Review: Unpleasant sci-fi
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 11 21, 2013
Sub-Human is thoroughly unpleasant sci-fi.  A story needs to balance evil with at least some good, and even a dark story needs an occasional dose of humor.  This book had no such balance.  The story was filled with violence such as nuking China, killing large numbers of scientists and their children one at a time with no sense of remorse, killing a man’s wife (and saying how happy he was to do it) and having US forces perform 9/11 scale killings against its own citizens.  Basically, this was a thoroughly unpleasant story that an “everything turned out okay” epilogue could not erase.  I also thought it was odd to introduce the concept of parallel universes, but to only use that concept as an unsuccessful means of evading one’s pursuers.  Sub-human deserves only the lowest rating possible, 1 star.Post-Human is a better story than Sub-Human as both its plot and its main characters were more interesting.  But, like Sub-human, the plot suffers from a constant excess of cruelty on the part of the antagonist.  Though better than Sub-Human, I feel Post-human is still sub-standard sci-fi and so only deserves 2 stars.I bought this set due to the many 5 star reviews, but I can only give the set 2 stars (and that’s a stretch).