The Northern Star: The End by Mike Gullickson

Reviewed by Erin Eymard.

The final novel wraps up the journey of John Raimey, who, thirty-five years before, became the first bionic soldier ever deployed in the field. He is a giant, a Tank Major, fourteen feet tall and with enough power in his fists to level buildings. He is a legend of war, cursed with a fate where everyone he touches - even in love - dies.

Evan Lindo, the father of bionics, now rules the world through his most ingenious creation, The Northern Star. But a war in the Middle East has triggered events that lead to Raimey. And a secret has been unveiled that sets Raimey on one last mission before he finds his place in Hell.

Mike Gullickson's The Northern Star: The End is the perfect ending to his The Northern Star trilogy. It brings the series and your favorite characters to satisfying conclusions. I read the book in three days but kept putting writing a review aside because nothing I wrote seemed to do justice to Gullickson's story.

One of the things that I always loved about Gullickson's writing is that he makes you care about his characters. You become invested in them and find yourself rooting for them (even the ones on the 'wrong' side). His storytelling is witty, real, and heart wrenching at the same time. You truly come to care about characters in this series, whether they are with you from page one of The Beginning or if you just met them in this book. Their journeys engage you. Their triumphs excite you. Their failures move you.

The characters in this trilogy are, with three exceptions, various shades of gray when it comes to morality. And while the majority of this book follows John Raimey and Mike Glass, both men who have done bad things by following orders but are nonetheless sympathetic characters. They are just vehicles bringing the reader to the true heart of the struggle between the characters of Vanessa, Evan, and Justin.

Vanessa represents the maiden, mother, and crone character. We first see her as a child losing her parents; then we see her as a mother, of sorts, to the world; and finally we see her as the aged goddess who wishes to save the world. Evan's evolution takes him from brilliant scientist to power hungry genius and then monster. His story is one of how absolute power corrupts absolutely. And finally there is Justin, the Sleeper King, whose story proves that sometimes you just can't escape your destiny.

The whole series is a science fiction masterpiece that will make the reader evaluate our current paths in regards to technology and the internet. Great read! Will read again!

For more information on The Northern Star series, please visit the author's website.

The Somniscient by Richard Levesque

When reformed dream hacker Nix Nighthawk's sleep chip malfunctions, he is forced to seek help from a world he is trying to avoid—his old friends in the pirate dream network. But that world has changed, and Nix soon finds himself at the center of a complex plot to overthrow the vast corporation that controls every aspect of society. Betrayed by his lover, his friends, and even the technology that defines him, he has to choose: go back to living his safe and controlled existence, or be the hero and join forces with the revolutionary known only as The Somniscient.

My first thought when I read the title was, "What the heck does 'somniscient' mean?" It's not listed in the dictionary, so I tried to break it down into its parts.

somni-: a combining form meaning “sleep”, used in the formation of compound words.

omniscient: having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding; perceiving all things.

When I put both parts together, I get someone that has complete knowledge of the sleeping world. It's the screen name of one of the characters, a dream hacker, in the story. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Levesque has created a world that uses sleep as currency. Everyone needs to sleep, so people earn "Zs" in order to sleep. You also use the Zs to buy things, pay for services, food, water, filtered air. The story takes place in the 22nd century. There's been some geological and economic upheaval that has brought civilization to the brink of collapse. One tech company, enLIGHTen, has pretty much all the power as it was their idea to use sleep as currency. Their device, the Loop, is surgically attached behind one's ear and connects people to the internet 24/7. Imagine seeing your Facebook feed updating all day and night. It also runs the sleep app which prohibits people from sleeping if they don't have enough Zs in their accounts.

Being someone who prizes sleep more than money, I thought that this was a horrific idea, and I would think many others would too. But if you want to be part of society and enjoy the comforts of civilization, you have to get one. I would be one of the "unLooped", the people who live on the margins of society. They can sleep all they want, but don't have jobs, homes, food, or anything else. Nix gets caught up in the rat race. He's burned out trying to earn enough Zs so he can sleep, but paying for rent, utilities, and other bills comes first. He can never seem to get ahead. He's trapped, working for the very company that makes the Loop. He literally becomes an indentured servant.

When people do get to sleep, they can buy dreams that they run on their sleep app. But just as people buy apps that their phone makers don't want them to today, people in this future L.A. buy unsanctioned dreams. Unsanctioned dreams can have malware hidden in them that can screw up one's Loop or steal their Zs.

Most of this is explained in the backstory that Levesque pours on the reader at the beginning of the book. It takes a while for the story get moving as we're introduced to Nix and the world he lives in. While it's a fascinating concept to have sleep as currency, I couldn't help but think that these people were idiots for agreeing to this system, so it took me a while to become sympathetic to their plight. But it isn't Nix's fault; he was born into this world. As we come to feel sorry for his lot in life, something happens to him, and the story's pace picks up. Nix is now on the run, and we're rooting for him to succeed.

But one-third of the way into the book, just when we get hooked, Nix disappears from the narrative. The story resumes several years later with another character in charge of the narrative. I was completely thrown by this abrupt change. I felt as if I was starting over. It took me quite a while to start feeling sympathetic for this new character—she's a trophy wife—after getting invested in Nix, and the pace of the story slowed to a crawl while she reflected on her predicament in life. The story eventually returns to Nix—and the pace picks back up—but it isn't until the second half of the book.

Another interesting avenue Levesque explores is gender identity. Because the Loop digitizes thought, one can, in essence, upload one's personality to a host computer and then implant it into another Loop. Through this process, a man and a woman are forced to share a body. Each takes turns controlling the body. The visiting personality gets to experience life as a different gender, complete with different sensations that they're not used to. The host personality gets to experience the visiting person's feelings and actions after ceding control of their body, even when they run counter to their own.

As for the technicals, I only found a few typos. As far as I'm concerned, that's professional quality editing.

In The Somniscient, Richard Levesque has created a unique world where sleep is currency and certainly not free. While it is an intriguing concept and Levesque provides the framework and world building for such a society to exist, the introductory backstory weighs the story down. The characters that provide the narrative are so self-absorbed with their respective plights that they slow down the story, and the sudden switch from one to the other nearly derails it. Still, The Somniscient makes for an entertaining read as Levesque uniquely explores gender identity, the "have versus have not" divide, and the extent our digitally obsessed culture will go to get its internet fix.

For more information about The Somniscient, please visit the author's website.

No Dogs in Philly by Andy Futuro

Philadelphia. Elzi on every corner, cops just itching to crack a skull, and the Gaespora lordin' it up in their high towers while the rest of the filth dribbled down the sewer. Saru had a way out. All she had to do was find the girl, one skinny stray with blue, blue eyes—bluer than anyone had ever seen—and ten million fat bucks were hers. Except someone was killing blue-eyed girls, and they were A-list, major-league, cold-sweat effective. And something about the end of all existence if she failed.

Don't let the doe-eyed woman on the cover fool you. That's Saru. She'll use that cattle prod on you if you mess with her. While not evident from the cover, she's enhanced with all the doodads that cyberpunk fans would expect of a near future sci-fi heroine. She's connected to the Net 24/7; has a pistol named "Betty" up her sleeve ready to go when adrenaline, pulse rate, and subconscious thought reach a critical threshold; and everything's subdermal. But just as her soft exterior belies the bad ass that she is, her gender hides the fact that she's more macho than most men, certainly the other male characters in the story. She could be Mike Hammer's granddaughter, though with less rage and more cynicism.

I get that she has to be tough. Her world is full of creeps and creepy things. But the hard-boiled persona has its limitations. While Hammer was out for justice, Saru only seems to be out for herself. People can sympathize with vigilantes, not so much the obnoxious brats just looking for a payday. It takes a lot of death before any kind of humanity breaks through the concrete barrier surrounding her heart. Even when it does, I wasn't convinced that she was going to carry through on her promise to set things right.

Futuro's Philadelphia is a complex place with enhanced humans, aliens, and monsters. The aliens and monsters would be right at home in Lovecraft's universe. But whereas Lovecraft's unthinkable creations lurked in the shadows and faraway places, Futuro's creations are out in the open. Considering the obvious menace that some of them pose, I'm surprised that there wasn't more panic among the populace. The elzi seem to be former people that were exposed to dark forces which devolved them into sub-human animals with tech sticking out of their bodies and great appetite (hence the book's title). Sure, there are even worse things lurking underground, but the elzi are out on Broad Street in broad daylight. The city seems to function; why not round them up or put them down?

Futuro is at his best when he taps into that Lovecraft vibe. He reaches out to the infinite and shows how it overwhelms a human mind. There's the plea from a desperate soul that we have to hope that the old, hungry god ignores our world. But it's the elements of indescribable horrors lurking in the dark that do unspeakable things that really fires things up. My favorite part was when Ria took shelter from the rain in a subway tunnel. It was already a tense scene as she sat with a few homeless people around a trash fire while dozens of satiated elzi slept nearby. Will they stay asleep? What if one of them needs a midnight snack? And then there's a rumble that wakes up the elzi, and they scatter. The people start to panic. What could drive an elzi to run away? Then Futuro reveals what that thing is.

Unfortunately, my experience was marred by comma problems (missing or too many) and run on sentences. Sometimes it seemed as if Futuro tried to cram as many adjectives and phrases as possible. These two sentences lack any form of punctuation:

We live as we can can as thoughts within your kind and through thought we drive action and with action we bring your world closer to our own.

She could pound a liter of vodka and walk a line and thread a needle and she remembered exactly what had happened.

Here's an example of a sentence that goes on far too long given its limited punctuation:

She'd tried wearing sunglasses to complete her disguise, but with the clouds and the dark she couldn't see shit, kept stepping in it and glass and syringes and tripping and potholes and the last time she'd had a condom dragging from her heel for about four blocks until the cashier at the liquor store pointed it out by yelling in his angry foreigner language.

While there are more examples, it's not like the whole book is like this. Most of the time, Futuro gets it right. If he had hired a proofreader, I believe that the manuscript would've been much cleaner. If commas and long sentences like these don't bother you, then don't sweat it. Just enjoy the story.

While it might seem from my complaints about grammar and the unsympathetic protagonist that I didn't like the story, that isn't the case. I really enjoyed it. Futuro nicely blends cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror together in a bleak, near future Philadelphia. While his protagonist is about as warm and cuddly as 80 grit sandpaper, she adds a hard-boiled detective element into the mix that works well given the story's setting and plot.

For more information, please visit the author's website.

The Northern Star: Civil War by Mike Gullickson

Reviewed by The Bookworm's Fancy.

Mike Gullickson’s The Northern Star: Civil War picks up with a bang eleven years after the events of The Northern Star: The Beginning. The tentative cooperation between the world government and MindCorp (the company that owns the technology that makes civilization possible in a world drained of oil) has slowly begun to fray. Like its predecessor, Civil War is full of complex characters with interconnecting motives. It is very hard to separate the bulk of the characters into good/bad or black/white. Instead they all (except for Evan Lindo) exist in a state of varying shades of gray. This, in of itself, makes for a compelling read. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start with the easy stuff. All too often, we hear horror stories of indie books with bad editing and horrible covers. Not only are Gullickson’s covers amazing, but the editing is spot on. No odd formatting or glaring grammatical errors to break the reader’s immersion in the story.

I referred to Gullickson’s The Northern Star: The Beginning as an “old school, science-fiction romp”. The Northern Star: Civil War is this and so much more. It is more than just men in mechs destroying each other. It is more than amazing technological advances. Gullickson manages to make it all accessible to the average reader without overloading the senses. The technology is intricate and complicated but explained to the reader with a simple ease that just flows.

All the characters that survived through the first book are back to continue their journey in this book. Most interesting, though, is the inclusion of John Raimey’s now twenty-year-old daughter, Vanessa. Just a child in the first book, she has blossomed into a confident, intelligent young woman working with the bionics. While Gullickson’s story sets her up as the lynchpin to the ultimate evil scheme, the character of Vanessa becomes the emotional center of the story. Her relationships with Evan Lindo, Mike Glass, and John Raimey drive the story just as much as the constant struggle for power between MindCorp and the government.

Following the trend of the second installment in a trilogy being darker, Civil War is to The Beginning as the Empire Strikes Back is to A New Hope. It is decidedly darker, dirtier, and grittier. You find yourself rooting for the heroes and rallying with them only to have the rug pulled out from beneath you when they fail. The final scenes evoked the same emotional distress and despair as when Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite. The ending compels you to read the last book in the series because it just can’t end like this. The good guys have to win. Or do they?

The Bookworm gives The Northern Star: Civil War 4.5 stars for delicious darkness. For more information, please visit the author's website.

The Northern Star: The Beginning by Mike Gullickson

Reviewed by Erin

The year is 2058. The great oil shortage that we have been warned about since the 1970s has finally come to pass, causing the Great Migration, where people began moving from the suburbs and back into the cities. Enter Cynthia Revo who successfully frees the mind from its physical prison. People now live more in cyberspace than in reality. But it is much more than that. Cyberspace is now the new reality. It has become necessary for almost every aspect of society. The economies of countries depend on it. But no one suspects the evil that lurks around the next cyber corner.

At first glance, I was prepared to dislike this book. I feared it was going to be a preachy environmental tale hidden behind a story that was part pre-Matrix, part Mechwarrior, and part Ender’s Game. I was delightfully surprised. I was treated to an old school science-fiction romp.

The characters are complex creations that grow and evolve throughout the story which, at its core, is a morality tale. Would you do bad things for the right reasons? When does the greater good trump personal freedom? Not even the villain is truly beyond redemption, though such redemption does not come in this book.

My one complaint is the addition of what, in my opinion, is an unnecessary section at the beginning of the book. It expounds on the background of a character that isn't a factor in the rest of the story. What we learn about him has already been covered by other characters in the story. In fact, he's probably the one non-complex character in the whole story. Oddly enough, the narrator for this part dies at the end of the chapter so even he doesn't have any value. Nor is the setting for this chapter important. It takes place in the jungles of Venezuela, but Venezuela is never mentioned anywhere else in the book. And the placement, early in the book, is all wrong and disrupts the flow. It breaks with how the rest of the book is laid out.

The book wraps up nicely with lots of action and suspense, setting up for the sequel brilliantly. I am looking forward to the next book which I’m sure will explore the question of at what point do we stop being human. At least, I hope it does. I give this book four out of five stars.

The Northern Star: The Beginning is available in a variety of formats. The links for which can be found on the author's website.

Strictly Analog by Richard Levesque

In Strictly Analog, author Richard Levesque introduces us to a future where California has seceded from a dying America. A corporation has been elected governor (Romney's "Corporations are people, my friend" comment taken to its ultimate extension) and isn't letting go. While some freedoms have been curtailed in the name of national security, the secret police won't bust you for smoking marijuana. Fear of being expelled to the surrounding wasteland keeps the population in check.

Technological innovation is still alive. Everyone has a pair of iyz, eyeglasses that let you seamlessly connect to the internet (You could say that the initial versions are almost here), essential in a near total digital world. Every facet of people's lives can be recorded and shared with their phriends. If you thought Facebook and You Tube were omnipresent in society today, Levesque shows you the next level.

Our guide to this dystopian future is Ted Lomax, private detective. Ted is a veteran of California's war for independence, where he lost an eye. Having lost said eye, he is unable to use iyz, which require both eyes to bring data into focus. Not being connected 24/7 means that Ted is excluded from society's online interactions, persona non grata, but in his business that's a plus. Not being connected means his investigations remain discreet. In a society where almost nothing is private anymore, secrets are priceless.

Ted's daughter has been arrested for the murder of her boyfriend, a member of the secret police. Ted has only a few days to crack the case before she is deported (the death penalty having been abolished). But clearing her name will require him to figure out who her boyfriend was investigating, a state secret in its own right. Analog skills won't be enough to solve this case. Ted will have to get help from hackers and gear-head rebels, provided they don't sell him out to save their own skins.

Levesque, an English teacher in Southern California, has provided us with a well-crafted story with realistic characters we can root for in a hard-boiled landscape. Told in first person POV, Ted is the perfect guide for the reader. His handicap renders him an outsider, much like we are in his world. While Ted lacks the tough as nails, hard-drinking attitude of typical noir fiction from the 50's, his down on his luck demeanor (he doesn't have an office; he lives in a storage facility) and soft cynicism are a perfect match for cyberpunk.

It feels weird for me, a former tech guy who basically had to re-learn creative writing, to critique the work of an English teacher, but I can definitely say Levesque brings the goods. I really enjoyed reading Strictly Analog. It's a story that should appeal to fans of early Gibson or Sterling. And now that our world is much closer to the cyberpunk vision of tomorrow that was forecast decades ago, the story should appeal to contemporary detective fiction fans too. Strictly Analog is highly recommended.

Strictly Analog is available on the Kindle and in print from Amazon. Visit his website to learn more.

The Godhead Machine by Thomas Carpenter

The Godhead Machine is the second novel in Thomas Carpenter's Digital Sea series. In the first novel, we followed Zel Aurora across the planet as she sought the cure for her daughter's illness while evading capture by her former employer, the mysterious Djed.

Two years have passed. Zel's still on the run, though she tries to give her unappreciative adolescent daughter a normal life. An old foe, who she thought was dead, has resurfaced and is hunting her down. Running out of options, she joins the Wiki, but finds that the accompanying reality binder comes with its own perils.

The Wiki is an open source religion. You know about Wikipedia - where everyone can contribute to the building of the encyclopedia. In this case, members are trying to crowdsource their way to create the one true faith to get God's message. Unfortunately, there's too much of a social media aspect inherent to the Wiki that leaves it ripe for abuse and manipulation. When religious leaders are allowed to re-write the rules and twist the message, you're not dealing with spirituality anymore. You're preparing for war.

The other two major characters in the story are Sigh, an orphan girl living on the streets of London, and Nari, a pop megastar whose endorsements build fortunes for corporations and governments. Zel's fate becomes entwined with them. Carpenter keeps us hooked through their predicaments.

While I've read stories where the protagonist was female, I think this is the first novel I've read where all of the major characters were women. Men were relegated to the roles of minor characters and villains, not that he bashes them in a fit of self-loathing. It just so happens that these are three strong, diverse women who are masters of the worlds they inhabit. When forced to deal with adversity outside their domain, their resourcefulness enables them to persevere.

Carpenter's writing has matured. While I enjoyed, The Digital Sea, The Godhead Machine shows a definite improvement. His writing is tighter and more focused. There is no filler here. Action is sparse, but well-utilized. Carpenter would rather have his characters survive by their wits than violence. The dialogue moves the story along at a good pace and is effective at revealing the nature of the characters. Carpenter efficiently weaves the three storylines together, discarding anything that doesn't develop the characters or contribute to the plot.

Carpenter's augmented reality novels are building his reputation as a skilled writer in the new generation of cyberpunk novelists. So before you buy your Google Glasses at the end of the year, be sure to check out his work to see where the future is taking us.

The Godhead Machine is available in various formats through the author's website.

The Digital Sea by Thomas Carpenter

The world is a bleak place in Thomas Carpenter's The Digital Sea. Rising sea levels, changes in climate, dwindling resources and overpopulation have forced governments to enact population reduction laws and trade in population bonds. But a global one child policy isn't working fast enough for some, leading them to consider more drastic measures.

Escapism via augmented reality (AR), what people refer to as the Digital Sea, is very popular. Whether accessed via glasses or “mods”, surgically implanted neural networks, people are able to wallpaper over the despair and ruin to see a rosier reality. Or you can observe what's others have projected over themselves and their surroundings. It's geocaching taken to a whole new level. Unfortunately, just as opening an email attachment may introduce a virus to your computer, accepting someone's AR program may grant them permanent control over your perception of reality.

Zel Aurora has a daughter who is deathly ill. Fortunately, Zel is highly skilled at parting the waters of the Digital Sea to reveal what people try to hide. And she can use it to wash away her tracks. For this, she receives enough money to acquire the medical equipment and medicines to keep her daughter alive, albeit barely. They've also been on the run from a former employer, the Djed, who Zel spurned. Tired of running, and her daughter in desperate need of better treatment, Zel decides to return to his employ, hoping that his desire to use her skills overrules his anger.

Besides Zel, there are several other characters that figure prominently in the story. I wondered how well Carpenter was going to tie their individual storylines together, but he pulled it off. Even though he shifts around a lot, at no point did I forget who any of them were. Carpenter deftly shapes and defines all of his characters, providing us with a diverse group. He deserves credit for writing a story where one major character is an amputee and another suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, yet neither falls prey to stereotypes.

While The Digital Sea is well written, it could have used an editor's oversight. Overall, Carpenter does a good job self-editing but nobody's perfect. Typos got past him (“too” and “to” swapped, “artic” instead of “arctic”, missing verbs) and there were times when there were too many short, choppy sentences and fragments. An editor would've helped to catch the mistakes and offer suggestions to improve the flow of the narrative.

But despite my complaints, The Digital Sea is a good story. There's plenty of intrigue to captivate the reader's attention. The characters challenge the reader in that it's not a good versus evil situation. They're just pawns on opposing sides, trying to eke out a living in a difficult world. It will be interesting to see where Carpenter goes from here with this series.

Links to purchase The Digital Sea and other works by Thomas Carpenter may be found on his website.