Philip Edward > Recent Status Updates

Appendix 1 attempts to re-write quantum mechanics with a lot of hand waving and blatant ignorance. Anyone with any passing knowledge would experience the same headache I’m suffering right now.

ThuleDammed It, there are bloody Appendixes?

Of all the bat-s**t crazy stunts Kira pulled off in the previous few hundred pages, jumping off of a hi-tech but essentially glorified TRAIN was your go-to for most exciting, Trig? She used a fission bomb as a HAND WEAPON for Thule’s sake!

Oh no you didn’t. You just ripped off a line from the Matrix??? Why am I reading this garbage?

Chris now has Kira web-slinging her way thru space. He isn’t even pretending to convince us that the xeno is anything other than a knock-off Venom symbiote. Also, the amount of damage Kira is able to shrug off, and we are talking about RAILGUN rounds, is just leaving the outskirts of incredulity and blindly teetering into Toontown.

Wait a second. Tentacles have BONES?!?! I don’t think that’s right, I mean other than the affront to literature that this novel represents. Tentacles mean invertebrate. And that means no bloody bones. Can’t break what ain’t there, Hwa-jung.

SPOILERS
Ok, the Maw just showed up. Any bets on how Kira’s darkest secret will be revealed and she will collapse in a pile of tears and just as she knows deep in her loins that she is utterly pitiful, the crew joins together in a spontaneous act of logic-bending forgiveness and reaffirms that Kira, you are a strong and powerful woman and who else could be the bestest BBF for Soft Blade, except you, of course.

Sparrow…can speak Spanish?

“Who wants fried calamari?” as your war cry, Sparrow? For goodness sake, one of those aliens is ON YOUR SHIP.

Dinner’s gonna be awkward.

I’m thinking Kira will need a chiropractor soon if she keeps on lifting her chin so dramatically.

Oh, hell no. I am NOT reading that sex scene. I saw “tongues”, I saw “fingers”, and I noped the heck outta there.

About a dozen pages ago, Chris read a Wikipedia page about Boltzmann brains. How do I know? Out of complete nowhere, the phrase “Boltzmann paradox” is mentioned. That’s actually a complex and nuanced idea about the life of the universe, random fluctuations and consciousness, so it sticks out like a sore thumb here in To Sleep in a Sea of Oblivity.

I hate this book.
I really do.
I had the stilted dialogue, the nonexistent character defining, the ridiculously obvious plot holes and inconsistencies. The lack of any real physics knowledge or any proper application of whatever Chris happens to pull out of his ass.
Gah.
It’s only my sheer stubbornness that’s making me soldier on.

Let’s say you’re at work, busy day at the office, and you stood up and screamed a primal scream, telling no one that you were about to do it. After, when you’re on the floor on your hands and knees, tears falling from your eyes, one person asks, “You ok?”
You say yeah. The boss asks if you’re sure. “Yeah.”
And it’s never mentioned or asked about again.

Politics, like right out of nowhere…no lead up or even a hint previously, and now they’re tossing around parties and affiliations with the assumption you know exactly what they’re talking about. Did I miss a chapter???

“She sighed. Why did everything have to be so hard?”

Oh come on: is she like 12???

And the conversation with the Jelly? Yeah, Chris, we get it: swim and shoal and wave…water metaphors.

OF COURSE, she wants to shag the captain. Alan who?

Vishal is a bad doctor. Half her arm is gone and the only question you ask is, “Does it hurt? No. Well, no need for tests or anything, hey let’s just rub this green goo on the stump, still covered in the impregnable Venom-wannabe, mind you, and off you go!”

MINOR SPOILER WARNING!

Wait a minute. Are you telling me that the Corrupted formed, flew around in space, eating minerals and ice, so it could get big enough to hijack a Jelly ship, which it promptly took to the nearest Jelly outpost so it could convert the whole PLANET, and then took over seven OTHER systems, in the span of less that a YEAR?!?!?

Yeah. I call bullshit.

Oh, dear sweet innocent Trig. With the silly real name and gosh-darn naïveté, I’m sure you’ll get thru the next battle just fine. Why killing you off, after making so much effort to illustrate how likeable you are and how everyone on the ship treats you like the son/younger brother they never had, that would just be a ham-handed example of narrative manipulation. Chris would NEVER do that!

The Paolini Method of Character Development.

Main character comes by other character’s cabin. With tea
“Leave me alone”
“I have TEA!”
“Well ok then, even though we’ve shared maybe only a handful of words before this point, let’s sit down and I’ll tell you my deepest motivations and trauma.”

End Scene!!!

She made a smiley face rise out of her palm, and Falconi said, “Talk to the hand.”

😳

Who the hell was the editor on this book? There are dozens of paragraphs that can be just eliminated and actually make the story better.

VOMIT ALERT!! VOMIT ALERT!!

Really Chris? Did you have to go into THAT much detail. Really?

I’ve just come across one of the contenders for the cheesiest sentence spoken in science-fiction.
“Those space rats are tough as titanium.”
Golly gee!

SPOILER WARNING


Oh boy. Little did I know that this was the author of Eragon when I picked this up at the used book store in trade of some doubles I had. The first few dozen pages, not too bad, but nothing remarkable. But then the alien showed up.
It was like Chris saw the Venom movie and thought to himself, gosh darn it, I can do better! I’ll hit all the same notes though, because originality is overrated.