"Hand of Steel" by Jessi L. Roberts

Hey look, more Christian science fiction! Not particularly good Christian science fiction, but it's there nonetheless!

I would like to note that Hand of Steel's protagonist is like Spensa from Skyward if you took out all the parts that made her likeable. She's another perpetually angry teenage girl, and both she and Spensa live in sci-fi space universes, but Spensa is somehow much more fun to read about.

(Actually, if I had a nickel for every time this summer I read a book whose protagonist was a perpetually angry teenage girl, I'd have three nickels: one from Apprentice, one from Skyward, and one from this. That isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened thrice.)

This book seems to assume that you already have the entire setting in your head before you read it. Or something. It'll just tell you "oh, this guy's an elba," without ever bothering to first introduce you to the concept of elbas or what the heck they look like. It does have a brief setting guide in the back, but having to constantly refer to that in order to be like "wait, which of the six alien races was that again?" is really immersion-breaking and doesn't actually help me envision anything.

You can't see it from the cover image, but this book is not very thick. I suppose that goes some way toward explaining why it feels the need to just explain everything in the setting guide, but... surely there could have been space for some grand sweeping descriptions of planets and aliens so readers (like me) don't have such a hard time envisioning everything.

Also, this author has some of the shortest paragraphs I've ever seen.

It's like one sentence to a paragraph. Maybe two if we're lucky.

And this is the entire book.

And while I fully know and understand that giving a sentence its own paragraph can be a way to give that sentence force, it manifestly doesn't work if you do it approximately twelve times a page. All that does is make your prose really choppy. 

Plus, thanks to a combination of this and the author's lack of concrete descriptions, half the fight scenes read more like outlines than actual scenes.

I suppose I might have liked this book a bit more if Skyward and Starsight weren't fresh in my mind to compare it to. The trouble is, those books are really good, and this has enough similarities that I can't help comparing them.

And now to compare it to something else! Specifically The Beast Player. Like that book's author, this one seems to like putting her protagonist through moral dilemmas. But unlike in The Beast Player, it's glaringly obvious to an outside observer (i.e. the reader) what the right thing to do in most of Hand of Steel's dilemmas are. So really they're just the protagonist getting confronted with the fact that she's wrong and not believing it.

Most of those revolve around the Ultimate Ruling Space Corporation Government's habit of using enslavement as a punishment for crimes, coupled with its rather loose definition of what a "crime" actually is. This makes it glaringly obvious to an outside observer (reading this book) that Your Leaders Are Totally Evil. Which, one, the evil government is not my favorite trope, and two, it gets a tad annoying when the protagonist repeatedly fails to realize something that's glaringly obvious to readers.

As I mentioned above, this is Christian science fiction. Sort of. The Christianity feels like it gets lost in the rest of the book, which is not really what one tends to want in Christian fiction. That said, it is still a plot point when it does manage to surface, so that's better than just being set dressing.

In conclusion, I think that Carthage must be destroyed this book needed a better editor.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence and a lot of slavery. Those, together, only really merit an E10+, except that there is also {T exactly one mention of slaves being sold to a brothel, which feels like it was just thrown in there to be edgy}. And that pushed the rating up.

2 stars.

(Endnote: Did I mention it takes like three chapters for the protagonist to actually get her cybernetic hand? That doesn't seem like a lot, but the book only has fourteen.)

"Starsight" by Brandon Sanderson

Y'know what, I think I like this better than the alternative. "This" being: |not all of the aliens are evil! Unfortunately, some of the aliens are evil, and they're taking over the alien government.|

We get a lot of tasty lore in this book. In particular, we learn why |the humans are stuck on this one planet|, and also more about how |the protagonist Spensa's (non-unique) ability to teleport and do pseudo-psionics| works. There are also |the delvers|.

Speaking of which. |Delvers| are |giant extradimensional beings| that |live in hyperspace [not called hyperspace but it's basically hyperspace]| and |don't like realspace people. And especially don't like it when realspace people mess around with hyperspace|. Apparently |it's painful and annoying to them, or something. So if you do too much hyperspace, they might decide to go into realspace for a bit and delete your planet|. But it's |revealed at the end of the book| that |they also don't realize the people whose planets they're deleting are sentient, and when one does realize that (via Spensa doing telepathy stuff at it during the climax), it immediately nopes back into hyperspace|.

Also, there's a plot twist in here that genuinely shocked me. That doesn't happen often.

One thing I do not like is that, because we |do a lot of interacting with aliens|, we |see bits of alien biology|. Many of these |aliens do not conform to the human "male and female and nothing else" pattern|, and while that could just be worldbuilding, it also smacks of {T-ish the whole gender ideology thing}. But it's not applied to humans, so there's that at least.

One thing I do like is how Spensa's character arc went from "|let's murder all the aliens!|" to "|let's murder all the aliens except the ones I'm friends with!|" to "|let's only fight the evil aliens and leave the rest of them alone!|". I also liked that |her disguise as an alien who totally isn't a human trust me on this| isn't |foolproof; multiple characters see through it to some degree or other. However, this doesn't lead to the inevitable "we found out you're a human, now go to jail" arc, because A) both of these characters have their own agendas which would be jeapordized by a "there are human spies everywhere" furor, and B) both of them draw somewhat wrong conclusions|.

|If you didn't highlight the spoiler tags, the fact that I said| potato soup |in this paragraph will be confusing to you. Or it might not be, if you read enough of my blog and know that I do this sort of thing on heavily redacted posts.|

My shipping was correct! It is now canon! Sort of.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...probably still T for sci-fi violence. A harder T, though, for the stuff mentioned in the paragraph with the content warning tag.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Keep them distracted."

    "Resigned sigh."

    I looped us after an enemy ship. "Did you just say the words resigned sigh?"

    Page 10. It's Spensa, talking with her robot copilot.

    Cobb folded his arms where he stood near the door. "I asked my command staff, scientists, and engineers to tackle the hyperdrive problem. How do we find a way off this planet? All the ideas I got back were wildly implausible, except one. It's only mildly implausible."

    Page 49.

(Endnote: Did I mention the |samurai fox-gerbils|?)

"Skyward" by Brandon Sanderson

Finally, actually villainous aliens! Ones that aren't a heavy-handed metaphor for colonialism! I rejoice!

The protagonist of this book somewhat reminded me of the protagonist of Apprentice, in that they're both perpetually angry teenage girls with slightly strange names. However, I liked Spensa from Skyward much better than Kerr from Apprentice, because A) Spensa is rather smarter, and B) Skyward's setting, not being a dystopia where you can get imprisoned for snapping at the wrong person, is more suited to this sort of character.

Spensa also has habit of making hilariously over-the-top threats whenever she wants to yell at someone, which I found amusing.

I really liked that this flips a lot of the standard tropes on their heads. For one thing, we have the actually villainous aliens. There are other examples, albeit ones that require major spoilers:

The |"clearing your family's name"| trope. |Spensa's dead father was branded as a coward for running away during the initial battle against the aliens, and Spensa spends much of the book trying to prove that he wasn't a coward. And she does discover evidence that he wasn't a coward, but unfortunately that comes in the form of evidence that instead of running away, he turned traitor, fired on his own allies, and had to be shot down. Later evidence proves that he did this because he was (sort of) mind-controlled by the aliens, but it's still a nice subversion.|

The |"person in authority who hates you for no reason"| trope. |There's an admiral who is seemingly dead set against letting Spensa achieve her dream of being a space fighter pilot and fighting the aliens. As it happens, this is because she's pretty sure that Spensa inherited from her dad the trait that lets you be mind-controlled by the aliens, and she really doesn't want a repeat of the "pilot goes insane and shoots down three of his comrades before being shot down himself" incident.|

Brandon Sanderson does not hesitate to |kill characters off| in this book. It pretty effectively hammers home the |"these aliens are dangerous and we're on the back foot fighting them"| aspect of the story.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence. No actual swearing, though there is repeated and vehement swearing with made-up swear words (the best kind of swear words).

4 stars.

(Endnote: Now is the time for all good men (and women) to get in a spaceship and fight some aliens.)

"Project Hail Mary" (2026)

I went to see this in the theater during... I think its last week in theaters. And I really, really liked it, despite my general dislike for seeing movies with more than like two other people around me.

Despite not being Roman Catholic, I do know what the Hail Mary is, and I also know that the title isn't referring to the prayer; it's referring to what's called a "Hail Mary pass". Basically "this probably won't work, but there's a chance that it might, and we're going to lose anyway, so we may as well try." Which pretty well summarizes the plot of this movie. As Cave Johnson from Portal 2 said, they're throwing science at the wall to see what sticks.

(If you don't know the plot, I shall direct you to my mom's review.)

I really liked that they kept the technobabble to a minimum. It helps that we don't know how the astrophage works, and we're trying to find out. But thanks to that, the movie's science seems like something we could realistically do. (Well, the Earth science, at least. How does |the alien Rocky| make |solid xenon|? I don't know, and neither does the protagonist. But |it's aliens|, so it doesn't have to make sense.)

Incidentally, the protagonist's name is a pun. His name is Dr. Ryland Grace. Now think about the text of the Catholic prayer.

I actually cried multiple times while watching this. And this is me; I don't often cry from fiction.

This is a movie, and it's rated PG-13.

5 stars. This has probably earned a spot in my top three favorite movies.

(Endnote: Spaceship!)

"The Long Earth" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

This is the only book I have ever read which includes an AI who's actually a random guy from Tibet reincarnated into a supercomputer.

It starts out as basically a thought experiment in "What if modern society suddenly gained the ability to travel through a multiverse of people-less Earths?" In other words, what would happen to society if scarcity of resources was suddenly no longer a concern?

So we're tied up in various vignettes for most of the first part of the book. The actual main plot consists of  a zeppelin, piloted by the reincarnated Tibetan supercomputer and crewed by one 28-year-old who's been hanging out in the various alternate Earths for most of his life and consequently reads more like an 18-year-old, traveling far along the strip of alternate Earths to see what's out there and look for any anomalies.

This does not really read like a Terry Pratchett book. There are definite bits of Pratchett in there (the reincarnated Tibetan supercomputer, for one), but it's not as funny as all his other books I've read, and it has a lot more swearing. I've never seen the Cardinal Swearword in a Terry Pratchett book (the closest he comes is all the "ing" jokes in The Truth), and it crops up several times here. Personally, I suspect those (and other bits that didn't seem Pratchetty) to be the work of the co-author.

There's a story in A Blink of the Screen, "The High Meggas", that was apparently the original version of The Long Earth. However, the two have several key differences, which occasionally tripped me up while I was reading this.

One minor character in this book is named Percy Blakeney. I... assume that he is not secretly the Scarlet Pimpernel. On the other hand, maybe he's just really good at hiding it.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: M for bad language (including multiple instances of the Cardinal Swearword), some sexual references, and some homosexual references. Which... {T15+ish soliloquy on that subject those bug me less as the age level of the surrounding work rises; most of my objection is when they crop up in things for people who aren't of an age to know about that yet. Homosexuality is a sin, yes, but no more so than heterosexuality outside of marriage, which we all seem to be oddly fine with. This concludes my soliloquy.}

3 stars.

(Endnote: There are five other books in this series, those being The Long War, The Long Mars, The Long Utopia, The Long Cosmos, and The Long Cat.)

"Apprentice" by Kristen Young

This book is weird. Not in necessarily a bad way, but also not really in a good way either.

It's dystopian. The premise of the book involves a government called the Love Collective (are you weirded out yet?) who claim to promote love and peace and harmony, unlike all the "Haters" who don't constantly promote love and peace and harmony. They also brainwash people, because they're dystopian.

Allow me to point something out. When you're living in a dystopia and you suddenly realize "hey, this is a dystopia" and want to get out, the expected course of action is to, y'know, not tell anyone while you try to figure out how to escape. It builds tension quite easily. Such is the plot of Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Sky Inside, the first book of Vega Jane, everybody's lives in Nazi Germany and the USSR... In fact, the one thing you don't do is go around saying seditious things to people.

Our main character, Kerr Flick (these people have the strangest names), is seemingly unable to keep her mouth shut. She goes around saying seditious things to people, which is not generally a quality you want in a dystopia. |It very nearly gets her arrested and brainwashed near the end of the book; she's only saved by Underground Resistance Members Ex Machina.| She's also constantly angry, which does not contribute to fitting in with the other dystopia people.

For whatever reason, the Love Collective has decided that normal names are for other people. We have people named things like "Buff" and "Pim" and "Freb". I think the most normal name in the entire book is "Lee".

My pseudonymous acquaintance Kittens warned me that this book was really weird. Having read it, I can now confirm that she told me so.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence.

2 stars. It's not that the book is bad, exactly, it's just really weird and I don't like the protagonist very much, and I mostly finished it because I wanted to find out what the heck was up with this universe. Which, hey, that did keep me reading, so the author must have done something right. I was originally going to give it three stars until I failed to force myself to read the second book, and realized that I actually disliked reading it. Hence, two stars.

(Endnote: No, monsieur. For loooooooove.)

"Winter" by Marissa Meyer

I haven't the faintest idea how to start this review.

We finally go to the moon, in this the final book of a series called the Lunar Chronicles. Though, granted, the "Lunar" part is actually referring to the people who live on the moon. And the people who used to live on the moon, but have moved to Earth because the queen of the moon is a tyrant.

Our Snow White character, Queen Levana's stepdaughter Princess Winter, is insane. Apparently this is what happens if Lunars go too long without using their glamour. (I don't know if I ever mentioned the glamour, actually. Lunars have this thing called glamour, which supposedly works by manipulating bioelectricity or something, and which they can use to change their appearance and/or mind-control people.)

Everyone gets their moment to shine in this book, even Prince/Emperor Kai (our Cinderella prince), who hasn't really had much to do for the entire series. If you don't count the prequel and the short story collection, this is the final book, so all the principals getting to do something cool and cap off their plot threads is only right and proper.

The Evil Queen (Queen Levana) has a very tragic backstory. It's a bit of an explanation for her evilness, but it isn't used as an excuse; whatever made her this way, she's still evil, not just misunderstood. I appreciated that, because it often seems like "tragic villain" and "actually legitimately evil villain" are mutually exclusive in a lot of writing.

We get to see the Lunar aristocracy (and Prince/Emperor Kai has to deal with them), and they are exactly as shallow and vapid and vain as one might expect.

I really liked how they did the poisoned apple in this retelling.

It's pretty clear to me that the author had the entire series basically planned out before she wrote the first one. Each book retells a different fairy tale, but bits of setup for each of them are woven throughout the previous ones.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sci-fi violence and some sexual references. Also child abuse as part of some backstories. Marissa Meyer managed to go the entire series without descending into lameness or ideology shoehorning (I'm looking at you, Shannon Messenger and Keeper of the Lost Cities), so some extra kudos to her for that.

4 stars. The whole of this series is greater than the sum of its parts, because I'd probably give the series 5 if I did overall series ratings. Maybe I should start doing that.

This has been my second of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: Winter's skin is not canonically purple. I'm pretty sure she's dark-skinned in the book.)

"Cress" by Marissa Meyer

I knew it. I knew it! The plague turns people blue!

(Back during the first book, I theorized that the plague in this series--letumosis, also called "the blue plague"--turns people blue as one of its symptoms. This I inferred from the fact that it's called "the blue plague." However, I didn't remember any actual confirmation of that until I ran into some in this book.)

Anyway. As you may be able to guess from the cover, this is a retelling of Rapunzel. But because this is a sci-fi series, Cress (our Rapunzel) is imprisoned on a satellite instead of in a tower, and her escape involves a partially botched reentry after our Gothel character tries to ruin everything. (Despite her best efforts, however, Gothel only ruins some things.)

I actually don't think I've read the original fairy tale. I'd watched Tangled (2010), but that isn't the most faithful adaptation, so I missed out on some details that I think this book did in pretty cool ways.

Case in point, in the original, the prince was blinded after getting shoved out of the tower. Which makes the fact that Carswell Thorne acquires some head-trauma-induced blindness from getting thrown around during the reentry make a lot more sense. Given that blindness from head trauma is actually a thing that can happen, that's actually rather brilliant.

Carswell "Probably Flynn Rider Guy" Thorne, by the way, is our prince for this. He first showed up in the previous book. As I suspected, the reason his cargo ship can go to space is for plot reasons, so he can rescue Cress from her satellite. Cress has an almost comically bad crush on him, because she's sixteen and he (thinks he) is Han Solo. It's honestly kind of adorable.

"Thinks he is Han Solo" is pretty much Thorne's entire character; he wants to be this cool smuggler person with a stolen spaceship, but he can't quite pull it off. Case in point, he starts the series... in jail. For stealing that spaceship. He doesn't even have a grand plan to escape, he just sort of gets dragged along in Cinder's beecause she needs his spaceship.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some sexual references and a rather disturbing telepathic torture scene.

4 stars.

This has been my first of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: I'm just glad the author picked "Cress" as the name for her Rapunzel character, and not "Spinach" or "Parsley" or something.)

"Scarlet" by Marissa Meyer

Welcome to the Future European Union, where there are still farmers. This we know because our protagonist, Scarlet Benoit, is one of them. I honestly thought this was going to be set in Future Africa, but I was wrong.

As you may be able to guess, this is a Little Red Riding Hood retelling. Complete with |genetically engineered wolf-hybrid soldiers|. Our Big Bad Wolf is named, [drumroll please]... Wolf. He and Scarlet also fall in love over the course of the book, because of course they do. (This falling-in-love also comes with a side effect of Wolf stopping being evil.)

(The |wolf hybrid people| follow those discredited theories about alpha and beta and omega wolves and pack dynamics and all that. However, putting the best possible construction on this, it's possible that they follow those because |they were engineered by the moon people, who probably haven't seen an actual wolf pack in generations and so are going off those instead of any actual science. But that theory set me wondering if they howl at the moon, and if so, whether they howl at the earth or at the floor when they're on the moon|.)

I suspect our Flynn Rider character, for the next book (which I suspect is going to be a Rapunzel retelling), has shown up in this one. He's slightly insane, or possibly just very weird, and he has a space cargo ship. Well, a space-capable cargo ship, because I don't think there are any Mars or Venus colonies, and I also don't think the evil moon people want to do much trading. So really, I don't know why his cargo ship can go to space, except for plot reasons if he turns out to be Flynn Rider.

(I know Disney made up Flynn Rider for Tangled. But they made him out of the prince who's in the original story, and it's easier to say Flynn Rider than "the prince from Rapunzel".)

Oh, and also: |prison break!| Because Cinder |got thrown into jail| at the end of the last one, at |the behest of the Evil Queen|. That's where we picked up Probably Flynn Rider Guy.

[Edited on 2/1/2025; changed cover image]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for violence and sexual references. (There might also be some bad language in there, but I don't remember any.)

4 stars.

(Endnote: For whatever reason, I seem to have been obsessed with parentheses (these things (that are on the outside of this clump of words) that I've been using a lot) today.)

"Cinder" by Marissa Meyer

Behold, it's Cinderella, except it's set in Future China and there's evil moon people. And also Cinderella is a cyborg who's also a mechanic, and there's a plague that nobody can figure out how to treat.

Thankfully, Future China doesn't seem to be Communist anymore. (The fact that apparently this universe has had two more world wars might have something to do with that.) People can own their own businesses now -- or, in the case of the main character, people's stepmoms can own their businesses.

This is a retelling of Cinderella, but it isn't purely Cinderella; I'm pretty sure the author had the entire series at least mostly conceptualized before she started writing this one. So the Rapunzel character (I think book three is about her) and the Evil Queen show up in this one. The Evil Queen is appropriately Evil.

There are four more books in this series, and I intend to continue through them. And not just because this one ended on a cliffhanger.

The pumpkin carriage equivalent in this is a really old, orange car. I don't actually know what kind of car it's supposed to be, so I imagined it as a Volkswagen Beetle.

There's like three different characters who could conceivably be the fairy godmother. Probably they all are. I was pleased that |the doctor guy turned out not to be evil|.

I really liked how they did the "Cinderella has really small feet" plot point: the main character is a cyborg, and one of her cyborg parts is a foot. Which is really small.

[Edited on 2/1/2026; changed cover image.]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some bad language, violence, and sexual references.

4 stars.

(Endnote: The plague turns people blue. Or something. It's called "the blue plague", so I can only assume part of its symptoms include turning people blue.)

"Secret Coders" series by Gene Luen Yang

The purpose of this series is, if not entirely, at least primarily to teach kids coding. Well, a bit of coding. By the end of it you can do a lot of stuff with turtles in the Logo programming language, and you learn about some of the principles of coding.

Book 1: Secret Coders

Yeah, this is one of those series where the first book has the series title.

I really like how they used actual turtle-shaped robots for the in-universe turtle graphics. ("Turtle graphics" is a term for pictures drawn by having a pointer move around the screen drawing lines, rather than by some other means.) I'm pretty sure most of the series's initial audience wouldn't get that joke (as I didn't on my first read-through), but it's funny if you know what those are.

There's a character in this, Josh, who's... how do I explain Josh? His reactions to everything are funny, partially because he's kind of clueless but takes everything seriously. Except it's seriously-for-Josh, so he does things like ask the angry janitor to please not feed him to piranhas.

(Our other two main characters are Eni, a deuteragonist, and Hopper, the protagonist. Eni's the dark-skinned one, Hopper's the girl, and Josh is the one with weird spiky hair.) 

Book 2: Paths & Portals

The title refers to Path Portals (in-universe, this means patterns on the floor where you have to program a turtle to walk around them in order to open up a secret door).

We get the first whiff of our minor antagonists and later minor allies the rugby team in this book. I'm not entirely sure why this presumably American school has a rugby team instead of, say, a football team, but it doesn't really matter.

We also get the first whiff of our first BBEG, Principal Dean. ("BBEG" is a roleplaying game term that stands for "Big Bad Evil Guy" [or, as necessary, "Big Bad Evil Girl"].) He's not actually in the "main villain" slot for very long.

Book 3: Secrets & Sequences

In which we're introduced to the Giant Flying Turtle which is actually a Giant Flying Laser Turtle. And in which Principal Dean gets kicked out of the villain chair by the actual villain of the series, Doctor One-Zero.

He actually has some interesting motivation. He used to be your bog-standard try-to-take-over-the-world supervillain with a robot army, but he's reformed. Sort of. Someone told him to use his super-genius status to make people happy, and he did. But by "make people happy" he means "give people a potion that rewires their brains so their sole desire is to see the color green."

Book 4: Robots & Repeats

This one sets up some stuff for later books, most notably the Turtle of Light (who is briefly named Josherella by Josh, before Eni names it Light-Light) and the fact that Doctor One-Zero's super potion, "Green Pop," does a supercharged Diet-Coke-and-Mentos thing when shaken.

This also reveals that Mr. Bee, the coders' mentor who I forgot to mention until now, has no nose and is from an alternate dimension. Which isn't Australia. (That bit will make more sense if you read the Favorite Lines section.)

There's a digression into ASCII encoding for a bit here, when the characters have to decode something written in ASCII.

Book 5: Potions & Parameters

This book ends with the protagonists about to use regular polygons to open a portal to another dimension, and that's rather a weird sentence.

And there are flying antigravity turtles. We use them, the new command we've learned that makes things go in circles, and the fact (established in Book 4) that Green Pop sort of explodes when shaken to ruin his stockpile truck of it. I don't think the flying antigravity turtles see much use in the final book.

Speaking of which,

Book 6: Monsters & Modules

The flying antigravity turtles do not see any use in this book.

The other dimension does get visited, though. It's Flatland (originating in this book), a two-dimensional universe from which Professor Bee hails.

I really like that this series has an in-universe reason for the random coding challenges sprinkled throughout the books. It makes it to where they have a plot purpose rather than just "kids learn to code yay!"

Overall Notes

I should probably clarify: "secret coders" does not mean people who make secret codes, it means coders (i.e. programmers) who are secret.

These books are really rather short, enough so that I had trouble making some of the books' sections longer than a sentence or two.

If you want to get someone interested in coding, these books would probably be a good vector for that.

The art is by Mike Holmes, who also did the art for the Wings of Fire graphic novel series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft E10+ for some cartoon violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Who are we?"

    "Stately Academy Rugby!"

    "And do we fear anything?"

    "Well--"

    "Usually not--"

    "but snakes--"

    Page 65, Paths & Portals. It's the rugby team.

    Mr. Bee: "Where I'm from, noses are rather rare."

    Eni: "And where is that, exactly?"

    Josh: "Australia!"

    Hopper, facepalming: "Such a dummy."

    Page 9, Robots & Repeats. Follows close upon the reveal of Mr. Bee having no nose.

    "Ducks aren't supposed to have teeth! That's cheating!"

    Page 89, Robots & Repeats. Josh, reacting to a duck-shaped robot which suddenly revealed that it has teeth.

    "You kids are taking Advanced Chemistry?"

    Page 31, Potions & Parameters. It's a random NPC doctor who doesn't believe that those kids are taking Advanced Chemistry. (My high school course in Advanced Chemistry caused me to quote this relentlessly for a few weeks.)

    "With regular polygons, we're going to open a portal to another dimension!"

    Page 79, Potions & Parameters. This one is Mr. Bee.

    "Quiet, B. Square!"

    Page 89, Monsters & Modules. It's the Circles from Flatland, who've been convinced that Doctor One-Zero is actually escaped criminal B. Square.

(Endnote: Despite what you might think, there isn't a secret seventh book named Dungeons & Dragons.)

"Steal Fire from the Gods" by Clint Hall

The Prometheus reference in the title doesn't make sense until the very end.

This is set in a world after robots acquired sentience, then acquired element magic, then acquired world domination. Over the course of the story they also acquire |blood magic| (despite not themselves having |blood|; they get it from |kidnapped babies|), then finally acquire |Satan|. I thought the robots were alien robots at first; they are not.

The plot follows a guy named Gunnar Graves, who's initially rather angstily self-centered and doesn't grow out of it for much of the book, not helped by everyone telling him he's some sort of chosen one. That usually tanks my enjoyment of a book (the "overpowered chosen one who angsts because he doesn't want to be the chosen one" trope is one of my least favorites, because it almost always feels like an emo teenager's self-insert), but in this case, it's redeemed. Mostly by the very end.

Speaking of which, ENDING SPOILERS. |The last two chapters elevate this from a kind of mediocre book to a pretty good one. The main character, Gunnar Graves, who's somehow acquired the title "The Immortal Gunnar Graves" over the course of the book... kinda dies. And by "kinda" I mean "permanently". This marks the first time I've seen any book do that; there's a couple famous series I've read that kill off their main characters, but both of them get brought back.|

|In my eyes, this makes up for the self-centeredness of the main character, as he goes from "it's all about me and my personal angst war against the robots" to sacrificing himself so everyone else can have a shot at the robots. The telepath kid NPC, who the main character had spent half the book being mad at for no good reason, proves to be quite good at his job. I like the telepath kid.|

The magic system in here isn't very explained. Possibly because the main character hates his magic lessons. 

This is, uh, sort of Christian magical realism? It's implied the magic is from God and the robots are just misusing it (this is possibly |Satan's fault|), and the book is written by a Christian. Eh, it can have the tag, it's better than A Song Called Home was.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A strong T for violence and harm to children.

4 stars. 

(Endnote: I have no idea what the promotional quote means by "compressed-epic".)

"The Walls Have Eyes" by Clare B. Dunkle

Series summary: A boy and his dog, but they live in a dystopia and the dog is a shapeshifting robot |who's also the President|.

The boy and his shapeshifting robot dog go back to the dystopia to get his parents out of it. Said parents do not react well to leaving the dystopia. They set up rules, complain about not having all the modern dystopian conveniences, and generally annoy the main character. While this was the expected outcome, it still irritates me; I'd rather the parents had been some semblance of competent.

We also learn the reason for the robot dog's abnormally high security clearance: |He's the President|. Well, actually, he has |a special chip that makes him parrot robots' individual identification codes back to them during the "ok bot who are you" phase of robot communications, so they think he is them. He was ordered by the actual President, who's also| a robot, to |get rid of the Secretary of State (the sole human left in the government; everyone else is robots) so he stops making things dystopian|.

This book also answers the question I always have with non-worldwide dystopias: what's going on with the rest of the world? In this case, the U.S. (well, former U.S.) is basically |a giant testbed for various consumer products. The popular ones get produced by the robot factories and exported to the rest of the world|.

 

My brain keeps insisting that "The Walls Have Eyes" does not naturally follow after "The Sky Inside", and the order of the titles should be reversed. Speaking of which, the title refers to a bunch of spy cameras some government robots are setting up on people's walls. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for threats of violence.

3 stars. Less cloney than the last one, but the parents bit leaves something to be desired.

Oh, and here's a picture of Mettaton NEO, Spamton NEO's counterpart from Undertale. He doesn't show up in the book, nor do I imagine anybody as him, but I had a picture of Spamton NEO last post so I decided I should complete the set.

Mettaton NEO.

(Endnote: Are you tired of using the same two senses to spy on your dystopian subjects? Walls with eyes and ears just not cutting it any more? Have we got the thing for you! Introducing the SpySniffer: the Nose Your Wall Could Smell With.)

"The Sky Inside" by Clare B. Dunkle

A boy and his (robot) dog. In a dystopia.

The boy is mad about getting a robot dog, because he thinks robot dogs are for little kids. Then a product recall notice is issued on all the kids under the age of like 10 (not for anything they have, for the kids themselves); shortly thereafter, an incredibly shady guy shows up and declares that he's taking the kids to a special school where they'll be cared for.

Plot twist: |the incredibly shady guy is doing exactly what he says he's doing. He's actually a good guy who's taking the kids to safety before the evil government can get at them and, uh, kill them or something|.

The main character |doesn't know that, however|, so he leaves the dystopia and goes on an epic quest to find the quote-unquote "school" the kids were taken to. With his shapeshifting robot dog, who also has an inexplicably high security clearance.

There are a few plot details left hanging in this one, most notably "Could we maybe do something about this dystopia hanging over our heads?" and "Where the nouns did the dog get its security clearance?" Those do get explained in the sequel, though, so the book's rating won't get tanked because it didn't explain a bunch of stuff.

(Side note: My brain refused to picture the incredibly shady guy, named "Motley" because that's what he wears, as anyone other than the boss Spamton NEO from the video game Deltarune. He looks like this.)

Spamton NEO.

There are also a lot of not-really-elaborated-upon lore details that the book mentions as almost an afterthought. Some people don't like those, but I honestly don't mind them; the main character wouldn't really think to explain them because he's lived with them his entire life, and they're mostly there for flavor. Except when they set up stuff later in the story.

The title refers to the fact that the suburbian dystopia is housed in giant domes that display an artificial sky, in order to protect the people inside from the apocalyptic outside world (which, in a plot twist so incredibly unoriginal it's no longer even a plot twist, is actually perfectly fine). When the main character leaves the giant domes and goes into the actual world, he gets a sunburn (having never been exposed to actual sunlight) and freaks out because he thinks the sky is trying to kill him.

Speaking of unoriginal plot twists, |Motley/Spamton lying about taking the kids to a school would have been one. We pretty much expect the agents of the dystopian government to be lying when they say stuff like that, so when they aren't is when we're like "Wait, what?"|

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for veiled sexual references (the main character being told that having them genetically engineered and delivered to you is not, in fact, the only way to make a baby).

3 stars. It's a good example of what it is, and what it is is a depressing corporate dystopia and somewhat of a clone of The Giver.

(Endnote: At first, I misread the author's name as "Clark." It's not.)

"Phoenix" by S. F. Said

[Unmarked spoilers in the body of this post.] 

This is a book about a boy who has the power to violently explode. He is also racist toward aliens (though he does grow out of it) and apparently destined to save the galaxy from something called "the Wolf that Eats the Stars". It could have been good science fiction.

Unfortunately, whenever the author touched science, he got it wrong.

He doesn't seem to care that the signs of the zodiac do not correspond to individual stars. I can excuse his screwing around with what dark matter does because we don't know what it actually does (if it even exists), but I can't excuse his screwing around with what demons are like, even if none actually show up in-story. (Lucifer did not, in fact, bring free will. What Lucifer brought was slavery to sin, and you should never name a good guy after him, much less insinuate even remotely that he was any semblance of a good guy.)

(I have more to say about the whole "Lucifer gave humans free will" thing, which basically boils down to "NO HE ABSOLUTELY DID NOT." If Adam and Eve hadn't had free will, he wouldn't have been able to tempt them away from God at all, even for a bit. But he did tempt them, so they must have already had free will, so he didn't give it to them. [And really, what would be the point of God telling those two "don't eat from this tree" if they weren't able to do it anyway?]. All Lucifer brought humanity was sin, which is a manifestly terrible gift. And in order to fall away, he himself had to have free will in the first place, so it's not like he created it contrary to God's plan either. QED-ish; I can put all that into formal syllogisms if you want.)

Even if it were possible to make a device that collapsed stars into black holes, that wouldn't make a black hole big enough to eat the rest of the galaxy. When the device is used, the resultant black hole would have the exact same mass as the original star (conservation of mass strikes again), and thus its gravitational attraction on everything around it would be the same. Sure, that star's planets would have a bad time with their lack of sunlight, but they won't be inexorably dragged into the new black hole.

Also, throwing energy into a black hole is the second least helpful thing you could do to try to get rid of it (second only to throwing matter into the black hole). All you'll be doing is making the problem worse.

Still on the subject of the black-hole-making-device, I find it hard to believe that turning stars into black holes is a very efficient way of generating the energy necessary to power your giant energy barrier. Dyson spheres come to mind. Matter-antimatter reactors. Normal nuclear reactors. Harnessing the tremendous energy of the vacuum, if you want to get really crazy. Some sort of made-up energy-dense alien material you have to mine. But nooooooooo, we have to be all "humans are killing the stars aaaaaa."

(On that note, could we please have a war-with-aliens story where the humans are in the right in their anti-alien war? Like The War of the Worlds, but more modern. It's the same problem as dragons [elaborated a bit more here]; "fight the thing" makes a perfectly good story, and yet authors persist in talking to the thing or feeling bad about killing the thing or discovering we're actually the bad guys for attacking the thing. Yeesh.)

Oh, and convection! All the heat and energy thrown out by the main character violently exploding has to go somewhere, especially when he's unleashing his full power right next to all his friends. I find it difficult to believe they actually survive the climax of the book.

There's probably more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. It would have worked better as space fantasy, like D&D's Spelljammer setting, where you are fully justified in just making stuff up to fit your concepts (proper science fiction should at least pay a bit more than lip service to actual science, which this doesn't.)

The prose here is interspersed with surreal, fractal-y white-on-black lineart and equally surreal depictions of ancient godlike beings. The fractal-y lineart is sort of cool; the beings, not so much.

The book's message--it essentially boils down to "interpersonal connections are what make people matter"--is also somewhat dodgy theologically, but I don't have the energy and experience to do a real analysis of that.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for swearing and nudity (the main character's power to violently explode does not spare his clothes, and |a mostly offscreen strip search also happens|.) And also the above-mentioned Lucifer thing.

1 star. Would have gotten 3, but, again, the Lucifer thing.

(Endnote: The Dark Matter Bombs from this have an effect that sounds suspiciously similar to that of the M.D. Device / Little Doctor from the Ender's Game books.)

"The Invisible Man" by H. G. Wells

Ah yes, ye (actually þe) olde 19th-century technobabble. (There was some in The Time Machine too, but that one was prescient enough to sound fairly like 21st-century technobabble.)

And about the Invisible Man himself (it's always capitalized): I'm not sure whether he's a psychopath or just evil. Or possibly both. He definitely meets the criteria for psychopathy (egotism, lack of remorse and empathy, etc).

In his early experiments, he also made an invisible cat. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster. As far as I know, it never actually shows up in the story aside from him mentioning it offhand, but it's fun to imagine its invisible presence at work in the narrative. (For instance, what if all the times where people trip over nothing--and it's implied to be the Invisible Man tripping them--are actually people tripping over the Invisible Cat?)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence.

3 stars. It's much less evolutiony than The Time Machine, but Invisibleguy annoyed me.

(Endnote: When I was younger, I got this book confused with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. They are not the same book, and that one sounds rather less interesting.)

"The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells

I don't know why, but, I thought this had Martians in it. It doesn't. I also thought it had evil humans who think the main character's time machine should have a poison gas button, which it also doesn't. I have no idea where I got the Martians from, but I did some poking around and it turns out there are evil humans with poison gas button opinions. Just not in the original.

Basically, for whatever reason, the abridged version I read when I was like seven (which absolutely terrified me, by the way) decided it was going to add a Cold War-esque dystopian future section featuring the main character (who's never named; he's only ever called the Time Traveller) getting interrogated about his time machine. Which includes the very memorable line from one of the interrogators, "Where's the poison gas button?!" (to which the Time Traveller inwardly speculates that, had the guy been building his own time machine, he would have included a poison gas button.) Why the adaptation people decided to do that I honestly can't fathom, but they did.

And it's not like the story isn't unsettling enough on its own. First there's the whole thing with the Eloi and the Morlocks: the Eloi are a race of childlike humanoids who live peacefully in the ruins of a previous society. The narrator surmises that they're |the descendants of humanity (H. G. Wells was pretty clearly an evolutionist), who've had medical and horticultural science advance so far that they've lost all need for things like "physical labor" or "intelligence". They're dubiously sentient and very afraid of the dark|. Meanwhile, the Morlocks are |cannibalistic, subterranean humanoids who seem to be using the Eloi as livestock, may or may not have some kind of fascination with machinery, and steal the time machine for a bit|. There's all kinds of disturbing subtext in there.

And after that, |the narrator goes to the really far future. As in, far enough that the sun has turned into a red giant, plant life is now mostly green slime, and the only animal life visible is giant screaming butterflies and some kind of giant spidery antenna-y crab thing. Then he goes even farther, to an era were the sole living being aside from himself (that we know about) is a bizarre football-shaped tentacle being, which seems to act as an ambush predator of a sort|.

The story is fully sufficiently unnerving and complete without having the Time Traveller drop into a Cold War analogue, and I decry whoever abridged the story and decided making up new parts was a good idea. For shame. If you're abridging a work, your job is to make what there is shorter and easier to understand, not to add new bits.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for spookiness and |cannibalism|.

3 stars. Too evolutiony for my taste.

(Endnote: I think this is the first time travel story, and yet it managed not to be all tropey. Maybe because the guy didn't go into the past?)

"The Diamond Lens" by Fitz-James O'Brien

Protag's a madman? Let me count the ways.

He's clinically obsessed with microscopes

On getting better ones bend all his hopes

He spent all his money on the blasted things.

Believes assurances a medium says--

Believes contact with Leeuwenhoek, the dope.

Was tasked to make a diamond microscope.

(With electricity, the magic rays.)

Friend's stuff he needs for his goal to succeed in,

So with a knife he murderized the man.

With microscope he found a micro-Eden

And got a crush on microscopic Eve

She dies, and he despairs, his will is beaten;

The story ends, a weird one, I believe.

Were this a game, I'd rate it E ten plus,

For seances, occult, and all that fuss.

Three stars shall I hand out, no more, no less,

In all, the story's somewhat of a mess.

(Endnote: Yes, I did just rewrite Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" about a science fiction short story from 1858 by someone no-one's ever heard of.)

"Cleopatra In Space" by Mike Maihack

This series was made known to me by one of my classmates in a literature class, who wrote one of her essays on the first book. (Yes, it's the same literature class for which I've been doing essays on things like A Tale of Two Cities and All Quiet on the Western Front. There aren't any actual rules about how highbrow your essay subjects have to be, I just feel silly doing literary analysis on unserious things.)

Anyway, on to the series! I'm not going to bother blacking out the spoilers; ye be warned. There's ending spoilers in the book 6 review, so if you don't want to know how it ends, maybe don't read that one.

Book One: Target Practice 

Fifteen-year-old Cleopatra VIII Philopator (the only Cleopatra most people ever know about) gets isekai'd into the future when she finds a mysterious tablet, leaving her friend Gozi behind. Despite this being middle-grade fiction, she isn't twelve, so I afford the author some extra points for that.

 

Could have done without the "you're in the future... but you still have to go to school" bit, but it does serve to introduce some characters who'll be important later (namely her history professor, Khensu the cat, as well as her classmates Brian, Zaid, and Akila). Also, apparently she's the prophesied "person who will save us from the evil overlord Xaius Octavian".

 

She gets sent on a training mission to retrieve a magic sword, which will be important later.

Book Two: The Thief and the Sword

Remember how I told you that magic sword would be important later? A guy steals it in this one and delivers it to Xaius Octavian. Said guy turns out to be named Antony, so we all know where this will go. Eventually. They spend a lot of time trying to kill each other first.

 

Did I mention the future world Cleopatra is now in (called the Nile Galaxy) is ruled by a pharaoh, and below her, a bunch of cats? I love the cats. They're awesome. [EDIT: Fixed a there/their/they're mistake.]

 

Also, it turns out the magic sword wasn't actually a real magic sword. Xaius Octavian breaks it in half when he finally receives it at the end of this one. (According to Wikipedia's summary it's actually also the same sword Cleopatra and Gozi found at the very beginning of book 1 right before Cleopatra gets isekai'd. I don't remember that bit at all.)

Book Three: Secret of the Time Tablets

In which Cleopatra acquires a fedora, only to lose it again before the next book starts. Also in which our heroes (Cleopatra, Zaid, Brian, Akila, and Khensu) travel to the planet Hykosis, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Antony is also here, as is a bartender named Fod Franze who Cleopatra ticks off. He'll be mildly important later.

 

This is where the permanent consequences start to set in, courtesy of Xaius Octavian finally confronting our heroes. Cleopatra develops mysterious pink energy powers. Akila loses an arm. Zaid takes a laser from Xaius Octavian (who, by the way, can shoot lasers) and sort of disintegrates.

 

Y'know how that sword would be important later? It still is. Xaius Octavian has the real one, which has kept him alive for... I think several millenia. He's also actually her friend Gozi, who's been kept alive for I think several millenia by the magic sword. And is very mad at her. And can shoot lasers.

 

Book Four: The Golden Lion

In which Antony and Cleopatra (yes, I know) traverse the ice planet of Hoth Cada'Duun to try to find the Golden Lion, which is not an actual lion. It's a sort of plasma thing, which apparently renders the area around it habitable no matter what said area used to be like. On the ice planet, it manifests as a village of people who talk in math; they're apparently total jokesters to anyone who can understand their math, which Cleopatra doesn't.

 

The Cleo-Antony romance starts happening. Also, Xaius Octavian is revealed to have a mysterious patron who manifests as a giant, vaguely humanoid patch of darkness with glowing red eyes, and Cleopatra's pink energy is revealed to be able to heal her.

 

Cleopatra also gets a pet in this one: Mihos the snow otter. He's adorable but doesn't do much other than "be adorable". He won't even be important later. Plus Akila has a robot arm that can shoot lasers; that will be important later.

Book Five: Fallen Empires

The Empire Strikes Back (Cleopatra in Space edition). Also known as, everything goes to heck.

 

The book opens with a flashback of Gozi/Octavian's tragic backstory: he got imprisoned for losing Cleopatra. Then Egypt was destroyed by space pirates. Gozi activated the self-destruct on the space pirate ships in retaliation, but survived thanks to the immortality-granting sword. He was rescued by aliens who gave him prosthetic tentacle legs; he had a normal happy life with them, but then those aliens were attacked by different space pirates, and he was the only survivor.

 

Also Administrant Khepra, one of the cat council, is secretly a traitor working for Octavian. And is Khensu's mom. Plus we learn what Xaius Octavian wanted the plasma for: he made a budget Death Star. Or several.

Book Six: Queen of the Nile

[ENDING SPOILERS IN THIS ONE]

Cleo has acquired a tan over the course of the series. Cleo has also acquired depression over the course of the series. It's understandable, given all the destruction Xaius Octavian has been wreaking and the fact that she's been stuck in the future for at least a year and a half.

 

We get some background on Octavian's mysterious patron: it's Anubis, who went mad with power/grief and tried to destroy everything. The rest of the Egyptian pantheon stopped him, sort of. It takes the combined power of Cleo's pink magic and Pharaoh Yosira's pink magic (Pharaoh Yosira is apparently a distant descendant of Cleo herself, who gets sent back to the past near the end) to get rid of him.

 

Fod Franze shows back up and is mildly important. He causes some problems and tries to get Xaius Octavian to pay him for doing so, then gets obliterated by a laser from Octavian.

 

All things considered, I think this series ended pretty well.

Overall Notes

Don't be like Kittens and start on book 2. It didn't make much sense to her.

 

Cleopatra in Space is a fun series, and not one I'd have qualms about recommending to kids. If you want a promotional quote from me, use that.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for sequences of stylized sci-fi violence. Nothing untoward. It would probably be a pretty good videogame in the right hands (something action-adventure-y).

 

4 stars. It's pretty similar to Five Worlds, though not quite on that level. The art is good, and as I've mentioned before, art quality is an important factor in my enjoyment of a graphic novel.

Favorite lines:

    Fod Franze: NO ONE SHOOTS FOD FRANZE'S HAT!!

    Cleopatra: Well, I just did so... not true?

    Akila (in background): Yeah. I'm gonna hide.

    Book 3 pages 44-45.

(Endnote: There seems to have been a short-lived TV show of this. It apparently made some pretty weird changes and looked absolutely nothing like the original, so I'm in no hurry to seek it out.)