Christopher Duro

Christopher Duro is a former professional astronomer and current engineer and outdoorsman. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and teenage children. An avid reader of science fiction, he has often considered and occasionally attempted to write it. Hero of Terra is his first novel.

adventure    ai apocalypse    artificial intelligence    artificial worlds    flying man    future history    genetic engineering    genetic mods    nano tech    nuclear fusion    private eye    scifi romance    secret society    solar system    witchcaft   

• 20 Million Leagues Over the Sea on June 16, 2022
  
  Picked this book for its attractive cover, clever title, and strong reviews. Those reviews are well deserved. The setting is an alternate early 20th century world where the characters and events described in several well-known late 19th century SF novels were real. Hunter weaves those stories together to create a backstory that’s fascinating in its own right. Her characters are well drawn, and their struggles feel real enough to care about. Her villains are especially good. The plot is complex but free of serious inconsistencies, and the manuscript is very clean. She’s done her homework, too: from the odd but mostly plausible technologies in her spaceships to the ominous rumblings of an incipient world war postponed but not prevented by an attack from Mars, there’s very little of the intellectual laziness that leads so many modern writers to sacrifice realism for a convenient plot device. Complaints? Sure: The first quarter or so of the story is a little slow. The ending is pretty abrupt, as if this is just the first half of a much longer novel. And the grammar and tone of the dialogue are sometimes jarringly modern and out of place in the post-Victorian setting. But those are pretty minor flaws in a fundamentally strong novel. I’m excited to get started on the sequel! • Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• The Mysterious Planet of Captain Moreau on June 27, 2022
  
  This book is the third of a three-part series, or rather it’s the second segment of a long novel that begins with Twenty Million Leagues over the Sea (currently free on Smashwords) and ends with The Invisible Woman (not yet published). It seems impossible to describe Mysterious Planet in any depth without spoilers, but it’s fair to say that the quality is generally as good as, or maybe a little better, than the previous book. The plot grows even more complicated and the revelations keep coming. Most of them make sense in the fictional universe introduced in Twenty Million Leagues, and some of them manage to surprise. But I found their emotional impact faded as the book progressed, partly because the relationships between the key characters seemed to get muddled by revelations that changed their understanding of each other too fast for them (or the reader) to fully digest. Overall this book is worth reading, but be aware that it probably won’t make much sense if you haven’t already read the first book. And there’s no satisfying conclusion at the end of this second book: the story just stops, with a promise to resume and resolve in the third. Here’s hoping Invisible Woman lives up to that promise. If it does, the set will be impressive indeed. • Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• It Ain't Over... on July 15, 2022
  
  Take a formulaic space-opera plot and fill it with tired SF tropes from the 1970s, add significant plotting and editing mistakes, and you come up with... a pretty good read!? I’m not sure why this book rates 4 stars, but I think it does. Despite a number of glaring flaws, it kept me reading way past a sensible bedtime and left me wanting more. Spoilers ahead, but only for the early chapters. You can pretty much guess from the beginning how the rest of the story plays out, though, so in a sense you can’t describe the book without spoiling it. But the book’s appeal doesn’t rest upon plot twists (there aren’t any), so there’s that. The protagonist (Cole) is the scion and sole survivor of a fabulously rich family who made their money inventing and maintaining the system of jump gates before being massacred by an unknown attacker. The jump gates enable practical travel between the inhabited worlds of a loose-knit and rather barbaric civilization. Humans are just one of an unspecified number of sapient species, of which we meet a few: cat-people (sigh), dog-people (sigh), and insect-people living in virtual nests as a telepathically-linked hive mind (sigh). Cole has lived as a criminal for 13 years, hiding among the low-lifes from his unseen enemies while quietly amassing precious metals to finance his final disappearance. That plan gets derailed by a series of implausible coincidences: as Cole arrives in a frontier system, a young woman is ejected into nearby space by a warship. Meanwhile, the asteroid mining colony Cole seeks to enter is destroyed by an accidental explosion, killing everyone there except for a pair of cat-girls (sigh) who attack him on sight but turn friendly and loyal after a few minutes’ conversation. Cole discovers a super-powerful alien ship run by a super-powerful AI, makes a deal with the AI to be its captain and owner, and rescues the spaced woman and the cat-girls, bringing them aboard his new ship. Almost immediately Cole discovers a debris cloud which is the remains the ship that spaced the woman. A brief investigation turns up evidence that the ship was destroyed by sabotage. But without stopping to wonder what happened to the saboteur (who might have valuable information and/or be a threat but in any case is likely to be nearby), he sets off to collect a motley crew of other rescuees, many of them survivors of ships he himself destroys, and almost all of whom are so grateful for their rescue that they instantly abandon any old loyalties to sign on with him. Along the way we meet repeated blocks of exposition (editing oops), more implausible events, and sub-minimal descriptions of characters (they’re just described as “persons” or “crewpersons”) and planets. So what, if anything, can rescue this mass of sloppy, unimaginative storytelling? How about an implicit moral in Cole’s finding success through ready generosity, steadfastness in friendship, and refusal to let himself be swayed by fear, doubt, or prejudice? He’s even chivalrous toward the women he meets, apparently not even tempted to exploit his new prestige and position. He’s a kind and considerate father-figure to a young female who lost her real dad. Add to this the author’s apparent familiarity with aircraft carrier operations (Cole’s ship is a “Battle-Carrier”), pretty good pacing, and plenty of violence, and my inner child is looking forward to the sequel. • Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• The Shot on Aug. 04, 2022
  
  The Shot is an action thriller in the mold of many others: Good Guys and Bad Guys face off with the weapons of war, terror, deception, and politics. Here the Good Guys are U.S. Marines and State Department agents of the old two-fisted school, and the Bad Guys are terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood and their sympathizers and stooges secreted among the Federal bureaucracy. The protagonist is an exceptional Marine, the kind of man a lot of good men aspire to be: a decorated veteran, sharpshooter, martial artist, bodybuilder, and tactician. He’s got a beautiful wife-to-be, devoted friends, a World War II hero dad, and a deep and abiding love for God and Country. So when the Brotherhood sets its sights on him, attacking, stealing away, and murdering those he loves, he responds with vigorous and deadly precision. What’s not to like? To be blunt, this book is in sore need of a good editor. Spelling errors and outright wrong words pockmark it like a brick hideout after a firefight. Apostrophes are likely to appear whenever a word ends with an “s”. It’s also chock full of meaningless little details (in one scene, our hero is described putting a lid on his coffee cup). And while the protagonist is a fully developed character, he’s pretty much the only one; the rest are simple archetypes. It’s got some decent plot concepts, but some themes get hammered flat: I lost track of how many times the corrosive influence of political correctness was pointed out. But, but... The combat scenes are really good, the hero is genuinely heroic, and the bad guys are plausible if not exactly original. The plot is formulaic, but it’s coherent. And to this reviewer, at least, some of those detailed descriptions of roadways, weapons, history, and terrain were satisfying as mood creators as well as playing important roles in setting the stage for the action. Even the sloppy language has an appeal to it, as if the author is deliberately putting down words the way men trained for survival in combat would use them. Taken all together, the book has an authenticity to it that a lot of more literate novels lack. Maybe that’s why it made the hours slip away and kept me up well past when I should have been in bed. This book is well worth the three bucks. It’d also be well worth paying somebody to edit out some of the mistakes. But maybe not all of them.
  
• Hunt (Children of the Hunt Book 1) on Aug. 12, 2022
  
  This is a romance story of werewolves and witches, with a detective story to help drive the plot. It’s set mostly in two small communities and textured by a complex network of hidden personal relationships. Everybody’s keeping secrets, usually less out of malice than for the sake of privacy and to avoid attracting trouble. The kickoff event is a grisly murder. The victim was well loved but lived in self-imposed isolation, so it’s a cold case by the time his PI brother arrives unknowing. One of the first people the PI meets is a pretty woman with more secrets than most, and the two quickly begin a complicated dance of attraction, suspicion, and discovery that leads to more deaths before the situation is resolved. The werewolves are atypical in several ways: there’s no changing at the full moon, no torture in their transformation, no infected bites. Their condition, or ability, is inherited. Importantly for the story, they’re not subject to bloodthirsty rages, so they mostly get along with their ‘two-footer’ neighbors as long as they’re reasonably careful. But many prefer living in their own extended family groups, called “packs”. The descriptions of small-community life are this book’s biggest strength, along with the well-written final struggle which brought out interesting features of werewolf society. The manuscript is pretty clean, relatively free of plotting errors and editing mistakes. There are some significant flaws, though. The plot drags at times while the two central characters vacillate over whether and how their relationship should progress. (Those parts might have been more interesting if their motivations were less hidden from the reader.) The detective doesn’t do much thinking about the case, misses clues he shouldn’t have, and eventually has the killer’s identity exposed without any special cleverness on his part. Some of the “ground rules” aren’t very clear, such as what the consequences would be if the existence of the werewolves became widely known. They seem awfully free to expose themselves at times, but at other times they go to great lengths to stay hidden. There’s no comic relief or major plot twist. In summary, this one was worth the read, but it didn’t make me want to stay up late, and it didn’t leave me hungry for the next installment. – Christopher Duro, author of HERO OF TERRA
  
• Oblivion: The Day Everything Dies on Aug. 23, 2022
  
  This is a time-travel paradox novel which attempts, with partial success, to deliver that old-fashioned sense of wonder that was the hallmark of the best science fiction of the nearly-mythical Golden Age. The book reminded me a little of Arthur Clarke. Its ambition is breathtaking: it opens with a debate among the leaders of a far-future galaxy-spanning civilization in desperate straits, and then leaps eons further to the entropic death of the Universe itself to describe a serious effort to fix it. The book is only about half the length of a typical SF novel. Its structure is unusual: it’s a set of vignettes that together tell an overarching story in which the central characters sometimes live in different eras. Unfortunately, the storytelling itself isn’t up to snuff. The prose is often clunky and ungrammatical. (To pick a random example, one paragraph begins: “Most, simply took a tranquilizer...”). There are a lot of redundant words (like “brief second”, as in, “Her step faltered for a brief second before she regained her composure.”) A lot of things are stated bluntly that should have been conveyed through the thoughts and actions of the characters, and sometimes the statements seem to contradict what was implied. Important background information is abruptly introduced just as it becomes vital to the plot. This lack of polish makes it feel amateurish. The good news comes in Chapter V: Adam & Evelyn, which begins a little past the halfway mark and takes up most of the remainder of the text. Here the characters are more sympathetically drawn and feel more real as they struggle with death, danger, and intense emotion. This chapter would have rated a more favorable review if it stood alone as a novelette. In fact, the best way to read Oblivion may be to skip directly to it. • Christopher Duro, author of HERO OF TERRA
  
• The Korpes File on Sep. 10, 2022
  
  This may be the best SF I’ve read on Smashwords so far. It combines excellent world-building with well-developed and interesting characters and situations. One of the book’s great strengths is that there are good guys and bad guys on both sides of the racial divide, and they interact in sometimes surprising ways. It’s not always obvious who’s who. The setting seems to be a far-future Earth which has seen a succession of technological civilizations come and go, apparently destroying each other in wars that eventually rendered the planet uninhabitable and forced the survivors to live under sealed glass domes for protection from an ecosystem turned alien and deadly to human life. The fighting’s not over, and there’s a sense that it’s put humanity on the downward path to extinction. The dominant polity is an empire reminiscent of some of the worst real-world cultures. It’s nearly totalitarian and highly militarized, and its people have been engineered to react violently to the scent of foreign pheromones. That serves as a driver of and an excuse for a racism that treats human beings as lab animals and unwilling organ donors, to be “recycled” at the end of their usefulness. The title character is one of those foreigners. He’s a Gulliver in Lilliput, a physical and intellectual giant pinned down by a dominant race who regard him as valuable for what he has to offer (or what can be taken from him), but have little regard for him as a human being. The story centers on his struggle to hang onto his humanity and protect his friends and loved ones, to overcome the neurological damage inflicted by a lifetime of service as an experimental subject, and to find a way to escape the terrible situation he was born into. The book is not without flaws. It’s unusually long (almost twice the length of a typical novel) and it isn’t so much a novel as the first installment of one, though the last scene sort of works as an ending. It dragged at times, partly due to the inclusion of unnecessary details. There are spelling and grammatical errors (usually misplaced commas) that made me have to go back and reread passages to figure out what they were supposed to mean. A good editor could clean and tighten up the manuscript, and I think it’d be well worth the investment. Even as-is, this is a really good read.
  
• A Torrejón Anthology on Nov. 11, 2022
  
  This is a set of short stories that describe experiences of a young U.S. Air Force recruit serving in Europe in the 1960s. It was a time of relative peace and high tension: the ever-present fear of a catastrophic nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union mostly contained the Cold War to a series of proxy wars along the borders between the Free and Communist worlds. The U.S. military was busy defending a continent still recovering from the devastation of World War II from a potential mass armored invasion. But these are not stories of heroic struggles, high stakes, and grand events on the global stage. Those things serve as a back-story to a set of reminiscences of road trips in battered old cars, of pretty young women and cranky older men, of accidental encounters rendered dangerous by Fascist politics and mutual incomprehension, and the kindness of soldiers toward a group of orphans at Christmas. Together they offer a patchy but interesting window on the lives of a few of the many thousands of American men who served in those pivotal times. Unfortunately the manuscript is marred by some significant editing mistakes, including a whole repeated paragraph and the usual sprinkling of spelling and grammatical errors found in Smashwords books. This isn’t a brilliant effort, but it’s worth the read for anyone with more than a passing interest in military life as it was in the 1960s and looking for something that isn’t another Vietnam War history.
  
• Free-Wrench on Nov. 23, 2022
  
  This is the first of a series of steampunk novels set in a world in which the survivors of a great (world-wide? volcanic?) cataclysm cling to life and civilization on scattered islands separated by thousands of miles of open ocean. As the cover art suggests, communication between them is via airship; there appear to be no sea-going watercraft, and electronics, including radio, are either primitive or unknown. The protagonist is a young woman of the suggestively-named island nation of Caldera, whose isolationist and inward-looking ethos turns dealing with foreigners into forbidden fruit. This is a conservative society, and Nita is something of a rebel: she’s defied the wishes of her sickly mother by setting aside art to pursue engineering. In a steam-powered world, that’s a dirty and dangerous profession, but she’s got the quick wits and courage to handle it. So when a visiting airship sneaks past Caldera’s defensive guns to trade, her hope of obtaining medicine for her mother drives her out to meet them, and when the foreign crew claim they might be able get the medicine she decides on impulse to join them for a month-long voyage. That turns out to be a bigger (and for the reader, better) adventure than she bargained for. The plot is competent and interesting and free of major inconsistencies, and it’s got a fair amount of moral complexity. The characters are well drawn and they span a fair range from mostly-good people acting ruthlessly out of perceived necessity to the outright depraved and vicious. The don’t develop much, but the relationships between them do. The description of the steam tech might have been better if it were more detailed and thought out, but most readers will probably be fine with it as-is. The manuscript is notably free of the grammatical, spelling, and editing glitches that plague a lot of Smashwords books. Overall it’s a pretty good read. ◦ Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• Shadow of the Wolf on Dec. 10, 2022
  
  This is an excellent book whose manuscript suffers from a plague of minor editing glitches. The description on Smashwords sums up its plot well. What it doesn’t tell you is that Parker crafts his characters with a degree of depth and sensitivity you don’t often see. His hero and heroine feel like real people refusing to give up hope while they struggle against almost hopeless odds, clinging to their decency and growing love even at the risk of their lives. Impressively, his Nazi villains are well developed too, showing flashes of genuine humanity and even self-sacrificing love as they brutalize the harmless people of a tiny, isolated village. The plot is coherent and interesting, with elements of a war story and a detective story, and of human survival in conditions made harsh by pitiless Nature exacerbated by human evil, and the inevitable moral complexity that comes with deadly combat, no matter how well justified. The background is worth the reader’s attention, too, with its descriptions of life at sea and on the rugged slopes of the mountain that dominates the skyline. This is a five-star novel but for those little glitches. It’d be well worth the cost of an editor to clean them up. -- Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• Our Song on Dec. 19, 2022
  
  Our Song is a romance novel and I’m a Science Fiction reviewer. But heck, any man who’s lived a real romance ought to have something worthwhile to say about a novel about an imaginary one. Heck, the principals aren’t aliens or even genetically-engineered humans, and they’re not being manipulated by a mind-warping AI bent on world conquest. How hard could this be? It’s pretty obvious from the outset that Kelsey and JD are a perfect match. He’s a smart and handsome man floundering at fatherhood without a woman in his life, while she’s a smart and beautiful super-mom who deftly rescues him from a clothes-shopping train wreck. They’re both living far below their potential, needing the right kind of prodding to achieve the career success they’re longing for. So of course they end up solving each others’ problems, and very belatedly realize they’re a perfect romantic match. But that rather blasé description doesn’t do justice to this story. It’s the little details that make it: JD’s unselfconscious demonstrations of conscientiousness show him to be not just a pretty face (and ass) but a genuinely good man; and likewise, Kelsey’s quickness to lend this struggling stranger a skillful helping hand proves her worthiness to be far more than skin deep. Their love grows naturally, and probably inevitably, as they form a parenting partnership that increasingly takes on the character of a family. Kade shows she’s got a head for business, both the commercial kind and the business of keeping a household running. There’s a real sweetness here, and a gritty realism too, that made me look forward to sitting down to read a chapter or two. But the book has significant flaws, too, and they kept it out of “hate to put it down” territory. There weren’t many outright errors with the grammar or spelling, but the language felt clunky in a lot of places, and even in the most intense moments it’s never lyrical. Worse, the story feels longer than its 110000 words, and it takes an implausible amount of almost-living-together before the pair of close friends and mutually-hidden lovers confess their true feelings. And why is this band of four testosterone-powered 20-something men never getting drunk, swearing, fighting, or even sharing off-color jokes? It makes the detailed play-by-play sex scenes kinda jarring. On the whole, this book was worth the read, but I’m not excited for the sequels. Then again, I'm not the target audience. Maybe a woman would appreciate it better than I did. Three stars. • Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• Edge Town on Jan. 08, 2023
  
  This is one of the most original SF novels I’ve read in quite a while. Although a lot of the plot elements are fairly ordinary, the overall feel is a bit like a fever dream. In fact, Maybury notes that the concept comes from a dream he managed to scribble out a precis of. Edge Town is pretty aptly named: it’s at the edge of a continent-sized organism that renders its planet’s atmosphere more or less habitable to some species (but not humans, except with special breathing equipment). Everybody lives on top of this organism, which keeps like interesting by creating “earthquakes” when it gets itchy, which happens a lot, especially near its edge. This makes Edge Town dangerous, and it collects runaways and refugees: people with their own rough edges. The protagonist and viewpoint character is Filmore Bagel (really!), a 19 year old medical student in a future in which medicine is low-status work in a Galactic society in which humans are a low-status species. So he’s delighted by the unexpected opportunity to advance his career by moving to a frontier clinic in Edge Town to quickly earn the Field Points he needs to finish his degree. Bagel is an interesting and likable character, largely because he’s got a conscience that’s often in tension with his self-interest and a philosophy of life that’s both silly and plausible under his circumstances. His first challenge on arrival is to make a place for himself among the rough crew of “truckies” (drivers of multi-legged walking machines called “spiders”), mechanics, entertainers, and others whose outlook on life is alien to him and whose outlook on him is filled with suspicion. Edge Town is in trouble after years of neglect from the powers that be, and after a while Bagel realizes that he can do something about that. The bulk of the plot is about his fitting himself into his temporary (?) new home, and how his conscientious efforts to help allow him to make connections that bring genuine good to all involved. “Doc” Bagel turns out to have a talent for surfacing hidden talents and virtues in the people he meets. It helps the story develop a pleasant sweetness without being overly sentimental. The plot has a simple overall structure with a lot of little twists that make it interesting enough to keep me reading when I should be doing something else, which is becoming my standard test for a novel. There are some noticeable flaws, but they’re pretty minor. These include the spelling and grammatical errors common in Smashwords novels, plus what I found to be an excessive reliance on anus jokes. A decent editor could clean this up pretty easily, I think. A very good read overall, but would benefit from a bit of polish. Four stars.
  
• Oasis (The Last Humans Book 1) on Jan. 18, 2023
  
  This is one of the best SF novels I’ve read in a while. It’s a combination of coming of age story and a slow, grand revelation of a plausible but surprising backstory. Theo, the protagonist, is a boy in a small artificial world: a bubble of life surrounded by an endless sea of deadly lifelessness. In this tiny, fragile oasis he lives a prosaic life in a dorm with his peers, attending classes, getting into schoolyard fights, and trying to figure out the mysteries of the opposite sex. But Theo is a curious kid, and a smart one, and that leads him to forbidden explorations that gain him a mysterious and maybe-not-imaginary friend. When one of his real friends goes missing, he discovers what turn out to be deep dark secrets protected by hidden and sometimes brutal hands. Threatened with fates that have no business existing, Theo and the voice in his head are forced to fight their way to a shared epiphany that might, maybe, set them free. I found little in this book to complain about. Theo is an interesting and likable kid, and even the bad guys are sympathetic enough. The fight-and-flight scenes are well thought out and fun. The plot is nicely paced (except for a slowish start which is probably necessary to set the mood and establish the setting). The editing, as far as I can tell, is completely free of the usual glitches. And it passed my acid test by keeping my up reading when I should have been asleep. On the whole, a strong start to what looks to be a promising series. Five stars. • Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• Save The City on Feb. 03, 2023
  
  A telescope on the Moon has detected a swarm of giant alien spaceships coming from around the orbit of Jupiter, and the whole world is freaking out. That brings opportunity for those who’ll use it, some to make a big score, and others to settle old ones. Hollis and Mia are a matched pair (don’t call them a couple) of con artists scrambling to save their own individual hides and bound to each other by their greed. They’re smart, good looking, ambitious sociopaths,. Faced with present chaos and likely catastrophe, they must make their escape from Mia’s vengeful husband (a bloodthirsty crime boss whom Hollis cuckolded and robbed) and out of a near-future Austin full of excessively well-armed Texans straight out of a progressive’s fevered imagination, and find a buyer of the stolen goods before the aliens arrive and do who-knows-what to everything. It’s a pretty good setup for the wild ride that follows, and the plot and editing are solid. The authors clearly know a thing or two about the science they describe, and their picture of the city feels spot-on. The language is nothing special, but some of the dialog is clever, and the pacing’s not bad. The aliens, when they finally arrive halfway through the story, are refreshingly strange. Yet somehow this book leaves me unsatisfied, and not in the sense of looking forward to the next one. It’s mostly due to the books’ deep cynicism, manifested in a lack of well-developed, sympathetic characters. The thing about sociopaths is that the better you get to know them, the less you want to spend time in their company. It doesn’t help that their behavior changes dramatically for the better over the course of the story without any obvious cause, or that the people they’re risking their lives for seem perpetually on the verge of committing mass murder. I was left wondering what the point of it all was. Three stars. • Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• Illusion of Control on Feb. 20, 2023
  
  What happens when you take snippets of Biblical stories, hurl them millennia forward in time, stir in a big helping of futuristic technology and a pinch of magic, and populate them with characters from a massively dysfunctional post-apocalyptic city? If you’re Kenny Ching, you produce something brilliant. This story succeeds on many levels. On the surface it’s about a struggle between an aristocracy that controls everything the world sees as worthwhile: power, beauty, luxury, health, education, and progress toward a vision of vastly more of all of them, against a mass of their outcasts who lack all those things. Look a little deeper, and it’s sometimes hard to tell who the good guys are: there are flashes of kindness and honor, but also blindness and cruelty, in pretty much every character, and they seem to struggle as much with themselves as with each other. Science contends with faith, and faith with witchcraft; loyalty vies with temptation, and love with honor. And in the background, it’s a struggle of man against radioactive nature. Read it just for fun, or read it for insight. Either way, you’ll find plenty of both. It seems petty to point to a few editing mistakes: a missing word here, a plain typo there. But these are few and far between. The bigger problem is that this book is only the beginning of a longer story. The sequel is promised “soon”. I’m really looking forward to it. Five stars. • Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra
  
• Pale Highway on March 13, 2023
  
  Since I downloaded this book two days ago, the cover image has gained a little circle that says, “Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novel, Preditors & Editors, Readers Poll 2015”. I’m not sure what a “preditor” is (“pre-editor”?) and I have no idea who was polled. But whoever they were, they had pretty good taste. This is one of those wonderfully weird stories that blends the mundane with the fantastical, producing a sort of fever-dream atmosphere in which the reader’s perspective leaps forward and backward in time and across space. That ought to create confusion, but Conley handles it so masterfully that instead it has the effect of bringing the depths of his central characters’ lives gradually into brilliantly sharp focus. This story depends on its twists and turns, of which there are many, and it’s hard to describe it in any detail without spoiling it. So I’ll limit it to a couple of observations, the first of which is that telling the story through the eyes of a man with dementia is a pretty good way to keep the reader guessing about the reality of the things he witnesses. The second is that flipping back and forth between decades in which his mind is alternately exceptional and addled makes it impossible to dismiss the real humanity of a doddering oldster trapped in a nursing home. If I’m interpreting Conley’s dedication correctly, that’s precisely his intent. It doesn't hurt that the use of language is very good, with dry descriptions interspersed with casually poetic prose. And the editing is nearly perfect: a rare treat for a Smashwords novel. The icing on the cake is that unlike so many books I’ve read lately, which are just “Book 1” of a story that’s probably not worth finishing, this book is a real novel with a beginning, a middle, a climax, and a denouement. Five stars. I’d give it six if I could. – Christopher Duro, author of Hero of Terra and The Human Diaspora