Cheerfully Inane

I'm not quite sure why people expect so very much from a light humorous sci-fi book, and then complain and whinge and gripe after reading it that it wasn't a deep, transformative experience. This book is a case in point. It's clever and good natured, with a few amusing twists, a handful of witty set pieces, some funny twists and angles, and a gung-ho "let's put on a show in the barn" vibe. How is that bad?

I like the idea that the sentient algorithm assassin is decompiled because our hero has an inexplicable "tech death touch" that causes electronics and computers to go haywire in his presence. That he is a culinary philosopher, is kidnapped by an alien disguised as a rock star, and is a relatively gormless innocent touches on lots of hoary conventions, but the author often gives them a nice fresh spin.

The author acknowledges his debt to Douglas Adams, which is only fair given the fact that Adams laid out the rules and boundaries for this genre. But hey, Johnston has given us a perfectly fine Arthur Dent, and has sent him spinning through some very engaging adventures. The bells and whistles are fun, the aliens are witty or deadpan funny, and the action is antic without being forced. I had fun.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

A quick, fun read without a lot of depth. There's enough here to keep the reader engaged throughout the whole story.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to preview this book. I enjoyed it.

Science Fiction: A Novel by Eric Scott Johnston. Some of the satire was not quite funny for me. However, it is a wild and crazy tale.

Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to preview the book.

Light SF but not much to it

I found this book mildly amusing and just interesting enough to spend the time to finish it. I feel like the author was trying to make a point through satire but what that point is has escaped me. If you are looking for a quick fun read that you will forget about after a couple of days then this book is okay. Otherwise there is a lot better humorous science fiction/fantasy out there.

Quite an all-encompassing title.
The first chapter introduces a galaxy-wide version of a cooking reality TV competition, in which a part of the loser becomes next year’s main ingredient. The next chapter shows an earthling with some cooking skills being scared out of his mind at a strip club. You can see where this is going.
It’s definitely silly, but I can’t say it’s funny enough. Like a lot I’ve seen recently, it’s trying really hard to be the next iteration of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–this one even more so—and falling way short. The ship’s drive is a huge example. And all this before I read the end, where he actually thanks Douglas Adams.
I do like how he turned the info drop on the ship into an infomercial.
Anyway, there were some cute moments, and I eventually liked Bridget, but it never hit the heights it set.

The title of this book gives an accurate indication of its contents, but only in the sense that it's sorely lacking in imagination.

Almost everything in the wider galactic civilization works exactly the same as it does on Earth (that is, in America in the 21st century); the author even points out explicitly several times that things work the same as on Earth. Judges even use gavels, which (I understand) real-life Earth judges seldom do these days; it's largely a TV and movie thing. Now, this could be an attempt at satire by someone who doesn't really understand how satire works, or it could just be lack of imagination or not caring about making the background any richer or more developed than a painted theatre flat; I'm not sure, but I am unimpressed.

One difference: in the galactic civilization, you buy things by laughing at them. If that was how things worked here, I was at no point in any danger of buying the book (which I got via Netgalley for review). The attempted humour fell completely flat for me.

If a supposedly comedic story doesn't work for me as comedy, it needs to work as a story, and this didn't. The main character (he's not a protagonist) is one of those aimless, hapless losers who blunders from crisis to crisis making things worse. That may have been meant to be the funny part. I counted exactly one time where he took action that was effective; the rest was either pratfalls or being rescued by someone else. Nevertheless, as the mediocre white guy, he naturally ends up winning.

There are a number of winks in the direction of Hitchhiker's Guide, but this is no Hitchhiker's Guide.

I don't usually mention the copy editing of books I get from Netgalley, on the grounds that they often undergo another round of edits after I see them. But the acknowledgements of this book mention a copy editor, so I'm going to say something. Either this is the version from before any copy editor got a look at it (in which case, if you release it to reviewers, you should expect to be dinged), or the copy editor did an incredibly poor job with an even more incredibly poor manuscript. There were errors on practically every Kindle page. Even if two or three very skilled editors worked on it between now and publication, they would inevitably miss things, because there are just so many basic problems. The punctuation might as well be random, and there are all the classic errors: missing past perfect tense (frequent); apostrophes in the wrong places; inconsistent capitalization, including of names; you're/your confusion, in both directions; changes of tense, number, or grammatical direction in the course of many sentences; vocabulary words used incorrectly (and not even obscure vocabulary words: "attenuated", "credulity", "unrequited", "duplicity", "conflagration", "quested", "nondescript", "deigned"); homonym or spelling errors (breeched/breached, timber/timbre, relived/relieved, salon/saloon, kinds/kids, spec/speck, cuddle fish/cuttlefish, Marshall/Marshal, compliment/complement, curios/curious, silicone/silicon); dangling modifiers; comma splices; missing question marks in questions, and a question mark where it doesn't belong; it's all here, a perfect storm of incompetence with the basic tools of a writer. The first step in being ready to write a book is the ability to write a coherent, comprehensible, and correct sentence, and do so consistently.

There's a gag that never really pays off about a starship powered by "postmodernism philosophy" - not "postmodernism", not "postmodernist philosophy", but "postmodernism philosophy" (or, in one case, "postmodernismism philosopy").

I finished it largely because I was very mildly amused and kept hoping that it would get better, but it never did.

About once a year, I seem to get suckered into reading a book that I end up giving two stars. This is the one for this year.

Science Fiction

Begins with an intriguing look at a cooking competition held on another planet, can’t get more SciFi than that but the author does an excellent job on details of all things space travel, alien, quantum physics-all while keeping the reader interested. My initial thought was the title should be changed but after finishing the book, I realized it was the perfect name and does not disappoint.

The overall flow of the book gave a easy-read vibe. I found this storyline to be captivating; one of those ‘can’t wait to read’ books.

Well, this was fun. An absolutely random Netgalley find that promised and actually delivered a perfect blend of science fiction and comedy. The plot is just about too convoluted to summarize, but here’s the list of just some of the things this book features…a man with a fear of naked women, an intergalactic cooking show where the losers end up as the next show’s ingredients (yeah, take that every cooking show out there, except for Great British Baking Show, you’re perfect and lovely and magical), various aliens and artificial intelligence that becomes a person to discover the vagaries of love. Are you with me yet? Is this grabbing your attention? It should. It’s freaking hilarious. Even as it tends to go on about quantum physics. Because, you know, it’s science fiction, it’s in the title even. It’s just pure fun to read and I sincerely hope my review (the first one on here) can help this book attract some much deserved readership. It isn’t as easy as you might think to find a genuinely funny read that entertains without insulting one’s intelligence. And the same goes for movies, so many things listed as comedies aren’t even close. But this book gets it and does it right. Very nice introduction to a new author too. Well done. This was a very quick and charming read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.