Review: The Beam, episode 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2014
While I hesitate to call the guys from Realm and Sands renaissance men when it comes to storytelling, it can’t be denied they don’t stick to one type of story, deciding, instead, to go with the muse and see where the ideas take them.  They’ve told stories about were-chupacabras, murdering monks, talking unicorns and time traveling cavemen, so where do they draw the line?  Hopefully nowhere.The latest in my list of books to read from the Self Publishing Podcast guys was THE BEAM, Episode 1.  This may have been the story I was most hesitant to read simply because the world sounded so very complex and hard to get into.  But read about the world and reading a story set in the world are two different things, and once I actually got started on it, I finished THE BEAM Episode 1 in only a couple of days.The world IS complex, though, and this first episode introduces a good half dozen characters, many of whom I had a hard time keeping straight.  If asked right now, a day after finishing it, if Isaac or Nicolai was Natasha’s brother, I couldn’t tell you.  Hell, maybe it was neither.  I know Dominic is a cop and Leah a hacker/revolutionary.  Kai is the escort.  Natasha is a famous singer.  Doc is a salesman.  And Crumb is an apparently very important person, but that comes later.In the world of Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant’s THE BEAM, it’s 2097 and most of the world is gone.  America is still around, part of the North American Union, walled off from the rest of the world and answerable only to itself--so it would seem.  If I’m reading it right, The Beam is a self-aware version of our internet, or at least a much smarter version of it, connecting everyone born in the NAU.  It’s like if, at birth, everyone now were given a smart phone with an unlimited data plan.In the world, there are two classes of people, Directorate and Enterprise.  The directorate do the work--wholly unnecessary as most jobs have been automated--while the enterprise are the movers and shakers.  Every six years, there’s a shift and people get to decide which group they want to belong to.  On the one hand, Enterprise has all of their needs taken care of, but the government gets its say.  The Directorate have actual jobs and have to work for what they want, but they do so without government intrusion.At the start of our story, Shift is looming and some high officials are trying to cause discord among the Directorate to keep them from choosing Enterprise.  Meanwhile, there’s another group who want to take down the Beam altogether and force people to live their lives instead of letting technology and machines run the show.  Then there is another group working to advance the science of machines even further, a road that can’t possibly lead anywhere good for mankind.One thing I try to avoid reading are political thrillers--and maybe that’s part of the reason I had so much trouble keeping some of the characters straight--but THE BEAM isn’t really that kind of story.  It’s got hints of political thriller, for sure, but there’s a lot more to the story than what this one 130-something page installment provides.And then there’s that cliffhanger. That was Abrams-worthy, for sure.The prose is much better here than in anything else I’ve read from the Platt/Truant duo.  It feels more natural and relatable, despite the metric ton of technical talk that passes by almost unnoticed.  One lesson they’ve learned is that when it comes to scifi works like this, there’s no need to delve into the specifics of how things work because the characters, living in this world, wouldn’t give it a second thought.  Hover cars work because they’re used everyday, and the everyday character in this story would give it no more thought than I do about how turning the key in my car makes the engine do that sound thing or how pressing this little thing on the floor makes me go forward.  We just don’t think about it.  So it was nice to read a story about such advanced science without having the diagnostics and such shoved down my throat.They’ve definitely created a world here that I’m very interested in and want to see more of, especially after that aforementioned ending,  Smart characters and a tight plot with more potential twists and turns than I’d ever care to guess at and THE BEAM Episode 1 is sure to entertain right before it convinces you that, yes, you DO want to see what happens next, don’t you?  Here, just one more installment before bed.  Just one more hit, it’ll be okay.  What could possibly go wrong?  With a story this intriguing, absolutely nothing.