The Saturday Morning Post (No. 51)

 

This week I have a novella that I picked up based on its review  on Berthold Gambrel's blog, A Ruined Chapel by Moonlight, which you can find here. I suggest you read his review before mine, as it will talk more about the story than I will.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Junkyard A Fractured Stars Novella by Lindsay Buroker  C

This was a free novella serving as an intro to her Fractured Stars universe which currently seems to be only a single book, Fractured Stars. Buroker is one of the best selling SF author/publishers in the Kindle store, with her author page listing 168 titles including box sets and foreign language books. She has been writing and publishing since 2010. She released this title in 2019 and since then it has earned 1,755 ratings/reviews with a 4.2 average. She has tens of thousands of loyal readers, and as far as I could see, all of her books are rated 4 stars plus. I have two other books of hers in my library that I picked up over the years, no doubt for free. I remember reading one of them, back in 2015-16 but I'm not sure I finished it. I think that you are either going to have to go with the opinion of her Kindle readers, or me, because we do not agree.

I don't know if it is an ongoing project, or a dead end. The premise is that a detective of sorts, with a purple spaceship, and an android companion are hired to find two hundred tons of missing maple syrup valued four millions in the galactic currency from a warehouse with stacks of "drums" filled with maple syrup. The ship captain/detective, McCall Richter, is hired to track down the theft in the belief that, due to a closure of the space port, the syrup has not yet been taken off the moon the story is set on. 

Eagle eyes readers will have already noted that I rated this story a "C" i.e. average. As a lifetime C student myself, I can attest to the fact that a C really means disappointing. Not as alarmingly disappointing as a D or and F, but disappointing, nevertheless. It is in that sense that I give my grade of C to this story. 

Now, as readers of this series know, if I like a book I usually don't have much to say about it except how much I liked it, and maybe why. But if I don't, I have a lot. So buckle in.

The first problem with this story is the writing. In both of the stories of hers that I have read, I found the writing so flat - without any passion in it at all. This is, of course, just my personal opinion, but I find no evidence of any style or flare in her writing. It has that the old first grade reader quality , i.e. "Run, Zip Run! See Zip run." No wit. No charm. "Just the facts, ma'am," plainness. Serviceable is the kindest thing I can say about her prose. She sets out a story. Period. 

She gives her characters certain characteristics. McCall is autistic and doesn't like dealing with people if she can help it. The android, Scipio, is Murderbot dialed down to 1. No, make that .5. He's sort of clueless and she makes a few lame jokes and moans about having to meet and deal with clients. All of which allows the title dog, Junkyard, to steal the show just by being a dumb, loyal dog.

As for the mystery, they walk around, talk to some of the employees, have a few red herring tossed in to make it a mystery, and save the dog trapped in the junkyard. The crime, who does it, and what little we are told of how it is done, defies belief. It is utterly, and unredeemable stupid and impossible. It isn't even up to a middle grade mystery standards. The Hardy Boys wouldn't have wanted to be found dead in a ditch with it. Maybe it would work for a Captain Underpants book. Maybe. There is no way anyone who thinks about the mystery could imagine it being done, much less how it was done. It defies belief.

Now I suppose that you're really not meant to think about this story a moment after you finish reading it. It's just passing the time - apparently quite satisfactory for most of her readers - and you move on. I pretty much gave it a C on that basis. But since I had to write this review for it, I had to think about it more, and the more I thought about the story, the mystery and its by-the-formbook  concluding "action" ending, the more angry I became that an author would crank out a story like this and inflict it upon her readers. Every element of the story was written for the convenience of the author with plot holes your could pilot your spaceship through - no real thought required, just "what can I do next to fill out the word count, but not a word more - oh, sure, why not?" The SF elements were all off the shelf stuff - stage settings and no more. The crime and solution wasn't possible or was utterly stupid. Lazy, lazy, lazy. So if you should happen to give this story any thought at all like I did, I'd actually score this story a D.  I would've changed it above, but I liked my line about being a lifetime C student, so I didn't. But that's the only reason I didn't.

People complain about the quality of author/published books, but when I read SF like this, and see the ratings, I have to say that it's not the books, but the readers. I read and probably enjoyed stuff like this 60 years ago in my youth, so I can't throw too large of rocks. But still... Give'em what they want, I guess.

You know, if I have failed to convince you to pick up this free book, and you're curious to know how the heist plan worked, a spoiler outline of the plan is below these books.

"Here's my plan." says the mastermind, the one employee who knows enough about the computer security system to disable it, as he talks to himself in the mirror. "I'm going to steal 200 tons of maple syrup from the drums stored in the warehouse.  

(Which from the description of drums being piled in stacks around the warehouse, I take them to be the standard 55 gallon drum. Maple syrup weighs 11 lbs per gallon, so that the contents of a drum of maple syrup weighs 605 lbs.) ... So that he would need to drain about 660 drums of maple syrup. (2,000 tons = 400,000 lbs divided by 605lbs per drum = 660 drums.) 

"To cover up my theft for a little longer, I'll refill all 660 drums with water....Heh, Heh Heh...

"To steal the syrup I'll make a hole in the wall of the warehouse and run a hose through it and then I'll make a hole in the fence of the junkyard next door. Since the junkyard owner is off planet,  no one ever works in the junk yard, of course, so no problem. Then all I will need to do is to siphon or pump the maple syrup from 660 drums into...Wait for this, it is the genius part - into big vats. I'm going have to buy them, as well as hire some androids to secretly get into the junkyard to excavate the big holes in the ground - at night-  to hide these vats, move the dirt somewhere, and then hire a helicopter to pick drop these big vats and secretly drop them into the holes I've had dug - at night. Once I have them in the big holes, then all I have to do is pump the syrup into them, one drum at a time, and when they are filled, I'll hide the them from sight by covering them with a canvas tarp. And get this, I'll make sure the tarp doesn't blow away by holding its edges down with heavy objects from all the piles of junk around this hole in the ground. Foolproof, Huh?' All I need to do for my plan to work is find and buy vats, hire some android criminals to dig the holes, fly the vats into position, and have someone on the other end of the hose when I'm pumping syrup. Once I've emptied 660 drums, I'll just sit tight until I can safely move these vats, with the help of those androids to the local maple syrup black market and make a mint. What can go wrong? All I need now is a ton of money that I don't have and some hired androids. Or a very lazy writer."

In this case, at least, you get what you pay for.