again regretting that we don't have a halfstar system here, Literally one of the worst books I've read of my own volition and I had to force myself to resist DNF'ing for the first time in years at several points.
Awful, dreadful and obtuse would be some of the more positive words I could use about my experience, Seriously, it must have gone down like this:
"Hey, I've got some ideas for new book, Or books, maybe a twoparter or even a trilogy, Its going to be EPIC!"
"What kind of ideas"
"Well, I want something like 'Dune', You know whatever made that planet special and kept the whole galactic power struggle going, "
"Like the Spice"
"Yeah!"
"Hm, not sure what to think, I know I like to put parika on my eggs, does that help"
"I think I can work with that somehow.
. . but no worms. At least no BIG worms, I don't like them! Smaller wormy creatures, ok, but that's as far as I can go.
. . Maybe they could change later into butterflies or something similar"
"OK, what else"
"Hm, not sure if the Freemen work here but definitely at least one Messiah figure.
Even make it a girl, Or more than one. Heck, even maybe some aliens that folks don't know were aliens, Maybe they don't even know it themselves, how wild would that be, especially if we repeat it a few times Oh and let them have really crappy lives in some cases, full of despair and even slavery!"
"Freedom fighters, I can dig it!"
"Oh we've got to have some serious Star Wars stuff in there.
Rebels would be freedom fighters, right And they face all kinds of evil Galaxy dudes and lots of robots and weird weapons that go zoom and shoot light and energy! Oh and weird hypertech swordfighting!"
"I can feel a toy deal coming!"
"Yeah! Heck, we can even make the ships be aware, too, like I've read in other books! Like Transformers from Avatar on the Death Star fighting Thanos! Goodness gracious it just writes itself, albeit I'll have to make it all uneven and poorly paced to hide some stuff!"
"Cool! And maybe even something like the Force or the whole parallel dimension so that when people die, they come back and are reinvented!"
"Absolutely! One of them could even be an old wise dude that everyone underestimates I don't know if I should make him green or not.
. . maybe he'll just like vegetables in a way, "
"I hear you!"
"Ooo, how about Matrix and Terminator combos It's real but it's not but good golly we'll have tons of weapons and gun fights! Zoom, pow, vroom and more!"
"Man, that is neat!"
"And you know what else I want like XMen stuff in there, maybe Avengers, too.
Oh yeah, like Wolverine and Dr, Strange, all in one! Damn, where are my old comics"
"Heroes! Amazing!"
"No, not heroes per se, because I'll have most folks be unlikeable.
How about antiheroes Or even antiantiheroes"
"Go for it! What else do you need"
"Well, at some point in the book, I want to use the word "pulchritudinous" Because reasons.
. . "
"That would be unique for sure! What else"
"Hm, not sure, I'm thinking some Tolkienesque references you know, small people, some with big hairy feet and Harry Potter themes, I want ALL of it!"
"Wow! Any sex appeal"
"Yeah, that's got to pop up, too.
Random sex and all the women have huge knockers but the actual consummation only happens on occasion when it just pops up out of the blue.
And lots of issues with unwanted pregnancies even in this advanced civilization!"
"Adult scifi! Sweet!"
"But I also want kids to be interested!"
"Wasn't the hero stuff enough, not to mention the kind of wizard looking into all dimensions thing"
"Maybe.
Hey, what if we also have kind of a parallel kids team And let's write parts of it in Young Adult format, maybe even go as far as to dip into Middle Grade!"
"Gosh.
How are you going to pull all that off"
"Oh I'll just keep writing until I think everyone is too confused or even unconscious enough to keep up.
A clusterfck to end all clusterfcks!"
"Nice, nice!
"But seriously, if the reader doesn't have to fight to keep this book from being a DNF at leasttimes, well, it's just not worth it!"
"Oh I don't think you'll have to worry about that.
This sounds like it'll be so random, illconceived, overplotted and poorly edited that at least this reader will never touch another of your books again! The sheer torture sounds delicious!"
"Awesome! Well, let me get to it, there are suckers out there waiting for this.
" Fortune has a secret.
Humanity, in its struggle to escape its own planet's demise, began sending colony ships from Earth almost seven hundred years ago in the desperate hope a handful would find some place habitable to human life and be able to continue our species.
Only one ship survived.
It only survived because it found a vast swath of alien planets, all terraformed, all utterly abandoned, Alien megastructures cold and lifeless, Alien vehicles left in panicked lines, sealed from the inside, no corpses within, Empty space stations, with no one to run them but the dust, Resources everywhere, ripe for the taking,
But Fortune is different, Of all the planets colonized by humans after the chaos of Migration, this single, jungleinfested colony on the very edge of the known universe holds the key to the alien collapseand to humanitys survival.
Everywhere else, advanced alien ruins mar every surface, every planetoid, every debris ring and asteroid, but of the creatures that made them, there is no sign.
On Fortune, something survives
Unfortunately for humanity, while time is running out, a rebellion is brewing, one that could save our speciesor consign it to dust like the aliens that came before us.
Now, seven hundred years after our first brush with extinction, the fate of the human race once again rests on the shoulders of a few: a sevenyearold sociopath and her combatgifted big sister, a man whos dreamed of the future, an infamous smuggler, and a Coalition pilot sworn to destroy the rebel cause.
This time, however, the stakes are higher, For lurking on Fortune is a secret,
An epic, postapocalyptic science fiction adventure that will make you hold your breath, cry, curse the powers that be, and in the end question what, exactly, it means to be human.
This is the SECOND book in the Outer Bounds series, Please start with Book: Fortune's Rising, This book was a slog of a read, It's like all the characters from the first book took some drug that gave them personality disorders, In particular, Tatiana has a bad case of diarrhea mouth and is pretty unrecognizable from the character in the first book.
To add insult to injury, the book offers no proper ending, just a random stopping point that leaves you wondering how many more book do you have to read/buy to get some real resolution.
Great premiss, but the execution is disappointing,
Props to the author for going independent, but a voice outside your own head when it comes to editing and character development would in this case be a very good thing.
You don't have to embrace the oldschool publishing industry to accomplish this either, A great sequel to continue the adventure, I still find the character of Tatiana to be completely ridiculous and unrealistic, but the rest of the players are interesting and well done, and the story is a riproaring ride into a future civil war.
Now to patiently wait for book, Thank the book gods, it is finally here!
After an agonizingly long wait, teased beta readings and a fundraiser, Fortune's Folly has finally been released to the masses.
Oh what a day, what a wonderful day! The book, just like the rest of Sara's other works, is amazing.
God I love reading her stuff!! Come on book! The first book in the series was great, This one took me over a month to read, I could not get into it, All the characters just seem to fall flat, Especially Tatiana, who wasn't too bad in the first book but in this one, . . I mean when did she turn into a spoiled beverly hills brat At least in the first one she was cognizant of danger and like.
. . not dying. In this one she's like "oh people are shooting at me I'm going to run over here and pick some flowers like a complete ditz"
Other than that it seemed like
every other page there was some new gadget or technology that either got overexplained or never explained at all.
By the end it felt very rushed and thrown together,
Of course we'll have to wait till therd book because the ending pretty much didn't explain anything new.
I love this author and really like this series, This story is GREAT. The characters are interesting, the story complex in ways that are unexpected, It's a scifi story about a colony revolting with a few subplots mixed in,
I just wish Anna would turn a corner soon and stop being evil, The author teases so many opportunities for her to mend her moral compass, at least a little, but Anna doesn't seem to grow.
She's supposed to end up saving everyone from the Phage, I wish she were a tad more likable, LOVE LOVE LOVE the yolk babies and Dobie, Brackett is a great addition, and Tatiana and her new pet are fantastic as well, The Alpha Gen subplot is a little less interesting to me, but I see how it's necessary to explain Mowgli and Anna.
I reread the book that leads up to this one as prep and also read the accompanying novella about Anna rescuing Milar when she was four years old.
I had forgotten the violence and cruelty in some of the scenes, I dislike that level of violence and wish it were at least more offscreen or not so extreme, Enjoyed bookbut felt parts of bookwas overly convoluted amp hard to follow, Kept expecting some explanation or background to the story but instead received a cliff hanger with no book, Made me kind of wish Id spent my time on another book or series, Wow, what a miserable book, Way too long I really didn't care about any of the characters, They all seemed to hate each other very blindly, Way, way, way too much "techno babble" and unexplained references that I assume are supposed to be cute, Pretty much every character is painfully one dimensional and never seem to grow, A map or some sort of description of this place would be nice as to picture what Rath is or the "orbital" or "void ring".
These "nephyer" are supposed to be bad ass's but no one has any problem dropping hundreds of them while no friendlies die or see to be phased.
Meanwhile these AlphaGen guys seemed indestructible in a very annoying way, Of course we don't actually get to learn about any of these guys but have to guess based off what little info is sprinkled in among the meaningless drivel that compromises aboutof this book.
I have a rule where I will finish a book/series if I started it no matter how bad and I've read some pretty lousy books by principle of this rule.
. . but when Bookcomes out on this I will probably skip it, This series is a guilty pleasure read for me, The story is fun and super easy to read but the dialogue is worst I've ever encountered in a story I actually wanted to keep reading.
The way the characters speak and interact with each other had me wondering it was meant to be 'young adult' but then there was too much sex and lust for that to be the case.
What kept me going was the richness found in each character's backstory and trying to piece together how everything came to be as we find it on Fortune.
I find myself really wanting to know more about the history of this universe and it's inhabitants, Except for Tatiana she really needs to be killed off already, How does the most badass fighter pilot of the coalition turn into a spoiled brat who thinks of nothing but screwing her hunky boy toy boyfriend and how many times must we be reminded he was a virgin, collecting cool new toys for herself, and making a dangerous wild animal her pet.
And we are supposed to believe Milar is into this nonsense Right,
And so, though I find myself quite often sighing and rolling my eyes with annoyed disbelief, I am looking forward to the next book in the series.
Both books kept me happily reading for hours, I read the first book in this series at least a couple of years ago, I wish I had read it again just prior to beginning this second book, It took me about halfway through Fortune's Folly to remember who everyone was and what was happening, There was so much going on plotwise, I kept having to go back to figure out who was related to who and why they were taking certain actions.
And then everything ended abruptly with no resolution, I guess this means there will be a Book, the story starts to get a little too introspective with the female characters and makes some plot line jumps like there a missing chapters.
What happened Book one was so great! If I read correctly, the author purchased back the rights to the story and self published I may be misremembering that but something has certainly changed and my guess is the publisher was pushing some edits to the story that really needed to be there.
I ended up hating most of the characters by the end of book two, Tatiana was devolved into an absolute air headed idiot, Anna's went from being a manipulative sociopath to completely socially inept and evil, and Quad was the most useless character ever.
I could go on. Every character was stripped down to a level that reminded me of a teenage TV show on the CW,
The story also completely side shot from the first book, The first book had a solid foundation of rebellion and science fiction and here the author lost all control and tried to weave way too many plots into a single book: AlphaGens, Aliens, Phage, Rebellion, Ghost Ships, Anna's time warp.
. . Maybe it will all come together in book three, but for now, book two reads as a mess, I really do like this series a lot, But Tatiana is still very insufferable, Her character alone almost made me stop reading, She is i dont know Naive or immature for the type of character she is supposed to be, There was new tech that was either thrown in there with no explanation or thrown in there with too much explanation.
This book seemed to bring up more questions rather than answer anything from book, Even Better Than Book One!!
Can't put this book down, Even though I sometimes get annoyed at some of the characters Tatiana, these books are so well written that you can't help but stay invested.
I can't wait to see where the next book goes, .