Paul R. Hardy's THE LAST MAN ON EARTH CLUB #OneBookAtATime

The conceit behind The Last Man on Earth Club is without a doubt the most original idea for a science fiction novel I've come across in a long, long time. On a multiversal hub world to which refugees of apocalypses (apocalypti?) galore are brought after being rescued from Earth's destruction by everything from solar flares to zombie plagues to Heaven's Gate-style mass suicides on a planetary scale, six people, each of whom is the sole survivor of his home universe's variant on the human species, are treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as part of the process of integrating them into a brand new society. That's the book in a nutshell, setting, cast and plot all in one. Such a schtick carries with it both the potential to be horrible and gimmicky, and the potential to be weirdly awesome.

I'm happy to say it's weirdly awesome, though I was left feeling a little dissatisfied with the ending.

But the beginning and middle are all kinds of inventive fun, fun that manages to have a real sense of authenticity to it.*

Fans of post-apocalyptic fiction will enjoy the veritable buffet of ways the world has ended in these survivors' experiences. Hardy explores nuclear war (from the perspective of the man who just might have been the one to push the big red button that started it all), alien suicide cults (from the perspective of the only person to survive his blissful attempt to join those bright white energy balls who promised Heaven to anyone with the courage to join them -- and who is still trying to spread the faith in his new world), Matrix/Terminator-esque man vs machine wars (from the perspective of a cyborg found drifting naked in outer space), the ever popular zombie apocalypse (from the perspective of an embittered doctor who tried to fight it), a horrible history of slavery and final extermination of one human species by another who shared the planet with it (from the perspective of the last survivor of a failed captive breeding program to preserve the species in a zoo), and a comic book world where just over half of the population has some kind of superpower but that couldn't save them from some kind of mad science experiment gone horribly wrong and spontaneously combusting them all (from the perspective of a ditzy office girl who thinks everyone just took off and hid from her as a practical joke). As the stories are told, the survivors emerge as distinctive personalities and fully-rounded characters, characters in a lot of pain and denial and trauma, trying to cope with what happened and with each other's foibles.

This would be enough for a pretty interesting book, but author Paul R. Hardy was much more ambitious than that. Rather than just creating a sort of post-apocalyptic Breakfast Club**, he turned his novel into a serious discussion of refugee care, genocide, justice and jurisdiction in a way that still has me astonished.

He also spun all of this into a sort of mystery plot, tantalizingly hinting at the possibility that some or all of these planetary destructions and extinctions are linked, that they might have been the deliberate work of one or more races of bad actors. Several of the characters, in the course of their therapy, reveal clues to who this might have been and how it might have come to pass, and as the Hub prepares to receive another huge wave of refugees from a universe in which the Earth is being destroyed by solar flares gone wild (that might just have been deliberately set off, one suspicious survivor hints), resolve to try to take on this unknown entity and deliver to it/them the punishment/justice that the IU looks unlikely to ever mete out. Interesting stuff, this (but isn't it all?), but it is here that my dissatisfaction comes in: this is never tied up, really, at all. None of it is, really. The novel just sort of ends -- on a semi-promising note, sure, but not with any conclusions or finality. I've not seen any word on whether a sequel is in the works, but there had better be, Mr. Hardy.

There had better be.

*Having been treated for PTSD myself, I found the novel's depiction of this difficult, chancy and inexact process to be wonderfully true to life, even as the stories emerging from individual and group sessions were the stuff of pulp fiction and comic books. I admire the balance the author struck there exceedingly.

**Though on this level the book works just as brilliantly as the John Hughes film I refer to. These characters are vivid as hell, and while none of them could ever be called likable, they nonetheless inspire both sympathy and empathy and feel utterly real and believable.

100 Books #116 - Hugh Howey's SECOND SHIFT: ORDER

After a reader has taken a few of the pummelings that Hugh Howey delivers so very, very well in his Wool/Silo series, one starts a new one with a certain caution that is not unlike the so-called Firefly Effect, I find. One knows going in that one is going to love at least one of the characters passionately, and that one is going to suffer horribly as a result. So the teeth clench, the abdominal muscles tighten and "guard" even as one flips past the title and copyright pages.

Such was my experience of starting, and reading, and finishing Second Shift: Order, the immediate sequel to First Shift: Legacy, and the middle of a prequel trilogy giving us a glimpse of how the world of Wool came to be. I was still reeling from Juliet and her fate when I took up First Shift; I was still recovering from the revelations and the anguish of First Shift when I took this one up.

And so I started reading with my dukes up, yes I did.

So the big questions now, for the purposes of a review* would be 1. Was this preparation on my part justified, i.e., did I wind up taking another pummeling as I'd expected and 2. Did said preparations help, or make it worse?

And the answers are... well, of course it's more complicated than that. Of course!

Second Shift is told from the points of view of two protagonists, whose stories unfold in alternating accounts of life in Silos One and 18. In Silo One, we rejoin Donald, an unwitting engineer of the world of the Silos whose journey from the world we readers know and down into that of the Silos we followed in First Shift -- and whose essential annoying nebbishness this reader totally failed to notice as the horrifying events of that novella unfolded, but whom she really wanted to slap quite often in this one and, retroactively, that one. For Donald is a guy that just lets things happen to him, who doesn't question what he's asked to do until it's too late, and who lets himself be manipulated into making this whole agonizing world possible. In First Shift, he designed the Silo system and seems to have just pretended to himself that it was some kind of intellectual exercise that might see use as a sort of rhetorical weapon in the hands of an authority figure into whose orbit he was drawn by a girl (of course), but never really thought we get used... even after it got built.... And now, in Second Shift, he is one of a small, elite cadre of dwellers in Silo One who are not living the true Silo life but are instead cryogenically sleeping through it, taking turns (Shifts) spending time animate and in charge of making sure all of the other Silos are functioning, technologically and sociologically. And of shutting down Silos that "break down" in one way or the other. Even though there are lots of people inside even the most dysfunctional Silo. And Donald is still pretty much a nebbish. Uh oh.

In tandem and in contrast to Donald in Silo One is young Mission Jones, a blue-clad Porter in Silo 18. He is a new member of what amounts to a guild: the people who haul stuff from one level to another. Computer parts, food, messages, dead bodies, whatever Silo dwellers need transported, the Porters, in singles or in pairs, do the hauling, up and down the endless stairs of 140 levels of underground society. It's an important job, and Mission is proud to do it, even though he knows he will eventually sacrifice his joints to the decades of toil. He also likes being a conduit for and a discoverer of knowledge and gossip, even though very little of what he learns is pleasant or has happy implications. Like the fact that some people on levels far below the Farms near the surface have decided to grow their own food. Or that some people are sneaking their own cargo up and down the levels, either on foot or by means of midnight pulley rigs. People, he finds, tend to resist being cogs in a well-designed survival machine. They don't like being parts that make up a whole. They want to be wholes themselves, independent and free. Which is dangerous in a society so closed and minutely designed and balanced that even an unauthorized glitch of a pregnancy guarantees the erring mother a sentence to cleaning once the child is born. Birthdays are deathdays, after all.

Unlike Donald, though, Mission is an active character in his own story, making decisions and doing things, taking risks and reaping rewards and punishments. The reader gets high on his agency and the mixture of hope and tragedy that make up Mission's very nature (nomen est omen, eh?). Howey gets his hooks into us with this character, oh yes he does. That bastard.

Ultimately, Second Shift is about the quest for forgetfulness. Those still alive who created this world do not want to have to think about, to remember what they did or why, and their efforts to keep everyone else docile and ignorant keep backfiring in tragic and yet horribly predictable ways. Failure and tragedy are always inevitable in this world, which Howey was at great and horribly successful pains in First Shift to show us could become our world with just a little more remote weaponry, a little more population pressure, a little more Tea Partying, and a little less fellow feeling.

But then, he reminds us, that no matter what happens to us, no matter what we do to ourselves, even if we're trapped in Silos below the ground in conditions that mimic, perhaps, those of a generational spaceship**, what we're packing away like so many grain seeds for the future are still people, and they are still capable, within their confined spaces, of great things, of acts of nobility and sacrifice, of lovingkindess and creativity, of demonstrating over and over again that they are worth saving, if those who put them there can just find a way to keep them alive without destroying what they're trying to preserve. If only.

A third volume in this series, Third Shift something, is due out next year. And you'd better believe I'm going to read it. And you'd better believe I'll have my dukes up.

*Though do I really write reviews, really? I'm more into the autobiographical experience of reading a book. But anyway.

**Which really is kind of what these Silos are, except the world they will someday colonize is the same planet they "left" when they went below its surface. Neat trick, that.

100 Books #24 - Hugh Howey's THE WOOL OMNIBUS

Since I have been unable to ride my bicycle for a few months, I have taken to climbing the stairs at my workplace from the basement to the sixth floor four times a night for my main cardiovascular exercise. I started out wheezing, out of shape, after just one floor; now I make two climbs to the top in a row each time I take a break from my night gig. I was really, really proud of this until I started reading these stories set in yet another vertical city (c.f. Alastair Reynolds' Terminal World and Ian Whate's City of Dreams and Nightmare), its floor-districts linked only by a spiral staircase, up and down which all goods and services must tramp on human feet on ancient metal stair treads, for some 140 floors. Ow.

Now I feel like a huge, huge wimp. All the more so for having spent hours immersed in the world of Wool instead of my own, eyes glued to the page, butt to various seats, instead of getting more exercise...

A bit of explanation here: The Wool Omnibus is not really this volume's title, more of a descriptor for a collection of short stories, novels and novellas, five in all, that the author later gathered into one book to give his fans a great deal.

For fans Mr. Howey has, and rightly so, for this post-apocalyptic world he has created, in which Earth has become a toxic sewer completely inhospitable to life and what's left of humanity lives deep underground in a vast silo. There are "windows" in this silo in the form of what amount to vast computer monitors that render images captured by a bank of sensors aboveground -- but these sensors get blurry, dirty, exposed to corrosive air and dust storms and all manner of filth...

The wool in the stories' titles refers to the cleaning pads people are given to clean off these sensors every once in a while, and perhaps also to the thick tangle of inherited folk belief and carefully fostered ignorance in which the silo's inhabitants live, for no one knows how long, for how many generations, humanity has lived this way; many don't believe the planet's surface was ever inhabitable at all. And to question the dogma perpetuated by priest and sheriff and IT staff (who function themselves as sort of the ultimate priesthood) is to get sentenced to cleaning, to be packed into a barely functional anti-contamination suit, handed a set of wool pads, and sent outside to clean the sensors -- and die.

These are seriously compelling tales, full of wonderfully imagined characters and a well-envisioned culture with  unique rituals and folkways and mores. Howey has a particularly deft hand with taking up the metaphor of the silo as a vast machine for survival and making it an overarching theme even before introducing his primary heroine, Juliette, a machinist and handywoman with a passion for preventative maintenance and real knack for problem-solving, for following the trail of effect back to cause and fixing what's wrong. She's a completely engaging and wonderfully strong character right from the start, so when circumstances draw her out of her world of generators and pumps at the bottom of the silo and she applies these talents to the (comparatively) larger world, the results are unforgettable. Her story is a marvel of tension and release, of the acquisition of awful knowledge, of misguided fervor and unbearable loss. It's not a terribly uplifting one, but it's a compulsively readable one.

Never have 548 pages gone by so fast for me.

This is (and I only even noticed this as I raced toward the very end of the last novel, Stranded), in part because the prose is damn near flawless; I have seen books coming out of the Big Six publishing houses with considerably more errors. And Howey published these himself, and by so doing has really set the standard for what indie authors should be striving to achieve. Because there were next to no lexical howlers to drag me out of the story, I  became, for a few tangled days, reduced to a thing that wanted to read Wool stories.

And so I read. And rubbed my calf muscles in sympathy with my heart in my throat. And then I went and bought some of Howey's other work, because this guy, this guy is good.

100 Books #21 - Anetta Ribken's ATHENA'S PROMISE

I was pretty much primed from the beginning to enjoy this book, early chapter drafts of which I was privileged to see because the author is a good internet friend of mine -- but not only because of that.

Set in a hotel on the edge of the questionable part of town, Athena's Promise concerns the struggles of its front desk manager, Pallas (and the naming is no coincidence, there, but I'll get to that in a minute), made all the more difficult as the story kicks in by two unwelcome events: a murder that has taken place in one of the guest rooms, and a new, unlikable and unpleasant "guest services manager" imposed on the hotel by its owners to beef up the "numbahs" and make sure it retains its corporate flag.

This new guest services manager, by the way, is a werewolf.

And he's far from the weirdest thing in this hotel or this world, for Athena's Promise is, in addition to being what is termed a "cozy mystery", an exploration of what life would be like if somehow the old Greek gods and goddesses came back (she doesn't bother explaining how that has happened, just refers to "The Crossing" and leaves it at that) and brought the whole stable of mythological creatures along for the ride. Thus one front desk clerk at Traveler's Haven is a pixie and the night auditor is a vampire, the hotel manager is Medusa (yeah, that Medusa) and the housekeeping staff consists of a lot of very kind-hearted and well-behaved and hard-working zombies. Zombies, of course, being all of those things naturally, at least before they "Turn" and become the shambling brain-eaters of familiar lore.

And the guests make the staff look plumb dull: randy centaurs flashing trashy bling and showing up demanding rooms by the hour, the better to ravish their too-willing groupies; Elementals for Environmental Protection in town to supervise work on cleaning up the Mississippi River (the city of St. Louis is never explicitly named as the locale for this story, but it is Ribken's home and the novel has the feel of St. Louis throughout); and mermaid divas who travel from city to city and strip club to strip club putting on shows and mezmerising men who then abandon wives, families and girlfriends to become the mermaids' too-devoted followers and, incidentally, steady guests at motels like Traveler's Haven.

And that isn't all, for Pallas herself, bustling around trying to maintain order AND solve the murder, is not an ordinary girl, either, and her mystery is expertly teased out in little doses throughout the novel, complementing and beefing up the neatness of the main plot.

She is, too, the narrator, and it's her unique, fierce, feisty voice that really makes this novel enjoyable. Her protectiveness towards her staff, especially the much-misunderstood zombies, her impatience with the foibles of centaur studs and barely competent cops and Guido the cheesy werewolf who thinks he's the boss of her, is wickedly fun to read, and even if you think you know her secrets from reading between the lines and applying your own meta-knowledge of Greek mythology, you really don't, not quite, but it all works very well.

This is a self-published paperback and it does have a few flaws in formatting that might bother some: the page numbers on the left-hand pages are in the wrong corner, and there are a few passages of text that, bizarrely, are centered instead of left-justified, but I urge anyone who thinks he or she might enjoy a story like this to forgive these. Ribken is a one-woman operation (except for her cover artist, Rebecca Treadway) and an original, amusing voice in fiction writing who deserves to be read.

Bring on Athena's Chains, the sequel to Athena's Promise!

100 Books #19 - MeiLin Miranda's SON IN SORROW

Available soon at meilinmiranda.com and other fine bookselling  type places!

MeiLin Miranda likes to use an amusing tagline for her fiction, announcing that she writes "fantasy with all the good parts left in," and it's quite apropos. The book for which she is perhaps best known to date (how I discovered her, at any rate) is the first set in this "Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom", Lovers and Beloveds, had lots and lots and lots of "good parts" in its two entertwined storylines, an arousing and disturbing and graceful read if ever there was one. And yes, I'm talking about sex, which is treated both frankly and delicately and in some detail in this series.

But what she could equally call it is "the feminine side of fantasy," for while these stories are set in a more or less typical epic fantasy world* -- gods are real as is magic, big burly men wear shiny armor and fight with swords, feudalism is in full effect -- but Ms. Miranda is more interested in the lives of the women who are kept in keeps and castles until they're useful to cement alliances or birth babies or look good on a nobleman's arm, even as these books seem primarily concerned with the life and education of a young man, Prince Temmin, heir to a vast kingdom (his education as we see it is focused on teaching him the stereotypically "feminine" qualities of empathy, compassion, attention to small detail, and oh, yes, good sex, which in Ms. Miranda's world does not happen without those other qualities. Let's hear it for MeiLin!).

Above all, we are prompted to consider the consequences of sex, and how women bear the worst of them in pretty much every society, even a fantasy one in which great goddesses actually walk among their worshippers through taking over willing "Embodiments" -- the many roles of woman, of lover, mother, teacher and healer may be sacred, but the actual women playing these roles still get treated pretty badly.

In Lovers and Beloveds, we were pulled into the story of Prince Temmin as a young man, as he fell for and doggedly pursued the woman who served as one of the Embodiments of the Lovers, twin deities, male and female, who preside over love and sexuality -- meaning, he was after a woman who is off limits -- right into her Temple, where he decided against his father's most strident wishes to enter as a Supplicant, a sort of high level lay priest (there was apparently a prophecy that if the Heir ever joined the Lovers' Temple, the monarchy would end in revolution and revolt, something no aristocracy wants to happen). As he decided to buck his father and the rest of society's expectations, he was magically immersed in the sad-yet-lovely story of some distant ancestors, a dethroned king and a cruelly enchanted princess whose love ultimately triumphed and whose experiences helped guide Temmin into deciding to go for it.

Alas, no decision made by one in his position is without consequences, and so he becomes the titular Son in Sorrow of this second volume (that title guides the reader's thoughts down a melancholy path as the story takes hold, and this is no accident), close to the Embodiment yet never further away even when he gets to sleep with her, enduring the icy disapproval of his father, and mostly out of contact with his mother and sisters, whose own anguished affairs threaten at times to dominate his tale -- even when a man is center stage in this Intimate History, he is defined by his relationships to women, even when he rides out to battle, as evidenced in the ancestral story Temmin is immersed this time around, this one a royal bastard whose mother bounced from kingdom to kingdom until the grieving ruler of one of Tremont's enemies married her and made her troubles even worse.

These works are often compared to George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and for good reason, but I find the comparison sells these Intimate Histories short: I find them to be superior works in many respects. Miranda may not write battle scenes as well as Martin, though she is no slouch in that department, but her understanding of and compassion for her characters is far greater, her magical and theological conceits better thought out and more thematically and aesthetically consistent, her insights into the human psyche keener. Male readers may dislike how her male characters are circumscribed by her females, but then, that is the whole point, for the whole nature of these books is to tell the "unknown" stories of royal mistresses and jilted lovers and illegitimate children even as they detail the coming of age of a Crown Prince whose very existence is owed just as much to the suffering -- and triumphs -- of these women as to the mighty kings and princes (and bastard sons) who make up his male lineage.

I didn't want this book to end but found myself racing to the finish nonetheless and now I find myself grateful indeed that Miranda releases her fiction in serialized doses on her website before formally publishing it. I first encountered her Intimate History this way, but then held off for the second novel until this volume saw formal publication**. I'm pretty sure I'll just be haunting her website again for more, though. Patience was never really one of my virtues.

*A lot of readers have compared this world to Victorian England, but I kept thinking of Austria. The Antremonts (the royal family of this series) made me think more of a polytheist Hapsburg clan than of the early Windsors. Let's say, the Hapsburgs had they and their empire been colonized an an early date by the Goa'uld, for that is what this setting's polytheism most reminds me of.

**Not that I totally had to wait; Miranda is a personal friend and gave me an advanced review copy of this book when I wheedled her into it. She's nice like that. Try that with George R.R. Martin, kiddies!

100 Books 70 - Mark A. Rayner's MARVELOUS HAIRY

I wonder if Mark A. Rayner and Kurtis J. Wiebe know each other, because they seem to share as deep a love for monkeys and robots as they do an antipathy for mad scientists.

But that's neither here nor there, and my elbows are paining me. Moving on. Because god damn, did I get a kick out of this whacked-out Tom-Robbins-without-all-the-half-baked-lyricism-esque sci-fi satire of a novel, which takes a firm stand  against biotechnology firms and executives who think their wealth and power entitles them to play god without ever getting too didactic, because, well, how didactic can you get exactly when you've got a character whose main way of responding to tense or weird situations is to release a dozen macaques (and, once, a Komodo dragon)?

Yeah, it's like that.

Marvelous Hairy purports to be a novel in five fractals, which is maybe meant to be a stylistic/narrative experiment of some sort that I didn't bother teasing out because I was just enjoying the mostly straightforward, only slightly asynchronous, story of a gang of old college buddies (who might do as a more realistic version of Wiebe's Intrepids) (and who spend a lot of time, as smart people with too much time on their hands and too easy an access to recreational drugs might, pondering the supposed evolutionary layers of the human brain, the human, the monkey, the lizard and the fish) who pit themselves against a big bad biotech corporation when said big bad biotech performs a wildly unethical experiment on one of their own, their loopy blue-eyed boy, who is suddenly and rapidly devolving into some kind of pre-human monkey man state that is perhaps irresistibly sexy to the lay-days but harms, perhaps, his future prospects for employment.

The revenge/take-down they cook up is worthy of Repairman Jack.

Yeah, it's like that.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

Well, that's because it is.

Disclosure: the author was feeling generous on Twitter one day and offered to send a free ebook copy of this to whomever might be seeking something new and different. Ever such, I said meeeeeeeee. And I wound up so falling in love with this quirky craziness that I now definitely consider myself a Mark A. Rayner fangirl. And I want to read his other extant novel, The Amadeus Net, pretty soon. It apparently concerns a secretly immortal Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his exploits in the mid- to late- 21st century. Yeah, it sounds like that.

But so anyway, that's how you create fangirls, ladies and gentlemen. Here endeth the lesson.

100 Books 65 - John Mierau's ASUNDER: WAR BETWEEN WORLDS

Short version: a fun answer to the question of what happened to all of the bad-ass alien technology after the microbes took care of the aliens in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds with a nice, adventurous flair. Victorian reverse-engineering, pirates, sea battles, and tension within the ranks of Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Alas, like a few other self-published treats, the sweet comes with a little bitter: this could have used at least one more careful edit/proofread before it was released into the world. Lots of sentences are weirdly missing the verb, more than a few homophone errors have reared their ugly heads, and a few malapropisms, too. They're all the kind of errors a professional editor would never let slip by, but that a spell-check doesn't catch. If you're the kind of reader who gets too distracted by these, wait for another edition. But if you don't mind them, this is a fun and delightful read.

100 Books 20 - Brand Gamblin's THE HIDDEN INSTITUTE

As I was finishing up Brand Gamblin's follow-up to the excellent Tumbler, a thought kept occurring to me that I couldn't shake: If my buddy Brand (for buddy he is, on Twitter and from Balticon) keeps it up, he could be a 21st century L. Frank Baum. I can think of no other writer whose work can beguile a precocious pre-tween and a cynical old grown up to this degree. And I have evidence: my friend's ten-year-old daughter has read Tumbler at least three times since I gave to her in December, and all of my grown up friends who have read or listened to it seem to enjoy it just as much.

The comparison doesn't stop there, though. Brand tells charming and fanciful stories with a lot of wide-eyed innocence and just a smidgeon of jeopardy -- and the jeopardy is as likely to be social as it is physical. That's as true of Tumbler as it is of The Hidden Institute, though they are otherwise very different books: Tumbler concerns a young woman struggling to make her way as a beginning asteroid miner, while The Hidden Institute concerns a young man dealing with a more earthbound -- but also more fanciful -- situation.

At the heart of The Hidden Institute is a chillingly possible (and becoming more so almost daily) future society in which our own near class-wars have been mostly settled and the extreme divide between the haves and have-nots has gelled into what amounts to neo-feudalism. A new cadre of aristocrats has seized control of the economic and political levers of a neo-Victorian society that may remind readers of that in Neal Stephenson's staggering The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, but has a heaping helping of a slightly grittier version of Baum's Land of Oz thrown in.

Our hero is Cliffy, an extremely lower class youth who blunders into a bizarre chance to better himself when he witnesses and records what appears to be a murder at the hands of an aristocrat. To hush him up, the seeming criminal gives Cliffy entree into a special, extremely secret, school (no, not Hogwarts) where he can train up to be a gentleman, then seek placement as a higher-level servant in an aristocratic household -- even though even these rather menial posts are reserved for the lower nobility (in this world, aristocrats' servants must be nobly-born or at least ennobled by the King. And yes, this takes place in America!).

Cliffy's journey through the school, with his lessons in history and culture, his deportment lessons (one day it takes three hours to get through a bowl of soup!), self-defense classes, and his foray into bear polo -- hold the phone! BEAR POLO -- it's exactly as it sounds, it's polo played riding bears instead of horses! -- is peppered with very acute observations on what it really means to be an upperclass gentlemen: obeying your servant is at least as important as learning to affect that je ne c'est quoi.

And Cliffy's interactions with his servant Whister, a seemingly omnicompetent robot valet, that give The Hidden Institute most of its Ozziness. I couldn't help picturing Tik-Tok, though Whister does not seem to share in any of his predecessor's limitations; say half Tik-Tok, half Tin Woodman, yet never fearing water or rusting. Such a robot is probably impossible any time soon, but Whister is totally plausible within the narrative because he's just part of the craziness of the story.

But what happens, you might ask, besides the school thing? Quite a lot. Cliffy runs afoul of not one but two conspiracies, either of which could quite easily get him killed. I won't spoil these except to say that fans of the podcast have already nicknamed the distaff conspiracy the "Silk Goon Squad."

The only thing that spoils this delightful read (and this is only problem if, like me, you're sensitive to usage/grammar issues), is a problem that I cannot 100% lay on Gamblin's door because I strongly suspect it's a technology issue. While yes, there are occasional flubs that illustrate again how completely the English language's many homophones are the bane of modern writers who rely on computer spellcheckers("discrete" is used where "discreet" is meant a couple times, with unintentionally humorous consequences), what really drove me nuts is the preponderance of the wrong "its." Every instance I found where either "it's" or "its" might appear, it was always the former, the contraction for "it is" rather than the latter, the possessive form of "it" -- and usually it was the possessive that was wanted. It's a small quibble but it highlights something I think lots of writers and aspiring writers need to be wary of.

I'm not certain that Gamblin has an iPad but he runs with an iPad-loving crowd, and I know a lot of them enjoy writing novel drafts on the device. That means, of course, that a little feature, much complained of, called AUTOCORRECT is a factor, and one of that feature's most annoying habits is always insisting on changing "its" to "it's" because, you know, it knows better than you. I curse it often when I send tweets via my iPod Touch and shudder at the thought of trying to compose a novel-length piece while constantly fighting it off. This is just my theory about what happened though.

The screechy brake sound my brain made whenever I encountered that small issue (and I'm sure your brain has made it in some point reading this blog entry; I type really fast and don't always see my errors until after I've hit "publish") notwithstanding, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Read it yourself and give it to a ten-year-old. Talk about the bear polo and you might even get your teenager to read it. Then you can all have a good sit-down and talk about economic injustice, opportunity and the importance of a good education. Bravo!

A final note. Gamblin has been hinting to me via Twitter that he's contemplating a sort of companion short story or novella centering on a doping scandal in the wild and wooly world of bear polo. If you're at all fond of me, or if you read this book and enjoy it, please join me in urging Gamblin to stop teasing and write the damned thing.

I lied. This is the final note. If you are e-book challenged, you can stil enjoy this one, either as a free audio podcast at the author's website or you can order a copy on dead tree HERE. It says pre-order but I got mine right away.