Lowly’s Book Blog

Every now and then I come across a book that tells me I may just have read too much science fiction in my life. This one seemed silly and false and boring because I really never got caught up in the adventure.

Maxo is perfect. Not only in his own and his parents mind, but because he has been genetically engineered to be so. But one morning he wakes up and finds a wrinkle on his face. Horrors! The rest of the book is Maxo’s desperate search for a ‘cure’.

I am sorry, but the theme of genetic engineering for perfection has now officially been done to death. Several authors have covered this with a lot more sensitivity and reality. Nicky Singer may be considered one of England’s best authors for children, but I reserve the right to disagree. At least until I find something of his that I like.

Have you ever wanted to close your eyes and suddenly be somewhere else? I have. Who hasn’t?

Nicky has regularly been able to ‘disappear’ into her closet at home all her life. She has kept this ability a secret, naturally. But one day while reading aloud in English she suddenly finds herself in her closet. Public disappearance is frowned upon, and Nicky finds that she has been removed from school out to a camp in the desert and suddenly joined something called The Project. With her are several other kids with the same ability to disappear. The Project managers begin to send them out on missions, sometimes search and rescue, sometimes information gathering, and sometimes even more dangerous and illegal activities. Are these ‘talented’ kids powerless against the adults, or can they fight back?

I remember this book was a quick read. I got caught up in the storyline and a two hour train journey saw the book finished nicely before the end. I put it down with a thousand thoughts spinning in my head, but no place to write anything down, and no time. So it is going to be hard to recapture my initial response. Yes, the book has slow spots. This is after all a first time author. But I expect the readers are going to care about the characters enough to push through the slow bits in order to find out what happens.

However, I suspect there will be a real problem in marketing this to students. The print is small, and the story takes awhile to get started. A shame really, because I think it is a worthy read.

First time author Michael Parker has certainly set a high standard with this scifi adventure set in a horrific future.

Andrew is a normal kid, in a normal life. He has a job at the local convenience store, goes to school, shares secrets with friends and everything. But then he gets sucked into an alternative reality where the city has been destroyed and life is in the control of vicious gangs. Soon he discovers that what happens in the alternative world has an impact on his ‘normal’ life and friends. As a result he gets caught up in a desperate struggle to protect ‘his’ world.

As I read this book I thought it was too dark and too complex for most students. However, as I am writing this review I am amazed by the number of kids passing and commenting ‘I read that book, it was really good.’ So I hereby reconsider. There is obviously enough adventure to keep older boys involved and the strangeness of the alternative universe is not too strange.

Sometimes I think I have read too much scifi in my life. I have been a fan of the genre for many many more years than most readers of this blog have been alive. My first introduction to the genre was the classic Asimov and Clarke space adventures and readers of my regular newspaper column know that I have still read everything I can get my hands on within the genre.

This series by Reeve had caught my eye, but with the pressure on my reading time I always made excuses not to pick these thick volumes up. Then a few weeks ago I needed to find some fresh scifi to promote to junior secondary classes. Book 4 in the series had just crossed my desk so I wandered out to the shelves to find and read book one.

And what a refreshingly original idea. Imagine far in the future when it is simply too difficult to get resources to a city quickly enough to meet the needs of the huge populations. What if (the crucial scifi question) someone invented a way to put the city on huge tractor wheels, well actually more like tanks, and move the city to the supplies. That inventor suddenly change the whole culture of humanity, and large cities started moving across the world devouring smaller towns and cities on its way.

Introduce into the story a young apprentice historian and a girl out to revenge her father’s murder and the stage is set for adventure. First the young pair get unceremoniously dumped out of London and left for dead, or as good as. But they survive long enough to meet all kinds of others in the wasteland fighting for freedom and survival against the all powerful cities.

As you can tell, I enjoyed the book. I found the story slow at times, and probably 50 pages could have been edited out without damaging the storyline. But the book has a new idea that is well handled. The adventure remains consistent to the altered reality, something that many scifi books fail to do. The characterisation was OK. I found myself bored with the young historian at times and the girl was too impusive to survive long. But this is a book written for children.

However, I won’t be racing out to finish the series. Like Harry Potter, each book is thicker than the last, and with the editing faults, I simply don’t have the time to spend.

When I catalogued this series earlier in the year, the blurbs caught my eye. I remember thinking that I would love to read them when I had the time. And then last weekend I got the chance to meet Scott Westerfeld! Naturally, I would have to read one of his books before then so I had some frame of reference when listening to him speak.

The Secret Hour is book one of a trilogy with a very X-files theme. According to the book the whole world pauses every night at midnight for exactly 1 hour. During that hour all the ancient evil spirits are free to wander and interact with the world, but at 12.01 (one hour later) they all disappear back into the restrictions that science and education have built around them.

And if a human child is born exactly at midnight, as they reach adolescence, they too can see this secret hour. They can move around as normal and interact with the world and everything in it, including the darkling spirits. In this book a group of teenagers has been gathered by cosmic influences in a small town in Oklahoma. Each of them has a special ability that will help them against the darklings. As they gather together and learn to work together they develop a true strength to fight against the evil that only they can see.

Westerfeld was inspired to develop these characters after the Columbine shootings. Apparently in the States teenagers who dressed in dark clothes, and avoided the light were seen as homicidal psychopaths after the shootings. Westerfeld has drawn his midnighters in the same gothic style, claiming that bright light can hurt, dark clothes helps them remain anonymous etc. Except his midnighters fight evil, not cause it.

I loved the book. In fact I have cleared space in my reading program to get through the other two in the series over the next couple of months. I’ll keep you posted.

And this comment will clearly demonstrate how far behind my reading list is! I just purchased volume 5 of this series last week, and I am only now getting around to commenting about book 4.

I have been reading James Moloney for years. His early books focussed on adolescent relationships and the importance of families. But a couple years ago he wrote his first fantasy novel, The Book of Lies, and I loved it.

Soon after The Book of Lies, Moloney commenced a scifi adventure series for upper primary/lower secondary, The Doomsday Rats. Each book is short, full of excitement, complete within itself, but leaves you wanting the next installment now!

As with many scifi novels, a summary sounds trite and unappealing, but here goes anyway. The idea of the series is that an evil genius has drugged the adult population and manipulated them to his will. This tyrant has an army of genetically modified beasts who act as enforcers. However, the good guys are a group of kids who live underground in the sewers, fighting evil whenever and wherever they can. As the children grow, they can no longer fit into the sewers and must take their chances above ground.

In this installment of the story, some of the children discover there is an antidote to the drug in a hidden valley in the mountains. So they leave the security of the sewers and head for the hills. Along the way they encounter some adults who also exist outside Malig Tumora’s control. And naturally they are followed to the secret hiding place.

To say any more would spoil the story, so find the series for yourself and enjoy them all.

She has done it again! Somehow Claire Carmichael can take current technology trends and project slightly into the future and come up with a great adventure story that doesn’t sound trite, or date too quickly. Most SciFi writers look at the distant future, it is much harder to look just around the corner.

I first encountered this style of writing from her with her Virtual Realities series. Remember when the media was all about how computer games were going to become all encompassing environments. Well in this series of books Carmichael suggests that a virtual reality monster becomes able to enter our reality and creats havoc.

In Ads R Us, Carmichael looks at current communications technologies. She proposes that in a few years phones, computers, TVs and all the other individual technologies will amalgamate into one general personal communicator. And to keep the service affordable to everyone, the communications are mostly continuous adverts. Naturally the advertisors will want maximum exposure, so the personal communicator can never be turned off.

Into this environment, drop a young man who has been raised in a Ludite farming community. Suddenly everyone sees him as a perfect test case to assess the effectiveness of the advertising. And so begins the adventure…

I see this book as a good introduction to SciFi for young readers who have not encountered the genre before. As with Carmichael’s other books, the environment is close enough to our own so that stark realists (and many young readers are) won’t be put off by the strangeness. However, some readers my find that the book takes too long to get to the action. There is a lot of scene setting, be warned.