G. Scott Huggins's All Things Huge and Hideous

 

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Sometimes you need a break from the norm.

Sometimes it can be fun to laugh when you would ordinarily be enthralled.

Sometimes you can be enthralled WHILE you're laughing.

Sometimes an author can knock it out of the park with their first novel.

Sometimes you wanna go...

Err...

Never mind that last one.

Listen folks, I just finished All Things Huge and Hideous by G. Scott Hutchins and I loved it. It's not the worlds serious fiction, but that's okay. I liked that about it. I have to admit that I never came up with the idea to ____ __ a ______ from the ______ (spoilers redacted) but that someone else did it flat out made my day. If it got him into a bit of trouble, well, better him than me and like he fixed the problem afterward...

Sort of.

Anyway, it was funny. Oh, speaking of funny...

WARNING WARNING WARNING

I love humorous novels. I love music by Weird Al Yankovic. However...

DO NOT MIX ALL THINGS HUGE AND HIDEOUS WITH WEIRD AL.

I damn near sprained a rib. Someone needs to inform Mr. Huggins that in the United States we have a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and that forcing another human being to dislocate a bone simply because he read your book is a serious violation of it! I'm gonna...

Uhh...

I'm gonna...

Well...

I'm gonna read your next one when it comes out now and it's all your fault. That somehow seems an inadequate punishment but he's earned it so, uh...

Yeah, I dunno either. I guess I'll live.

Seriously, this a book for people who don't take their fantasy too seriously. I mean, there are some of the usual tropes here to be sure, but not everything fits into a typical fantasy setting but that's what makes it fun. Really. You know what's funnier than having a pet basilisk? Trying to keep it healthy on a blood only diet. Yup, totally happens. Of course, finding an alternate use for a medusa is fun too...

Listen, this is some good stuff. I've needed a laugh lately and this provided it. Don't get me wrong though. There's plenty of good stuff here. The political intrigue is as entertaining as anything I've seen elsewhere and more immediate in its consequences. Yeah, when the leader of the world is the Dark Lord and he has this weird case of caps lock disease and a bad attitude to go with the power of life and death over pretty much everybody...

Yeah, it's intense. 

But there is just something about a veterinarian in a fantasy setting that kills me. What makes it better is that Huggins has found a way to take full advantage of the situation and make everything that much better. I don't want to spoil too much (and I've give up a few already) but watch for the situation with the Ring of Invisibility. James, the main character and also my namesake, finds an interesting way out of it, even if it's not one I'd have thought of. And it's REALLY funny. Come to think of it, the dragon thing? Yeah, awesome.

Of course, only in All Things Huge and Hideous could you have a school of Witchcraft (but no wizardry) that discriminates against humans and kicks students out because they're not pretty enough. I mean, scarred and ugly USED to be the thing, but sorry chick you're not in fashion anymore. We need statuesque witches and you're expelled, but you already know everything, but it hasn't been tested and you can just go wait tables in a tavern that caters to orcs and goblins for all we care. 

Yup, totally happens. Then Harriet the almost-witch ends up as an assistant to a veterinarian that deals in monsters. It can't get much worse than that right? Well, yeah. Kind of. I mean, what if the veterinarian gets eaten by something? Or petrified by something? Or something else weird? Or what if...

Nevermind that's a spoiler. But trust me, I wouldn't want it to happen to me. I'm pretty sure you'd think it would be well below average if it happened to you as well. But yeah, it happened and it sucks and it took skill, pluck and fire to fix it. Of course, fans of Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International know that the best solution to killing pretty much anything is to kill it with fire. Although, I have to admit that I wouldn't have thought about kill THAT with fire...

But what do you I know? I'm just a guy with too much time on his hands, a loud mouth and a keyboard. Oh, and a bit of a headache, but that's go nothing to do with anything.

Well, probably.

So yeah, the Dark Lord is not a very nice guy, his council members are stinkin' meanies, his Beast Master seriously needs an attitude adjustment, there is never enough money, the average person hates humans and well, that's where our very human hero and heroine find themselves. It's not a fun place for the characters but the shenanigans they get into are fun for us to watch.

The villains in the book are not Saturday morning cartoon types, but they're not supervillains either. James has to use every bit of his wit and cunning to, well...

Not defeat them exactly but at least keep them one step ahead. Maybe it's more like not falling too far behind. At any rate, All Things Huge and Hideous is, as much as anything a story of survival, and I think that's what makes it work more than anything. Yes, goofy things happen and weirdness abounds, but at the end of the day we can't help but root for the plucky little hero James who is really just trying to keep the bills paid and not get himself tortured to death slowly. Maybe that's what makes All Things Huge and Hideous work. I'm all for a good Chosen One story if it's out there. Lord knows I love Harry Potter. But sometimes it's can be awesome to read about a guy like me, who is just trying to survive and keep moving.

Bottom Line: 4.75 out of 5 Ten Centimeter Dragon Scalpels

All Things Huge and Hideous
H. Scott Huggins
Self Published, 2019

All Things Huge and Hideous is available for purchase at the following link. If you click it and buy literally anything from Amazon, I will get a small percentage at no cost to you.

RIP Terry Goodkind

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Once upon a time I went to visit my Aunt Janice and Uncle Bob, accompanied by my ex-wife,who may have still been my girlfriend at the time as I'm a bit hazy on the exact date of the trip. We talked. We ate. Aunt Janice's main courses and desserts were awesome. I was always a bit more cautious about her side dishes. And, as it usually did when I got together with Aunt Jancie, the subject of reading and books came up. She jumped up talking about a library book sale she had been to. She had some books that weren't for her (she was mainly a romance reader) and wanted to know if I wanted them. I pulled them out of the bag they were in and looked at them. On the spines the words "Terry Goodkind" were written. At the time, I had never heard of the guy, but I figured "Why not?" The blurbs had a fantasy feel to them, so I thought I'd check them out. 

That was a good decision. Goodkind's fantasy world was well realized. His characters lived and breathed. I was carried away to a world where magic was real and so were its practitioners. It was a world where not everything was as it seemed. D'hara was a world that looked to the ancients as a source of power and to the future and what could be.

Some of my friends would refer to Terry's writing as "competency porn." Richard Cypher (later Rahl) the woodsman and main character knew how to do a lot for himself. He never threw his hands up and walked away from a project if he could find a way to make things work, and he usually could. Kahlan Amnell was a woman of extreme talent and iron will who did what needed to be done regardless of what it cost her. She was the kind of woman every man wanted for the most part. I mean that whole thing where she could straight up destroy your mind and make you accept her most horrible command as your deepest wish was a little bit terrifying, but hey, what woman doesn't have some kind of drawback somehow?

 And the villains, were evilly evil persons who were evil. Or at least they seemed that way, up until they didn't anymore. It turns out that sometimes someone is something other than what we don't like about them. That's a lesson that today's society would do well to learn. Of course there are, and always will be, legitimately horrible people and Goodkind made it clear to all of us that there were some people in his world that were flat out beyond redemption. He showed us what to do with those people and how to do it.

 As a matter of fact, the first book in the Sword of Truth series was Wizard's First Rule," and it's an important one to remember. "People are stupid. They will believe anything they want to be true or fear to be true." That's another one to hold on to in today's society. I won't go into specifics, but there is a lot of this going around.

Goodkind was a modern day philosopher. His Wizards Rules (of which there are ten if you count "The Unwritten Rule. I'm not such a fan of that one, myself) are good rules for life. They're not hard and fast rules about how to conduct oneself as much as they are a framework for critical thinking. Goodkind portrayed the world not in terms of moral absolutes but as a place where one must think for himself. He portrayed his characters as individuals struggling to make the world a better place. He clearly makes a case for individual rights in his books without being preachy about it.

It was a few years and a divorce later when the girl I was dating at the time introduced me to Legend of the Seeker. I loved the show but it just wasn't the same. I'm guessing that Mr. Goodkind was the only one who could deliver his world the way he envisioned it. That's not meant as a knock to the show runners. They did a fine job, they just weren't Terry Goodkind.

The world lost Terry Goodkind today. We lost a man who could write things that were not only entertaining but also had a purpose. A man who believed that one person can make a difference and who held his beliefs up for all the world to see. A man who created a world we could all get lost in. A man who held many of us enthralled. A man who sold twenty-five million novels not because of who he was but because of how well he could write.

It's a sad day, but I'm sure if Terry were here he'd view it as what it is: An inevitability. Being alive is, after all, a fatal condition. It was actually a heart condition that did him in, but the empirical data all points to the fact that no one lives forever. He didn't. My Aunt Janice, who introduced me to the series, passed on over a decade ago. That's hard to believe, but it's true. But Goodkind was, at his heart, a man who showed us all how to evaluate facts for ourselves and the facts are in: We've lost him.

 So Rest in Peace, Terry Goodkind. May your sleep be slow and unencumber by ties to the world that you have left. May your family take comfort in the fact that you managed to touch the loves of so many others while you were here. There are few who can say as much. May your family, and your fans, also take comfort that you have earned the Author's Immortality: Although your body has failed you, your words remain and you can continue to touch the lives of others.

There is a story that goes around in my family about an answering machine tape. When one of my great-aunts passed another of my great aunts (and there are approximately a million of them) called her answering machine to hear her voice so many times that someone eventually recorded the voicemail message and gave it to her. What we're looking at here is an analaguous situation. Terry is gone, but his voice can still be heard in his books. He won't be forgotten.

The first book in the Sword of Truth series is available for purchase at the link below:

M. Helbig's Team Newb: Sun and Shadow Online

Word to Mr. Helbig: Far be it from me to correct an awesome author such as yourself, and believe me your novel Team Newb, Sun and Shadow Online, makes me believe that you're an awesome author or, since this is the first of your works that I've read, at the very least an author who wrote an awesome book, but BRO...

 It's not Newb, it's N00b, and those aren't the letter "O" they're zeroes to show the whole wide world just how much value a n00b has.

 *SIGH*

 Ah well. I guess I'll get over it, because this was a REALLY good book. 

So what's got me so excited?

Usually when I read a LitRPG, the main character starts out with at least an idea of what the problem is and an idea of how the game works. Not so much this time. Our hero, Lucas, isn't even planning on entering a game. He starts out the book trying to get away from a game that his father designed (the titular Sun and Shadow Online) and then things take a turn for the dark side and he has no choice.

I like this main character though. He's got a high degree of mental toughness and enough brains to think himself through a problem. He doesn't give up even when all seems to be lost. He learns the game quickly (for a n00b) and levels somewhat quickly-ish. I mean, I feel like I probably could have out-leveled him playing WoW, but I've been playing for close to a decade and I know the game. I've played both sides and I know the starting areas and quests really well. He doesn't have that and if he kills more bunnies than he REALLY needs to, well he got a couple levels out of it.

Of course, one does not adventure alone if it is possible to avoid doing so. For the vast majority of hardcore vets out there (that didn't start a game during the beta or on launch day) there was someone who helped them figure things out. I did my first raid in WoW after a woman named Edie (in the guise of her toon Persifinee) helped me figure out where to go and what to do to level my character. In Lucas's (COUGH, I mean Horus, his in-game avatar) case, that happens to be a small group of friends named Alizia, Decronas and Olaf. 

They're all n00bs too, and he helps them as much as they help him (since he does have experience with other games) but as with any Massively Multiplayer Role Playing game (let alone one that's conducted in Virtual Reality) there is an awful lot to learn and Decronas in particular seems to have friends who know things. This is big because it enables the team to venture out into the world sooner and to be better equipped when they do it. 

I don't do spoilers, so I'll just say that there is a very good reason that all of the characters, but in particular Horus, need to make gold quickly. I find their "kill everything you can and loot everything you kill," type strategy to be the one that every single n00b ever has used to increase their bank balance. Seriously, even most Dungeons and Dragons campaigns start out with "Go over there and get rich" as the incentive to start adventuring. Gold and gear are the motivation to have a good time, but there is something I wonder about.

It would seem to me that Horus, at least, has played other games and would have a working knowledge of how craft skills work in general. And yes, I know that you won't get rich with beginning craft skills in any game that's more than a few months old, but I'd be starting out learning something. That's how I became a WoW millionaire (well that, and way too many solo runs of old raids to get cash quick) and you'd think he'd try it, but not so far. Then again, there is a sequel so maybe there? I dunno, I'd just like to see my boy doing something to help himself when he desperately needs it. You'd think Decrona would get it too, since she has all of those contacts feeding her information. That's just me whining though and sitting around crafting doesn't add a whole lot of action to a novel, so maybe that was a better way to go? Maybe?

Speaking of action, I love the way fights work. Team Newb is set in the future so the tech is a lot more advanced than what we have now. I love the thought of targeting specific vulnerable areas (tabletop RPG players would recognize this as a "called shot.") to maximize damage in an MMORPG. I love the creativity of the players as they figure out how to defeat some of the enemies they face. I've never seen an online setting where some of these strategies would be possible, but they work great and they make sense. The reader just has to keep in mind that Sun and Shadow Online is a game of the future. There are features that have been added over the last century.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, I have to wonder if Mr. Helbig hasn't had a max level character or sixty-three himself. I get the sneaking suspicition that he's seen the Horde trash Goldshire before moving on to an all out assault on Stormwind once or twice, or maybe died a couple of times defending it. And the way he uses quests as a primary way of leveling is very similar to that in WoW.

Then again, the way his bind points work looks more like Everquest as does the amount of downtime (he skips over it unless there is something going on during downtime) he includes. No EQ player will ever forget the frustration of FINALLY beating that freaking Goblin Whelp and then taking five minutes to get his HP back so he could fight a giant rat. Mark my words, it happened. A lot. Two words: Newbie Log. Everyone who ever played an Dark Elf in EQ just laughed. The rest of the EQ players are remembering seeing the words. "You are hungry. You are thirsty." pop up in their chat box while their HP wouldn't recover and wondering why. Yup, happens here.

And I guess that's really what makes Team Newb (N00b!) work: There's enough differences here to make it feel like a game you haven't played and just enough similarities to make it feel like a game you could play. I love that aspect of it.

I'm leaving out much of the meta-story and that's really the important part of Team Newb but I don't want to spoil too much and there's a lot there. Trust me though, anyone who has played an MMO knows that Real Life Comes First. There's always the guy who can't make raid because his wife is making him mow the lawn that night, or the woman who didn't manage to make the potions this week because she had to babysit, or the ranger who didn't have time to craft the good arrows and is stuck using the cheap vendor junk...

*SIGH*

Real life MMO playing is often about avoiding the meta-story, but trust me it's there. And it's in Team Newb too. Try it. You'll like it.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Jerkins of Please Don't Kill me

Team Newb: Sun and Shadow Online
M.Helbig
Self Published, 2019

Team Newb: Sun and Shadow Online is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no cost to you.

Jennifer Brozek's Ghost Hour

 

Life is good when you can revisit an old favorite in a new way. It's even better when the new stuff is enjoyable. Enter Jennifer Brozek's <i>Ghost Hour</i>, a newly release Battletech novel. It's a Young Adult novel, which is something I wish they had when I was young enough to fit into the demographic. Ah well, I've got two daughters in the YA age group now. I still loved this thing.

We all know that the Young Adult genre really began with J.K. Rowling. Before Harry Potter readers went straight from childrens books to the big leagues. I kind of feel like this is probably closer to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows than Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. Like Deathly Hallows, Ghost Hour does not shy away from the cost of war. The body count is pretty high and the anguish the characters feel at losing their friends and family members is real.  Ghost Hour is a rough read in a good way.

Seriously, there is a lot here that is honestly kind of gut-wrenching. Brozek herself has served as I mentioned when I reviewed the first in the Battletech YA series, The Nellus Academy Incident. It shows here, as she exposes the dark side of war better than the vast majority of Military Science Fiction authors I've read. With a lot of authors you see the glory side of war. Maybe a friend or two gets lost along the way, but they're nearly forgotten for most of the rest of the story. Maybe a spouse is left behind somewhere (and if you haven't seen the film We Were Soldiers you need to because it does this well, too) but the reader never hears about the anguish they feel not knowing what's going to happen to their loved one. There is a lot of that here, although it is people that are serving wondering about their loved ones who are also serving. It's pretty deep. 

That's not to say that there aren't some really awesome slam, bang slugfests, because there are. No one loves a good old-fashioned 'Mech battle like the guy who used to set them up on his bedroom floor and leave them there because they lasted for weeks and trust me, I'd know if they weren't done right, but they are. There are plenty of explosions to keep even the most hardened grognard among the Battletech elite happy. I mean, unless they're the "OMG EVERYTHING AFTER <insert year here> SUCKS" camp, in which case they can go cook along with their character. I mean that literally. Double heat sinks FTW!

For the record, no Ghost Hour does not go that deep into the tech. At least not for the most part. I will confess to not having seen the latest edition of BT, and there is apparently at least one new weapon that I'm not aware of but totally could have used in my mixed Battletech and Mechwarrior RPG campaign even though it wouldn't have been invented in 3050 because GH takes place a century later, but...

Yeah, I'll stop whining now. But still, it was cool. 

And for those still wondering, no you don't have to have a very good understanding of the technology of Battletech to enjoy Ghost Hour. There is a glossary at the back if you have any questions. Those with just a passing familiarity will find the story extremely easy to follow. With one exception, Brozek keeps to the classics of the series. And if you like tabletop war-gaming at all, you can always check Battletech out. I love it. I used to run a mixed Mechwarrior TTRPG/Aerotech/Battletech/Battletroops campaign and I loved it.

This series is about a bunch of cadets who won't stay in their place when their planet is attacked and  go rogue and try to fight the war before they're out of training. I find this to be a lot of fun, even if it often works the other way in the real world. (During World War II, training times were reduced and West Point classes graduated early.) It was still a rollicking good time and a good representation of members of the military and their desire to be involved in "the real thing" whether they're ready for it or not. Although these kids do appear to be about as ready as anyone else ever was. 

At the end of the day too, it's the kids that make the book. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads my reviews that it's characters and what happens to them that really get me into a work of fiction. The thing is that the main characters in Ghost Hour are precisely the kind of people I can respect and worry about. They go through an awful lot, but they never give up. For most of the book they're losing or just taking a pasting they can't really do much about. They don't care. Actually that's wrong. They DO care. They just don't let it stop them. They keep fighting. These cadets are soldiers in the truest sense of the word. 

Probably the only part about Ghost Hour that I didn't like is that it reminds me how much easier it is to find quality YA SF/F these days than it is to find quality regular SF/F. Outside of what Stephanie Meyers tried to pull (and yes, I tried reading Twilight. It was terrible. I gave it to my sister and she gave it to her daughter. And yes, Bella was a teen and it was YA. Some terribly angsty, sparkly vampire craptacular YA but still YA) I haven't seen a single YA Science Fiction or fantasy novel that I haven't enjoyed. I can't necessarily say the same of the adult samplings I've seen.

I have to mention the main villain, however briefly. I tend to be pretty sympathetic to people who are just doing their duty. I'm an American who thinks that Yamamoto Isoroku was a respectable guy. I still can't feel the slightest bit of sympathy for the antagonist of this one though. I won't say if anything happens to him but he deserves nothing but the worst. Still, it makes reading the book more fun if you really want to see the bad guy get his.

Overall, I don't really have much choice except to tell you to buy this book. I realized partway through Ghost Hour that it wasn't a sequel to the book I thought it was and now I have to go back and buy the first one in the series (when I got the email I thought this was the sequel to The Nellis Academy Incident. I guess that's why my mama always told me not to think. She says it always gets me in trouble.)I'm kind of bummed because I've spoiled part of it, but I'm really excited because there's more to read.

Well, and there's a preview of the sequel to Ghost Hour at the back of the book. I didn't read the preview. I never do. I am, however, looking forward to reading the whole book and find out how this ends.

Bottom Line: 4.75 out of 5 Crashed Dropships

Ghost Hour
Jennifer Brozek
Catalyst Games Lab, 2020

Ghost Hour is available at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.