John-Michael Lelievre's Reviews > Helene

I'm going to try something a bit different from what I normally do with reviews with this one, and keep it as vague, and yet informative about it as possible.

For starters, if you have been reading the "Lost Solace" series from Karl Drinkwater from the beginning, you will notice some familiar characters, akin to seeing what good friends were up to before you ever knew them. At the same time, this short story also works as a good starting point if you are unfamiliar with the Lost Solace universe. Chronologically speaking, this is the earliest story in the series thus far, but much like other fantastic Sci-Fi series, whether it be in written or visual form, it was not the first released.

That said, let's get on with the proper review! In essence, the story takes place in a dystopian society, where we have Helene Vermalle, a scientist, who is somewhat of a learning aid for an artificial intelligence, known as ViraUHX. Now if you read the tagline, The UFS is the dystopian society, which is in fact a future conglomerate of star systems, the super weapon is ViraUHX, though he/she prefers "Via" (For now at least...). And the teacher of course, is Helene.

Helene is a lovely character, we don't get to know her too well over the course of so short a time, but at the same time, you do get the sense of her character. I will say, that the developing relationship between her and Via, is lovely to read, and counts as either foreshadowing or a callback depending on what order you read the series in. The dialogue between them is top notch, and I love the Aseides' laws (Read it to find out what those are)!

There's, a lot of not very nice going's on this story too. All I'll say on that is that's it worth paying attention to.

Drinkwater's writing, is of course, suberb as always. I need to touch on that. If you have never found yourself feeling emotion for an artificial intelligence, this may be the book series for you. The Terminator series of movies has touched on that in ways, remember that scene at the end of T2 when Schwarzenegger's hand disappeared? There are some moments... that I promise are as good in this series.