OTW Challenge: SHADES OF DARK, by Linnea Sinclair

Read in Kindle

This is my first review of a DNF’d book

Published: 2008

Genre: Space opera

My Rating: DNF

Part of a series: Dock Five #2

Have I ever said that I have to read the books until the very end? Even if I don’t like it? Even if it’s boring? Well, I couldn’t do that with this book.

A few months ago I started reading this book, but I understood nothing and left it after the first chapter.

And then, I had nothing Sci-Fi to read in October to be published at the beginning of November. And I said, let’s try this one again! But as I couldn’t understand what was going on in the book, I read other reviews. That’s the way I discovered that this is the second book in a series. The first one was Gabriel's Ghost (2005) and that’s the book in which Captain Chasidah "Chaz" Bergren and Gabriel Ross Sullivan met, fall in love and she stops being the pride of the Sixth Fleet after her court-martial and became a fugitive.

So in the beginning of this book they are already a couple. Sully is secretly a Kyi-Ragkiril, humanoid with special mental abilities, a telepath. They are runaways in search of a gen lab breeding jukors, genetically engineered monsters

Then they discover that her brother, who had helped them in the first book, is now in jail for that, suspect of treason. And on one side she wants to rescue him because this poor guy is her brother, and on the other side, he knows that Sully is a Kyi-Ragkiril, and if the fleet discovers that or it’s public, Sully’s life will be endangered.

OK the thing is - I was interested neither in the history, nor in the characters. Yes, they had great sex for four hours and all that, but it wasn’t particularly steamy. It had two things I usually dislike – paranormal elements and first-person narrative. So, when I got to the point 20 % I said ‘enough’. There are more things I want to read.

It is not the first time I leave a book unread. It happens from time to time. Many times I trust that in the future I will take up the story. But this is the first time I publish a review about a book I haven’t finished. But it was too late to look for a different Sci-Fi romance for the OTW Challenge this month. I was struggling with this book for weeks until I surrender.

Anyway, many people liked this book. In All About Romance they published a DIK A- review. It won the RT Reviewers Choice Award in the FuturisticRomance Category, and the RWA PRISM Award in the Futuristic Category. It deserved a Starred Review in Publishers Weekly and then Romance Readers at Heart chose it as one of their Top Picks of 2008. So perhaps the problem is not in the book but in me.

OTW Challenge: UNCHARTED TERRITORY, by Connie Willis

Interesting. It had the core of a romance story but it wasn’t developed.

FictionDB

Published: 1994

Genre: Science Fiction

My Rating: 2 stars

So this challenge needs a romance story set in another planet. So, after some time unlucky with the things I choose I said with this one I cannot be wrong. If it’s titled ‘Uncharted territory’ for sure it will not be set on planet Earth.

But what about the second point? Is this a romance novel? No. It has a love story, you see it, but so underdeveloped that the book ends even before they have even said ‘I like you’. You just have to imagine everything.

It’s a short story, 160 pages. Findriddy and Carson are planetary surveyors that are mapping the planet Boohte. With them works a helicopter pilot called C. J., who looks to be permanently horny and Bult, a local alien. They have a visitor, Evelyn, a scientist who studies the mating customs of different species.

The story is told in first person narrative by Fin, a character you are not sure if it’s female or male for a while.

As the surveyors of new planets have got to be politically correct, nearly anything Fin and Carson do makes Bult give them penalties. They have to respect the flora and fauna, and the soil –they cannot leave footprints- and the water –the surface cannot be rippled-, respect the locals and don’t make Terracentric assumptions and comments etc. This is very funny the first time you read it. All that part about the red-tape involved in planetary exploration is satirical and very recognizable for anyone who has to work with bureaucrats.  But then you keep on reading and the fines keep on coming and in the end is quite irritating, as you see that it is not a very efficient way of investigating anything.

The same happens with Evelyn and his description of different mating customs. Some of them were known to me as Ethology is something I’ve read about. But talking about it all the time? It became boring in the end. And when they arrive to the Homo sapiens, the way the courtship rituals are described sounded quite sexist.

Part of the humour in this story comes from trying to name things. They have to use the name the locals give to things, animals, plants or landforms. But then, if there’s none, you have to name it but not from a Terracentric point of view. Quite a tricky task.

The world building is great, I have to recognize that. And also that there was a very powerful love story here that comes out of the blue but then you see that’s been there all the time. Only, it’s so underdeveloped that made me want to cry. There’s only the emotional and sexual tension and nothing else. As if you were reading the first two chapters of a romance novel when you –the reader- know they like each other, but they don’t. So in the end, it was a very frustrating reading.

This is the first Connie Willis book I read. I guess I have to try ‘Doomsday Book’ and ‘To Say Nothing of the Dog’ to know her at her best.

Why did I think this was a science-fiction romance novel? Well, because I read this review in All About Romance that gave it a DIK A- grade.

OTW Challenge: THE SILVER METAL LOVER, by Tanith Lee

Read in Kindle

A perfect YA novel avant la lettre. Not my thing.

Published: 1981

Genre: Science Fiction / Futuristic

My Rating: 2 stars

Part of a series: The S.I.L.V.E.R. Series #1

This is a science fiction book, but –again-, I haven’t chosen a book set ‘out of this world’. I have to look more carefully in the next months to find something really Out of This World.

And there’s something worse –this is not even a romance novel.

This is a book that was written in the eighties and it shows. It can be set in a future when an Asteroid has killed one third of the people on Earth, but still, I was seeing a 1980s teenager, dense make-up and shoulder pads included.

It’s told in a first person narrative, something I only find interesting if the character who is telling the story is interesting or funny or clever. But that doesn’t happen here. Jane is 16 years old! I’m not interested in what an imaginary person of that age wants to tell me. No, really. Hearing about her insecurities was very boring, and her feelings about her friends or what she wants to tell her mother but is afraid to do so, or the make-up or the clothes.

This girl is very rich. She lives in a wonderful house in the clouds (literally), with her very brainy and successful mother who has no time for her. Jane feels quite lonely. One day, she finds a new kind of robot on the street. Very human, with a silvery skin, long auburn hair and it plays the guitar and sings wonderfully. She falls in love.

And that’s a problem, as she is a virgin and it’s not very sensible to have her first sexual experience with a robot. She wants to tell her mother, but she can’t. And she wants to acquire it, but she hasn’t got the money and then it’s not so easy because she’s a minor and it looks like the robot has problems. And then she’s all the time talking to herself and crying. Yes, nearly on every page there it is –Jane crying, and all the mascara running away. Please, this is the future! Everybody expects make-up would be perfect in the future.

Water-proof at least.

I was around 20% when I said: ‘I quit’. Being OC as I am that didn’t mean a strict DNF. I read the rest of the book very quickly, one line here, another there, particularly the dialogues, so I get a general idea of how the rest of the story goes.

And it goes the way the Wikipedia describes it:

[Jane] gives up everything she has known for him, and discovers herself. Silver becomes more and more "human" in loving her—a clever illusion created by his programming. Or is it? This unstable society can't afford any evidence that some robots might be indistinguishable from humans. Tragedy is inevitable.

And that’s the worst thing. This is not a romance novel. There is no happy ending as I understand it – the lovers together and alive. I can *spoil* that, I guess, as this book was published for the first time more than thirty years ago.

So why did this book end in my list of romance novels? Well, it got a DIK A review in All About Romance, and the webpage RomanceNovels.Me chose it as one of their ‘thousand best romance novels? (nr. 476) so I got this idea that it was a romance novel.

In the end it sounded like the fantasy of a teenager, how she rejects her life as she knows it in order to mature. She sacrifices nearly everything for the love of the ‘boy’ she loves. And everybody has great sex, too. A bildungsroman they call it, I think.

If you like YA or NA, this could be a good book for you. Those are not my favourite genres, so I did not connect with this story.

Moreover, the Sci-Fi part wasn’t believable for me. I couldn’t see any world-building worth its name. As usual, nobody guessed that something like mobile phones would appear in the future, they still use phone booths. While I was reading, in my mind everybody was dressed as Madonna in those times when she still sang ‘Like a virgin’ in a believable way. This book could be called ‘Desperately Seeking S.I.L.V.E.R.’

No, really. I was there, in the 1980s. I have pictures to prove it. The music was great but although my looks were not as awful as those of some of my friends, the general aesthetics of the time make my teeth grind.

This was going to be a 1-star review, but two things saved it. First, Jane’s ring of ‘friends that are not friends’ -Clovis, Egyptia, Jason and Medea. Sometimes they look and behave like good friends. Other times they don’t. But each of them is clearly developed and a real character.

And then there he is –Clovis, who is gay and is wonderfully portrayed for a book written in 1981. Gay characters were so rare in 1980s commercial fiction! And when they appeared they were very stereotypical, and usually crazy, or depressed, or something awkward and problematic. But here he is an important character, with good things and bad things, just like everybody else. The only character from this book that will stay in my mind.

I didn’t hate this book, it just bored me.

If you want to read the opinions of some people who enjoyed this book, here is a review written by Victoria Strauss in 1999.

From that year is also the DIK A review published by Jennifer Keirans in All About Romance. BTW, Clovis was also her favourite character in this book.

Kristen (Fantasy Cafe) gave this book a 7/10 in 2009.

And last but not least, in 2015, João Eira (Fantasy Literature) wrote a 5-stars review.  

All of them can give you a different idea of this classic book.

OTW Challenge: DRIVEN, by Eve Kenin / Eve Silver

A story of revenge set in a very cold future

FDB

Published: 2007

Genre: Science Fiction / Futuristic

My Rating: 3 stars

Part of a series: Northern Waste #1

This is a science fiction book, but for the second time, I haven’t chosen for this challenge a book set ‘out of this world’.

This story is set on planet Earth, but in the future, in the end of the 21^st century. There was a ‘Noble War’, a couple of them as a matter of fact:

‘As if there was anything noble about a nuclear holocaust that led to tectonic plate shifts, floods, earthquakes, and the decimation of the entire world’.

There’s a very cold part in the Northern hemisphere, the ‘harsh Northern Waste’ mentioned in the blurb. Vast tundra, lots of ice, coldness, a snowy landscape... while I was reading it, it was in the middle of a heat wave in July 2016, and so it was very refreshing.

The main character, Raina, is a truck driver (an ice trucker) who has made a legend of herself as a woman who can defend herself very well in a rather hostile world. She wants to participate in a race towards Gladow Station, a Northern location, where she is supposed to take grain for the settlers, in order to win the prize which is –a lot of money. Tons of money. Enough money to buy a future for herself -and a sister that she doesn’t even know- in warmer latitudes.

But she needs a license, a trucking pass, and she contacts somebody her late father trusted, a man named Wizard. She does not know him yet. He is, of course, the ‘sexy stranger’ of the story.

He was a soldier for the government. He is a quiet man, who has nearly suppressed all emotion. A very cold person. From the beginning you ask yourself if this is a human being or a robot.

‘Wizard, who was even more of an emotional wasteland than she was.’

In any case, he’s a mercenary and has his own reasons to do everything, even to be there in contact with Raina, whose life is an open book for him –only he does not tell her anything. And she knows next to nothing about him. That bunch of secrets could destroy both of them. But at the same time, the author gives you hints that allow you to anticipate where the book is going. And it’s a nasty place.

Both are quite competent in the art of fighting and even killing, if it comes to that. She needs the money, and he has his plans to revenge. Raina could be part of it, and she is totally unaware of it. There’s a sexual tension rising between them. Certainly he is not cold in bed –or in any other place she’s with Raina. They lust after each other. And having a relationship, even if they were able to restrict it to the physical level, is the worst thing any of them could do.

The bad guy is a sadist who wants Wizard dead and Raina alive, only to kill her himself, slowly and painfully. Raina has survived until this point by being very tough, a real kick-ass and knowing when to fight and when to flight. So being together is an added risk.

At the beginning of the story I was a little bit bored, because it was all about trucks, and the road and those are things that do not interest me. Or maybe it’s just that road stories have to develop in a slow rhythm. But then the plot was more complicated when you realised that there more things in this game than a race. The world building was competent and believable. It’s a Post Apocalyptic environment where everybody fights everybody else and wants to survive, with truckers, ice pirates, rebels.... If you see some place this book compared to Mad Max, yes, it’s more or less that wild-on-the-road story, only in a frozen desert instead of a sandy one.

In the end, it was a very fast reading, with fights, and sex, and more things going on.

I enjoyed it, although I felt a little detached from the story, as if I was seeing it from behind a glass. There was also this anguish, this sensation that something horrible was going to happen and you didn’t want to see it. Like an accident in slow motion. The sex scenes are very sensual and well-written. But it was the same -I didn’t feel the emotional connection there. As if those very tough characters were seeing their own feelings through a microscope. I imagined any of them being surprised –and not very happy- when they discovered what love is and what means and how they feel.

It can be that both of them have these emotional issues.

A hollow laugh escaped her. “We make a fine pair. A man who has a computer chip instead of a heart, and a woman whose emotions were beaten out of her.”

On the other hand, I just loved it when Wizard discovers that his happiness depends on her,

But Raina had made clear that her happiness no longer included association with him. So he would give her that because... because... she mattered to him in a way that his own happiness did not.

I found it a perfect thought. He is not intimidating; he respects her feelings and desires. Therefore, it’s Raina who makes the decisions and he does not interfere. As simple as that – and I love it.

This book won the 2007 All About Romance Reader Award in the Best Cabin/Road Romance and also the 2007 RT Reviewers Choice Award as a Futuristic Romance.

You can see this novel either with Eve Silver or Eve Kenin on the front page, depending of the edition.