It kept promising. An incredible universe, instantaneous travel, inimical aliens, and then... nothing. Boy travels to edge of galaxy. Boy meets girl..sort of girl. Boy meets another girl. Boy betrays both girls, and everyone else for no reason. The end.

“The Fortress at the End of Time” eBook was published in 2017 and was written by Joe M. McDermott (http://jmmcdermott.blogspot.com). Mr. McDermott has published 9 books.

I categorize this novel as ‘G’. The story is set in the far future. Military personnel are not physically transferred between the distant outposts of humanity, but their design is sent electronically and a clone is constructed for their duty assignment. The primary character in this story is Ronaldo Aldo, a recent military academy graduate.

Aldo is assigned to a very remote base, the Citadel. The Citadel is where the last battle with aliens had occurred many years previously. Now it stands as a remote outpost to warn if they return. Life at the Citadel is not easy. The planet is far from being terraformed into a pleasant space and the military unit is rife with corruption. Aldo does find love interests.

I thought that the 7+ hours I spent with this 272 page Science Fiction novel were interesting. I am not a big fan of the story as it simply plodded along for the most part telling of the years that Aldo spent at the Citadel and how he spent his life there. There was almost no action and I really did not like the way the story ended. I think that the cover art implies more than the story provides. I give this novel a 3 out of 5.

Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.

My book reviews are also published on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31181778-john-purvis).

A cool and original tale that left me wanting more. The ideas explored in this story were enthralling. Enjoyed it a lot.

Not really what I expected. I think it is way too long for what it explains. The writting is very good, but the characters are not very well drawn. The average is that is an entertaining story, but not as good as I expected.

This book might have been great
The premise is certainly clever enough
to get my attention.
But It really just lost me when it brought
in religiocity.
One of the reasons I love SF so much
is the unspoken sentiment shared by
many authors that Humanity will outgrow
religion in the future.
There might be a good book in there
somewhere
but I couldn't be assed to find it.

Once in a while, I come across books that make me wonder what the author was thinking when he wrote them. Why did he think that this particular idea would make a good book? Well, Fortress at the End of Time is one of them. It almost landed in my DNF (did not finish) pile, but I received an advanced copy of it and had promised to write a review, and I don't think it's fair to write reviews on books I didn't finish. So I had to suck it up and read it to the very end. It was a struggle.

I have several problems with this book one of which is the glacial pace at which the story progresses. It is so incredibly sluggishly slow. I mean a snail could move faster than this book does. And I have read some books with a slow pacing before and loved them to pieces, but that was because I was in love with the story they were telling. I didn't mind that the narrative was slow because I was immersed in the world and the characters and I didn't want the book to end.

Unfortunately, it is not the case here. The story is not only slow, but also boring. There is no great evil mastermind to defeat, no life or death situations, no real mystery or conflict even. Just a bunch of people stuck in the butthole of the known galaxy on a crumbling space station. Maybe that's what the author wanted to portray - how tedious and boring such a life could be? How it brought the worse in people?

Granted, it could have been an interesting exploration into the dark depths of human psyche and what we are capable of out of sheer boredom when there is no visible end to the misery in sight. And I would have been on board with that IF the author had managed to make that exploration interesting. As this book stands, it feels like the reader is serving a prison sentence along with the characters - its long, boring and I couldn't wait to be done with it.

Still, this book could still have been redeemed if we had some interesting characters to bond with. I could have suffered through the slow pacing and the lackluster story if I cared for the characters. I've done that before. Unfortunately, this is not the case here.

Try as I may, I never managed to bond with Captain Ronaldo Aldo, or even like him enough to care what would happen to him. He is selfish, self-centered and narcissistic. He thinks that he is better than everyone else and that he knows best what to do in any situation, nevermind the fact that others have been here for longer and have more experience managing people. He never listens to other people's advice, and often goes AGAINST that advice even when his actions have disastrous consequences time and time again. That's not a protagonist I want to follow for 272 long sluggish pages, thank you very much.

As for secondary characters… there are none. Oh, there are characters aplenty on the station and the planet it orbits around, but they have no personality of their own beyond a role they play in Aldo's story. We have the typical love interest and the love rival, and the corrupted superior officer the protagonist has to work with. It doesn't matter what face those tropes wear and what names they respond to. They are forgettable and interchangeable.

So all in all, I don't recommend this book. If you like sci-fi, there are plenty of other books on the subject with better stories and characters. Save yourself some time and frustration and pass this one up.

PS. I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Lots of interesting questions are raised in this book: what it might be like to be a clone, or to spend your life preparing for the clone's life you'll then never see, and just how unglamorous life is likely to be at the end of the universe. I found the story a little spare, but the world building was great.

Whelp, not really sure what I was expecting here. Hammy title, intriguing but vague blurb. Turned out to be a recklessly deliberate novel most similar in tone to Robert Charles Wilson's Spin or even Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Also turned out to be pretty kickass; was even in the running for five stars, and I don't hand those out often.

The story is told as the protagonist's confession, the implication being that he's going to do something particularly sinful at some point. It starts out with him finishing space pilot training on earth and getting quantum cloned to his first posting at the ass end of the galaxy. There's one episode of a couple of months where he adjusts to his new life, then the story jumps a few years ahead and works its way toward his most serious sin.

The station is a forlorn listening post, waiting for the return of an alien menace from the depths of intergalactic space. It's been waiting for hundreds of years and the handful of crew mostly pass the time by committing suicide out of sheer boredom. The system also sports a dusty little planet where a few colonists are trying to carve out some kind of future for themselves when they're not hiding from sandstorms.

This is a quiet book. Not a lot of action. No antagonist. Setting and characters are enough to carry it and carry it well. Minor conflicts. The protagonist's first spaceflight. Love interests. The relationship between the station and the colony. The tension of knowing there's this serious crime coming. Everywhere desolation and wistfulness. The occasional flash of hope. And writing to get it across, rarely taking center stage, but then sucker punching you when you least expect it.

Here's the protagonist just after he gets cloned across the galaxy and has a crew member give him some basic instructions:

"Only after she left did I realize that she was the first person I had ever seen, despite my memory of before. Shade of quantum lifes not mine, illusions not me, newly born - if I were a duckling, she would be my mother."

And here a flight over the colony:

"We soared over dunes in a twilight darkness. The horizon glowed purple and gold where the sand kicked up. It was beautiful and stark. It reminded me of the ocean where I grew up. I miss oceans."

You think you're getting a generic description of rocky, dusty colony land, just some filler to pass the time until they get where they are going, and wham! He misses oceans.

So why not five stars? Because the ending just doesn't quite come together. For a while I was afraid that it would completely flip out and go full Beacon 23, turn into saving the galaxy. It doesn't do that. But at the same time, when we finally find out what the protagonist's great crime is, it doesn't quite seem worth the build up, doesn't quite justify the guilt he feels throughout. It's not totally out there either, just doesn't quite hit the mark.

Still a great book. If you're into SciFi without the fireworks, you won't go wrong with this.

A popular sub-genre of science fiction is military SF. It is, as are many things, mostly awful. There are occasional startling exceptions however. I recently read Joe McDermott's The Fortress at the End of Time, from Tor, which is being marketed as military SF, and though this is true, it is true in a way that happily subverts any expectations or cliches.

The book, also quite short in a genre which encourages bloats and endless sequels, is a perceptively written first-person confession by a young officer assigned to one of the worst postings imaginable: a boring station in orbit around an ignored planet on the edge of subsistence. The plot concerns the implacable hostility of bureacracy, frustrating attempts to combat the sexual abuse of female soldiers, and attempts to stay uncorrupted in an economy based almost entirely on bribes, favours and patronage. The hero is a stolidly well-meaning but also somewhat priggish and naive man, very well drawn. Though the setting is military, there are no battles and no aliens. McDermott is also imaginative and rigorous in his future physics, and the book is a delight. Even the cover is nice: a lonely figure in a uniform looking out over a nearly dead world. There should be more like this.

Good ideas, a great scenario and a good final, but in the middle the story loses interest. A pity.
Review in english: http://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-fortress-at-end-of-time-joe-m_21.html
Review in spanish: http://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-fortress-at-end-of-time-joe-m.html

Joe M. McDermott’s The Fortress at the End of Time might be a little bit genius, but I can’t decide if I loved it or hated it. It’s got a great classic sci-fi sensibility if, but I’m generally not one for classics. It’s a novel that, while short, is often boring, but intentionally so and in a way that mostly works if you’re a patient reader. It’s got some big ideas that are worthy of considered exploration, but none that are particularly fresh. It’s solidly written with a distinctive voice and style, but there’s nothing especially exceptional about it. It’s a book that I’m glad to have read because it is a bit outside of my usual fare and a nice change, but I don’t feel compelled to read either more of McDermott’s work or more of this sort of thing in general. It’s not that The Fortress at the End of Time is unremarkable or pedestrian; it’s just a profoundly workmanlike example of its type of thing–thoughtful medium-hard military-ish sci-fi that has something to say about some stuff–if you like this sort of thing. I can easily imagine this being a book that lots of other people love, but I can’t muster any very strong feelings about it, myself.

The story is told in first person from the point of view of one of the most unpleasant characters I’ve had the misfortune to read about in some time. Ronaldo Aldo was raised on Earth and attended a military officers’ school, after which a copy of him (not really a clone, despite what the cover blurb says) is made and stationed on a remote military base at the far end of the galaxy, where he finds himself lonely, bored, and with few opportunities for success or advancement. While the book seems intended to explore the banality of that sort of everyday experience–not everyone can be a Captain Kirk, natch–I found Aldo so unlikable that it was difficult to root for him at all. For me, this is primarily because Ronaldo Aldo is a man who really doesn’t care for women, in spite of being straight and wanting to fuck/possess one (or more) of his own.

The first introduction to Aldo is his attempt to flip a coin with a friend of his over who gets to fuck a woman they are both hanging out with, only to find out that his friend and the woman are already a couple. It speaks to Aldo’s self-centeredness and obliviousness that he didn’t know that the people who are supposed to be his two best friends are in love, and it speaks to Aldo’s deep-seated misogyny that he ever thought it was appropriate to flip a coin for access to a woman’s body. McDermott doesn’t portray this behavior favorably, and I think that it’s intended to make Aldo unlikable from the start as well as set a baseline for his behavior towards women from which we can measure change over the course of the rest of the book.

However, Aldo’s subsequent arc never actually improves his attitudes towards women very much. Throughout the book, Aldo thinks of every woman he meets (and there are few enough of them) in terms of sexual attractiveness, which is consistently gross and off-putting, specifically because there are so few female characters in this book. Aldo’s championing of women at the Citadel feels hollow, and his “romantic” relationships are dysfunctional, with the dysfunction almost entirely on his side. Aldo continues to be slightly obsessed throughout the book with the girl from the very beginning; then he almost immediately becomes infatuated with the beautiful wife of one of the other officers at the Citadel, who he later has an affair with.

Aldo magnanimously gets involved with a young trans woman, but he primarily thinks of her in terms of her beauty and her transness, which is in turns almost fetishized and slightly vilified. Amanda’s transness is suggested to be a ploy to be able to marry a man and thus gain more land on the surface of the planet, and this plays off of some extremely negative tropes about duplicitous trans women who want to “trick” good men into being with them. I’d say that the treatment of this in the book falls in depiction rather than endorsement territory, but I’m not sure it’s handled as well as it could have been. There is quite a lot of time spent on talking about Amanda’s transness, in general but especially about her lack of childbearing ability (Future people can replicate whole people but can’t give a trans woman a uterus yet? Okay.) and there are several times where characters misgender and deadname her in ways that are derogatory and unpleasant to read.

Still, thematically, The Fortress at the End of Time is moderately ambitious, and McDermott does a good job of staying on target with the story he’s trying to tell. There’s not much fat that could have been trimmed here, and the deliberately slow pacing works nicely to highlight McDermott’s theses. The interplay between the planetside monastery and the Citadel could have been given somewhat more page time, but I may only feel that way because I could have done with less of Aldo’s feelings. All in all, though, The Fortress at the End of Time is fine. It’s not great, but it’s good, and sometimes that’s plenty. This isn’t a book that was perfect for me, but if you like this sort of retro-styled sci-fi or if you have a thing for unlikable protagonists and likely unreliable narrators, it’ll be right up your alley.

This review is based on a copy of the title received from the publisher through NetGalley.

Ensign Ronaldo Aldo just wanted to be cloned by ansible to a good post, fly ships on missions deep into space, and get more clones promoted out to other postings. That's all anyone in the Service wants.

Unfortunately, his ratings weren't particularly stellar, so his first cloning is to humanity's most remote outpost. It's so grim and boring, the person he's sent to replace committed suicide.

He just wants to follow the rules and do a good job, but life out at Citadel isn't that simple.

The basic premise of the book is that humanity has propagated all over space by data transmission by a tool called an ansible. It scans a person in one location, transmits data, and reconstructs them from matter at the remote location, creating a clone, or copy. When people do a good job and get promoted, they're cloned again out to someplace better.

The main character isn't an admirable guy (or even an interesting one), but through boredom, frustration, and ingenuity born of desperation we watch him turn from disappointed but stubbornly optimistic to pessimistic and reckless. The story is told as Aldo recounting his 'crimes' to a confessor, and we learn that although his crime may be seen as serious, by the end you can't really blame him.

For anyone who's been stuck in a dead end job in the ass end of nowhere that killed their optimism and good will, you'll probably see Aldo's unraveling as almost familiar.

The Fortress at the End of Time by Joe M. McDermott

For the newly cloned there is little worse than a posting to the Citadel, a listening outpost located between galaxies, on the very edge of human-inhabited space. So far away is it that time itself has little meaning. There’s no escape. In time, the clone will retire to the desolate desert rock orbited by the Citadel, and there he or she (but mostly he) will farm or contemplate God. If very lucky he will have the comfort of knowing that a piece of his consciousness has transcended, itself cloned to live another, hopefully happier existence far, far away. This seems unlikely for pilot Ensign Ronaldo Aldo II, clone of Aldo I and similarly lacking in empathy and tact. He’s liked by few – his commanding officer hates him – and he is cursed by bad luck. Things always go wrong when Aldo is around and, even though it’s not his fault if his colleagues die, commit suicide or abscond, nobody wants to get too close.

The Fortress at the End of Time follows Aldo through ten years of misery. First Ensign and then Captain, Ronaldo Aldo has much to endure as he learns more and more about the way that the Citadel works. Corruption seeps through the shoddy walls of this stinking rathole. The fact that there are so few women doesn’t help tempers. People remember what life was like before they were cloned and sent out to the Citadel as if they were no more significant than an email attachment. Aldo made mistakes before and it looks like he’s well on the way to repeating them.

The novel moves between the Citadel and the planet below, which is undergoing the slow process of being terraformed. While people on the Citadel live in squalour, the settlers on the planet are barely surviving at all, watched over constantly by a monastery of untrustworthy brothers. Almost everyone fears the return of an alien force that attacked the station lifetimes ago and is for a return of this enemy that the Citadel listens. This gives Aldo purpose but it could also send him mad.

The premise of The Fortress at the End of Time is extremely appealing, as is the title, and parts of the novel deliver on its promise. It is a very compelling read and once you’re immersed it can be hard to extract yourself. The descriptions of the Citadel and the rock below are very well done, contributing to the mood of remoteness, alienation, abandonment and isolation. One way or another not everyone lasts long out here and this adds to the sense of despair that Aldo must endure every day. There is only a small number of characters and they are deployed very well, forming a tight if disjointed circle and intensifying the claustrophobic atmosphere and feel of a small lifeboat hopelessly adrift. Each of the characters stands out well and plays their part in the story, with the possible exception of the monks – they felt comparatively undeveloped and purposeless, even though there was an important place in the novel for them to fill.

There are some interesting issues considered here, mostly to do with sexuality and gender. It is this human element of the story that is developed at the cost of some of the science fiction. I didn’t think that the science and process of cloning were explained clearly enough and almost no time at all was spent on the past war. It’s all left very vague, although it’s quite possible that this was intentional – memory is another theme of the book. How can clones remember the past and what does the past matter when time is meaningless?

My main issue with The Fortress at the End of Time is with its relentless doom and gloom. Aldo is not a cheery character, which is hardly surprising, but he’s also not very likeable (or even likeable at all) and this adds to the general despair of the novel. There is some lightness – love and families – but conditions are so hard that love doesn’t often fare well. Aldo certainly does his best to do it harm. There is a religious element which isn’t fully explored in the novel and so, when it rears its head later in the book very unexpectedly, it rather felt like I’d been bludgeoned with it. If there are answers here, I can’t agree with them.

This is a short (about 300 pages) and fast read and, as I mentioned, it is an immersive one. The Fortress at the End of Time is full of premise and promise but not all of it delivers, creating issues that are exacerbated by the unremitting gloom and negativity. There were lots of elements that I enjoyed and it is most certainly an intriguing novel but my mood was dark when I put it down for the final time.

2.5/5

There's a pretty even split on reaction to finishing this rather short science fiction story; I really liked the technology/inventive side to this novel, but I disliked or didn't care about the people/clones/[alien thought experiments, according to one solder] concerned. So it's a sturdy 2.5 out of 5 with a note that what didn't work for me may be a better fit for less character-driven readers.

The ideas used here, for travel, for terraforming, etc. are cool, creative, and above all, smart. In veteran author Joe M. McDermott's universe humanity has fought a war against an alien enemy, won, and now uses ansible and clone tech to guard and wait the possible return of enemy forces. For all that it's established on the effects of a former intergalactic and interspecies spacewar, The Fortress at the End of Time is more introspective than action-packed. The author has a clear ideas on how that high stress and high boredom scenario would affect the people and explores it though his characters.

The story is told from the view of a newly-transmitted clone sent to an isolated and troubled station at the edge of a universe. Everything about The Fortress at the End of Time's narration through Ronald II is rendered in his remote, removed POV. It makes the story dry and emotionless in tone no matter the events being described. It's hard to really care about either Ronalds I and II or the majority of his acquaintances on the station. The choices Ronald makes, the guilt he constantly mentions... well, those don't exactly help, either. It's often a dour book, for all its imagination.

The rather slow plot hinges on the narrator revealing, piece by piece, story by story, some past major indiscretion that has lead to his subsequent imprisonment and the telling of events that lead here to The Fortress At the End of Time. It's an oft-used concept and McDermott reveals the rules of Citadel life to fully illustrate and show how Ronaldo has come to his current situation, both through his own actions and the machinations of others. The plot is interesting but takes a long time to develop and a lot of patience to watch build. The high concept nature of the plot can only carry the book so far and the ending lacks impact.

Short version: cool concepts, lots of detail and creatives idea, but unfortunately falls entirely short on personality and characterization.