reading. Warning, it is at this point rather huge.

None of this means, oh dear aspiring authors, that you have to shackle yourselves to known science or anything like that. What you should do - if you don’t want me to rip my hair out - is think about how biology affects your story and what kind of consequences there are for what you decide to do. You don’t want to have your plot turning on the fact that you’ve made a massive error by forgetting the consequences of a thousand years of ruthless inbreeding. So do your homework.

Brute Force By K.B. Spangler

Brute Force

By K.B. Spangler

Ms. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband Brown and her many dogs. Among her hobbies is struggling with the upkeep of a famous American poets house when she's not laboring to write and draw her webcomic. K.B. Spangler is one of the more successful independent authors I've had on this review series. Her first novel was published in 2013, Digital Divide (feel free to check out my review on that) was set in the same universe as A Girl and her Fed. In the five years since she’s published seven more books and a graphic novel; along with a number of short stories. With the exception of Stoneskin (which I reviewed back in October of 2017) they're all set in the universe of a Girl and her Fed. There are spoilers so I'm not going to cover everything but let me give you the basic setup if you haven't read the other reviews.

Right after 9/11, everyone was in shock and the average member of the civil service community were horrified at what happened on their watch and desperate for ways to ensure it would never happen again. In the following year a wealthy businessman would offer the government an exciting new technology that would allow government agents to exchange information and coordinate on a level that couldn't be matched. All it would require is massively invasive brain surgery and a lifelong commitment on the part of the agents, so you know, nothing too big. They approved the program and used 500 volunteers from across the civil service. The agents in question were from everywhere, IRS, FBI, the military, CIA, etc. They received a cybernetic implant that basically connected their brains not just to the internet but gave them the ability to access any electronic device capable of being communicated with, even if it didn't typically have networking capability. Of course dealing with all of that would be overwhelming so an ever-so-helpful interface was added, it would appear as a cartoon version of President George W Bush. The interface proceeded to drive the agents insane (readers feel free to insert their own political joke here [Can I? Please?! There are so many!]). The powers-that-be, realizing they had made a teeny tiny mistake by utterly destroying the lives of 500 loyal Americans with improperly tested technology (or was it?) and that the voting public had a shocking inability to take such minor mistakes with grace and humor, decided to bury it as deep as possible. Before someone demanded heads roll for this one. So the 500 volunteers who wanted to serve their nation were all rolled together into a single agency with two departments and given quiet non-demanding busy-work and all the drugs they would need to make their lives marginally bearable. Five years passed and they learned that if they just stopped feeling feelings and thinking thoughts, that the interface was almost workable. It's about this point that an agent was assigned to shadow a very special young lady named Hope and things broke open.

Brute Force is the 4th book in the Rachael Peng series, which takes place after the public revelation of everything that happened in the above paragraph and the agents received the help they need to live as human beings again. Rachael Peng, as a former member of the Army Criminal Investigation Command, was seconded out to the Washington DC Metro Police. She often finds herself on the forefront of difficult and politically sensitive cases that could spell doom for herself and the remaining 400 or so cyborgs who are fending off political threats that could see them reduced to tools or worse. This is on top of dealing with the other parts of her life that complicate matters, such as being a 3rd generation American born Chinese woman, being gay, and technically blind thanks to a really bad reaction to her implant. Agent Peng may have used direct sunlight to reduce her eyeballs to barely functional bags of jelly, you see. That said, she kinda sees better than the rest of us combined, with her eyes down, her implant has taken over and allows here to see on a number of spectrums that are unavailable to us mere mortals. Among them is a spectrum that seems to allow her to directly observe someone's emotions (she sees them as colors, so for her the average person is a rolling combination of colors and shades that constantly shift according to their emotional state). This makes her really good at sussing out when someone is lying or hiding something. She can also see the density of objects and if she wants, see through things at times. This helps her be a really good shot among other things. So Agent Peng is a cyborg with superpowers with her own police unit that she fights crime with and she is gonna need every superpower and every friend she can get because crime has come knocking with boots on.

So Hope Blackwell, the woman who was instrumental to freeing the agents from their imposed hell; and Avery the barely-out-of-diapers first born child of a pair of agents (also the first born child of any agents) have been kidnapped by a militia being led by a Sovereign Citizen Lawyer (Oh look, a contradiction in terms!) named Jeremy Nicholson. A Sovereign Citizen (which I should note is a label not all members of the movement accept) to put it briefly is someone who believes that federal laws do not apply to them and they can declare themselves not citizens of the United States but citizens of their states and thus opt out of having to follow federal laws. Most of the time this involves refusing to pay taxes, but there have been times when it turns violent and sovereign citizens have killed police officers for a variety of reasons, including have a police officer pull over their car. So there's every reason to worry that the militia may turn violent (Kidnapping is violent. Ship sailed!) ... More violent and worse Hope and Avery aren't the only people they've kidnapped. The hostages and the militia have holed up in a ruined factory that was owned by Jeremy's father but closed down by a corrupt EPA agent decades ago. On top of that, this has turned into a media circus as the militia as made sure every news outfit who can reach them has been told what's going on. Jeremy claims he's doing this as a protest and tells everyone that Hope and the other hostages are there willingly (Because clearly the toddler can hold high ideals about Militias). No one's buying that and while everyone is worried about the confrontation with the militia turning violent, they're actually a bomb ticking away here. You see, Hope is perhaps the most dangerous woman in the world, being burdened with a number of mental issues (I'm pretty sure she has ADHD just to start with) and has a natural talent for the art of maiming and murder, as if she was the unholy spawn of Bruce Lee and Miesha Tate. If that wasn't bad enough she also great at escaping and if her meds should wear off while she's tied to a chair and being starved...

Look guys, speaking from my own experience, strength, speed, and size do matter in a fight. Bigger stronger people tend to win and the bigger and stronger you are the less skill you need to put people down. That said, with enough skill and raw screaming desire to hurt people? You can make up for a lack in size, strength, or speed. Add in this, none of the militia guys are big enough, strong enough or fast enough to make up for the difference in skill level between them and Hope. So if her discipline snaps? She will kill a good number of them before one of them finally shoots her, which will drive her husband - a man big and strong enough to lift cars for fun and skilled enough to spar with his wife even without his cyborg super powers - over the line. Before I forget, the factory is also full of stolen Chinese firearms, so it's entirely possible that the Chinese government is involved or at least someone wants everyone to think so. Rachel has to figure out what the bad guy’s game actually is, because there's more going on here than a protest about an unjustly shut down factory. Who is backing Nicholson, where did he get the equipment, how did he come up with this game plan and who is this plan really aimed at? Can she crack this before her bosses or before Hope cracks? Can she do this without turning it into a public relations disaster and triggering a political backlash against the Cyborgs that might just turn them into tools of the government without legal rights? But she also has to tackle this while dealing with ghosts of her past haunting her. An old enemy has shown up out of nowhere, wearing the face of her old army buddy and having moved into her neighborhood. So now Rachael has to deal with the fact that a cold blooded killer is attending the neighborhood cookouts; a cold blooded killer who knows too many of her secrets for her to just turn in to the police. So Rachael has to work backwards using a person she cant trust to hunt down the origin of a militia armed with stolen Chinese firearms led by a rich kid lawyer turned sovereign citizen, and do so without letting any secrets leak out. At least she's not under pressure right?

K.B Spangler does a great job telling a tense story with complex characters and motivations while keeping the plot moving at a good pace. Although I'll admit that I think she glossed over a good amount of what Sovereign Citizens actually believe and might have been a tad too generous to them (despite making one of them the bad guy). That said, Ms. Spangler does a good job presenting people who believe that they're doing things for the right reason, even while they're crossing just about every moral line imaginable. Of course her protagonists also do a number of shifty things, but I would argue they never get near as dirty as their enemies. Her books tend to show a very good understanding of how things work in the federal government and present a convincing example of the culture within the civil services that actually make our country functional, even when they're under attack. Rachael is a great character and plays well off the others, although I have to admit that I am disappointed that Santino (her partner) was barely in this book. In fact a good amount of the supporting cast doesn't really get to involved in this one, with most of the supporting work taken up by fellow agents like Josh Glassmen or the gentleman I'm going to refer to as Wyatt. To be honest Wyatt and Rachael don't play off each other as well as Santino, Hill, and the others do. That might be because I just flat out don't like Wyatt. I just don't find an outright psychopath (or is he a sociopath with violent tendencies?[Depends on personal history. Psychopaths are born, sociopaths are made… usually but not always from psychopaths]) a compelling character and if we're going to be honest, I may have been really looking forward to Rachael finally tracking him down. It's still a fun read with a well thought out plot, good crisp action, and as always snappy dialogue. Brute Force by KB Spangler gets an -A.

Next week, we go further into science fiction with Poor Man Fights by Kay Elliott, this Sunday our very own editor would like to discuss something in our first From the Editor's Chair. Keep reading!

Red text is your editor, Dr. Ben Allen.
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

Other reviews in this series are:
Digital Divide http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2016/11/digital-divide-by-kb-spangler.html
Maker Space http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/01/maker-space-by-kb-spangler.html
State Machine http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/04/state-machine-by-kb-spangler.html
Greek Key http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/06/greek-key-by-kg-spangler.html

Worldbuilding by Max Florschutz

Review Sidebar: Worldbuilding

by Max Florschutz

Hey all! My name is Max Florschutz, and I'm the author of a couple of Science-Fiction and Fantasy books you might have heard of, like Colony and the more recent Shadow of an Empire. Today I'm going to talk a little about worldbuilding.

I love it. I'm just going to open with that. Part of the experience of opening up a book is discovering a new world to get lost in. Seeing all its nooks and corners, figuring out how all the pieces stick together, and discovering fantastic places or people. As an author that makes one of my primary responsibilities to the reader to make those people and places come to life. To give them dimension, depth, and character. For characters, sure, that's a given ... but in many books, the world in which the story takes place is just as much an important "character" as the characters themselves are. Shadow of an Empire wouldn't feel the same, for example, without the harsh desert landscape that the protagonists journey through (and sometimes battle against). Colony wouldn't be the same without the world of Pisces that much of its story takes place on, complete with its people, culture, and unique requirements for living there.

So it is with just about any other story. A setting really does matter: A good setting can be the difference between an okay story, and a great one. I like to use video games a lot as examples, mostly because they're so visual they're an easy bridge, but if you look at standout games such as Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, or even the first Halo, one similarity you'll notice between them is that the world they take place in leaves an impression on the player. The village in Resident Evil 4, for example, oozes atmosphere and contributes heavily to the tone of the game's opening areas. Now, I'm not here to talk about games, rather books, but the illustrating principle remains the same: the setting, IE the world in which your story takes place, can leave a vast, massive impression on the reader. The more sense this world makes, and the more it fits together ... the better off your story will be.

Now, a lot of different writers and creators go about achieving this "togetherness" a lot of different ways, but the point of this sidebar is for me to share my methods and what matter most to me, as well as how I sit down and work out that process. And for me, the process of building a world for the characters to inhabit is one of the most important and early parts of the process, because that world will shape everythingthe characters do and say.

On a side note, this is why some "epic" books out there come off flat: Their world is generic, and therefore the characters actions and reactions, no matter how well-written, don't have much to play off of. Think of it like a pinball table: A good player (character, for a story) can "succeed" on any table, even if it's just a flat surface with a few bumpers and the flippers, but a good pinball table? It has bumpers, ramps ... all sorts of bits of scenery and mechanics for the player to interact with. And yes, that last bit is important enough to warrant a highlight. "Poor" pinball tables are often explained as those where the elements are just flashy and for show, or don't interact with one another. The great ones? All those elements of the table don't just provider interaction with the player, but the can interact with one another as well. For example, bouncing off of a series of bumpers to end up on a ramp that sends the player to another part of the table—the player has to interact with the bumpers first to get to the other elements, usually with some sense of skill (or dumb luck).

So, when I sit down to work on a story? The world had better be one of the first things I look at, because it's going to be something that directs and interacts with the characters on all levels.

For example, the first thing I did with Shadow of an Empire was work out the magic system. I sat down and built on the initial idea I had (gifted folks who can absorb and then emit the basic forms of energy), writing out the different kinds of energy at their disposal, and how an individual used their powers. From there, though, I wasn't done. In fact, just laying out what the powers were was barely half a job. I next had to sit down and say "Okay, we have people that can absorb and emit heat energy. How would this change the society in which these powers were discovered? How long ago were they discovered?" From there I worked backward and forward, reaching into the past (Where did these powers come from? When did they first arise, and how did people react?) and into the "future" (How would culture look if these powers had been around for several hundred years or longer? How would people refer to them? What would religion think? What would science think?).

Why start there? Because such a system would change the world, which meant it was going to be one of the most important things that shaped the world I was about to write. For example, a culture in which people can absorb and emit heat would sidestep some of the problems of creating steam engines, such as a high-energy fuel source—which meant that steam power was going to rule the world I created, and be a bit more capable and important than steam power in our world ever was (as well as hang on longer over alternatives). Likewise, since this heat was so important, cities would likely spring up around areas with access to heat in addition to other things ... Which lead to the capital city of the Indrim Empire being founded on a host of geothermal springs for that readily available heat energy (Just toss your heat-absorbing employee in a hot spring for a few hours!).

However, I didn't stop with the big changes. As I sat and worked out the larger pieces (the Indrim Empire, its history, how people reacted to the gifted, etc), I also started working out smaller, more down-to-earth details. Culture and clothing, for example. Folks who can absorb light through their skin and emit it later, for example, are going to want to wear clothing that protects but also exposes a larger amount of their skin to light. People that can control that visible emission are probably going to create "art" with it (and then there were light-dancers). People who can absorb sound will be in high demand by those who don't want to be overheard, or even by those who just want to keep something loud quiet.

And it didn't stop. I came up with slang names for each type of gifted, sometimes more than just a few. And in figuring out how these gifts changed the society of the world I was building, I was able to answer other questions about the world as well. Government, religion, markets ... the list goes on.

Was all of this important? Well, yeah! It outlined the world that the characters lived in, the world that they interacted with and were acted upon on a daily basis. Greater steam power meant that steam trains were the lifeblood of this empire. Roads between towns? Not as much of importance, at least in outskirt areas of the civilization. The presence of that magic also meant that their steam trains could be much larger and more powerful than ours. And is that important to the story?

Well ... yeah. It was. Not only as an element of the setting, but the characters themselves took trips aboard the trains, traveled on them, and even faced death on them. They interacted with them.

Pisces (from Colony) was a similar situation where worldbuilding was concerned. I had to sit down and ask a whole host of questions, from logical applications of the technology present in the story to how people living on Pisces would find solutions to certain problems. Sands, or even what those problems might be. Extrapolation, in other words. How is this fixed? What could someone else do with that? Etc, etc, etc. Again, there was a whole host of things to consider with how sweeping differences could occur, or what they were.

Oh, and did I mention the research? Yeah, research plays a big part in this. I won't go into details, but a lot of this development often involves sitting down and reading/looking up information on whatever it is I'm creating. For example, the jump drives used by the subs in Colony actually stem from a real-world "supercavitation drive" technology that involves ... well, exactly what it was in the story: Use of an electrical field to create low-drag vacuum bubbles around something. In the real world thus far, that has meant torpedoes that surpass speeds of 320 KPH. Sometimes worldbuilding has meant digging into real-world approaches, events, and people to see how similar problems were dealt with or solved. Can an old-world solution to long-distance communication, for example, work in a new way within what I'm working on? It may seem like an odd question, but in Shadow of an Empire, there is a mention of a group of folks experimenting with shockers' electrical talents to send electrical signals down lengths of wire ...

Which, by the way, is a one-off line in the book, but was there for another reason other than just "I thought of this." It was there to make the world feel organic. Which leads into this next part of what I do ... After I've got the big stuff figured out (like the magic, and how that changed the society, and the history), I start thinking about the important small stuff. One of the key ones?

Money. No joke, with Shadow I sat down and wrote a whole system out. Why? Because part of worldbuilding is the small details, the little tiny ones that we all know of but don't always acknowledge ... until they're missing.

Money? That's a small detail ... but think about how much of a day to day life can revolve around money. How it's used, who uses it ... even how to pay for a sandwich.

If that still seems odd to you, think about it this way. When was the last time you commented to a friend about their lunch, and they replied "Yes, I bought it with money!"

Seem weird? That's because it is. Most folks don't talk like that. If they tell you how much it was worth, it'll likely be something like "Yeah, and it was only like four bucks!"

Spot the slang is in that last sentence? If you're thinking "bucks" then you're right. "Bucks" is slang for "US dollars." Now how many of you have read a book where a detail-oriented character simply says 'I gave the waiter some money to cover my meal" or something similarly vague? I've noticed it before. The issue there is that the one doing the worldbuilding didn't think of the small but important details in their world, like cash.

Think of it as the difference between a picture of a scene that doesn't move, and a video of a scene where the flowers gently sway back and forth in the breeze. One feels more real than the other. Similarly, the small details of worldbuilding can go a long way. In my Being a Better Writer articles, I've sometimes referred to this as 'remembering the butterflies near the flowers.' A character that says 'Give 'em five bucks" to pay for information feels a little bit more real than a character that says "give them their money" because readers use money on a daily basis. Even if the form of currency isn't quite the same, just having the characters stay consistent with it can really ground a reader in a story.

In summation? I work out all the big, large pieces of the world first, but then after that I sit down and poke at all the details to make sure they all line up with one another, or at the very least exist beforehand so that if they do come up in my story, rather than panicking and making something up on the spot that feels "rough" by comparison, I can simply nod, check my notes, and then roll right on with my story. I have the large bits, and the small bits, and if I've done my job right, they'll come together without grinding against one another (unless, you know, that's part of the plot).

And again, this stuff isn't window dressing. It's not flashy lights that the characters just walk past. The characters live in the world I build, which means that the story, their day-to-day actions ... all of it will be shaped by it. Amacitia Varay is a serial killer that uses her power over sound to hunt and deceive her victims, and likewise the peacekeepers responsible for hunting her use their own powers (as well special tools just for dealing with gifted criminals). The city around them is shaped by these powers. And they make choices based on that city (that holds true for Colony as well, but with science and location rather than magic powers).

Okay, this is getting long (though it is my process), so I'm going to wrap this up with a final point to make: I've had some that aren't writers say that my worldbuilding process sounds too detailed, like too much work. Some even say it's "wasted time I could spend writing."

I disagree, obviously. My rebuttal would be this: If I weren't using what I spent so much time worldbuilding, then yes, it would be wasted time. If I wasn't using my worldbuilding to shape the story, wasn't putting it into effect? Yeah, no disagreement.

But that's not what happens. Instead, I spend a good amount of time (usually a week or so) working out all these details, big and small, about the world. Then, when I drop my characters into this setting, they can interact with it, be shaped by it, shape it in turn, etc etc etc, because it's all already there. There aren't any "blank" spots in the setting that stump the story, because even if things bounce in a new direction, I still have all the tools and elements that shaped the rest of the world to work off of. And what results ... well, it's a world that feels real, from the characters to the setting. It feels like a place that could exist.

That's a win for me and my readers.

A quick summary, just as a recap: The world and setting can be as much a character for the reader as the characters. What's more, they should both act on the characters and be acted upon by them, rather than just be there. I worldbuild by starting with the biggest elements, such as magic or an underwater planet, and extrapolate what sort of "world" would come from those elements. I also work out the tiny details, like money. The little stuff. I do research!

And then? I get to writing, and bring that world to life.

If you liked the sound of what you read here, feel free to swing by my site, Unusual Things, and check out Being a Better Writer, a weekly series on ... well, it's not a misnomer. Writing tips, advice, and so on. Plus books, some of which have been reviewed by your reviewer!

Noble Ark By Colette Black

Noble Ark

By Colette Black

Like Fourteen, I picked up Noble Ark at Comicfest 2018 in Phoenix. I've already discussed that and our author in that review that was all of two weeks ago, so let's just into it.

In the far future, humanity has fled Earth and settled on the planet Saeana. They rebuilt civilization and branched outward meeting a number of alien species, engaging in trade and diplomatic relations with most of them. However, things went bad when the Mwalgi, depending on who you believe, either started attacking humans for their Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) or asked the government of Saeana for CSF and started attacking when their request was refused. In the twenty years since, marauding Mwalgi pirates have hunted human merchants ships across the civilized systems. When they find a human ship, they attack, board it and kill everyone they find by draining them dry of CSF (WHY!? Seriously why!? These are advanced space-faring aliens, surely they have discovered the miracle of genetically modified bacteria that are capable of making human CSF in mass production vats like we do fucking insulin!). Among the victims of these bluntly brutal attacks were the family of Aline Taylor our main character, but let's talk about the Mwalgi and the war first.

The Mwalgi have a number of physical advantages. They are stronger and tougher than human beings, have fangs and built in talons capable of cutting through a wide variety of materials. On top of that their skins are covered by heavy scales that are even resistant against a great number of the weapons humanity possess. The Mwalgi appear to avoid large scale attacks and confronting human military ships, at the same time it seems that the human fleet isn't strong enough to attack the Mwalgi home world. So human merchant ships have become the main field of battle. A series of agreements enforced by a number of other alien races forces the Mwalgi to limit themselves to single ship raids on merchants and to not attack humans in certain areas marked off limits. The details aren't gone into, but from what is said, it seems the other aliens were mostly interested in keeping the war off their territory and ships while maintaining the benefits of trade with humanity and not having to get involved (... What the fuck? No, seriously what the fuck? “Well Mwalgi, we can’t have you draining ALL the humans, we like their trinkets. So we’re only going to let you drain still-living fellow sapient beings of their CSF under sustainable harvest quotas”.) The war was frankly bloody but humanity has managed to slowly shift the tide through series of social, tactical, and technological adaptations. First is the creation of private military contractors, who actually serve as training beds for the military as well a good place to stick a junior officer you want to gain combat experience rapidly. They deploy aboard human merchant ships which are now built on vast scales to make carrying large crews profitable. Humans have also adapted tactics to draw Mwalgi, who are often driven half mad by the scent of humans into prepared ambush zones, with the ships themselves being built according to these tactics. Lastly is the adoption of acid guns, by which I don't mean ‘melt your bones’ acid but something closely related to the drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, aka LSD. The weapons in question fire pellets or darts small and sharp enough to penetrate the scales of a Mwalgi killer. While if you or I (I assume that all my audience is human) would experience a hallucinogenic trip if we were hit, the chemicals are nearly instantly toxic to the Mwalgi resulting in a painful and messy death. For bonus points they even figured out how to configure the acid guns into pretty good melee weapons for when you run out of ammo. So the killing doesn't have to stop simply because there's more Mwalgi then you have acid. Which as you can imagine suits most humans just fine.

Aline Taylor is definitely one of those humans, as I mentioned earlier she lost her entire family in a particularly violent Mwalgi assault that she witnessed at a young age (Holy PTSD, Batman!). This left her with a pathological (No no, it is entirely justified and normal. Granted it is also probably PTSD...) hatred of the Mwalgi and a desire to make killing them her life's work. She's gotten off to a good start having focused on making a military career with the kind of obsessive focus you don't see in sane people. However she's too young to get into the military academy and rather then calmly wait for nature to take its course, she's looking to force her way in. Preferably by creating a vast ramp of Mwalgi corpses to walk over to the admissions board. I have to admit I admire her focus on a certain level even if I'm a bit terrified by her laundry list of psychological issues. To Ms. Black's credit, she doesn't spend a lot of time dressing up Aline as some sort of perfect soldier, but as a damaged and in some ways frail individual who happens to be pretty good at xenocide. That said I wouldn't bring someone like Aline into the field if I had any choice in the matter, since people like that eventually break and tend to do so in an very dramatic fashion (There is that, yes). Until she faces her issues and comes to terms with them, she's basically a time bomb only the timer doesn't have numbers on it, it has animals and you have to figure out if she'll explode at half past octopus or a quarter to sparrow. Again Ms. Black confronts this by having her authority figures be painfully aware of this and constantly pushing Aline to do healthy things, like have non-murder hobbies and get therapy, with actual therapists (I’d recommend MDMA assisted psychotherapy and ALL the anti-depressants!). Course our next main character is going to force the issue by virtue of his existence, let's talk about him.

Larkin Travgar is a Mwalgi, sort of. He claims to have a Saeana mother and a Mwalgi father, which makes him half human. Now as my editor will explain, in painful depth if I let him, this is impossible (*Screams into the void*). The medical and science characters of the book agree with this being impossible, pointing out that the Mwalgi evolved on an alien world and even have a different number of chromosome pairs then humans (Okay, that doesn’t even scratch the surface. Different chromosome pairs might not even be that bad provided there is at least one copy and no recessive lethals that get unmasked by only having the one copy. No no. The problem comes in gene regulation, particularly in morphogenesis, and nuclear-mitochondrial incompatibilities that make cellular respiration impossible.) All that said, Larkin, or Lars for short, exists and clearly combines human and Mwalgi physical characteristics. This isn't explained in the book, but given that it's the first book of a series, I'm willing to give that a pass. While I demand a complete story, that doesn't mean you have to explain everything, some plot elements can be left to be resolved in future books. Due to his hybrid nature, Lars doesn't crave CSF but was drafted by his government and basically thrown onto a pirate ship and told to murder people. He instead saves Aline during a raid and murders a bunch of his own crew members. This leads to an awkward situation, as Aline hates Lars due to him being... Well Mwalgi but admits that she owes him her life and has a debt. So she repeatedly puts herself on the line to ensure Lars fair and just treatment despite her dislike of him. It doesn't help that Lars is a very likable sort on his own, he's honestly more mature then Aline, fair minded and even charming in his own rough way. Which sets us up for the main conflict of the book... The love triangle.

The love triangle (well to be fair it's not a triangle but I'll get into that) involves a third character, David Blake. Blake is pretty, charming, an accomplished soldier with the private contractors and from a wealthy and powerful military family. David Blake is also utterly toxic as a person, being a manipulative, controlling, entitled little shit of a man. This is illustrated in his relationship with Yone, another crew member who has the bad taste to fall in love with David. He's perfectly happy to use Yone’s talents to try and manipulate Aline and when Aline isn't available he's perfectly happy to sleep with Yone, all while giving Aline the impression that he wants an exclusive relationship with her.

Meanwhile Lars is undergoing a physical change as he starts basically imprinting on Aline, as the Mwalgi have physiological process that basically lock them into a single monogamous relationship for life. I'll come back to that but the takeaway is that Lars is in love with Aline. Aline is somewhat confused as she has a mountain of hate, fear and resentment for Lars’ species, but Lars himself is attractive to her. This puts Lars into the archetype of the monster boyfriend, other examples are Edward Cullen (or Jacob) from Twilight, Beast from Beauty and the Beast (so many versions that I don't have time to list them) and you've likely thought of half a dozen examples by now yourself, gentle reader. To be honest most of the monster girlfriend characters I've run into are from Japanese sources, either books or anime (Ryoko from the grandfather of all harem anime Tenchi Muyo comes to mind). Basically the Monster boy/girlfriend is physically powerful (often supernaturally so) and dangerous, often with fangs, talons or claws to serve as an example of their dangerousness. They are usually from a larger group that are considered predatory towards normal humans (vampires, werewolves, aliens who drink our spinal fluid, you get the idea) but this specific individual is either through voluntarily means or outside circumstances rendered safe for the hero or heroine. They are also usually shown as devoted beyond the human norm to their human love interest to the point of fighting a large list of dangerous enemies for the safety and well being of their human love interest. Most of the time, the human love interest is rendered helpless, in order to highlight the power and savagery that the monster boy/girlfriend is capable of. I will say that Aline is a better protagonist than most, being a capable and accomplished fighter, willing and able to pursue her own agenda. So bonus points there. Additionally, there are a wide number of situations in the book that would normally result in angst and drama that are solved by people talking out their problems like adults. Unless it involves David, who for pretty much the vast majority of the book makes such a pain of himself that I find myself asking what most of the other characters are asking, what the hell does Aline see in him beyond his pretty face and officer tabs? I'm not a fan of love triangles as the main plot honestly and in this case I was more interested in the war and exploring the societies of the humans and Mwalgi that have formed in response to a two-decade struggle for survival. David doesn't help this, as frankly the best love triangles are ones where you can at least see the virtues in everyone involved and realize why this is a difficult choice. In this, you're just waiting for David to screw up badly enough that Aline realizes what he is and gives him the boot.

My big struggle this review is objectively reviewing a book that tells a story other then the one I want. That's not Ms. Black fault. There are plenty of readers who would roll their eyes at any story I would write in this universe of hers and would vastly prefer her own work. The world building is interesting, although Ms. Black does attempt several time to make the struggle between humans and Mwalgi morally grey by suggesting that the human government was approached peacefully to provide CSF to the Mwalgi but refused. So the Mwalgi marched to war. The problem here is that after discussing this with several biologist I know... Well first while there are differences in the CSF of us and say... cows? They're not huge differences. Second, any chemical in CSF can be created in a lab, in large amounts. So while the Mwalgi might not have the technology to do so (technology that I am assured that 21st century earth has) there are plenty of other alien powers out there that do (Including us! You go up to any government asking if you can harvest their citizens they’ll say no. Ask if that government can make something to sell you? Sure!). So why hasn't anyone tried to tap this vast market and reap the economic and political benefits of having Mwalgi in hock to them? Why haven't the Mwalgi pursued this technology? Why would I believe that anyone has a right to my spinal fluid and why would I feel bad for people who will murder children violently for it? Given that there are two other books in the series that likely have those answers I don't want to throw too many rocks there. As it is possible that those questions are answered in those books. But it does undercut a lot of the good work she did in worldbuilding here. Because as long as you can accept the premise of alien pirates coming for our precious bodily fluids, everything else makes sense and is great work! The LSD guns are incredibly imaginative and I love the idea. The small touches of life in a merchant ship built to serve as a death trap to invading aliens are very well done. The characters are very believable as functional adults, they talk out their problems, they plan ahead, etc. So I'm just going to say if you're a fan of monster boy or girlfriends and of romances with love triangles, then this book is likely for you. If you're not? Skip this one. I'm giving Noble Ark by Colette Black a C+, but if you're into the plot I've outlined, then it's going to reach up into the B tier.



You know, I think it's time to break out the big guns of independent authors. Next week, Brute Force by K.B. Spangler. Keep reading!


As always red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

From One World, Many By Kristene Perron

From One World, Many

By Kristene Perron

One of the most frequent comments I receive as a speculative fiction author is, “Where do you get those crazy ideas?” My response could easily be, “Have you seen our world?” Worldbuilding is one of my favourite parts of the writing process because there is so much source material to draw on.

The natural world is a treasure chest of weird, scary, and positively puzzling creatures and behaviours. Consider the Acanthaspis petax, a member of the Assassin Bug (Reduviidae) family, found in East Africa and Malaysia. This clever little psychopath injects ants with a paralysis-inducing saliva and a venom that dissolves the ant’s innards, then piles the exoskeletons (up to 20!) onto its back and glues them together with a sticky excretion. Hidden under its victims’ bodies, Acanthaspis petax can move around freely and enjoy protection from spiders (spiders are reluctant to attack ants because they swarm). Now, imagine this Assassin Bug on a bigger scale, make it intelligent and sapient, give it language and culture, give it bigger and more intelligent prey and predators and, voila, you have yourself a race of creepy aliens.

The human world is no less fascinating.

When Joshua Simpson and I sat down to hash out details of our co-authored Warpworld series, we frequently drew upon human history and culture as a guide. Our different backgrounds were an excellent jumping off point for discussions of gender, nationality, politics, religion, colonization, and other issues that thread through our story. Though our books are not set on earth, all the problems and challenges our characters face have happened right here at home.

Conflict is the heart of fiction and nowhere is conflict more apparent and volatile than between cultures. Even countries that share a border and a language can hold wildly differing views and the farther you travel from home the more striking these differences can become.

In 1992, like so many other English speakers with a desire to travel, I moved to Japan and taught conversational English. Never before, nor since, have I encountered a culture with such a complex and rigid set of rules for social etiquette. My employer once laughed as she recounted a joke she had played on a visiting Canadian friend. According to Japanese custom, however you are greeted, you must follow the same level of protocol. If someone bows to you with a simple nod of the head, you do the same. If they bow deeply, you bow deeply. My boss’s Canadian friend, having been made aware of this and wanting to make a good impression, dutifully got down on hands and knees in several public locations to return the ultra-formal bows offered to him by Mrs. Kakegawa’s friends, who were, of course, all in on the prank. And while that particular cultural anecdote is humorous she also told me about how she was forced by her family to break off a happy relationship with the man she loved because of a supposedly long-dead caste system, a concept that was barbaric to my Canadian way of thinking but was completely normal to her.

Travel is an excellent tool for worldbuilding, but you don’t need to travel to the other side of the world to build an alien culture, you only need to look in the mirror. What are your customs, beliefs, superstitions, celebrations, rituals, etc, and where did they originate? Why do we shake hands when we meet someone new? Why do we knock on wood for luck? Why do we put trees inside our house and decorate them with lights in December? What would an alien with no prior knowledge of earth or humanity assume about us by these actions? At its heart, building new worlds is how we create a lens to look at our own without the biases of our geography and culture.

Thanks for listening and if you’d like a peek at how Josh and I built our warped worlds, you can pick up a free copy of Warpworld Vol. 1 anywhere fine ebooks are sold or visit www.warpworld.ca.

The Warrior's Stone Matthew O Duncan

The Warrior's Stone

Matthew O Duncan

Another book I bought at ComicFest 2018, The Warrior's Stone was self published in 2014 by Matthew O Duncan and reprinted in 2018 using Lulu. Lulu is a self publishing company that was founded in 2002 by Bob Young, who’s mostly known for founding the open source software company Red Hat. He founded Lulu after trying to get a book (titled Under the Radar) about his experiences founding Red Hat published and being frustrated with the experience. Lulu.com also takes steps to ensure that books published with them can be sold on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles.com and the Apple store if the writer applies for an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) which is free. Mr. Duncan also lives in the Phoenix area with his wife (Reviewed authors shall be part of the Fremen army that invades the state capitol during a giant Haboob. Long live the fighters of Mua’Dib!)

The Warrior's Stone takes place in the year 2319; humanity has expanded to the stars and met many other alien races. It even joined an interstellar alliance of races for peace and trade. For a long time humanity wasn't seen as an important member of the alliance and Earth was a backwater world which served as the capital for a minor race. Then, as you might have guessed, war happened. The Serken, a reptilian race of slaving war happy carnivores who think eating other species is fun and profitable attacked the alliance. The Alliance promptly... Kinda feel apart and it was up to humanity and a number of other races to pull together and fight off the monsters. It's taken decades and hundreds of millions if not billions of deaths and billions if not trillions of tons of materials reduced to burning wreckage in the void, but the war is turning in the favor of the alliance. As the Serken struggle to build new ships and weapon platforms to offset the Alliance's logistical and industrial advantages, the Alliance plans an attack into the home system of the Serken to cripple their war-making ability and force a final peace. Roy O'Hara, widower, fighter pilot, and squadron leader operating from the Alliance Carrier T.S.S Phoenix leads his squadron in an ambush to destroy one of those new ships; a Super Destroyer with a main cannon capable of wrecking anything it hits in a single shot (We need to sit down with scifi writers and have a chat about ship classifications). There doesn't seem to be a lot of those around however so if his fighters can take it out before the invasion, that's a major piece off the board. The problem being that the Serken know that too and while they're savage and fairly monstrous, they ain't stupid.

Meanwhile, on the pleasant planet of New Terra, the Princess Katreena is in mourning. Her husband George and her father were killed in a freak accident and while she misses her husband George, it's her father she really mourns. Her marriage was an arranged one and while George was respectful, kind, and friendly, he was also away regularly visiting another girl from a relationship prior to their marriage. Katreena's father the King on the other hand was someone close to Katreena, especially since her mother passed away working as a healer during a plague. Princess Katreena herself is a healer, due to being able to use the magical healing stones. There are a number of different stones with different powers, healing stones, which can be used mostly by the women of the the eleven royal families, can heal physical injury, pain, and illness. There is a cost in that the healer ends up taking on some of that pain, which means repeated use can weaken or even kill the user. Warrior Stones are mostly used by the men of the royal families to generate energy blasts that can be used as weapons. There are also prophecy stones which means... We're looking at a prophecy story... Again. Anyway, while Princess Katreena still has remaining family in her Uncle and her Aunt, who have become King and Queen, she is left without anyone she can confide in as her position isolates her in a lot of ways. Although I am left wondering why she doesn't have a favorite servant or a fellow noble woman she can talk to. There don't seem to be a lot of nobles around honestly but there are some that show up in the book. Frankly it seems odd to me that Katreena doesn't have a single friend her own age but that's not impossible. As a result of the stress Katreena decides to sneak off to an out of the way cottage that her father maintained, where he and his family could go and pretend to not to be royals (historically a number of folks have done this) and no one else knows where it is. I have a harder problem believing that part honestly. If the King is the only one who can make certain decisions, people kinda have to know where he is. I mean if the kingdom starts burning down while he's pretending to be peasant and no one knows where he is... What then?

These two very different settings are about to collide as Roy O'Hara is forced to crash land on New Terra after chasing a Serken fighter bomber (FTL doesn't seem to take much space or energy in this setting as you can fit it into a single-man craft) into the system during battle. His ship is pretty banged up but repairable due to him having repair drones that basically make replacement parts as long as they have metal (the implications of his repair drones being basically Von Neumann probes is never really gotten into. [Hi! For those of you who don’t know what a Von Neumann Probe is, they are self-replicating machines that are capable of exponential growth {That means the more of them there are, the faster they can make more}. Basically, a drone capable of producing advanced technology for a spacecraft can in principle make more of themselves unless their programming is somehow constrained. This capability, if turned on accidentally or on purpose, could lead to the exponential growth of those probes and the eventual conversion of all matter within travel distance into more probes.]) but more importantly is the fact that Roy is grievously injured in the crash and metaphorically left at death's door (you ever notice that death doesn't open his door all that often? [Not in fiction, anyway.]). In a more literal sense he's left at Katreena's door and in an effort to preserve his life she is forced to break out the big stones, the Boto Stone, which is a special type of healer's stone with a lot more mojo than your standard magic rock. It does have a side effect however of “soul bonding” the healer and the healee to the point that they can share dreams and sometimes even memories. I'm sure that my readers know where we're going with this. Roy and Katreena start sharing dreams, memories and more... Intimate moments. Katreena, realizing what's going on, decides that the responsible thing to do is to break contact. She takes Roy to a nearby settlement once he's stable and runs home. It's a bit too late for that, as she finds out when she gets home and using the magical rock pregnancy test finds out that she's expecting, which results in her promptly panicking.

It's here that we get the major world building, we find out that New Terra is ruled by eleven royal families, all descended from eleven people who were able to use the magic rocks to throw off their alien enslavers. You see, the people of New Terra are all descended from a Scottish village that was kidnapped about 1500 years ago to use as slave labor to mine the magic rocks (Oh god, the background inbreeding. There’s a reason Icelanders have an app!). After kicking out the aliens and shooting up their spaceships with really big magic rocks called land stones (these things also grant extra sensory information so you can see targets in interstellar space and shoot them down, if you know where to look). Afterwards these eleven people set themselves as kings and queens, created their kingdoms, and begin setting up rules. Now, the rules start to make sense when you consider what’s going on. The power of the royal families is completely dependent on being able to use the magic rocks, no one else is supposed to be able to. The ability seems to have a genetic component, as it is passed down from parent to child. The Royal Families have adopted strict rules on sexual relationships, flat out banning sex outside of marriage (with even Royal Heirs being branded and banished if they're found doing so) and a number of rules dictating who royals can marry. Mostly the children of royals, or nobles who tend to be distant relatives of royals (Oh. My. God. After 1500 years, approximately 60 generations of introgression - serial inbreeding - they would all basically be clones, there would be no heterozygosity left, they’d have no immune system and they’d be completely incapable of successful reproduction because every single embryo would have more recessive lethals than you can shake a stick at. The Spanish Habsburgs have absolutely nothing on this shit, even the Targaryens have a healthier genome! Hell, out-crossing to other families won’t even help, because they’re all inbred to hell and back too from just the small population size. Her brother would be identical to her….brother-cousin-husband and he’d be deformed. Stillbirths, so many fucking stillbirths. It’s a miracle the society hasn’t collapsed under its own Arkansanian weight!). Roy being from an entirely different planet doesn't qualify and Katreena is beside herself, thinking her only shot is to jump into another marriage and claim the kid is from her new husband.

Now I can understand why Katreena would be frantic about this and frankly I don't blame her for the whole thing with Roy, as the sex happened during a walking-dream when she wasn't entirely in her right mind (neither was Roy) and she had no idea what the consequences would be. I don't blame her for deciding to lie about it because... The alternative is anything from being flogged and banished to having a massive X branded on her face and banished. That said... Her husband George died three weeks ago. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to just claim it was George's kid? (Ironically enough, no, because the kid would look very much like someone else’s kid! Really she’s screwed either way!) I mean if they have magic that would prevent you from doing that, wouldn't it prevent you from passing the kid off as her new husbands? Sure the kid may be born a bit late (and not suspiciously Quasimodoesque) but that happens fairly often. Is it dishonest? Yes, but so is marrying another dude and telling him that the kid is his! At least this way you minimize the people you have to lie to and the harm you do. For that matter, what do you think George was doing the whole time visiting his ex-girlfriend?  This whole plotline just comes off as unnecessary to give Katreena something to fret over and have a conflict that she needs to resolve. If you realize the solution that I did, it has the side effect of making Katreena look like an idiot on top of that. I don't think that was Mr. Duncan's intention but there is it. (And yet, it is realistic. Assuming she survived being an embryo and a fetus, and then somehow doesn’t die from ‘not having a functional immune system’ and not being physically deformed, chances are she’d be as dumb as a box of rocks! This plot line makes an unintentional but huge amount of sense.)

Thankfully this isn't the only conflict in the book. The Serken find New Terra and send troops looking for their lost pilot. Roy finds himself pulled into a new theater of war, as he has to convince the kings of New Terra to follow him against the alien invaders and push them off the world. He is aided in this by a... Of course... A prophecy proclaiming the aliens would come again and a Commander from elsewhere would appear to lead the armies of the kings. Not everyone is happy to see Roy because the prophecy also promises the kingdoms will fall. I'm not going to repeat my rant on prophecies I think most of you got the gist of it in the last review. I will say that the prophecy in this book brings the story down, often being used by characters to resolve problems and avoid conflict. This robs the book of suspense and makes the solutions feel a bit cheap.  It's prophecy that causes the Kings give him command for example and is used to slap down every challenge to his authority.  I don't think that was Mr. Duncan's intention but it's hard to avoid when you make a prophecy front and center of your plot.

The story is well paced and bringing these two settings together under a single roof is rather difficult, which makes it interesting that Mr. Duncan would set such a tall task for what is as far as I can tell, his first book. There are a number of first book problems; the dialogue is overly formal and at parts a bit stilted. Mr. Duncan also has a tendency to tell the reader things instead of showing them. We are told Roy's emotional states rather then shown them, we are told about problems in the Alliance rather then shown them and how they're impacting the story. I'll admit this can be a problem because if you want to focus on say, a single confrontation taking place on a out-of-the-way planet, how do you show the problems in an interstellar alliance? Another thing is we don't meet any of the allied aliens. In fact the only aliens we really see are the Serken and if it wasn't for their advanced tool use I wouldn't be sure they were sapient. I also have problems with elements of the setting; for example, why would you spend the time and effort to kidnap a small Scottish village to do your mining when it would be easier and cheaper to just build robots? Plus non-sapient robots don't use magic rocks to rebel against you and can work longer without rest periods. New Terra's society works alright and Roy is a very believable and interesting character, he's a full grown man who while carrying a heavy loss (the death of his wife) is able to function and have friendships and develop goals for the future. Katreena was less impressive to me and I'm not sure Roy would be all that interested in her without the influence of a magic rock. This damages my ability to buy into their relationship, which is one of the big plots of the book. To be honest in each scene that they were together in, I wasn't really sold on Roy's feelings for Katreena and was left wondering how much of that was actually them vs the rock (Maybe intentional?). I do have to give Mr. Duncan points for aiming high and trying to tell an original story but I think another draft or two would have been very helpful. I have to give The Warrior's Stone by Matthew Duncan a C-.

Alright, next week, we're giving Colette Black another shot with Noble Ark.  This Sunday join us as Kristene Perron discusses her take on worldbuilding. Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

Worldbuilding 101 by Joshua Simpson

Worldbuilding for me has always been one of the easier and obviously most fun aspects of creating fiction. It’s a revelatory experience, as pieces come together in my mind to explain why things exist the way they do, why characters behave as they do within the story.

For me it typically starts with the vision of a single character, captured in a small moment in time. It may be an action scene, it may be a moment of reflection. It comes to me as it so often does for so many people, right around the time I’m trying to get to sleep at night.

I build from my characters, primarily. My Warpworld series (co-authored with Kristene Perron) started as a late-night vision of a character giving a training lecture to students, establishing the function of their organization and the nature of the world around them.

(The interesting twist of it all is that the scene as originally written would actually be impossible to fit into the novels that ensued, as the context that provided for the scene did not occur in the novels.)

So the characters were the core of it, because the characters provide me with the story. My writing process typically amounts to ‘create the characters, then set them against each other and allow them to dictate the events’. So at first, the characters give me the world by having traits, clothing, and accoutrements that come from their social origin, which then fills in as an environment that would provide these things.

After a while, the world begins supplying its own characters as needed. Do I need a lawyer or a corrupt bureaucrat? A janitor? A bored magnate? A wild ravening monster on the loose? At this point, the institutions and environment will provide them. Moreover, as the setting bakes in, obstacles are easy to provide- the nature of the world itself, the human problems that create the friction that creates the tension, these emerge naturally and organically from the setting.

It’s not an organized process, but neither is a society. Elements come to me as needed, sometimes staying and making a lasting impression on the setting, while others flitter in and out to provide the touch of a lived-in world, a place where things are happening beyond the doings and adventures of our protagonists and antagonists. I like to try to leave the impression that there are any number of stories being told in my world, that a shift of focus could bring us a whole new series of moments to digest while following the life of entirely different characters.

I like to think that my method tends to help alleviate the peril of elaborate worldbuilding, in that the world and the details within becomes the point of the story rather than the drama and tension of those acting within it. Since the world exists to suit the needs of the story and characters, it can be bent behind the scenes as needed, so long as previously-established details are not contradicted.

Which does bring me to one final point, which I hadn’t really appreciated or even comprehended until I co-created a fictional universe of my own and began publishing work in it: the world is more real to the reader than it may be to the creator.

That’s a cool fact that creates its own inherent challenge. When you’ve created a setting that exists entirely in your mind, you’re entirely used to moving things around, adding and removing things, it never really feels static or beyond those adjustments. But for the consumer of the media, if they’ve suspended disbelief then the world is real, and should be held to the standards you’ve established for it.

Before I wrote my own books, I could be a bit of a canon snob on occasion. After writing them and seeing how easy it is for details to blur in your creations, I have a much greater appreciation for how writers can lose those details and outright contradict them in service of the story. Keeping on top of that was a harder piece of work than I originally anticipated.

So ends my discourse on worldbuilding, how I go about it, how it functions in my creation, and the ramification of making a world that readers engage with. If you haven’t read our Warpworld series, let me take a moment to encourage you to pick it up- the first hit is free on any epub vendor. I’d like to thank Garvin Anders for inviting me to write this, and wish everyone a great day.