Zero Hour

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1947.

Gutenberg Link

Zero Hour

SPOILERS BELOW

“Zero Hour” sees aliens invade Earth by convincing children to help them, framing it as a game called Invasion. Though adults all over the world see their children exhibiting bizarre behavior, and any child asked freely explains the whole plot, they still just dismiss it as youthful imagination until it’s too late.

So, with a few well-written exceptions, I dislike child characters. This is not one of the exceptions. The adults are no better, all being infuriatingly obtuse. Add to that a non-ending that just cuts off once the invasion begins, and there was nothing about this story to amuse me.

Final Rating: 1/5

Side Effects

My mood is down and my tongue’s getting rough. It must be side effects. I’m taking pills and I drink like a lush. It must be side effects Yeah, I’m afraid of my shadow, what’s going on? Can’t get nothing done, who knew? Let’s pay the price for what we put in our veins with Side Effects, by Ted Anderson and Tara O’Connor.

Synopsis:

It’s Hannah’s first year away at college – the first time she’s been away from home, without a support network. Within the first month, the combination of classes and socializing and adjusting to college life sends her into a full-on breakdown. Fortunately, her roommate finds her, Hannah goes to campus mental health, and they prescribe her therapy and meds ― though with every new medication, you’ve got to watch out for unexpected side effects.

Every new medication Hannah tries comes with a new power and side effect. One makes her super-tough, and also makes her gain thirty pounds. Another gives her telepathy, while also completely screwing up her sleep schedule. Yet another gives her super-strength, as well as terrible constipation.

Nothing balances, but the powers are handy; Hannah even manages to save a few of her friends from mortal peril, or at least minor annoyances. And with the growing confidence from her powers and her therapy, Hannah even manages to ask out the cute girl she’s been eyeing!

Hannah doesn’t want to be a hero – she just wants to be well. But what does “well” even look like? What does it mean to be “healthy,” mentally speaking? How do you fix your brain when you’re living inside it? And can you really help other people if you can’t even help yourself?

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Side Effects is the story of Hannah, a college freshman struggling with anxiety and depression. She gets prescribed medications, which in additional to the usual unpleasant side-effects also give her superpowers. The story is about Hannah struggling to adjust to the medications while pursuing a romance with a fellow student, Iz.

This was a decent story, if a bit odd in execution. Take the superpowers, for instance: they didn’t really factor into the plot of the story, in that there was no explanation for why Hannah got them and she didn’t use them to become a superhero or anything, so they functioned as more of a metaphor for medication side effects than anything – except Hannah also had regular side effects, so you get the sense the superpower aspect could have been cut entirely without affecting the story too much. Feels like bit of a wasted opportunity, to introduce this element and then do almost nothing with it. There was also a bit of storytelling clash between what was being told and what was being shown – when on the medication that caused disassociation and astral projection, Hannah was repeatedly shown to be zoning out and falling asleep during class, so I was a little surprised when the story then reported that her grades were greatly improved since she started taking it: that certainly isn’t the impression I was getting from what was shown on-panel.

Well, the character work was good: Hannah’s anxiety over managing her medication and attempts at romance with Iz were both handled well. As such, I think I can call this graphic novel fine overall. I just wish it had made more use of its premise.

Final Rating: 3/5

Rocket Summer

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Rocket Summer” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1947.

Gutenberg Link

Rocket Summer

SPOILERS BELOW

“Rocket Summer” is about President Stanley, who has developed the first rocket to take Man to the moon. However, he changes his mind at the last minute – science has gone too far, Man is not yet ready, the excessively fast pace of technological development is contributing to spiritual emptiness, all the usual Luddite excuses for trying to drag us back into the Dark Ages. When public opinion prevents him from cancelling the launch outright, he arranges to fake the crew catching a horrible alien disease in space in order to dissuade further exploration. What an asshole.

So yeah, as you may have gathered, I wasn’t a fan of this one. As a big believer in improving lives through technological progress, I find its regressive message hideously unpleasant. Go ahead, reject scientific advancement; but don’t let me catch you coming crawling back for antibiotics when you catch cholera from your natural, untreated water, hypocrite.

Final Rating: 1/5

Waking Fire #1: Waking Fire

Another head hangs lowly, child is slowly taken, and the violence caused such silence. Who are we mistaken? Let’s raise the dead with Waking Fire, by Jean Louise.

Synopsis:

This incendiary YA fantasy debut follows a girl who will stop at nothing to save her village after it’s discovered by a dangerous warlord and his army of undead monsters.

Naira Khoum has only known life in Lagusa, a quiet village at the desert’s end. But to the rest of the world, Lagusa is a myth, its location shrouded in secrecy. While war rages to the north led by power-hungry Sothpike and his army of undead monsters called Dambi, Naira’s people live in peace.

Until the impossible happens—Lagusa is attacked by a Mistress sent to do Sothpike’s bidding with a hoard of Dambi under her control. The Mistress is looking for something, and she’s willing to let her Dambi destroy Lagusa to get it.

Desperate to protect her home, Naira convinces her twin brother Nez and handsome refugee Kal to join the newly formed resistance with her. Together, they’ll have to figure out what the Mistress wants—before there’s nothing left of Lagusa to save.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Waking Fire is about Naira, a girl who lives in the remote desert village of Lagusa. An evil necromancer named Sothpike is conquering the continent with armies of undead monsters called Vra Gool Dambi, but her village has thus far escaped his attention. That changes when a Mistress in service to Sothpike comes searching for the lost heir to the throne of the Ur Atum Asim, smuggled out of the capital as a baby and hidden amongst the refugees headed to Lagusa. As Naira is the protagonist, no points for guessing she turns out to be the secret heir.

So, this book had some good fight scenes; I generally liked the battles against the Vra Gool Dambi. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all I liked about it. None of the characters particularly impressed me; and as for the plot, it leaned far too heavily on that laziest of genre conventions: prophecy. Why did Sothpike overthrow the Ur Atum Asim? He was following a prophecy. Why did the Hands of God, sworn to defend the Ur Atum Asim, abandon her in her time of greatest need? They were following a prophecy. Why, 16 years later, has Sothpike launched a search for the Ur Atum Asim’s heir? Prophecy. Why have the Hands of God chosen this moment to return from their self-imposed exile? Prophecy. And the cliffhanger that the book ends on is Naira going to seek out the Prophet Gamikal so he can give her some more prophecy. It seems like no one in this setting so much as picks their nose unless there’s a prophecy foretelling that it shall come to pass. I hate when prophecy is used like this, as a substitute for character motivation or logical plot progression.

I admit that I am almost tempted to check out the sequel, though not for any good reason – mainly it’s because Naira’s father hasn’t been revealed, and I want to know if the story will go full Star Wars and have it somehow turn out to be Sothpike. The whole thing about a secret heir being hidden in a desert, having their parents killed by servants of an evil emperor, being recruited by the remnants of a mystic order that was scattered when the emperor rose to power… t just gives off a certain vibe, you know? But no, I can’t really say I enjoyed this book as a story.

Waking Fire didn’t work for me.

Final Rating: 2/5

The Creatures That Time Forgot

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “The Creatures That Time Forgot” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1946.

Gutenberg Link

The Creatures That Time Forgot

SPOILERS BELOW

“The Creatures That Time Forgot” sees ships crash on a planet where intense solar radiation accelerates the human lifespan so that the period from birth to death of old age is just eight days (with a handwave of racial memory allowing mental development appropriate to apparent age despite no time to learn normally). The protagonist, Sim, plans on using his eight days to reach an intact ship so that he can escape the world and live a long life. However, though many have attempted this, none have yet succeeded, for the sun’s intense heat kills anyone caught outside during the day and the planet’s rapid rotation means night isn’t long enough to make it to the ship.

If you ignore the sheer biological impossibility of it all, this is actually a decent story of a character struggling to survive against harsh conditions in a desperate race against time. Once I got past the racial memory mumbo-jumbo, it was actually pretty enjoyable.

Final Rating: 3/5

The Terrifying Tales of Vivian Vance

You hear the beating of your heart. You know the screaming’s gonna start. Here comes the really scary part. ‘Cause it’s terror time again. They’ve got you running through the night. It’s terror time again. Oh, you just might die of fright. It’s a terrifying time. Let’s get frightened by The Terrifying Tales of Vivian Vance, by Joshua Ulrich.

Synopsis:

Veronica Mars by way of Lovecraft in this thrilling lightly gothic YA graphic novel, for those who love a dash of campy and a dollop of darkness.

It’s just a bedtime story….right?

Parents in Pensmouth tell their children a devious bedtime tale—their beloved town is riddled with flesh-takers, monsters who snatch unruly kids off the street if they don’t go to sleep on time.

Vivian Vance, amateur teen detective, heard that story as a kid and never believed it.

When Vivian takes on a case in the Pillars, a downtrodden and long-ignored community beneath the highway, she stumbles on a dark secret about her town’s history and finds herself face-to-face with those horrifying monsters. Saved from certain death by a group of kids from the Pillars, Vivian decides her next job will be exposing the flesh-takers to the world–at any cost.

But her biggest opportunity quickly becomes her worst nightmare. Her pride puts Pensmouth and her new-found friends in mortal danger. In order to right her mistakes, she must stand up to the creatures that offer all her heart desires before she loses the only people left who matters.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Vivian Vance wants to become a private detective someday; and though still in high school, she’s already honing her skills by taking cases from other students. Though she’s heard the urban legend that their town is home to monsters called flesh-takers, which snatch kids off the street at night and devour them, she’s never believed – until one night when she’s out on a job and she happens to see one in action. Upon realizing the deadly reality of the danger, she teams up with three other kids to find the eldritch Source beneath the city from which the flesh-takers draw their power and put an end to them once and for all.

This graphic novel was something of a mixed bag. On the positive side, I really liked Vivian as a main character – her confidence, daring, and bold go-getter attitude made her a pleasure to follow. The Source was awesomely creepy, and the climactic battle between Vivian and the flesh-takers was excellently executed. So the story definitely had those things going for it. On the negative side, however, were a number of aspects to the story that I disliked. There’s the obligatory shoehorned romance subplot, of course, which was completely unnecessary and didn’t add anything to the plot; but it was a relatively minor plot thread, not intrusive enough to overwhelm the main plot the way the very worst unnecessary romances do, so I could easily overlook it if it was the only problem. However, the story also indulges in some hoary old horror cliches that I strongly dislike. There’s the “all the evidence was conveniently destroyed and no one will ever believe us” trope, which, ugh – Vivian saved the city, let the girl have some credit for that accomplishment. And then there’s the “the evil is vanquished and the day is saved – OR IS IT!?!?” teaser at the end implying the Source is still a threat to the city. C’mon, is a satisfactory resolution to the story too much to ask for? Don’t sequel-bait unless you actually intend to write a sequel.

Due to its mixture of elements I enjoyed and ones I did not, I think The Terrifying Tales of Vivian Vance is around average.

Final Rating: 3/5

Defense Mech

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Defense Mech” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1946.

Gutenberg Link

Defense Mech

SPOILERS BELOW

“Defense Mech”’s title refers not to a robot mech tasked with defending, but rather a psychological defense mechanism. Halloway, a crew member on a mission to Mars, has a mental breakdown while en route. The ship’s psychologist has the “brilliant” idea to hypnotize him into believe he’s back on Earth, and we follow the mission from his perspective as he interprets attacking native Martian lifeforms through his delusional worldview.

I think this was meant to be a comedy, but following Halloway’s disjointed stream-of-consciousness rambling was agonizing. It made for an incredibly unpleasant reading experience, and I didn’t enjoy it in the least.

Final Rating: 1/5

I Kissed Shara Wheeler

What now? That is the question. But, it’s not up to you. So I think I will leave you guessing after all you put me through. In the early light, I found you with a bottle by your side. I can see by your eyes you know that I, I’m kissing you goodbye. Let’s pucker up for I Kissed Shara Wheeler, by Casey McQuiston.

Synopsis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of One Last Stop and Red, White & Royal Blue comes a debut YA romantic comedy about chasing down what you want, only to find what you need…

Chloe Green is so close to winning. After her moms moved her from SoCal to Alabama for high school, she’s spent the past four years dodging gossipy classmates and a puritanical administration at Willowgrove Christian Academy. The thing that’s kept her going: winning valedictorian. Her only rival: prom queen Shara Wheeler, the principal’s perfect progeny.

But a month before graduation, Shara kisses Chloe and vanishes.

On a furious hunt for answers, Chloe discovers she’s not the only one Shara kissed. There’s also Smith, Shara’s longtime quarterback sweetheart, and Rory, Shara’s bad boy neighbor with a crush. The three have nothing in common except Shara and the annoyingly cryptic notes she left behind, but together they must untangle Shara’s trail of clues and find her. It’ll be worth it, if Chloe can drag Shara back before graduation to beat her fair-and-square.

Thrown into an unlikely alliance, chasing a ghost through parties, break-ins, puzzles, and secrets revealed on monogrammed stationery, Chloe starts to suspect there might be more to this small town than she thought. And maybe—probably not, but maybe—more to Shara, too.

Fierce, funny, and frank, Casey McQuiston’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler is about breaking the rules, getting messy, and finding love in unexpected places.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Shara Wheeler is the most popular girl at the conservative Christian Willowgrove high school. On prom night, she goes missing after kissing three different people: Parker Smith, the quarterback who has been her longtime boyfriend; Rory Heron, her neighbor with a crush on her and Parker’s former best friend; and Chloe Green, her academic nemesis and rival for valedictorian. We follow Chloe as she forms an unlikely alliance with the other people who kissed Shara before her disappearance in order to follow a breadcrumb-like trail of riddles she left behind as clues to her location.

The whole following the clues thing was interesting at first, but quickly wore out its novelty as it became apparent that Shara was just jerking them around. No, what elevated this book from being merely decent to good and then to great in my eyes is what came after. Chloe actually finishes the scavenger hunt and finds Shara well before the end, and the latter part of the book is about her looking past all the bullshit game-playing and seeing what the adventure has truly meant for her: how she’s come to see different, hidden sides to people she previously never looked at twice. How they have these hidden sides because the school’s toxic environment shames people into hiding their true selves beneath a plastic mask of perfection, fearful of being crushed if they step out of line. And how that leads to the novel’s true climax – not the end of the search for Shara, but the alternate graduation where the main characters, along with many other students, are able to be validated for who they truly are rather than who they’ve been forced to pretend to be. Just like that, the story went from a contrived sequence of pointless puzzles wasting the protagonist’s time to having genuine emotional weight and depth. Suffice to say I was completely won over by the end.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler started off slow, but ended up being a strongly compelling story.

Final Rating: 4/5

Morgue Ship #2: Lazarus Come Forth

Project Gutenberg is a massive digital library of public domain works. Its archives contain not merely novels, but also numerous short stories from magazines with adjectives like “Amazing”, “Thrilling”, “Startling” and “Wondrous” in their titles. I’m making my way through its vast catalogue of these speculative fiction works. Today, I’ll be looking at “Lazarus Come Forth” by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories in 1944.

Gutenberg Link

Lazarus Come Forth

SPOILERS BELOW

“Lazarus Come Forth” is set on the same type of two-person morgue ship as appeared in the story “Morgue Ship”. The two obviously share a universe, and I am therefore dubbing the two stories members of the “Morgue Ship” series based on their common element. This time, the Earth is at war with Mars. A morgue ship finds the body of a scientist who may hold the key to developing weapons capable of winning the war. The treacherous Logan wants to sell the body to Mars, but the heroic Brando finds a way to overpower him and sacrifices himself to ensure the scientist makes it to Earth.

This was a decent story, but I didn’t find it as deeply compelling as “Morgue Ship” because it didn’t take the same amount of time building up the atmosphere. “Morgue Ship” worked to drive home the loneliness and despair of the protagonists jobs, while “Lazarus Come Forth” fails to sell that aspect of the setting before moving on to the action stuff. It’s still good, but not as good as its predecessor.

Final Rating: 3/5

Luminous Beings

The night is come, but not too soon, and sinking silently, all silently, the little moon drops down behind the sky. There is no light in earth or heaven but the cold light of the stars, and the glowing eyes of the zombie squirrels. Let’s illuminate Luminous Beings, by David Arnold and José Pimienta.

Synopsis:

A wholly original graphic novel from New York Times bestseller David Arnold and comic artist Jose Pimienta. When a group of teens decides to make a documentary about humanity’s recent brush with extinction (via undead squirrels), their quest for top-notch gear leads them on a 24-hour wild goose chase through rowdy nightclubs and once-familiar neighborhoods, perilous castles and off-grid RVs, and at every turn—people. Some more eccentric than others, all leading quiet lives of love and loss in a strange new world. With nothing but their phones, the Squad documents these encounters, along with a slew of hijinks and misadventures throughout the night. The resulting footage becomes (and is indeed filled with) Luminous Beings, an accidental documentary, not about the past, or how shit hit the fan, but how people came together to answer the ultimate where do we go from here?

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Luminous Beings is a story set in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Fortunately, it’s not a very apocalyptic one, as the virus in question primarily affects squirrels. For most humans outside the unfortunate 0.008% of the population who fell during what’s been termed the Lost Month, life goes on. Our protagonists are four teens looking to make a documentary about the squirrelpocalypse, a task they are somewhat hampered in due to their complete lack of equipment or funding. When they notice a flyer promising a $20,000 reward for the location of a local man who is missing, presumed dead, they think they might have a shot: a noted paranoid survivalist-type, there’s a good chance he went off the grid at the beginning of the apocalypse and hasn’t heard that it turned out to be a non-pocalyspe. So begins their quest across town in search of clues.

The setting for this story was fantastic. I loved the idea of the weaksauce zombie-squirrel apocalypse, the way everyone is going on with their lives while making only token concessions to what at one point seemed to have been a world-shattering event: the fashionable squirrel-proof hazard gear for outdoor use called “hazzies”, recycling and garbage cans being joined by third set of containers for disposing of the carcasses of dispatched squirrels, mobsters now feeding people to the squirrels instead of the fishes… I would love to read a story set in this world. Just maybe not this particular story.

You see, the synopsis isn’t kidding when it calls their quest a “wild goose chase”: the whole thing turns out to be a shaggy dog story of epic proportions. Turns out there is no reward; the guy posted the flyers himself to test how well he’d succeeded at going off the grid. He knew all along the danger had passed, he didn’t need rescuing, they don’t end up getting their equipment. While the adventure had a few highpoints along the way, it’s a very disappointing ending, and leaves the whole thing feeling pointless. The synopsis suggests that it’s supposed to be a character piece, but that aspect of it kind of fell flat for me because I didn’t really get invested in any of the characters. The idea of people continuing to be people even in the strangest of circumstances is appealing in the abstract, but none of the people turned out to be very interesting (except perhaps the druggie who built a potato cannon to fire zombie squirrels out of, but the kind of character who is best as a bit part – a little bit of him goes a very long way, and he’d quickly become obnoxious or send the tone of the story spiraling irretrievably into ridiculousness if he got too much focus).

Also, while the setting was definitely the strongest part, there is one element that I don’t feel it explained very well: what the hell is the “Kill Shot”? They say that the Lost Month caused by the initial emergence of the virus was ended by the discovery of the Kill Shot, that the missing guy might think the end of the world is ongoing if he didn’t get the word about the Kill Shot, but they never explain what the Kill Shot actually is or why it made the difference. Is it a vaccine against the virus? But it was said at the beginning that the virus is species-specific to squirrels, meaning it never infected humans: I got the impression that the deaths were due to being eaten alive by fuzzy hordes or secondary infection from their dirty, dirty teeth. Is it a method of killing the squirrels? But bludgeoning them seems to work just fine; no special technique needed. Is it a 2008 John Madden film? 2014 video game? A 2018 Eminem song? What? If this is going to be an important part of your setting, the reason that the world didn’t actually end, it deserves an explanation.

All in all, balancing the cool setting and the highlight moments against the lackluster characters and gaps in exposition, I think I can call Luminous Beings decent. The art is certainly very pretty, I’ll give it that: never have zombie squirrels looks so good.

Final Rating: 3/5