sci-fi nerd

Entertaining and delightfully absurd

Reviewed: 05-31-25 Listener received this title free

I have been a fan of Rob Dircks’s work since I met a wayward android, Heyoo, in his 2016 novel, The Wrong Unit. I’ve found that Dircks offers a generous helping of all the things I look for in the books I choose: humor, heart, aliens (or characters who act very alien), a bit of political snark regarding current events casually thrown in, and, when possible, cats.

In Sunnyside, we meet Theo Hoover, a guy 800-ish years in Earth’s future who wanted fix things in history (his fulltime job) and for someone to fix things in their government, where their colonizing and terraforming efforts are not exactly going well. But Theo never wanted the spotlight on himself. I think you can see where this is going…

There’s been a tragedy among those in the ‘ivory tower’, the decimating kind they showed on Designated Survivor (excellent show, btw). With no one to keep everything together, somehow Theo is hoodwinked into becoming the person responsible for the government, and all that’s wrong with it. Our reluctant new Supreme Leader even has some weird aliens – first contact, mind you – to deal with.

His predicament is made even more absurd by the names accidentally given to places and things in the colonies, as there was a historical database screwup and choices were unwittingly plucked from a truly tragic list. 800 years in the future people might not know or care what happened back at Earth’s Chernobyl, but hey, let’s vacation there this summer. Maybe we can pop by Krakatoa on the way, or go boating in Lusitania. I hear Pompeii is a gas. The casual references made me giggle every time.

I laughed through the whole debacle, and am so glad that once again, Dircks narrated the audiobook. I can’t imagine another narrator voicing the misfits bumbling through these predicaments any better.

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1 person found this helpful

Such an excellent trilogy

Reviewed: 04-10-24

In this third installation in the In Times Like These series, Ben and Mym are making a solid go of their relationship, which is a FINALLY moment for everyone. But as always in time travel, things are never as easy as we want them to be. Kudos to Nathan Van Coops for the painstaking effort he put into authoring the entire trilogy, because getting all the intricacies right must have been soul-sucking.

Ben's travels in the previous two books have complicated his existence, and he continues to encounter versions of himself, each of whom has their own idiosyncrasies. One Ben is gone, "dead"?, stuck in the Neverwhere, a time purgatory no one would wish on their worst enemy. And to add to the confusion, there are these (Stargate-styled) "Eternals" complicating the way things are, by mucking with how they were. Altogether, Ben has his work cut out for him, trying to avoid paradoxes and to set things right. Or not as wrong.

I have a special place in my heart for futuristic ideas that show a more graceful existence for humanity. This is why Star Trek has always been a favorite of mine. This book showed a less apocalyptic future than we see in most speculative fiction, and even showed some hopeful advancements. There were also examples of tech-gone-overboard, like some of the more intensive synth options for "people", that were incredibly realistic.

Overall I give this series five stars and will continue to keep Nathan Van Coops flagged as a favorite author, no matter what genre he delves into next.

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The Southern accent is embarrassingly bad

Reviewed: 11-29-23

Good fast-paced story, nice addition to a great series. But I suggest you get the Kindle or paper version. Audio is not the way to go here.

You'd think if the story takes take place in Tennessee and North Carolina, Audible would find someone who knows how to do an appropriate accent. The narrator doesn't need to nail the accent down to a small radius, but seriously, could they at least get the century right? This is not the 1840s.

It makes me cringe every time there's a "Southern" accent in a book and the default is to make every man sound like a cartoonish John Wayne and every woman sound like Scah-lette O'Hara entertaining suitors on the plantation. The south of the US stretches thousands of miles, from cowboyish Arizona across to Alabama and then all the way up into Virginia. With that much southern real estate in question, you'd have to imagine a one-size-fits-all accent wouldn't do, and here is a perfect example of it not working. In the UK, accents change every 20 miles, and people honor the distinctions. Why not here?

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2 people found this helpful

Great fun, with decent science behind it

Reviewed: 07-07-23

What a fun audiobook! Truth be told, I have a serious love-hate relationship with time travel books. They tend to irritate me, because they become so outlandish and contradictory that they make the show Supernatural seem plausible.

But this one didn't completely butcher current science. It explained away a lot of the complexities in a satisfying (though vague) way. And the characters were worth cheering on toward their goals. It was engaging, enjoyable, not at all flashy or hyped, and easy to read -- exactly the kind of brain candy for when work gets crazy and my mind needs an effortless and fanciful distraction.

I'll definitely pick up the next book in the series, The Chronothon. I want to find out what time has in store next for Ben/Benjamin/Benji and his friends.

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Listen to the sample before you slap down a credit

Reviewed: 02-26-23

I read City of Light for a book club. While historical fiction isn't really my thing, I did find the locale especially interesting, as I currently live in the neighborhood where this novel takes place. I drive on Forest Avenue, passing the Asylum and Forest Lawn Cemetery, as well as Delaware Park and Hoyt Lake every single day. I didn't have to imagine much to see where Louisa is walking, sledding or riding, as all the same homes and estates are right here, updated slightly but mostly unchanged. Unfortunately, this is where my enjoyment of the novel ends.

I now understand better how difficult was the effort to use Niagara Falls to introduce electricity to Western NY, and how fearful people were of this "new" technology. My 123 year old house still uses gas for practically everything, and we are constantly having to remove old gas pipes in order to put in electric ceiling fans, electric appliances and such. Buffalo ran on gas, and in lots of ways, still does, which is kind of funny since the source of vast amounts of electricity is right here at the Falls.

I know this is a work of fiction, but it still felt so very contrived to me. Did you see the movie Midnight in Paris? Where the guy keeps running into all les années folles movers and shakers, like EVERY SINGLE ONE of them? This book is kind of like that, but most of the politicians and prominent Buffalo investors she encounters are rapey, misogynistic and condescending to our almost childlike heroine, Louisa. It was a different era, but I still got annoyed by almost every single male character.

As for the narration, if they were going for an old-timey, echoey, bland production, then they by George, they nailed it! Was it an effort to sound more authentic for the era in which the book was placed, or was the production just really awful? Either way, I did not enjoy it.

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the start of a new series, please!

Reviewed: 12-29-22

I refuse to let go of the idea that Amok must be the beginning book of a Dox chronology.

Mr. Eisler, we know "some people just need killing". But don't others just need their stories told?

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I didn't have the patience

Reviewed: 05-28-22

So many people said this was a "must read".

I don't know how to say this, but I found The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle tedious and not particularly intriguing. I love Connie Willis's books, and this had the same feel to it, but with probably double the weight. Yikes.

I got maybe 2/3 of the way through and knew I didn't have the patience to go minute by minute to find out who did what, what everyone's motivations really were, and who the Plague Doctor really was. I skipped ahead and cranked up the narration speed, and ended up really disappointed with the answers provided at the end.

MOST IMPORTANT: I still don't know what the "1/2" thing was all about. Come on, it's in the freaking TITLE! Feeling really gypped by that omission.

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Unoriginal

Reviewed: 01-18-22

Constance seemed enough like Brandon Sanderson's novella, The Original, which I read a couple years ago, that I lost interest and eventually decided not to go back to it.

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Everything I love about science fiction

Reviewed: 06-19-21

"Unputdownable" isn't a word I use lightly, but today I'm pulling it out and slapping it down on the table.

That story. That friendship. That adventure. That ending!

Project Hail Mary is like a feel-good Adrian Tchaikovsky space adventure, with the frantic science of The Martian, sprinkled with the snarky humor of Scalzi's Old Man's War. It is everything I love about science fiction rolled into one amazing book.

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My only complaint is that I wish it were longer!

Reviewed: 05-22-21

Nathan Van Coops has a real talent for world building, which comes in handy when the potential for countless time streams becomes possible in the "In Times Like These" series. I was excited to see a book inserted between books 1 and 2 in the series, and hope there will be more! My only complaint is that this audiobook was 4 hours. Why not 8? 10? I'll take all I can get in this wacky universe.

In this betweener story, we aren't experiencing time travel alongside a character. We get to view the idea of time travel and futuristic ideas through the observant eyes of an ambitious FBI Special Agent, investigating impossible happenings. As if she didn't already have a whole bucket of crazy and misogyny to deal with -- this is happening back in the 1980s-90s -- now she needs to accept the improbable and then convince others of the same. In a not-so-distant time when women were still being told to smile, because it makes them look prettier (such a priority!), Stella York carries the burden of proof of time crimes on her feminine shoulders, where most "manly" men would only see hysteria.

Watching, in bits and pieces, the wild ride of time travelers popping in and out of various times past was fun. Plus, I'm glad to have the perspective that comes with remembering that era. I was in tech as early as the late 1980s, still am today, but it's been a long time since anyone called me "sweetheart" in the office.

For the audiobook, narration by Kylah Williams was all right, not great but definitely not bad. She left me wondering in which part of the US people pronounce it "eee-mediately".

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