War Golem By J.A. Giunta

 War Golem

By J.A. Giunta

J.A Giunta was born in November of 1969 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up on Long Island but has spent more than 25 years in Arizona, graduating from Arizona State University with a BA in English, which makes him yet another writer connected to this heat-soaked, blast furnace of a desert. His first novel “ The Last Incarnation” was released in 2005 and he has published numerous novels and short stories since. War Golem was published in 2019 by Brick Cave Media and in the interest of full disclosure, not only does Brick Cave Media donate to my patron but I got this book for free. That said, what is going to follow are my honest thoughts but I want to be upfront with everyone. (Hanging with writers is a terrible habit. I recommend finding a better company. {But you’re a published writer}Wow you went there dude I thought we were friends)

War Golem is the story of a young man named Eric and how he only really grew up after he was kidnapped and murdered in his sleep by goblins. Eric is, or perhaps was would fit better, a 21st-century American teenager. He was a type of gamer called a griefer, which is a type of player who intentionally harasses and provokes other players of a game for amusement. Eric by his own admission was something of a newbie hunter, which means he hunted down people who were just learning the game for his tricks. Since Eric mostly talks about playing fantasy MMOs, I assume he did this by hunting down new players, killing their characters, taking their stuff, and trash-talking them over the game chat the whole time. In short, he was honestly the worst part of the gaming experience and community.

However, when Eric wakes up in the massive iron body of a war golem while staring at his dead human body things begin to change. (My first thought would be whoops, which afterlife version did I fail to do the rituals for? Oops, my bad. {You mean as your first thought in waking up in a golem or as the shaman?} Golem, assuming I perceived I was dying before ending up in that state.) The goblins in question are honestly pretty surprised by this as the ritual used for this wasn’t supposed to leave Eric self-aware. The Goblins out of self-preservation quickly swear loyalty to him because they have nothing that can even mildly dent him and well, he’s understandably upset over being magically kidnapped and murdered in his sleep. I think we all would be a touch cranky in Eric’s place, although he quickly establishes with his actions and behavior in the book that he’s not a very likable fellow. It’s here that his character arc takes off and it’s the best part of the book.  

Because, the spell the goblins used was meant to find the nastiest, bloodthirstiest psychopath they could safely grab, someone with a massive body count according to the goblins. This would provide the golem with a certain… killer instinct while the spells putting his consciousness to rest would ensure that the golem just followed orders. Eric protests that everything he did was done in a video game and therefore not real and in his defense, he’s never actually killed or injured anybody.

That said, I’ve heard real-life trolls and griefers use that excuse before, nothing is real so nothing matters. It’s an excuse that rings hollow to me as I’ve seen how far online bullying and harassment can go and how much pain they can inflict. While I’m not saying you should never play an evil bastard online, I do think we should remember that online actions can have real-life consequences. That said, I don’t think the harm Eric was doing justifies being murdered and stuffed into a large war machine either so clearly the goblins have screwed up here.

This brings us to our second protagonist of the book, Grizzletongue the goblin shaman. Grizzletongue is something of a mentor/prime minion to Eric as he patiently does his best to guide Eric and tries to achieve the Goblin’s original goals. Gris, to use his nickname, is honestly pretty good at convincing Eric to further the Goblin's goals and agenda, whether it be by attacking a castle full of undead so the Goblins can take it over or focusing on acquiring metals and gems for their homeworld. This is one of the more interesting bits of worldbuilding, Goblins don’t appear to be native to the world the story is taking place in but come from yet another world and these goblins have been sent here to gather resources. So Eric is basically talked into working for an alien invasion and the Goblins are alien indeed.

To start with the Goblins are well, basically sapient constructs. They are not born, they don’t have a childhood. They are created full-grown and fully aware. (So mentally at prime capacity, but lacking the experiences coming with maturation? Is that reflected? {We never deal directly with any “newborns” although it is mentioned that there is an education period}) They are also sorted into a caste system because depending on the materials used to make them, they’ll have different grades of intelligence and capabilities. They are of course conveniently color-coded so everyone can see what your likely abilities and strengths are at a glance. (Does the sort of natural bigotry that would flow from this sort of society get depicted? {To a certain extent, however, keep in mind we’re dealing with a small group of goblins in hostile territory and seeing everything through Eric’s eyes so we’re missing a lot}) The darkest part of this is to create goblins you have to kill something as part of the ritual. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a person as we see that animal sacrifice can create fully aware and intelligent Goblins but given Gris admits to Goblin society regularly kidnapping and murdering people like they did to Eric their claims of moral superiority over humans is less than convincing to me. (Yeah likewise.)

Once Eric commits to leading the Goblins and honestly fulfilling their original goals anyway, the plot takes off at a neck-breaking pace. There’s a lot I like here and a lot I dislike. First Eric doesn’t always do the right thing and even when he does there are negative consequences for his actions. Second his growth into something like maturity occurs in fits and starts. His initial step into maturity is when he realizes that the Goblins and various other creatures he’s been dismissive of are actual people, with their own feelings, thoughts, and desires that need to be considered. He’s not always successful in considering those feelings but the realization is a key moment for him and when he decides that killing people is something he wants to avoid, I started feeling a lot more sympathetic to him.

One thing I did dislike though is just how much plot the book is trying to cram into 250 pages. Frankly, this story would have been better off being split into two books I think. For example, we have Eric starting a conflict with a group of beings that the Goblins call Demons, whether they are real Demons (by which I mean evil spirits who are part of the afterlife) or not is never really addressed. Neither really is the conflict or the fact that the Demons kind of have a legitimate complaint against Eric. While it makes the climax of the story an amazing 20-car pile-up, I was honestly left asking if this even needed to be part of the story.

We also have Eric becoming aware of a 2nd alien invasion of this world by a group of beings called the Fey. I wasn’t entirely thrilled by his treatment of the Fey either. This is gonna be a “your mileage may vary” but I tend to be a bit of a snob in how I want my Fey/Demons/etc to reflect the stories and traditions that have grown around them in the real world. Mr. Giunta’s Fey felt more like a video game fantasy version of the Predator alien to me, which I didn’t care for. Ironically I would probably love them if they weren’t called Fey. A lot of you, my glorious readers, might not have that problem. That said, this element wasn’t really explored or did much at all and I was left asking again if it really even needed to be part of the story. There’s even a briefly introduced troll character who tantalizingly suggests all manner of interesting things about Trolls having a society and civilization in this world but nothing is done with this. So I was left asking, did this Troll character, as interesting as she was, really need to be in this story?

These things distracted from the main conflict of Eric with the local Human lord, named Sebran, whose grandfather and father lived in the Castle that the undead were inhabiting and Eric took over. I was more interested in this conflict than the Demons or the Fey because… Sebran was given the space and development that I understood his motives and his goals and that made him a character in his own right. I honestly was interested in his story and the story of his family.

This also took time away from the issues Eric has navigating his own growth and development while trying to keep control over the Goblins. Like I said Eric’s growth comes in fits and starts and there are setbacks and mistakes made. This made the story more compelling and believable to me. Because I think if we’re all honest, our own journeys to adulthood were full of mistakes, setbacks, and screw-ups that we should have known better about. (Hooray for depictions of fallibility, I love that.) Eric having these issues but getting up, dusting himself off despite his misgivings, and deciding he would do better next time made me root for him even harder. Because while he might have started this story as frankly an insufferable little shit, watching him fight and crawl his way to at least partial adulthood was incredibly gratifying to watch. That was more compelling to me than him powering up his golem body.

Meanwhile the Demons and Fey are just kind of plot devices to make the action scene at the end of the book really climactic with huge monsters barreling into each other and armies slamming into each other by accident and mass confusion. Add in the main villain as I will call him, who honestly I wasn’t even sure was needed given how little time was spent on developing him. And you get a story that honestly feels overly crowded and moving too fast. This is unfortunate because if these plots had time and space to develop I really think Mr. Giunta could have created something I would have really enjoyed reading.

All that said, I still enjoyed reading this book. My enjoyment hinges completely on Eric’s struggling to grow as a person and if that doesn’t sound interesting to you, you might not enjoy it. On the flip side, if you want violence and action, there is plenty of it in this book and Mr. Giunta does a great job of writing hard-hitting action scenes. It’s good enough I feel like I should take a look at one of Mr. Giunta’s other works and see what it’s like when he’s not rushing the plot so hard. That said while this book was better than average, I have to grade War Golem by J.A. Guinta a C+. Although I think many of you might like it more than I did. 

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Blue text is your editor Joshua Simpson

Black text is your reviewer Garvin anders

Mariner’s Wake By Adam Marsh

 Mariner’s Wake

By Adam Marsh 

A quick note for full disclosure, Brick Cave Media donates to my patron.  That said I paid full price for this book and the following review is made my honest thoughts and opinions of the story.  Also note that we are switching to a new editor, Mr. Joshua Simpson, who long-time readers will remember as the author of the Warp World series with Kristene Perron. His text is in light blue. Now on to the review!

Adam Marsh is an American Army veteran and Software engineer. He graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Computer Science and a Certificate in novel writing, which makes him yet another author from this Sun Blasted Desert to show up in this review series. I’m pretty sure it’s not the water that results in so many Arizonians taking up writing. I can only consider it may be the result of too much sun. Mariner’s Wake, the novel we're reviewing today, is his third novel. It’s unconnected to the other two, titled The Changed and Survived, both books take place in a world ravaged by disease where some of those who survive gain strange abilities. Mariner’s Wake takes a world that has not suffered such a plague but has gone through other changes, most of them bad. 

So to set the stage, Mariners Wake takes place shortly before the beginning of the 22nd century. The United States is a One-party, Dystopian Cyberpunk state. A nation mired in the corruption you commonly see in states where only a single party exists. This party covers that through controlling news media as well as the government. This is aided and abetted by the fact that the party in question has a very business-friendly bent, to the point of declaring entire cities like San Diego Free Trade Zones.

 In these Free Trade Zones there appears to be no law enforcement (Interesting. In a place where trade takes place you want a secure environment. Manufacturing is where lawlessness tends to serve monied interests best, as long as Ned Ludd’s kept out of the factory. {The book shows these FTZs as marginal successes or outright failures at best, the main one we see is a smuggler's den with no major corporation or international trade.  San Diego is mentioned as an FTZ and the situation is so bad there that most major trade has moved to Portland and Seattle} Oh, unintended consequences incorporated into a plotline, I like it.) and no government, which has gone about as well as you might think.  On top of that, this government is also incredibly militant and imperialist and deeply allied with the resurgent Russian Federation.  In fact, several characters flat-out state that the US is part of the Russian Federation, although I admit I find that a little confusing. (Ah, the classic future fic overestimation of Russia, a time-honored tradition. I’d have expected the Chinese to start taking Russia’s place in these storylines by now, but Russia is a more culturally familiar nation, and featuring China could also entail future difficulties with movie deals. {Yeah but I don’t see even a right-wing single-party America allying with the PRC} Paging Mr. Jerry Pournelle.) The United States in this book honestly reminds me of the American Empire of Ghost in the Shell although stronger and in bed with Russia instead of opposed to it. That said there are still elections but for the most part they’re a sham and heavily rigged even when they don’t need to be, much like modern-day Russia. 

All of this seems to be the result of a civil war that was fought in the mid-21st century and frankly, it looks like the bad guys won. So you might be wondering what happened to the people who objected to this? Well, it seems that some of them at least fled into the Pacific Ocean and founded the home culture of our protagonist, the Mariners. 

The Mariners are a group of people who have rejected the corrupt and materialist culture of much of the world and embraced a community-centered idea focused on living sustainably and working to restore and repair the ecological damage to the Pacific. Since then there have been several armed conflicts between the Mariners and the United States increasing the bad blood on both sides. This isn’t helped by the fact that most of the contact between the two cultures is often from poachers, illegal waste dumpers, and corrupt navy captains infringing on their space. In some ways, the Mariners seem like an example of a genre I looked at a few years ago called Solarpunk. (Aquapunk?) With their values and way of life, they contrast very starkly compared to the Corporate mercenaries and corrupt government and military officials they’re up against. 

So it’s no surprise that Kara Nkosi has nothing but distrust and disdain for the United States. This is a problem because when the Mariners are approached by a US Congressman and US Naval Captain asking for help. They tell the Mariners that a US naval base full of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons included, has been rediscovered by criminal elements and they need help securing the nuclear bombs in question before they end up in the wrong hands. She has to figure out how much she can trust them and what has been left out of what she has been told.

Especially since this mission inflames internal tensions among the Mariners, many of whom are understandably resentful of past treatment and conflicts.  They're also concerned that outsiders are increasingly encroaching on their territory. Often people commit mass fishing, destroying the stocks that the Mariners have worked generations to rebuild, or dumping waste in seas that the Mariners have painstakingly cleaned. Even those trade vessels just passing through destroy large amounts of Mariner infrastructure like their floating farms or fish hatcheries. As I’m sure you can imagine there are members of Mariner who are feeling that a more proactive and muscular policy is called for and they’re thinking backing that up with a couple of nuclear weapons may be just the ticket. On the flip side, the Mariners have no international recognition but they do have a broad amount of support and sympathy, and going full nuclear pirate would lose them that and may see them surrounded and choked to death. (Getting the nukes generally puts you in a safe spot internationally. It’s the process of trying to get them that makes everyone break out the boots.{developing nukes might put you in a safe spot but stealing them?}Possession is deterrence, I’d argue.) 

This story is built on some really interesting world-building that manages to feel real and lived in. What’s interesting is we’re never given an objective retelling of the events, instead, we get dribs and drabs of the world through character conversations and actions and giving us really good characters to have those conversations with.  A good example is the US Congressman, Representative Drummond, who is rather ignorant about Mariner's beliefs, history, and traditions but willing to learn. The relationship between him and Kara is a realistic one, as Kara moves from flat distrust to slow consideration to guarded trust as a result of Drummond’s actions and attitudes. Which mirrors my own reaction to him because my first thought was, who the hell sends a Congressman on a secret mission? (Throwing back to the days of Leo Ryan there.) I’m still not entirely sure Drummond is telling us the whole truth about himself. He does however give us a look at American culture and politics in this story with an unflinching view of the corruption and other flaws therein. 

Another great character was the cyber-enhanced Tren, a hapless computer programmer and once-happy corporate drone who was thrown out of the corporate world for reasons unknown. Although if I had to guess it may be due to him innocently poking around somewhere he shouldn’t have been. Tren is clearly what I believe is referred to as neurodivergent these days. He can’t read social cues worth a damn, easily gets locked into something and over focuses on it and cannot stop going on about it. In his defense, however, he clearly wants to be helpful and is just looking to make an honest living.

 Honestly, I like Tren, he’s a giant nerd who loves poking into things and solving puzzles and I can’t help but feel bad for the guy. I mean this poor sap’s first attempt to find work outside the corporate world basically ends with him being enslaved and kidnapped by a low-level crime boss going for a score way too big for him. 

This crime boss is also an incredibly colorful character, named Big Madrid, I really did enjoy hating his guts. Big Madrid is a guy almost good enough for the big leagues, he’s smart, quick on his feet, and just weird enough to be memorable without being annoying. He’s decided this is his big score and by God, he’s going to get his piece of pie and the sheer gall he displays in pursuit of it is honestly kind of amazing. Big Madrid is outgunned by basically everyone else going after these bombs but you wouldn’t know it from how he acts and damn if you don’t almost come to a sneaking tiny amount of respect for the slimy, brutal, slaving bastard. I still wouldn’t weep at his funeral but he did not commit the cardinal sin of any villain, that of being boring. (Three cheers for quality villains! This is a subject I’m given to lengthy rants on.) To be honest, given how big the payday in front of him was, I can’t honestly blame him for his single-minded pursuit of it. 

Kara does more than hold her own against this colorful array of characters and it helps that she has her own colorful past and abilities. She wasn’t born a Mariner but then most of them weren’t, becoming Mariners by adoption or joining up as adults.  In Kara’s case, she was taken in as a small child, and that saved her life. Because of that, despite being born on American soil, Kara is a Mariner's heart and soul and in a lot of ways serves as the main representative of the culture. That said she isn’t perfect, she is prone to anger and honestly doesn’t always deal with stress well. 

This is displayed in her clashes with the religious/philosophical leader of the crew, as the Mariners have created a syncretic belief system merging elements of the major Abrahamic faiths, Buddhism, and various other religions and philosophies, they call the Core. Honestly going into the Core would take up space that we don’t really have time for but it was another interesting element in the world.

 Kara having to deal with her own temper and hot-headedness gave us an interesting internal conflict but Mr. Marsh doesn’t drag this out or over-dramatize it. He shows it more as Kara matures and grows into a position of leadership. Also while she does have conflicts with other Mariners, she manages to do so in a mostly adult manner and you are left with the feeling that this is a community of people who honestly care about each other. 

A story and a world like this could have easily gone into grim dark cyberpunk territory, where nothing good lasts and no one is allowed to do anything that will make the world better. Mr. Marsh also doesn’t go too far the other way where the forces of corruption and greed only exist to be flattened by the power of friendship and good vibes. So what we get is a realistic but hopeful story with intrigue, colorful characters, and a good amount and variety of action whether it’s the characters fighting against ocean storms, gene-sliced super mercs, or their own dark impulses. It can be a difficult path to tread but in all truthfulness, Mr. Marsh treads it well and entertainingly. 

A big point for me was how none of the characters were ever rendered flat, although the Navy Captain Faulkner came close but it was balanced out by the naval officer Grant in a lot of ways. Even the corporate executive Mr. Nakamura hit a good note of being a believable character. He’s completely evil and soulless but in a realistic way, which honestly makes him scarier. This may seem odd to some of you who have read the book but I’m going to say trust me the fact that Mr. Nakamura can behave the way he does to people, even while planning dark deeds is scary. 

The action is also well written and Mr. Marsh avoids falling into the trap of having all action set pieces be gun battles or kung fu duels to the death which can also plague the genre. It’s also interesting that our main character has no cyber or genetic enhancements especially since enhanced to the gills super-spy/operative is often the main character of choice for these settings so I appreciated it a great deal. 

There’s little I disliked, beyond wishing we could have gotten a few more details about the world. I also think that a resurgent Russian Federation making a client state out of the US is becoming less believable but I’m willing to put that to the side. Mostly because the book was released in 2021 and likely written in 2020 when that would have been a lot more believable. That said I can understand if some readers don’t share that opinion, we’ll just kinda have to wait for modern events to shake out.  Although to be blunt with everyone, Glory to Ukraine. 

 Mariner’s Wake gives us a combination of an intriguing world with strong, multi-dimensional characters placed in dangerous and interesting environments and situations. There’s also the novelty of having a book in a mostly cyberpunk world showing strong ecological themes beyond “everything is ruined due to human greed” and a focus on characters who are from strong counter-cultural communities that aren’t buying into the profit first and last ethos.    I’m giving Mariner’s Wake by Adam Marsh an A and I really recommend you give it a look. 

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Creature Feature IV: Monsters of North America and Atlantis

 

Weird how hit or miss the insert function is here.  But for your amusement and edification the cannibal dwarves of North America and a special bonus, the Peryton, the eagle deer hybrid with a human shadow from Atlantis. 

Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire

 https://youtu.be/KFKJpgHNujs?si=AyarPp06LZGqQS9N 

So again blogger isn't letting me insert a video.  Super weird.  Well, this is Atlantis the Lost Empire, the Disney film, I discuss the film, my thoughts, and how it fits into the over arching view of Atlantis and what influenced it.  Hope y'all enjoy!