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Zero Calvin by Brian Cramer. check out website: www.iuniverse.com and www.zerocalvin.com
Well, that's exactly what you'd do if you're Calvin Jones. Except you'd be heading for your own early demise, behind the wheel of your speeding car and you would probably be driving said car with your knees! What you can also expect is being unfrozen from a cryogenically icy state three hundred years after your death and having the horrible realisation that you were at one stage in your memory, dead. Not only that but your world, the Earth as you once knew it, has changed drastically. Now being run and governed by an AI named Ariel who was created by a cloned movie star.
Ariel has a dim view of anything that ‘detracts’ from human happiness. This is a good thing, is it not? Only problem is she deems termination necessary to resolve this view. This is a bad thing and now Calvin has to find out if the bad things will keep coming or the good happy times are ahead. Let's start by getting out a pair of scales as, for me, the book boils down to pros and cons. On the one hand you have a witty, wry observational-humour running through the story. Intermingled with that and, on the other hand, you have monotonous speeches in which the main character is prepped for life in this new age. There are no inclinations of what is happening whilst this goes on and it is page after page of one character's speech. While the background of the future is well thought out, it could have done with a far better delivery method. Brian Cramer has created quirky characters that come at you off the page, but I have to admit that they are incredibly similar to the characters from ‘Futurama’. I felt that the characters were blatantly ripped off from other sources. One character to look out for, though, is a German Shepherd eventually named Astro who has gruesome beginnings. While the plot has scattered gems of complete inanity and Cramer could be accused of having a fanatical obsession for a certain movie star, the overall prose left me a little cold. The innumerable grammatical errors, for example using ‘past’ when he should have used ‘passed’ and others too many to mention were the sign of Cramer's inadequate writing skills. This is the problem with some PoD titles, the writer is unpublished elsewhere probably because his/her manuscript is unpolished. For Cramer, I would say this is definitely the case. The premise behind the book is very good. The PCs (Personal Communicators) were cool to say the least and I almost wished I could use some nanobots to clean my teeth in the morning, too. Economic wealth in the future, as it was described, made a lot of sense and I thought this line of thought was inspired. Unfortunately, Cramer's first book is far too short, lacking enough description in parts and not quite reaching that sense of enveloping storytelling that even the shortest of tales need. Overall, for me the book had an equal list of negatives as it did positives. For spoof SF, it does deliver a good story, but the novella length and the lack of skills when it came to the actual writing detracted from its appeal. The only problem is that I actually got to the end of this book wanting more. Maybe it is Cramer's secret weapon to convince readers they want more through subconscious brainwashing throughout his writing. Roll on the next instalment! Donna Jones
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OTHER REVIEWS - May 2004
Non Fiction Mythology: The DC Comics Art Of Alex Ross Futures: 50 Years In Space The Challenge Of The Stars by David A. Hardy and Patrick Moore Lyra’s Oxford by Philip Pullman Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon: Second Edition by Brian Roseberry DVDs Babylon 5: The Complete First Season: Signs and Portents Fantasy Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson The Siege Of Mithila by Ashok K. Banker Broken Crescent by S. Andrew Swann The Magician’s Guild by Trudi Canavan The Destroyer Goddess by Laura Resnick The Weavers Of Saramyr by Chris Wooding The Iron Grail by Robert Holdstock Faerie Tales edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davies Darknesses by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Slipstream Changing Of Faces by Tim Lebbon Karloff’s Circus by Steve Aylett The Well Of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde Science Fiction The Golden Globe by John Varley Market Forces by Richard Morgan It Came From Outer Space screenplay by Ray Bradbury A Gift Of Dragons by Anne McCaffrey Different Kinds Of Darkness by David Langford Felaheen The Third Arabesk by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Absolution Gap by Adrian Reynolds The Line Of Polity by Neal Asher The Affinity Trap by Martin Sketchley Natural History by Justina Robson Horror Living Dead In Dallas by Charlaine Harris Magazines
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