Getting Out There

In just over a month you, dear reader, will be able to buy a fresh copy of Starfall from the usual outlets. A paper and ink copy will be, I imagine, something of a rarity as the cost for dropping a paperback of this epic is pretty high. The e-book will be more reasonably charged at whatever you feel like giving me for it.

I have done something with Starfall that I have never done before. I sent copies out to reviewers. I haven't done this in the past because it hasn't been totally obvious who would be interested in reviewing my output. In the case of the three Chicago Shadows books they were super odd, police procedural? Horror? I still don't even really know.

Before that you'd have to go back in time over a decade to 2005 to my self-publishing debut, when I was new to Lulu and kindles were not a thing. So I would have had to buy and mail out individual copies of the books to get them reviewed. Back in those days I was vehemently anti e-book because Amazon hadn't made them so ridiculously easy to procure and acceptable to read.

I began writing Starfall in 2006, and it has been a source of long lament that the book I wrote for my wife has not seen the light of day for as long as we have been together (almost). When I think about it, though, what better time to put the book out than a time when I can email reviewers .epubs and .mobis, a time when digital collaboration has never been easier.

I got a couple of suggestions from a writing colleague and, once I had digested that list, I had the appetite to google for myself. I didn't have to google long before I found this immensely useful list of contacts. I worked through that too.

I do recall that back in the mists of time a writer would have to seek out obscure almanacs to get lists like that. Unsurprisingly the internet has changed the game. Good job too. Most authors are authors on the side, we don't have time to seek out, transcribe, and file any more. Much aside from anything else we have to maintain a public profile, however measly, and some of us have to typeset and publish our own books.

Not that it's all plain sailing. The problem with easy access to a resource (such as a reviewer) is probably often abused. I didn't just bang out fifty identical emails with e-books attached and spam the entire bunch of reviewers, no, not at all. I asked each one that I submitted to whether they had the time and capacity for another needy book baby.

Also, I didn't automatically submit to a reviewer just because they exist. In each case I tried to seek out a review policy to see if I failed the reviewer's requirements, which I did on occasion. I also didn't try to contact people who were not easily contactable. If I didn't know how rude a lot of authors are about getting their work out there I'd wonder how reviewers with no obvious inbox got books to review. Obviously, they may also not do reviews via request.

As I wandered through this gallery of web pages, seeking out the method for getting in touch with the reviewers, I realised that we have come to an age when you should really take some control in the matter of how people access you, or at least the public you. Anyone who visits this blog has some access, but then anyone who visits any blog has some access to the person who runs the blog. I don't really think that's enough any more.

I really do love to collaborate on things, podcasts, story collections, guest posts, anything I have time for I will do at this moment. So I set up the You're Invited! page to let people know that I was open for business. Now I know that people have a way to get in touch with me if they do want me to be on a podcast, or to write a story, or anything else.

It's early days so no one's asked yet, but I have a little bit of confidence in the fact that I haven't missed opportunities now. That's what all this accessibility stuff comes down to, opportunities are rare, and you shouldn't be passing them over. If people find it utterly impossible to work out how to get in touch then that's what will happen, on the other hand you want to control the flow. Otherwise you will miss some things and those people who are really determined will just find some other communications channel, appropriate or not.

The Re-Return of Reviews

So I did reviews for a bit, then I stopped. Then the Kindle was invented, then I started doing reviews again. Then life got a bit hectic so I stopped again. Now I have started writing for Trash Mutant and so I have decided I'm open for review business once again.

If you have a book you'd like me to review read the I Do Reviews page and, if that doesn't put you off, drop me a line. Trash Mutant-y things will be given priority. So contact away I want to read your genre filth!

Review: Sweet Money Won

The Book: Sweet Money Won by Mycroft Magnusson

Price: 77p (AKA 99c)

Review Category: Requested via email

The Blurb: Rick and Liam are small-time con artists from the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, who spend much of their time healing from the beatings dished out by disgruntled victims of their scams.

As if the pair’s troubles weren’t serious enough, Rick is addicted to internet pornography and falls in love with Amethyst, a mysterious web-cam girl he meets online. For his part, Liam has a gambling problem, which centers on a lifelong devotion to the New England Patriots.

When Rick learns his new love has been forced into prostitution by a gang of Russian sex-traffickers, he sets out to save her. To do this, he must betray his longtime partner and steal their life savings, which Liam has just bet on his beloved Patriots.

Things go horribly wrong, and the two friends find themselves scrambling for cash to stave off their leg-breaking Korean bookies. With only three days to raise all the money, the partners—along with Amethyst—hatch a desperate scheme to blackmail a philandering US congressman.

Can they pull off their audacious plan, or will jealousy and suspicion tear them apart? Finally, what is the web-cam girl’s dark secret, and can these two screw-ups survive long enough to learn the terrible truth?

It’s all-in for Rick and Liam—the debut novel from Mycroft Magnusson, Sweet Money Won is a sexy, funny crime thriller, balancing character-driven suspense with a comic portrait of masculinity in crisis.

Preview Available: The usual Amazon look inside thing.

Would I buy this (again)? : Possibly.

The Product: Your usual Kindle e-book, pricey paperback also available.

The Nitty Gritty: I'm going to resort to the well known doo-doo sandwich method for reviewing Sweet Money Won. It earned its four stars from me and the reasons for this are numerous. A number of clever, funny comic vignettes. Some energetic card play writing. Sexy scenes that allowed the reader space enough not to feel a cringe coming on, a good variety of situations and character interactions.

Sweet Money Won does its work, it's well edited (often a concern when it comes to indie works even now). The book earns its place in my heart as a collision between murky hard-boiled crime fiction and sexy farce that manages to work despite its extremes.

So Sweet Money Won is well-written and a bit different, both of which qualify it as a worthwhile read. Having said this the book sailed close to the wind for me. It scrapes its four stars rather than being an assured winner. I nearly didn't finish it. If there was one thing that stood out as making the book a chore it was the length.

Don't get me wrong it's only possibly a shade longer than much commercial fiction in the thriller genre. Amazon gives the print length as 405 pages. I did a quick comparison against some other thrillers by Donald E. Westlake, James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler. Sweet Money Won is around the same sort of length as LA Confidential. Raymond Chandler always kept his stuff around the 200 page mark.

Why is this important? I don't think that Chandler consciously kept his stuff brief any more than I think Ellroy beefed up LA Confidential. Let's not forget that the latter title has three intertwining plot strands that shift around and about one another to build up the whole story. Assumedly in both of these cases the authors just kept writing until they ran out of story.

Sweet Money Won does not feel like this. It feels like it has been bulked up, there are at least three subplots which are not strictly speaking necessary to get the story from A  to B.

When a pair of protagonists, such as Magnusson's Liam and Rick, are going to be such exhausting company it is almost certain that less would be more. The novel is obviously a set up for a recurring series of adventures and, as such, some parts of the novel that clearly weren't going anywhere could have done well to fall to the red pencil.

Having said that I could not single out a scene that was poorly written or not at all amusing (the opening section I made a note that I found it quite depressing for about the first 15% of the book but I did keep going). The problem is not with one particular moment or the writing in any one scene it's in the sheer bulk of it. In the end Sweet Money Won is an enormous, violent, smutty shaggy dog story of a book that gets away with not overstaying its welcome just as its protagonists get away with the bundles of cash suggested by the title.

Review: Devil's Hand

The Book: Devil's Hand by ME Patterson

Price: £1.97 (Kindle)

Review Category: An author following me on Twitter posted the most intriguing Twitter shout out for his book about Las Vegas being caught in a blizzard.

The Blurb: Trent Hawkins survived a 30,000-foot fall from a jetliner and became an overnight sensation -- the Luckiest Man Alive. For years, his strange and unnatural luck made him the king of the Las Vegas poker scene. After years on the blacklist, despised by every high roller, he finds himself returning, with his wife, Susan, to his former stomping ground, only to be caught between a serial kidnapper, vengeful angels, poker-playing demons, and a magic-wielding thirteen year-old girl who stands unwittingly at the center of a fallen angel's plot to end all of mankind in an unholy blizzard. As Las Vegas grinds to a halt, Trent is forced to make terrible sacrifices and must ultimately choose his role in the coming War, or watch our world fall to ruin beneath a blanket of shadow and ice.

Preview Available: Amazon look inside, also an excerpt to read on screen on the official novel website.

Would I buy this (again)? : Yes.

The Product: Decent e-book, nice cover. One small caveat. I read a couple of chapters on my Samsung Galaxy Ace because I couldn't be bothered to go and get my Kindle from downstairs. Something in the typesetting made it very occasionally drop a word or two off the bottom of one screen and not display it on the next. This meant I had to freestyle the gist of the two missing words from context. Like I say, it's a small niggle.

The Nitty Gritty: There was a point at which I stopped going into bookshops to look for books. The reason why was that no publisher was putting out stuff like Devil's Hand. I don't know if things have changed. I guess they haven't, people keep drawing comparisons in the places I've looked between this and the Dresden Files. If you're going to say that if you liked Dresden then you'll probably like this people would be right. If you want to say the two things have much in common, then you'd be far less right.

Devil's Hand starts out doing things right by not being in the first person. I understand that there's a sort of gumshoe vibe in Dresden but that guy does sometimes come off as a whiner because that's what first person perspective tends to do in long form unless you're clever. Trent Hawkins, the hero of Devil's Hand, is described in the third person and all the better for it. I found it a hell of a lot easier to get on with Trent.

The other two great features of Devil's Hand show a pretty solid understanding of what this series is and what it's about also. One is that it starts a series and has that "television show pilot" vibe about it, but the story contained within its pages is ultimately satisfying in its own right. The other is that its metaphysical set up is laid out for the reader in a pretty clear fashion, giving this urban fantasy thriller a weight that propels it forward and keeps it involving.

As for the plot, the blurb tells you most of what you want to know. The one thing a blurb cannot help to make clear is just how well acquainted Mr Patterson has made him with the apocryphal (as in actually from the apocrypha, not in the metaphorical sense) source of his mythos. I have found that when it comes to contemporary fantasy aimed at adults authors do have a tendency to think that they can half-bake something and let it loose. I have often left these works feeling, somehow, poorer than I came in. Devil's Hand displays the author's research and knowledge in a plot appropriate manner, hence, it enriches even as it thrills and excites.

Not that this is a perfect score card. There is a little flab that could have used some revision. There's too much fighting between the main protagonist and the main antagonist in the first half. There's a character who at first appears a bit thin, then appears to be a cheap motivational device and later proves to be a set up for something down the line; the whole matter is clumsily handled.

These minor problems, however, do not detract from the fact that the overall impact, once the story is done, is a resounding success. I think that some people would say it's an unqualified good that you can get to the end, turn back and see how deftly the players have been introduced and the set up going forward will give room for surprises and drama. I would say that this kind of dramatic coyness, meaning that you can only really see where you were going when you've got to your destination, risks losing a small number of less patient readers along the way.

None of the problems are fatal. I really enjoyed the book and, crucially, am really intrigued to read the follow up and further volumes in the series. Next time I have a gap in my leisure reading schedule (holiday or such) M.E. Patterson's oeuvre will be one of the places I'm going to go looking for another encounter with the fascinating cast of angelic hosts and demonic hordes.

Review: Empire

The Book: Empire by Michael R. Hicks

Price: Free

Review Category: An enthusiastic tweeter and successful indie author I was keen to check it out.

The Blurb: EMPIRE is the coming-of-age story of Reza Gard, a young boy of the Human Confederation who is swept up in the century-long war with the alien Kreelan Empire. Nightmarish female warriors with blue skin, fangs, and razor sharp talons, the Kreelans have technology that is millennia beyond that of the Confederation, yet they seek out close combat with sword and claw, fighting and dying to honor their god-like Empress.

Captured and enslaved, Reza must live like his enemies in a grand experiment to see if humans have souls, and if one may be the key to unlocking an ages old curse upon the Kreelan race. Enduring the brutal conditions of Kreelan life, Reza and a young warrior named Esah-Zhurah find themselves bound together by fate and a prophecy foretold millennia before they were born.

Preview Available: Well, it's kind of free so...

Would I buy this (again)?: Given the price of titles in the series I probably will buy the others at some point so, yes.

The Product: A really well put together e-book and an example to others, well laid out for the reader with marketing folded into the closing pages. Really well done.

The Nitty Gritty: When I finished Empire I found myself having to ask my wife: If someone gave you a book that claimed to be a space opera what would you expect to happen in the story? She replied that she would have expected space ships, laser battles and aliens. By which count Empire scores 1 out of 3, it does contain aliens. In most other respects, however, this is not a space opera, rather it is a swords and sandals fantasy, in the vein of Conan the Barbarian, with space opera-y trappings.

What's even weirder is that the space opera sections are, by far, the weakest parts of the book. So I'm going to pitch it to you straight, this is a really really good blood and thunder melodramatic gladiatorial fantasy with action, adventure, lizard women and a fascinating, bizarre romance at its core. The slices of space opera bread in which this is the meaty, spicy, satisfying filling are dry, cardboardy and a little mouldy, don't let that put you off.

The story of Reza Gard, enslaved by the Kreelan Empire as part of a grand spiritual experiment is earnest, surprising and exciting by turns. After a couple of chapters of the fifteen year old Reza being obnoxiously wonderful in an orphan's colony the sudden switch to an environment where he is weak, frightened and not loved or respected by anyone is a welcome change. When Mr Hicks begins to dish out punishment to the precocious little snot I began to relax. Later on, when he begins to develop fuzzy feelings towards one of the blue-skinned, taloned, sadistic lizard women who surround him it definitely gave me pause for thought.

That's the hard nugget of mental engagement squirrelled away in amongst the torrid tale of survival, combat and forbidden love on an alien world as deadly as it is beautiful. This is heady stuff indeed, the two lovers in the centre of the tale are given depth by the situation in which they find themselves. Reza is more than just a two dimensional Buck McHeropants because he was a normal all-American human kid who got a taste for bondage and domination at the hands of blue lizards. His lizard companion Esah-Zurah because Hicks commits fully to the idea that this woman is like Red Sonja only blue and not as cuddly or loveable.

So often in fantasy tales female warriors are just vehicles for the expression of dodgy submissive fantasy and misogyny on the part of the author. Empire has the cheek to subvert that notion by extrapolating it to its ultimate end. Hicks is careful to communicate that the Kreelan warrior women are anything but desirable to humans. For a start any human that meets a Kreelan is way too busy watching their intestines uncoil to wonder about alien nookie. To take this unforgiving template and spin an interspecies romance is chutzpah beyond that which I possess. To take all the reasons why such a twist is insane, laugh in their face and then add fairly sophisticated alien political and spiritual complications into the already unlikely mix propels the narrative into a whole new sphere of crazy.

Maybe I am just a bit of a fuddy duddy when it comes to this sort of stuff but the most gripping aspect of this story was the feeling of buying into everything even as you wondered whether you were being an idiot for doing so. The story of Reza Gard is what keeps me interested here, and the adventures in the Kreelan Empire are an amazing ride. I must admit to misgivings about reading other books in the series as I am uncertain that I will enjoy them as much, but I will be giving them a chance when I have some room in my reading schedule (so some time in 2017 then?) simply out of respect for this gloriously lunatic alien fantasy love story.

Review: Dark City Blue

The Book: Dark City Blue by Luke Preston

Price: £2.90

Review Category:  Luke Preston was the first author to follow me on Twitter, I instantly bought his book to review.

The Blurb:  A fistful of people are murdered, fifteen million dollars is stolen and detective Tom Bishop is stuck in the middle. When he hits the street, every clue points in the same direction - his colleagues in a police department demoralised by cutbacks and scandals. Hunted, alone and with no place left to turn, Bishop embarks on a hellish journey down into the gutters where right and wrong quickly become twisted and problems are solved with gunfire and bloodshed.

Over the next two days, Tom Bishop will be cornered. He will be beaten. He will bust into prison. He will shoot at police. He will team up with violent criminals. He will become one of them. He will break every rule in the book, chasing a lead nobody else will go near down a rabbit hole of corruption, murder and buried secrets.

Will Bishop become the very monster he set out to destroy?

A modern hard-boiled tale that unfolds at a relentless pace, Dark City Blue is Serpico, if Serpico snorted a fistful of cocaine and hung out with Lee Marvin.

Preview Available: Amazon Look Inside dealio, also his twitter feed links to the first few pages.

Would I buy this (again)? : Oh yes... yes I would.

The Product: A decent well-formatted e-book. Don't think much of either title or cover because they totally don't do a very good job of conveying the quality of the contents.

The Nitty Gritty: I'd never really considered the possibility of there being a sub-genre called "hard boiled oz noir" before cracking open Dark City Blue. The first thing to note about this is that the Australian patois definitely delivers a unique wrinkle to a powerful, bloody, violent thriller.

Let's be clear about this, there is something joyously adolescent about the violence, the swearing, the cranked up adrenaline-soaked machismo of Dark City Blue. I think the jazzy mood title does little to convey the swaggering minimalist confidence of this assured slice of sardonic action.

The story revolves around your classic hard man super cop Tom Bishop hunting, and being hunted by, a network of corrupt cops in Victoria. The novel wastes no time kicking off with a gun battle, proceeding through an armed robbery, into a balls to the wall action chase where Preston takes every opportunity to beat the crap out of Bishop in a most satisfying manner.

The language is terse and revels in its punchy economy. There's exactly enough story to keep the whole thing barrelling forward, not so much you ever find yourself confused. Dark City Blue is an assured exercise in literary economy. It's the closest thing to a great tits and explosions action movie I've ever read in novel form. The whole thing's a gestalt, no individual element is unusually strong but the whole thing pulls together to make a terrific début novel and I wait with eager anticipation to read the next Tom Bishop novel.

Review: APE: How to Publish a Book

The Book: APE: How To Publish A Book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch

Price: £6.42

Review Category: Bought after it popped up in my newsfeed.

The Blurb: In 2011 the publisher of one of my books, Enchantment, could not fill an order for 500 ebook copies of the book. Because of this experience, I self-published my next book, What the Plus!, and learned first-hand that self-publishing is a complex, confusing, and idiosyncratic process. As Steve Jobs said, "There must be a better way."

With Shawn Welch, a tech wizard, I wrote APE to help people take control of their writing careers. APE's thesis is powerful yet simple: filling the roles of Author, Publisher and Entrepreneur yields results that rival traditional publishing. We call this "artisanal publishing"--that is, when writers who love their craft control the publishing process and produce high-quality books.

APE is 300 pages of step-by-step, tactical advice and practical inspiration. If you want a hype-filled, get-rich-quick book, you should look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you want a comprehensive and realistic guide to self-publishing, APE is the answer.

Preview Available: Amazon's usual "Look Inside" deal.

Would I buy this (again)? : Absolutely

The Product: A fine example of artisanal publishing ;)

The Nitty Gritty: I bought Kawasaki and Welch's "How To" guide because I needed some advice about how to upgrade my woeful marketing skills. The book has definitely helped me and, for no extra cost, has shown me everything a "How To" guide ought to be.

After labouring over being an author and a publisher with novels and role-playing games I have evolved my own approach to the titular A (Author) and P (Publisher). So being given tips on "How To" by the authors lead me into situations where I felt vindicated and situations where I point blank disagreed with the advice given.

The book is formatted to within an inch of its life with a swish font, nice use of drop caps, stylish bullet lists. This book has had time and attention lavished upon it in terms of making it a product.

The prescription for doing this is that it will drive people nuts if you don't. This is because the display will go wappy on certain devices and you will know nothing about it as you only previewed it on your e-reader and the e-reader of a close personal friend. People will view your completed tome on all manner of inappropriate devices and you need to make sure that you have as much control as possible over the way it will display.

I permitted myself a smirk as I read this advice off the screen of my Galaxy Ace, which rendered all the wise words of quoted sources in thin columns about five characters wide. The fact is that fancy formatting is always going to break something somewhere, so I have always adopted a formatting lite approach to my books. I commit the sin (according to APE) of marking dialogue with "dumb" quotes because in some places "smart" quotes render as little diamonds with query marks embedded in them or hollow rectangles of character doom.

My approach to the smoothest possible read is to make the typography as unfussy as possible while still rendering it readable. Indented paragraphs, font sizes, italics, and ASCII characters only need apply. This is possibly because I write fiction and to me the words are the medium in which the story is contained. If people are reading Chicago Shadows thinking: Hey, I like the way he's starting each section with a weighty drop cap! then, dear reader, I have invoked the wrath of the fail whale.

If I was writing a text book maybe I would need some advanced typographical-fu. I know that in the case of the RPGs I wrestled long and hard with LibreOffice and its PDF exporter. So, the advice to publishers is largely dictated by the needs of the text being published. In other words: sometimes it's different strokes for different folks.

In addition the overview of being an author runs you through the process of deciding whether you should even write a book that did cause my eyebrows to raise. After all, if you didn't even know that you definitely should write a book then why would you pick up a guide telling you how to publish one? Circular, indeed.

I have to confess that I didn't read the Author section in any great depth. It is too late for me. Maybe this volume will help to save a few but I have my corner of Hell pre-booked and warming nicely.

Where APE came into its own for me was in the 'E' section, which stands for Entrepreneur. Essentially I have spent a long time learning to write a book and a long time learning to publish a book but I have, to date, spent no time learning how to market a book.

I am 100% positive that a marketing expert would tell me I didn't necessarily "need" to follow all of Kawasaki and Welch's advice in the Entrepreneur section, much as I would advise authors and publishers that they didn't need some of the advice in the other sections. But the point is I don't have a handy marketing expert to advise me and having a concrete list of things to do is already a great comfort.

Don't get me wrong, the authors have managed to break the bad news to me that the release of Chicago Shadows 1-3 has been handled "wrong". I have missed out several things I "should" have done prior to release. What is comforting is the fact that I now know this stuff even if I didn't before I released my heart-pounding gritty cop thriller trilogy. Following up on the tips that I can in APE means I am one step closer to being able to tell people about my books properly in future.

So, if you know all this stuff and are reading APE to feel vindicated you may find that you're not always in agreement with Kawasaki and Welch. If, on the other hand, you are clueless about any of it then APE will give you a good solid wedge of practical advice that will support you through the production of your own self-published marvel. That is all anyone can really ask of a solid "How To" guide.

Looper - Doomed To Repeat

This is also available at Beware The Spaceman.

Film noir is a much abused genre. The concept describes a series of tricks and techniques used to elevate the transition of hard-boiled crime stories from the inter war period of the 20th Century. Noir arose from a tension at that time between market demands and moral zeitgeist. People had an appetite for fiction about the excitement of the criminal underworld but moral propriety laid out a strict definition regarding the kinds of things that could occur in the stories.

Hardboiled fiction, in its original form, was a method of compromise, the characters readers wanted were present, but the consequences of their life choices were always harsh. It was impossible for bad people to truly succeed in the moralistic world of hardboiled fiction. To even out the odds authors often cynically put the point across that success was impossible for just about anyone and all apparent success was just a moment of transitory relief before pain, suffering and death weilded their inevitable grasp.

As this world view contains a grain of truth it is hard to escape, merely making life difficult for protagonists became a method of suggesting gritty reality without a story having to be all that realistic. In crime movies this can work, movies that feature precisely zero likeable characters who all suffer horribly have found an audience. The problems start to creep in when you mix elements of speculative fiction with the hardboiled world view.

Enter Looper.

Looper comes from director Rian Johnson, whom I think it's fair to say is a fan of the noir genre. His debut, Brick, was a twist on noir homages blending the hardboiled detective story with a teen movie. Brick also provided work for Joseph Gordon Levitt, an actor fast becoming one of the most important of this generation.

For director and star alike Looper provides the possibility of a big break. A high concept SF action thriller is the kind of vehicle that makes a star's name. It has also been known to elevate directors to unheard of heights of stardom. Both Levitt's performance and Johnson's direction are solid to say the very least.

Levitt's affectation of some Bruce Willis tics is confident and adds a vital layer of believability to the conceit that they are both the same man adrift in time by three decades. Johnson also does a neat trick in setting Looper in Kansas, where the hick town of tomorrow looks like the big city of today. It's a little like Inception and a little like Minority Report and, crucially, not much like Blade Runner except in a kind of "Hey! Look! I'm not trying to be Blade Runner!" kind of a way. The worst that could be said on that score is that Johnson pushes it a little too far the other way, making the Orient of the future infected with a kind of minimalist Westernism in an almost direct reversal of the Blade Runner aesthetic.

The supporting cast also turn in some fine moments. There's not one cast member who doesn't contribute some character moment that helps build the world and deepen the view we get of it. Jeff Daniels makes an excellently rumpled mob boss, developing the plot point that almost all of the mobsters he's supposed to be running are dangerously flaky when it comes to their performance on the job.

For the first forty minutes or so Johnson takes his time building the world of the loopers, a bunch of feckless, directionless psychopaths, killing people who don't exist yet in exchange for the transitory life style of sex, drugs and jazzy retro electronica (film noir, remember, no long haired hippie noise here). Levitt's character, Joe, does his looping in a corn field (appropriate for Kansas) and it is this that leads to the deeper dramatic revelations when he meets Sara, played by Emily Blunt.

Blunt is every bit as good as all the other cast members. However, it is in the introduction of this second plot layer that the wheels start to come off Looper. At the outset Looper is a story of the dealings of mobsters, making a comment on the consequences of such a lifestyle choice. In the second half the story takes a turn as Levitt stumbles onto Blunt's farm, from the first moment it is clear that the relationship between the two characters is going to get very messy.

If Looper had used the relationship between Levitt and Blunt as a foundation, so that the mystery of Levitt's past and future unfolded around that core, things might have been different. If Blunt's storyline had been cut, leaving the brutal and bloody Looper war front and centre the story stood a chance of working.

It's with these two strands jostling for attention that the story's flaws and contradictions start to weigh. All that's worst in film is here. Clumsy signposting, idea fatigue, plot bloat all of the sins of self-indulgence and ill-discipline rear their heads.

Looper clocks in at a fairly hefty 118 minutes. As with airport fiction, quantity is no indication of quality. In fact, the discipline to tell the important story would have trimmed the running time and probably hoovered up the multiple problems with the set up from the get go.

In order to remain spoiler free I can't enumerate and discuss any of the problems but anyone who's read around The Terminator and Terminator 2 will be well aware that no system of time travel is without logical flaws. There has come a tradition that discussing logical flaws in the mechanics of paradox is ungentlemanly and, indeed, I give Looper all the licence I can for the amusing parts of its set up.

Where I drew the line is at the point where statements are made and the consequences are not understood or explained adequately enough for anyone to understand them. At one point Jeff Daniels throws away a comment to the effect that killing someone today whom you know (because of time travel technology) to be alive in the future causes too much stress on the timeline to be a possible course for conflict resolution. This plot rule lasts as long as is convenient and then is merrily forgotten later on when it no longer serves a purpose.

This is the kind of sin in storytelling that puts Looper beyond my capacity to give it a break. Many parallels are going to be drawn between this and Inception, some have even gone so far as to compare Looper to the Matrix. The comparisons weaken Looper for it is neither as neatly tied togther as Inception, nor so grandly (but foolishly) ambitious as The Matrix Trilogy.

In fact Looper combines the worst elements of both these movies being sloppily constructed on the one hand but not grasping far enough to cause your head to ache with anything more than irritation. There are many many worthwhile things about Looper and I was rooting for it to be a surprise gem because no one wants to come out of the cinema feeling weary and disappointed. That's exactly how I felt upon leaving Looper. As its ponderous pulp indulgence loops in my brain the cycle is not broken.

Review: Undersea

The e-Book: Undersea by Geoffrey Morrison

Price: £1.53

Review Category: Bought after sidebar  entreaty in Facebook

The Blurb: In a world flooded and irradiated by a nearly forgotten cataclysm generations passed, all that remains of civilization clings to life in two war-torn, city-sized submarines. For fifty years, the only peace between them has come from separation.

Now, young councilwoman Ralla Gattley has uncovered mysteries that will bring these two factions face-to-face, setting in motion events that will forever change their undersea world. Along the way she meets Thom Vargas, a bored fisherman and aspiring drunk who merely wants to climb one rung on the social ladder. Little does he know that single step may well put the fate of the world in his hands.

Preview Available: An Amazon Look Inside thingie

Would I buy this (again)? : Probably

The Product: A well formatted unfussy e-book with a nice cover that only tangentially reflects the contents.

The Nitty Gritty: I finished reading Undersea nearly a week ago now and the more and more I turn it over in my head the more I can trace the book's issues come back to just one decision.

More on that later, because issues there are, but it would be grossly unfair to say that there was nothing to love in Undersea. As the blurb informs us the subject matter of Undersea concerns itself with a particular furrow of SF that doesn't get ploughed all that often. It's a watery space opera, no stars in the sky but plenty of decompression chambers beneath the waves.

This was a smart move in many ways. Undersea cannot suffer by comparison as nobody's yet produced the definitive oceanic colony novel (AFAIK). By the same token this is most certainly not the definitive oceanic colony novel, although it has many of the right ingedients. This is a slice of action thriller with some technological stuff and a moist post-apocalyptic scenario.

As such the piece is not 'idea driven' so much as 'based on an idea'. The drive has to come from the characters. The main pair, Ralla Gattley and Thom Vargas are personable enough, although I wouldn't go quite so far as to say rich, deep or well-rounded. We get to know Ralla quite well during the book, meeting both her parents and her fiance. We also get to see her wield the weapons of war and resist the efforts of their enemies to break her will.

Thom Vargas we see less of. We meet some friends of his, we learn he likes a drink, we learn that when he's not soused he can rouse himself to lead a team of sub-oceanic ninja fishermen on rescue missions.

Before we go any further I would like to make it quite plain that I enjoyed Undersea. The point of discussion here is 'is it worth £1.53 if you are intrigued by the premise'? The answer to that question is undoubtably yes. It delivers enough action, enough character and enough techno stuff to keep you going until the end.

Would I recommend it even to people who are not that bothered? That's where my endorsement ends.

I think it might be time to mention that key issue, and go from there. At one point during my read a character's name was spelled 'Mrakas'. I assumed that it was a slip of the finger and that next time the character would be correctly rendered 'Markas'. The character then continued to be called Mrakas every time he was invoked all the way to the end of the book.

Point one, the book has been somewhat shoddily proofed to the point where meeting a man called Mrakas I thought it had to be a typographical goof. The volume is rife with many of the more pernicious typos where a homonym substitutes for its more appropriate sibling, something I just can't bare (joke). There are also many places where a good editor would have spotted uses of the wrong word, nothing as bad as playing it fast and lose or loosing all patience but certainly more creative uses of that particular boob. I didn't mind, I just re-edited for sense in my own image as I went along. Less arrogant more pedantic readers will definitely find this a chore.

Point two, no doubt the character was called Mrakas because the author felt it added a little something. It did: unpronounceability. When faced with the choice of rounding out a character or giving him a silly name the journeyman author should learn to engage with a solid work ethic.

The character is not a child, giving them a silly name will not force them to make themselves more interesting to make up for their nomenclature. Until the book is out there mean kids like me cannot whale on him for having a silly name. Now that I am giving him a going over I bet there are many things Mrakas wishes he could do to make himself more interesting and rise above this unfortunate shortfall in the process of his creation, but he can't. The story is told and he is left only regrets and a tortured alphabet salad to enter into the forename box on his insurance claims.

This kind of laziness infects all the characters. If the author could be thought entirely incompetent then I might be more forgiving but Morrison demonstrates some raw talent. The setting is important, only someone with potential as a storyteller could really latch on to the hook presented by the danger and oppression of a human life forcibly pushed into less than ideal circumstances into undersea habitats.

The poetry of two communities, the heroes on board the citysub Universalis, the oppositions on board the citysub Population, living in hastily assembled gigantic submarines manages to outstrip the question of how they haven't managed any R&D on their living spaces in the three or four generations that they've been tooling about under the sea. (This latter problem is even poked hard enough to make it a sore point when you are told that they had the time to develop deep sea mining colony domes, research stations and whizzy shards of body armour but no new development in the mobile capital city of humanity.)

In addition there is a heartwarming thread of utopian philosophy embodied in the political stance of Ralla Gattley. Morrison has a way of communicating how people act in mobs comes to life in a way I've not seen before. The politics of the masses and the manipulation of leadership communication are used to make plot points in a way that seems believable and contrasts with how such devices are usually overplayed. At one moment an attempt at undermining a character's leadership credentials backfires (which such moves don't tend to) and the description of the fallout from this ham-fisted attempt really gives the drama some muscle.

Gattley is idealistic enough to be endearing but realistic in her outlook enough not to be naive, a hard balancing act, to be sure. A key part of this balance can be attributed to the villain, the opposing citysub's lead politician: Governor Oppai,  who is a splendidly weird creation.

I'm not entirely sure whether Oppai's distinctive character is a design or an accident. It is certainly possible that Morrison made the whole plot and supplied notes for "Villain 1 acts this way" before writing. When he came to write the novel he tried to fit Oppai's personality to the actions he was required to take.

Regardless, Oppai's characterisation does work, it shouldn't, but it does. Oppai is, simultaneously, a charismatic statesman and a paranoid lunatic. This sounds like something it would be fairly easy to pull off but his brand of charisma is very much of the contemporary age. Oppai makes statements about being "in it together" with the people on board the citysub Population whilst, at the same time, enticing them into his dangerous fantasy through a web of deceit; an exemplar of fascism through lies, appealing to the worst in human nature.

Oppai is brilliantly manipulative and eminently despisable. Making him Ralla Gattley's main adversary boosts the protagonist's character. Oppai is pretty much as two dimensional as all the other main characters but in a pantomime villain this is excusable.

To be fair I didn't have high standards for the main protagonists. 2.5 dimensions will usually do a great job in a plot-driven action thriller and 3 whole dimensions can often make the meat too rich and too strange.

Given that the novel is supposed to be complete in itself the fact that all you know about the protagonists is that they are pacifists with guns who may or may not be in lurve is a shortcoming. It is one that could have been mitigated in two ways.

The first is that Undersea could have gone from one off to saga, over a longer period the gradual accumulation of character is easier to forgive and almost inevitable for the storyteller. The second would be to have more characters front and centre making the piece into an ensemble.

Following both of these suggestions to their natural conclusion it would appear that Undersea is not just a fine idea for an SF adventure but also a solid basis for a television series.

I couldn't shake the feeling that things would have turned out a little better if Undersea had been given some of the discipline applied to a television series. Among the likely improvements such a treatment would have furnished are: the major beats would have been slower, the enemy could have amounted to more than a single character, the ensemble would have helped build a richer world.

The end result may have come out like Waterworld meets (new) Battlestar Galactica but in genre terms that's got potential to be a winner.

As it is the product before us at once goes too fast and doesn't deliver quite enough story to raise it further than a solid "just above average". The good news is that there are free volumes out there with more editorial polish and less compelling action. The bad news is that there are free volumes out there with identical (or better) editorial standards that are more gripping. As these are the facts I cannot grip you firmly by the shoulders and direct you to read Undersea now, but neither am I going to warn you away. If you're looking for a cheap and cheerful slice of action adventure with a twist Undersea will certainly scratch that itch.

The Post's On Side

The Huffington Post that is. Today's self-publishing article from their blog is more encouragement and analysis for my views on the self-publishing scene. I'm becoming a Huff Post fanboy, for certain.

The other thing that caught my eye implies quite clearly that many people who wish to dabble in the waters of self-publishdom might not really have understood the point of the brave new Kinde-riffic era.

In other news I'm hoping to ressurrect my review column on here. I used to have to trawl about for free stuff or plough through PDFs on my PC to review self-pubbed stuff, relying on the generosity of authors to supply me. Now I have an e-Reader (not Kindle) and many commercially available books are cheap enough for me to buy review copies.

Watch this space. It's more lively already.