The Colony by RM Gilmour

Cover image (Goodreads)

When Lydia is pulled through spacetime into Jordan’s plane of existence, she finds herself immersed in a world controlled by the Guardian, an artificial intelligence. The Guardian’s sole purpose is to protect the power source that runs the planet; but it does so at the cost of all who live outside of its city.

Sheltered in the Colony, beyond the city’s borders, Lydia is befriended by an advanced race of hunters and warriors, who do all they can to protect her and themselves from the Guardian. To survive in this new world, she must find courage and strength, and learn to face her fears. But to save her soulmate and the colonists from the Guardian, she must overcome those fears and embrace her inner strength.

I was drawn to The Colony by reading an extract online—not a very long extract, but it convinced me that here was an interesting main character, dropped into a challenging situation. I was hooked.

RM Gilmour's story begins in a familiar Earth, but quite rapidly shifts to a wider focus. "Our" Earth is only one among a small set of alternate parallel worlds. The inhabitants are recognisable, but each has pursued a slightly different line of development, both biological and technological. There is a complementarity about the various groups; like any other kind of diversity, this has the potential to go well for the separate groups, or to go really badly. There are a lot of echoes of today's world, as a diverse group of people plucked from their own context tries to establish a kind of refugee existence.

The central character, Lydia, would be interesting in any story, but her complex and painful back story fits particularly well in this setting. She is constantly having to reassess who can be trusted and why, and whether she can rely on her own perceptions of the situation. Her personal history does not predispose her to depend on others, nor to feel that she herself is anything other than a destructive influence. Ironically, this very capacity for destruction proves to be crucial for the plot, once properly directed.

The story takes many twists and turns—it is at times a love story, an abduction, a rebellion, or a desperate defence against unthinking aggressors. It is to the author's credit that she has handled these possibilities without the story becoming bogged down and confusing. Since we follow Lydia throughout, these changes seem natural developments as her own awareness grows.

The book provokes thought about important personal issues. The one I grappled with most was what draws two people together. The book proposes that it is our similarities which make for compatibility and love. I feel it is more to do with complementarity and difference, but I appreciated the fact that the book tackled the question head on.

In terms of editing, there were a few more slips than I had expected, chiefly around homonym words such as your / you're. A few of them had me puzzled for a moment, but none of them interfered with my great enjoyment of the book.

The Colony ends with the defeat of the enemy, once its identity has been finally clarified. However, the closing words suggest that the victory has brought new risks, almost before the dust settles, which I am sure will be explored in a second story.

In short, The Colony is an engaging and stimulating book, providing a new twist on the theme of parallel worlds. Well worth reading.

The author's website can be found here.

God of Ruin by Michael John Grist

In the battle to defeat King Ruin and protect the Bridge between souls, ex-Arctic marine Ritry Goligh tore his own soul into pieces. Now those pieces, embodied as six rugged marines spread across the tsunami-blasted world, are adrift without Ritry to guide them.

Their captain, Me, is addicted to dying in raids against the remnants of King Ruin's army. Ray longs for the love he lost. Far seeks the mythical heart of the Bridge, So is lost to her calculations, while twins Ti and La have split as far apart as possible. They trudge from bunker to bunker blinded by loss, mopping up holdouts from the war.

But the war isn't over. It's only just begun. From the ashes of King Ruin's defeat a godlike power rises, one that understands the Bridge better than Ritry ever did, and means to bring a flood so vast it will erase every soul from history. Me's only hope is to ascend to godhood himself, before everyone he loves is washed away forever.

If you haven't read the first two books in the series, then this review will contain spoilers for those books.

In the promos for the new season of Fear the Walking Dead, someone off-camera is heard to say, "To defeat the monster, you become the monster." In effect, that sums up what happens here. King Ruin's successor, the Pawn King, has built upon King Ruin's knowledge and gleaned how to transcend the Aetheric Bridge from Ritry's technique. With the knowledge gained from both, he becomes even stronger than King Ruin and Ritry's chord. Knowing what he's capable of, the chord wrestle with the moral dilemma: Does one adopt the tactics of the evil Pawn King in order to defeat him? Does the end justify the means? Many within the chord's army don't think so, and the debate threatens to tear them apart.

If you've read the first two books in the series, you'll be familiar with Grist's style of alternating chapters between the real world and the metaphorical landscape of the mind. But whereas the first two books featured Ritry in the real world and his chord handling inner space, this book throws that convention out the window. As the blurb above explains, Ritry's chord went from metaphorical to physical at the end of King Ruin. With the Ritry gestalt no more, the real world narrative is handled by "Me", the leader of the chord. But he handles the narrative in the inner space journey as well, so if you don't pay attention to the chapter titles, there's a chance for you to get confused as to what's going on.

Both versions of Me embark upon solitary quests to battle their respective foes in the physical and metaphysical worlds until they blend together to become one surrealistic landscape. The science fiction and dystopic elements of Mr. Ruins are gone, replaced by fantastic elements where the laws of time and space are irrelevant. Both protagonist and antagonist strive to achieve godhood to reshape the world as they think it should be.

But this isn't merely a battle of good versus evil. Grist is too smart an author to reduce the story to these simplistic elements, though he leads us to believe this at first. Eventually, we learn how the Pawn King came into existence, a child in one of King Ruin's brutal courts. We see what horrors he endured just to survive and what his goals ultimately are. Grist's resolution of the conflict between Pawn King and Me is unexpected, but it makes sense.

God of Ruin brings the Ruins trilogy to a satisfying conclusion. The war waged in the desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland is but a prelude to the battle to control existence itself. It reinforces the message from King Ruin: Our pain defines us. But God of Ruin also asks us what we would sacrifice to erase that pain. Would we sacrifice those we love? Would we turn that pain on others? Would we sacrifice our very souls? But if pain defines us, should it be erased at all? Grist explores these questions in the surreal landscape of the mind and the ruins of a tsunami and war ravaged world.

For more information about God of Ruin and the Ruins trilogy, please visit the author's website. You can also read my reviews for Mr. Ruins and King Ruin.

Justice, Inc. by Dale Bridges

Imagine a future where orphan children are adopted by international corporations and forced into indentured servitude, where zombie viruses are spread through heterosexual intercourse, where Osama bin Laden is cloned by the thousands for public execution. Welcome to the world of JUSTICE, INC. No one is safe. Nothing is sacred. And all sales are final.

Justice, Inc. is a collection of short stories written by Dale Bridges and published by Monkey Puzzle Press. It is due to be released on June 20th.

All in all, this is a solid collection of 21st century American satire.

"In the Beginning: An Introduction" sets the tone for the collection with Bridges explaining how he came to write these stories. If it's divine inspiration, there's certainly a bit of playful smirking—and possibly spirits—involved.

There are bits of flash fiction that serve as appetizers for the normal length stories. While "Texting the Apocalypse" doesn't have any direct links to "Life After Men", its sniping characters would fit right into the latter story. Shallow, materialistic mean girls maintain their 21st century valley girl identity until the bitter end and would likely commiserate with the protagonist as she bemoans the loss of her purse more than her zombified ex-boyfriend.

"The Villain", another short piece, imagines how a pair of bros who have acquired super powers figure out who the hero is and which guy gets to be the sidekick. It isn't anything you see on the big screen.

Generational discord is an underlying theme in "The Generation Gap", "The Other Ones", and "The Time Warp Café" and each story explores it differently. "The Generation Gap" is playful. "The Other Ones" is sinister. "The Time Warp Café" adds in the dilemmas of immortality. How do you explain youthful rebellion to a new generation of immortals?

In "The Girlfriend™", socially awkward Derrick buys an artificial companion to combat his loneliness. Assembly required.

At first, it felt bizarre to be handling body parts in this manner, like a remorseful psychopath who had chopped up his lover and was now trying to undo the crime.

Bridges deftly manipulates our feelings towards Derrick. Having a girlfriend, even a robotic one, changes him. But as Derrick's outer personality undergoes a transformation, his inner self betrays him.

"Welcome to Omni-Mart" is another story where a man's relationship with artificial life transforms him. Leonard, one of those aforementioned orphans forced into indentured servitude, inherits Peter, an InstaBaby, which is an artificial life form that grows from infant to adult in a single day. Leonard is meek and obedient after growing up at Omni-Mart, not to mention terrified of the world outside (he actually lives in the store). He lives in fear of his bullying boss, Barry, and he pines for fellow orphan, Cynthia. Peter forces Leonard into confronting elements of his self that he's been too afraid to face.

The collection's namesake piece, "Justice, Inc.", is the kernel of Bridges' work. James Hamilton and his wife, Sarah, are struggling to have a child. She lost her brother in 9/11 and sees having a child as the only way to cure her depression. The longer it takes, the worse it becomes, and it's putting a tremendous strain on their marriage. James works for Justice, Inc., a company that provides a unique way for Americans to deal with the sort of grief that comes from national tragedies induced by evil men. And in Dubya's America, it totally makes sense. James uses his job to formulate a solution to his wife's dilemma.

Justice, Inc. lives up to its billing. Dale Bridges has channeled his acerbic vision of American corporate dystopia into enjoyable satire. Of course, it is advised that readers share a similar perspective in order to appreciate Bridges' wit. Those readers bearing any similarity to the characters skewered in these stories will chafe at his spot on portrayals.