A Man Disrupted, by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

Fresh off the presses from the Hinterlands division at Marcher Lord Press is A Man Disrupted, the first offering from the team of Steve Rzasa and Vox Day.  Besides both having cool names, they are both accomplished sci-fi writers.  Rzasa's pair of novels The Word Reclaimed and The Word Unleashed are favorites, definitely on my "I'll read this again" list.  Day has written some strong fantasy works, including the epic A Throne of Bones.  In A Man Disrupted, I am not sure where one voice ended and the other began.  They make a great team.

Set several hundred years in the future, on the planet Rhysalan, A Man Disrupted starts off with a murder.  A prince has been disrupted (disintegrated) in a part of town princes typically avoid.  As an investigator for the military police, Graven Tower wouldn't normally respond on the scene, but when he catches wind that Detector Hildreth, the pretty blond policewoman whom he has a crush on, is on her way, he decides he might offer his assistance.  So begins a tale of court intrigue, big explosions, fast (and destructive) chase scenes, and an investigative team that won't be let themselves be stopped.

 The blurb on the back cover describes this as "action-packed Mil-SF mystery," which covers the book very well.  The action: non-stop.  Military: you learn every thing about Tower's arsenal short of the weapons manual.  SF: Rzasa and Day have created a complex future history, giving the astro-political and scientific background without overwhelming the reader with history or technology.  Mystery: all of the above is the backdrop against which they tell a compelling mystery story, a political assassination with implications for the stability of the planet (Rhysalan as well as others).

As I mentioned, A Man Disrupted is on the MLP's Hinterland books.  Readers of other Marcher Lord Press books will be aware the the Hinterlands division was created for their books that are a bit, shall we say, rougher around the edges than their main MLP works.  As they say on the web site,

 Hinterlands books may contain vulgarity, profanity, nudity, and/or sexual content, but never for gratuitous purposes. Hinterlands . . . allows us to examine mature themes in a realistic manner that some Christians will appreciate. We know that not everyone will want to read these books, so we have set them apart into the Hinterlands imprint. 

Readers of mainstream sci-fi, or really any secular fiction, or viewers of PG-13 or even PG movies will not be shocked by what they read here.  The few profanities that are used are used sparingly, in a way that makes them much more effective than the constant streams of expletives we might hear or read in modern literature or movies.

Finally, the spiritual theme of A Man Disrupted is thin but interesting nonetheless.  Tower has an augment named Baby, sort of like Apple's Siri, only it's in his head and always on.  She has a high level of self-awareness, and contemplates her own mortality (as well as Tower's).  Rzasa and Day don't develop this side of Baby much, but I have a feeling that in future books, Baby and Tower will delve into some deeper theological waters.

Amish Vampires in Space, by Kerry Nietz

Winning the prize for goofiest title of the year is Kerry Nietz!  Nietz has become a favorite of mine, with his imaginative, highly original sci-fi with a Christian message.  When Marcher Lord Press editor Jeff Gerke mocked up a fake book cover with a fictional author and the silly title Amish Vampires in Space, he meant it to be a joke, mocking the proliferation of Amish fiction among Christian publishers and of vampire fiction in secular presses.  However, Kerry's imagination took over and he actually came up with a story!  No joke about it, this is a great sci-fi novel.

Here are some thoughts, one word at a time.

Amish:
An Amish colony on a terraformed world gets picked up by a trading vessel, who will relocate them to another planet, since their planet's sun is about to go nova.  It seems a bit counter-intuitive, but Nietz makes a good case that the people best suited for colonizing a new world are people like the Amish: self-sufficient, able to build a community without an infrastructure in place, committed to cooperative efforts in community building.  I thought of parallels to Westward expansion in the U.S.  Those pioneers had to know how to live off the land, how to build a house from scratch, how to farm and raise livestock, how to make their own clothes and furniture.  Similarly the Amish, in Nietz's future, can relocate to a recently terraformed planet and thrive, without the support of advanced technology.

Nietz further reflects on the Amish people's resistance to technology as a matter of their faith.  They shun technology, yet advanced communication and space travel save their colony, which otherwise was doomed.  Nietz did a nice job of capturing the tension the Amish face when confronted with technology, contact with "Englishers" (non-Amish), and the use of violence.

Vampires:
I don't want to give away any of the story, but these are not your vampires of Bram Stoker and Bela Lugosi (or, I suspect Twilight, although I've never seen those movies or read those books).  Although Nietz's vampires may have common characteristics to other vampires of fiction and film, the origins are different, and perhaps more insidious and disturbing than other vampire stories.

In Space:
Nietz tells a good story about the vampires and the Amish people, but I particularly liked the background against which he tells it.  Other than the first scenes, based in the Amish colony, all the action of the story takes place on an interplanetary cargo ship.  Nietz doesn't dwell on the history, culture, and technology of this particular future, but he reveals enough that the reader begins to feel that this future is tangible and plausible.

The Christian message of AViS is not as explicit as in Nietz's DarkTrench saga, but the faith of the Amish, as well as some of the crew members, plays an important role in the story.  A major theme is faith and works.  The Amish in Nietz's story place their hope of salvation in their works, their adherence to the Ordnung, the rules of community.  Some of them begin to question that, risking a break with their community in hopes of a deeper truth.

Any sci-fi fan will enjoy AViS.  It has the feel of those sci-fi movies which feature a claustrophobic spaceship, lurking aliens, and a crew distant from any source of help.  Fans of vampire fiction will, I believe, feel at home with Nietz's take on vampires.  Fans of Amish fiction would probably be put off by the sci-fi/horror element, but who knows. . . .  Go ahead, laugh at the title, Kerry won't mind.  But after you judge the book by its cover, give the story a chance.  You won't be disappointed.

Mask, by Kerry Nietz

Kerry Nietz, author of the fantastic DarkTrench series (see my reviews here, here, and here) is back with a new vision of a near-future earth in his new novel Mask.  It's the not-too-distant future, and through some combination of human conflict and natural disasters, many parts of the world have become uninhabitable, and those that are still populated are isolated from other regions.  In PacNorth, masked Collectors round up people who have been voted inconvenient by their peers.  It's a great system, in a way.  Everyone is always on their best behavior, for fear of being voted down, and the population stays under control.

That is, until Radial begins to have second thoughts. . . . Grill cook by day, Collector by night, Radial is one of the best of the Collectors, but on the spur of the moment decides that a little girl he's collected deserves a chance to live.  Together Radial and Darcy seek to discover the truth about the collection and bring down the system.

Mask is a brisk, fast-paced story, which leaves plenty to be explained.  How did PacNorth become isolated?  What's going on in the rest of the world?  How did the collection system get its start?  Nietz hints at the answers, but chooses to focus on the action of the story rather than on the exposition of this future history.  He also raises interesting questions about the nature of democracy, as the whole society is built around the tyranny of the majority.  Is mob rule really the next logical developmental stage of democracy?  And with God having been voted out as inconvenient, Nietz hints about pockets of Christian faith that remain.  While the story of Mask wraps up nicely, these questions cry out for answers.  There is plenty of material for a sequel.  (I hope you're working on it, Kerry!)

Mask does not have the epic scale and theological weight of the DarkTrench saga, but does showcase Nietz's story-telling skill.  I didn't want to put it down, as evidenced by the fact that I am writing this review at 1:30 a.m., having stayed up way too late finishing the book!



If you haven't read the DarkTrench saga, do!

Freeheads, by Kerry Nietz

Last summer I read books 1 & 2 of Kerry Nietz's DarkTrench saga, and loved them (see my reviews here and here).  Lucky me, about the time I was finishing those books, Nietz was finishing up book 3, so my wait was blessedly short for Freeheads.  In books 1 & 2, debuggers SandFly and HardCandy are sent to repair a robot on DarkTrench, an interstellar ship which has just returned from a voyage to Betelgeuse.  The robot, as well as the crew, had encountered a curious song from a star, which had transformed them. SandFly and HardCandy then take DarkTrench on a return journey to Betelgeuse where they encounter a seemingly idyllic but ultimately malicious alien race.  Freeheads opens with the pair returning to earth, in hopes of bringing the message of A~A³, Nietz's moniker for God, to people spiritually enslaved by a controlling Islamic regime.

Through a series of events driven by both divine intervention and sabotage, SandFly and HardCandy have to abandon DarkTrench, intending to head straight to earth, but end up on the moon.  There they discover a colony of exiles from earth and learn the source of the rogue stream they had briefly accessed on earth.  To their great surprise, they realize that due to a malfunction on DarkTrench, 40 years have passed since they left earth; to them, it had only been weeks.  Also to their surprise, the message of A~A³ and the superlative stream managed to make its way to earth via the original DarkTrench crew.  However, the fledgling group of followers of the message have been persecuted and nearly eliminated.

Things had changed on earth during their absence.  Before they left, everyone lived under religious oppression, but that oppression had progressively become widespread slavery.  SandFly returning after 40 years to confront the leaders and lead the people out of slavery?  Any Biblical allusions you might imagine here are certainly no accident. 

Nietz has a spiritual message in Freeheads, not in the sense that he preaches, and certainly not in a way that deters from the story.  In fact, that's part of the fun of the whole DarkTrench series: In a world in which Christianity has been effectively quashed by world-dominating Islam, what would it look like to reintroduce the gospel?  Nietz gives us a warning to heed.  Sandfly's theory as to why the message of the Bible "just faded out": "Those who knew the Truth got lazy, or worse, refused to share what they knew. . . .They cloistered.  Failed to do something when they had a chance."  Sobering words for a Christian culture that sometimes seems to make itself irrelevant to the wider world. . . .

Besides a great story and a compelling spiritual message, Nietz handles the science well.  Freeheads is chock full of speculative technology, but Nietz, not satisfied with simply throwing out crazy devices or giving people and machines unfounded superpowers, gives enough description and background to make the technology almost believable.  He's no stranger to natural science either; his descriptions of a close encounter with a comet and a walk on the moon's surface are quite convincing as well.

With his DarkTrench saga, Nietz shows his skill as a captivating writer, adept at conveying a fast-moving story with thoughtful spiritual reflection and an imaginative view of the near future.  The three books can certainly be read and enjoyed independently, but they're best taken as a whole, showing both SandFly's development as well as Nietz's development as a writer.  He's got a few more books to write before he enters the pantheon of sc-fi greats, but I do like Tim George's blurb from the back cover of Freeheads: "Nietz writes in a way that makes me wonder what the masters of the genre like Asimov and Heinlein might have written had they known A~A³."  Well-said.  I'm already wondering what Nietz will come up with next!

The Superlative Stream, by Kerry Nietz

I recently read Kerry Nietz's first novel, A Star Curiously Singing, loved it, and was delighted to see that the adventures of Sandfly continue in a sequel, The Superlative Stream.  In ASCS, we meet Sandfly, a debugger who is sent to investigate the self-destruction of a robot on the space ship DarkTrench.  In the course of the investigation, he discovers a possible cause: curious singing from a distant star.  TSS picks up where ASCS leaves off.  Sandfly and his fellow debugger HardCandy take DarkTrench to search for the source of the singing, the superlative stream.

Nietz clearly matured as a writer with TSS.  As good as ASCS is, TSS adds a higher level of depth and complexity to his engaging style.  Utilizing flashbacks to their lives on Earth, we get to know Sandfly and HardCandy better and see how circumstances have brought them together.  We also gain insight into the Muslim culture of their world.  Nietz will not win friends in the Muslim community, as he takes certain elements of Sharia law to their logical, painful conclusions.

A subplot in both books deal with Sandfly's implant.  As a result of his encounter with the superlative stream, his stops are removed, so, if he wishes to, he can sin with impunity.  For the first time in his adult life, he experiences free will unencumbered by the programmed controls of the implant (and this right at the time time he embarks on an interstellar voyage, alone, with a beautiful woman!).  Given the Islamic theology of good works, he struggles with the realization that his good works can never tip the scale in his favor; his sinful nature will continually pull him toward 50.1% bad works.

Sandfly's understanding will no doubt continue to develop as he gets to know the source of the stream, whom he knows now only as "(A~A)³."  (That's A not A cubed, A being the shorthand for Allah, who is not named in the novel. )  Nietz skillfully weaves basic, thoughtful ideas like this throughout the story without preaching or distracting from the overall plot.

Much of the story takes place on a planet in the Betelguese system.  There the humans encounter a whole new civilization, technically far ahead of human civilization.  This part of the story will feel very familiar to any reader of sci-fi or viewer of sci-fi movies and TV shows: an idyllic, communal society, where there is no evident material need, where everyone seems happy, yet everyone sort of looks and dresses alike.  Nietz kept me going for quite a while, trying to decide if this were some sort of angelic community, or if there were something more ominous under the surface.  I'll leave that discovery to you when you read it. . . .

Nietz shows his skill as a bona fide sci-fi writer with his use of hard science as a driver in the story combined with plenty of realistic scientific and technological speculation.  Combining that with his use of hard theology, exploring theological questions from a refreshing outside perspective, he gives us a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying read.  And here's the good news: the Dark Trench saga will continue!  An e-mail from Nietz confirmed that he has completed book 3.  It's in the hands of the publisher now, so we should see it in the coming months.  Keep an eye out at Marcher Lord Press for the release.

A Star Curiously Singing, by Kerry Nietz

I have long been a fan of sci-fi, but have been skeptical of Christian sci-fi as a genre.  Several years ago, I read some novels by Jeff Gerke (under the pen name Jefferson Scott) in the sci-fi/tech/suspense genre.  I enjoyed them, and wondered what happened to him.  Lo and behold, he has started a publishing house dedicated exclusively to Christian sci-fi and fantasy titles, Marcher Lord Press.  Of course, titles from this small, new publisher are not available at my local library, so I went against my reading glutton, cheapskate tendencies and actually bought a few titles from Marcher Lord Press.

I was more than pleasantly surprised by Kerry Nietz's first novel, A Star Curiously Singing.  This is not a second-rate, knock-off imitation sci-fi novel, but the real deal. Nietz creates a believable, if a little scary, near-future earth, incorporates creative technological ideas, and introduces likable characters in an engaging story.  I was reminded of some of Asimov's stories; like Asimov, Nietz weaves a detective story into a future setting, letting the technology and cultural commentary provide a rich background while giving primary attention to an engaging plot.  Sandfly, the narrator and central character, is a debugger whose owner sends him to check out a robot who self-destructed during a deep-space mission.  That sentence alone requires a large amount of explanation, immersed as it is in the context of the book.  Nietz takes the reader directly into that world, so it may take a few pages for you to feel comfortable, but he does so artfully, quickly drawing you in.

Without giving away the story, I'll highlight a couple of story elements that set A Star Curiously Singing apart.  First, the cultural context.  In the world of the novel, everyone, I mean everyone, is now Muslim.  Sharia law is the law, and it's zealously enforced.  Nietz doesn't go into much detail about how that transition came to pass, but he does off-handedly imply that the Muslim takeover occurred primarily due to birth rates.  It's a little on the extreme side, of course (Catholics have high birth rates, too.), but it stands as a warning to us Western Christians who have small families and whose children tend not to embrace their parents' faith.  And before you write off the possibility of world-wide sharia law, keep in mind that there are heads of state in the Middle East whose stated goal is just that, and they have, or will soon have, nuclear weapons.

As a debugger, Sandfly has an implant which not only gives his owner a means of control (think of a training device like you might have for your dog, only implanted in the brain.  Ouch!), but the implant also controls his actions when he's alone.  Tell a lie.  Zap!  Steal.  Zap!  Blaspheme A (The full name of the deity is not spelled out here.).  Zap!  Yet free will and the sin nature survive.  Using this device, Nietz explores human nature and our sin nature in a unique way.

The core of the novel, the singing of the star, makes the story.  In a world where Christianity has been successfully quashed, where all reference to it has been eliminated, no witness to God remains on Earth.  But, as Jesus said, if we keep silent, the stones will cry out!  Why not the stars, too!  I love this depiction of God's calling out to his children, even when his children have cut off all communication.  I hope and pray we don't come to a place where the whole world rejects God, but if it ever comes to that, Nietz reminds us that creation will not keep silent.

I heartily recommend this book, and encourage you to check out Marcher Lord Press, as well.