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An Interview With James Marshall, Author of Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 29, 2012Posted in: Books, The Daily Shaft

As part of the blog tour for his new novel, Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies published by Toronto’s ChiZine Publications, Canadian author James Marshall took some time to chat with me about his book, his artistic vision, and what he perceives as art’s relationship with the larger world.

James Marshall

Hi James. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me. For the benefit of anybody who isn’t familiar with this novel, how do you think Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies compares with your work in Let’s Not Let a Little Thing Like the End of the World Come Between Us?

 

JM: They’re in the same family. Let’s Not Let A Little Thing Like The End Of The World Come Between Us was a “literary” short story collection. Technically, Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies is a genre novel. I guess I’m supposed to say, they’re really different. But I consider NVPFZ more a “geek literary” novel than a traditional “horror” novel. I mean, for a genre book, NVPFZ is pretty “arty.”

Geek Literary, I like the sound of that. Care to expand on the idea a little?

JM: Literary is synonymous with quality. Unfortunately, it’s also synonymous with boring. “Geek literary” combines everything you expect from high quality writing with everything you expect from pop culture entertainment. For example, a lot of times, especially in Canadian lit, you get a bored lonely woman remarking on how the fields in winter are not unlike her soul. In “geek lit,” you’d have the same bored lonely woman remarking on how the fields in winter are not unlike her soul, but then a ninja would drop down from the ceiling and cut off her head. Everybody is happy.

Dreary Canadian landscapes in winter could do with more ninjas now that I hink about it. So let’s explore this Geek Literary idea a little. The satire within NVPFZ taps into some very serious issues within our world: global warming, resource scarcity, and economic turmoil to name a few. Yet all of your central characters are teenagers and the story is set in and about a high school. Was this an intentional contrast?

JM: I dealt with teenagers and high school for a few reasons. Firstly, I never grew up and I’m very juvenile. Secondly, teenagers have to cope with the monumental problems facing us and high school is the place where they’re supposed to receive the tools and training to address those problems. Since the school in my novel is completely crumbling and filled with zombies, you can guess what I think the chances of success are. Thirdly, it’s when you’re in your teenage years that you start thinking about sex. I think we need to have a serious discussion about whether or not population planning is a way to address many of the problems facing us. Obviously, I think it is.

Now I want to take issue with something you said in your review: NVPFZ might be “the most flippant and offensive thing [you've] ever read.” Please, ask me if I think NVPFZ is offensive!

*Clears his throat and puts on his most professional voice* Mr. Marshall, do you think there’s anything offensive in NVPFZ? And as an immediate follow up to that question, do you think there’s anything in your novel that some readers might find particularly objectionable?

JM: Some people might not like the scene in which Guy Boy Man and a few of his hot young female followers throw lifeless babies at each other, for fun, but people are so sensitive these days. (In ”reality”, the babies might have actually been heads of lettuce.)

For the most part, no, I don’t think NVPFZ is offensive. But I do think the things to which I draw attention are offensive. For example, when Guy Boy Man uses overweight kids, special ed kids, and a disabled girl in a fight with the zombies, you could say that’s horrible, and it is. But is it horrible of me? Or is it something that’s horrible with the world. I mean, that’s the way high school is. It’s social Darwinism. The strong thrive at the expense of the weak. I think it’s horrible too. Nobody really seems to be doing anything about it, so I thought I’d draw attention to it using metaphor and (what I hope passes as) entertainment.

When Guy Boy Man proposes a solution, tasteless as it is, to the problem of kids starving in Africa, is that really offensive, or is what’s really offensive the fact that so many kids really do starve to death every day in Africa, and no one talks about it?

When Guy Boy Man takes Baby Doll15 on a date to a prison wherein the prisoners are amusements, is that offensive, or is the fact that our prisons are filled with the poor, the mentally ill, and our ethnic minorities? And how many TV shows would go off the air if we didn’t use ”crime” as entertainment?

Some people might find NVPFZ offensive, but “art” is supposed to serve a purpose, and I try to use satire and metaphor to raise issues that are important to me. For examples of my satire, I hope your readers will check out my website: www.howtoendhumansuffering.com

While we’re on the subject of howtoendhumansuffering.com, can we expect more sermons from Guy Boy Man in the future?

JM: Yes, that’s definitely on the agenda for the not-so-distant future.

Excellent. For the record, I found the one on pregnancy camps to be particularly apropos given current “debates” on reproductive rights. I hope the danger quotes appropriately denote the low regard in which I hold said “debates”.

On another note, you mentioned BabyDoll15, Guy Boy Man’s paramour, in one of your previous answers. Her name as well as Centaur111’s struck me something that resonated with online culture. Was that an attempt on your part to skew these characters toward a certain audience?

JM: The prologue to NVPFZ is the key to unlocking the whole thing; it’s intended to be a modern-day retelling of Plato’s Parable of the Cave. The basic idea is that there are different layers of reality. The characters of NVPFZ are meant to inhabit one of these layers where everything is sort of a mash-up of the real world and the online world. Guy Boy Man has insight into an even higher level of reality than the other characters because he can see zombies everywhere, controlling everything, and they can’t. So I guess it wasn’t so much that I was targeting a specific demographic as I wanted to explore a mash-up of the real and online worlds.

So if the narrative mirrors Plato’s Cave, does that make Guy Boy Man a philosopher king as well as a pirate?

JM: Yes, but it gets complicated, because the utopia in Guy’s vision doesn’t include people. Obviously, his desire for everyone to stop reproducing is ludicrous; it’s designed to bring population control into the debate regarding all the problems facing us. But if you took it at face value, Guy would return the planet to the animals, and I suppose there’s a certain appeal to that. There wouldn’t be any need for philosopher kings though. And Guy is meant to represent mankind. Sure, he’s funny and charming, but he’s violent, selfish, and probably completely irredeemable, so he’s far from an ideal leader.

He wants to destroy himself. I.e./ Mankind wants to destroy itself.

If that’s the case, what’s the third way between Zombies, who are a slow burn destruction of the Earth (corporate personhood, outsourcing, consumerism) and Guy’s all-in inferno of self-destruction? Or is that a question better examined in subsequent novels within the series?

JM: To be honest, I wrote NVPFZ because I’d given up on the world. I mean, population planning is a “possible” solution to “some” of the problems facing us, but it’s fraught with peril. All in all, I’m pretty pessimistic. I think we’re past the tipping point on a lot of things. I try to be indifferent, but it’s not easy. I wish I was like Guy Boy Man. It’d be nice to sit back, relax, and watch everything go up in flames with a smile on my face. Unfortunately, I find it all rather stressful and depressing.

Let me ask you one more thing then. If we’ve crossed the Rubicon on issues like population control, doesn’t that change our relationship with art? Doesn’t that make the entirety of the artistic community akin to Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns around us?

JM: In NVPFZ, I suggest that artists should stop creating beautiful works of art and force zombies to face the mess they’ve made. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work, because just about anybody can entertain a mindless idiot, but it’s an interesting thought: even in railing against the status quo, the artist supports it, whenever he or she produces a work of art that makes the status quo a little more tolerable. I guess I consider the artist complicit in the destruction of everything. I’m complicit in the destruction of everything. I thought I’d found a job that let me be removed from it, but when I really thought about it, I realized I hadn’t, and I was involved in it too.

A complex answer to a complicated situation. James, thank you so much for your time, and best of luck with the novel; it truly is a fantastic read.

JM: My pleasure and thank you. If any of your readers would like to keep up to date with me, please invite them to follow me on Twitter: @james_marshall

Ninja Versus Pirates Featuring Zombies is now available in print and e-book editions from ChiZine Publications. Learn more about the book at howtoendhumansuffering.com


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Book Review: Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 15, 2012Posted in: Lit Reviews

Summary Judgement: The novel’s satire runs so perfectly parallel to the zeitgeist of contemporary culture that it’s either the most flippant and offensive thing I’ve ever read, or the most concise allegory on post-industrial culture to ever to be constructed.

Where the hell does a book reviewer start when the protagonist of the novel in question is a teenage trillionaire who is also the founder of the world’s most popular religion as well as the self-appointed saviour of humanity? Did I mention that Guy Boy Man, the eponymous pirate of Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies wants to save humanity by destroying it?

NVPFZ is set in a world, very much like this world, quite possibly this world, where zombies control everything. Upon realizing that life is a prison meant to entertain human teenagers until such time as they can become infected with “The Strain” and turn into zombies, Guy Boy Man kills his parents. It’s okay, they were zombies, probably. He then meets a centaur named Centaur111 who gifts him with all the money in the world on the condition he can never tell a girl that he loves her. Therein, Guy Boy Man, demagogue, messiah, and teenager begins his quest to save humanity by purging his school of all zombie influences.

Eradicating Scare City High School of its zombie control means that Guy Boy Man has to confront the unseen foe that dominates all aspects of school life, The Principal. Along the way he meets Babydoll15, the love of his life, even though he can’t tell her, Sweetie Honey, the most bad-ass ninja to ever grace the Earth, and a quartet of impossibly perfect looking Eastern European girls who are the result of an abandoned KGB project to spy on America.

It’s absurd, nihilistic, narcissistic, and bitingly funny – no pun intended, and that’s just the first chapter. The only other thing I’ve read that is this measured in its planned insanity is Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five.

Yet the satire that drives the story is a complicated thing. There’s a very real chance that everything that Guy Boy Man sees as reality is just a twisted acid trip, or some similar demarcation from reality – case in point, throughout the book Guy Boy Man imbibes enough whiskey as to kill a full grown Rhinoceros. There are enough clues in the text to suggest that when confronted with the uncaring tedium of the world, Guy Boy Man adopted a perceptual filter that allows him to cope with Western civilization through the tropes of 70s genre movies. Perhaps Guy Boy Man, and the world that Marshall has created, embodies the perceived, if not essential, cynicism that was Generation X’s ethos. Then again, it could be a bad acid trip, who’s to say.

That’s where things get potentially alienating. Guy Boy Man, who is also the narrator of the text, has some rather unusual ideas about the world. For example, he employs a very clever sort of sophistry to explain how religion, specifically Catholicism and Christianity, is a form of piracy. He considers obese people as well as the disabled, both mentally and physically, apt human shields during a gun fight with some “troubled teens”. Also, the aforementioned festively plump factor into Guy Boy Man’s plans to harness human bio-fuel as a means of ending America’s dependence on foreign oil.

One level, it’s quite obvious that Guy Boy Man is echoing the absurd notions of certain fringe minorities were their ideas taken to the extreme. In doing so, the narrator’s voice becomes a way of subverting harebrained politics and policies. A deeper reading of the text reveals a character who perfectly channels the teenage desire to root out hypocrisy in all its forms. But where most teenagers could well be expected to default into outrage and “damn the man” philosophy, Guy Boy Man is The Man. His reactions to the world are that of a fully empowered Stephen Colbert.

So there can be little doubt that this is a highly political and socially aware novel. But hardly anything therein is scared. In so much as I laughed at the one-liners, the deep satire, and the semiotics as foreplay to the most awkward sex scene ever, I can imagine a great many people who won’t be able to get past Swiftian discourses on eating babies under the age of three, or one of Guy Boy Man’s sermons on howtoendhumansuffering.com that is anchored around the idea that killing the unemployed would be the best way to stimulate the economy. It’s not enough to say that some people won’t like this book. Some people won’t like any book. NvPfZ goes out of its way to make light of a great many things that are very important to a great many people. In doing so, the novel offers a powerfully didactic relationship with its readers in that it uses absurdity to comment on existing self-destructive trends within society.

Make no mistake, Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies might have all the trappings of a light hearted genre romp, but it would be folly to assume it is a frivolous piece of writing. This is a tremendous literary work that draws together a teenage voice of outrage with the various “adult” problems of our world. Like all novels by ChiZine Publications, it’s probably not for everybody, but who wants to live in a world where everything is?


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Podcast Episode 20-1: Adam Shaftoe in the Morning!

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 11, 2012Posted in: Podcasts

Here’s what happens when I work through the night, and I’m left to my own highly caffeinated devices at five-thirty in the morning.

With my compliments to J.M. Frey, Matt Moore, James Marshall, Adrienne Kress, Bunny, Jason, and Sam (even though he’s on hiatus) at Imperial Trouble Podcast, and Candice and Nick at Limited Release Podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed


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The Daily Shaft: Nominees Announced for the 2012 Bookie Awards

By
Adam Shaftoe
– March 8, 2012Posted in: Books, The Daily Shaft

Hot off the heels of Canada Reads, the CBC has announced its nominees for the second annual Bookie Awards. Billed as “the people’s choice” of Canadian literary awards, the Bookies offer eight Canadian and two international categories that represent every walk of written life. The categories for this year’s nominees include, literary fiction and non-fiction, poetry, thriller/mystery/crime, sci-fi/fantasy/spec-fic, young adult, graphic novels, short story anthologies, and international fiction and nonfiction.

Here’s the details on the selection process direct from the CBC.

The finalists were chosen by CBC’s book-loving producers at CBC Books, Canada Reads, Writers & Company, The Next Chapter and more, with consideration given to your recommendations online. The finalists represent our favourite Canadian reads (with the exception of the two new International categories) published between January 1, 2011, and December 31, 2011.

So let’s do a quick round-up on the science fiction category and see who is who.

Brent Hayward – The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter

Fun fact: Hayward’s first novel, Filaria, was one of the first books that I had the pleasure of reviewing on this website. Mark Dunn likened Hayward’s unique writing style in The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter to that of Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake. High praise, indeed.  Dunn goes on to say that, “The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter is dreamlike in its strangeness and complexity. Like a dream, it is difficult to define and difficult to shake. The imagery lingers like archetypes dredged up from the sleeping mind.”

Margaret Atwood – In Other Worlds

In the November 2011 issue of Quill and Quire, August C. Bourré described In Other Worlds as “a collection of essays and other short pieces that tackle [Atwood’s] relationship with “SF” head-on.” I say this with the utmost respect and reverence for Margaret Atwood, but does anybody else think that this book might seem a little more at home in the non-fiction category?

Caitlin Sweet – The Pattern Scars

Ilana Teitelbaum’s HuffPo review of The Pattern Scars describes the book as “a novel of intense contradiction: a lush, delicately imagined nightmare; a horror novel about intimacy.” I’ll admit that I haven’t read the novel myself as I’m usually one to stay far away from fantasy. However, as an intense study in human psychology, The Pattern Scars has just moved into my “must read” list. It also merits mentioning that this is the second book that Toronto based ChiZine Publications has in the running for a Bookie, Hayward’s novel is the other.

J.M. Frey – Triptych

Never in a thousand years did I think I would get a chance to talk about an alien “invasion” novel that features time travel as well as a deconstruction of sexuality as seen through gay sex with aliens. Yet J.M. Frey, a regular guest on the Page of Reviews Podcast, pulled those and other threads together with her debut novel, Triptych. But don’t take my word for it, here’s what Publisher’s Weekly had to say … “Frey tells the story from varying points of view in distinct voices, imagining a world at once completely alien and utterly human.”

Robert J. Sawyer – Wonder

Once again, it’s a book that I’ve yet to read. Though I do feel somewhat annoyed at the people who maintain my information sphere for not doing a better job of foisting this series upon me. I’ll let Cori Dusmann’s review summarize. “Wonder completes the interwoven stories of 15-year-old Caitlin Decter and Webmind, the Internet-based life form she discovered through a retinal implant that allowed her to “see” data streams within the World Wide Web in Wake (2009) and that became a self-determined entity in its own right in Watch (2010).”

Voting for the Bookies closes on March 31, 2012. Head over to the CBC’s Bookie Award page to see all the nominees and to cast your ballot. Remember, this award represents Canadians supporting Canadian authors. So even if you don’t vote in every category, it’s worth your time to vote for somebody.


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Podcast #7 An Interview with Matt Moore

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 26, 2011Posted in: Podcasts

Featuring the voices of Adam Shaftoe and Matt Moore.

Topics under discussion include: Matt’s Aurora nominated story, Touch the Sky, They Say, Matt’s fiction at large, the importance of small press publication, life as a panelist at genre conventions, why The Walking Dead is brilliant television and the pervasive nature of zombies in pop culture.

Head over to Matt’s blog for links to the stories mentioned in the podcast.

Any ChiZine Publications book that we mentioned can be found here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

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Book Review: Filaria

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 7, 2011Posted in: Lit Reviews

Summary Judgement:  With its rich environments and characters who ooze empathy, Filaria is as thoughtful as it is emotionally satisfying.

Written by: Brent Hayward

Published by: ChiZine Publications

Filaria is one of those rare novels that refuses easy classification.  Pegging it with one specific genre would undermine the ease with which Hayward brings together elements of sci-fi, speculative fiction, fantasy, horror and bio-punk.  Even calling the book a novel stands as a mild misrepresentation of what Hayward offers in Filaria. Rather than following one character through a beginning, middle and end of a narrative, Filaria reads more like four novellas woven into one large tapestry.  Although the four main characters cross paths with each other, their stories remain mostly isolated from each other.  Their only real connection is the world in which they live.

As mentioned, there are four central players within Filaria: Young Phister, Deidre, Tran So and Mereziah.  Then there is “the world”, which is quite honestly a character in its own right.  Phister lives in the bottom of the world.  Isolated from the world’s suns, Phister spends his days drinking acrid water and gumming down hallucinogenic moss.  Deidre is the privileged daughter of an orchard keeper at the top of the world.  Tran So lives in Hoffman City, a den of vice, inequity and religion, somewhere in the middle of the world.  Mereziah is an elevator operator/maintenance man in the great shaft that runs through the world.  One of the reasons why this novel works is because the catalyst for each of the main characters’ stories is something wholly normal, despite occurring in a very alien environment.

Phister leaves his hole in the ground because a girl who once kissed him has gone missing.  Deidre’s father sends her and her family away from home for reasons beyond her knowledge.  Due to the death of his infant son and an illness that his turned his wife into a shell of her former self, Tran So embarks on a journey to seek answers from the god of all gods.  On Mereziah’s hundredth birthday he decides to abandon his life of service to elevator occupants; before he dies, Mereziah wants to see the much fabled uppermost level of the world.

To wax in detail on these stories or the world in which they are set is to risk spoiling the novel for any would-be readers.  Sufficed to say, each of the narrative’s threads move the characters from their home level into other parts of the world.  At the same time, the environment of the world and plot are inextricably linked to each other.  Such nuanced writing has the benefit of rewarding readers with a story that unfolds quite organically.  Hayward’s narrative voice is exquisite in its ability to capture how people within their levels would perceive the details, both extraordinary and mundane, of everyday life.  Moreover, the characters emanate empathy in such a way as to render their back-story largely irrelevant.  It’s rare to find a novel that can paint such a vivid picture without resorting to clumsy infodumps or characters speaking about the obvious for the benefit of the reader.

Beyond the evident metaphors on class and economy that a reader can draw when exposed to a world where the people who live on the highest level have it the best, Filaria seems primarily concerned with exploring the things that trap us in our lives.  I might be skewing this review toward an English Lit paper, but motifs of love, (perhaps more accurately read as desire but I’ll leave that to individual readers to decide) religion, innocence and “capital P” Purpose permeate the novel.  Each of the characters embodies one of these motifs and the events of their lives orbit the same abstract ideas.  Yet in attempting to complete their respective quests, they are all freed of these things.  In my estimation, this unshackling of ontological burdens works out well for two out of the four characters.  The effect of these varied endings amounts to a grand resolution that is equally beautiful and tragic.

The only caution/criticism that I would offer toward this book is that it must be approached with the right attitude.  If an animated corpse as a playmate for a little girl or a fisherman catching a gene-hacked talking crab inspires a response along the lines of “What? That’s stupid!” Filaria is probably not the book for you.  In its opening chapter the book easily compares to a surreal nightmare along the lines of Naked Lunch (I’m thinking the movie with Peter Weller, not the book.  Although I hear the book is just as much of a head trip). However, as the stories progress an order emerges from the perceived insanity.  There’s no doubt that Filaria is a smart book; but it is also a book that expects its readers to display a little patience and intelligence.

Filaria is one of the best things that I have read this year.  Fans of genre lit would be doing themselves a grave disservice if they didn’t read this book.

Overall Score: +4.5

This review was brought to you by Chris Noon Graphic Designs.  See what Chris can do for your business at www.chrisnoon.com

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Book Review: Nexus: Ascension

By
Adam Shaftoe
– March 29, 2011Posted in: Lit Reviews

Summary Judgement:  Nexus: Ascension deftly weaves post-apocalyptic storytelling with space opera to produce a unique novel that explores the depths of tragedy and the limits of hope.

Written by: Robert Boyczuk

Published by: Chizine Publications

Robert Boyczuk offers a supremely intriguing story in Nexus: Ascension. Set in a far-flung corner of the galaxy where human life exists on multiple planets, the novel charts the fate of the starship Ea. The Ea’s crew, upon returning to their home planet of Bh’Haret from a thirty-year trade mission, emerge from stasis to find a strange network of satellites orbiting their world.  Blocking all transmission in and about Bh’Haret, the satellites scream two words, over and over, into the void “plague hazard”.  Low on food and fuel, the Ea’s crew land on Bh’Haret only to find cities pockmarked with radioactive craters and human life seemingly extinguished.  And did I mention that all this happens within the first thirty pages?  To say that Nexus: Ascension has a convincing hook is to understate the robust narrative that Boyczuk generates with his words.

Nexus: Ascension is no simple story of survival.  Indeed, that is one of the strengths inherent to Boyczuk’s style.  He constantly plays with preconceptions that readers might be bringing to the table.  Each time the plot approaches a cliché of the post-apocalyptic genre it changes pace just enough to keep a reader on their toes.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the book plays in plot twists, it is keenly aware of the need to be unexpected when treading down the familiar literary path of planetary catastrophe.  Allow me to illustrate the point: Nexus: Ascension isn’t content to merely have its characters lament the loss of their world while they get on with the business of survival.  Rather, the book unrepentantly explores loss as a psychosis so strong that its characters are constantly courting insanity.  On its own, that idea might not seem overtly avant-garde.   Yet, maintaining a believable malleability in the characters’ sanity without reducing them to blithering idiots, cannibals or other tropes of madness is quite a feat.  Arguably, the novel’s tableau of coping skills, which quite naturally put me in a place to ask what I would do in a similar situation, is one of its most accessible qualities.

Much to my surprise, the novel’s tendency to explore the mental state of its characters in no way slows the pace of the book.  One of the ways Boyczuk ensures the tempo of his novel is in resisting the tendency to provide detailed exposition.  Equal measures of sharp dialogue and rich environments drive the plot rather than merely elaborating on it.  Indeed, as the story transitions from survival narrative to space opera, I appreciated that the writer focused on the events at hand rather than the pointless details of fusion engines, laser pistols and other such sundry sci-fi gizmos.  This shouldn’t suggest that the book deserves being labelled as soft sci-fi.  All events within the book unfold according to the rules of physics as we currently understand them.  Thus, avoiding excessive details therein assumes a level of sophistication from the audience in addition to grounding the text in the human condition.

Despite the aforementioned strengths, the character development within the book isn’t quite perfect.  There are a couple of religious kooks within the book that serve no real purpose, not withstanding their occasional prognostications of doom.  Additionally, there are times when it seems that some of the main characters, in particular Ea’s captain, Sav, are a little shallow.  However, the more I read into the book, the more I came to recognize that this shallowness was not a failure on the author’s part.  Rather, these occasional moments of character hollowness were a reflection on the fact that the book’s characters find themselves constantly reinventing who they are to suit the moment in which they live.  In retrospect, this is an interesting way of exploring self-identity when everything that defines a person and their place within a society has been destroyed.  While a very bold gambit for subtextual exploration, it is one I fear that some readers may misinterpret.

Further criticisms of Nexus: Ascension are few and far between.  As the story develops, the focus splits from one inclusive plot line to two separate threads.  The segment wherein my favourite character dwells ended a bit more abruptly than I would have liked.  Of course, a complaint such as that speaks more to Boyczuk’s ability to draw me into the story than it does any fault in the writing.  Also, the characters’ relationship toward cybernetics is as thought provoking as it is frustrating.  While it all makes sense within the context of the story, I felt a desire for a greater understanding of the relationship between the cybernetic “facilitators” and their role within Bh’Haret’s nation states.  Again, it’s another criticism that speaks more to how the book tapped into my fascination with post-humanism than any failing in the narrative.

As a study in human emotion and a first rate space opera, Robert Boyczuk’s Nexus: Ascension is so unique that it defies easy comparison.  It is also a bold story in that it dares to have individual characters honestly grapple with the end of their world.  Short of the sheer physical exhaustion that comes with reading late into the night, it was almost impossible to find a reason to put this book down.

Overall Score: +3.0


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