Review: Complex and interesting science fiction
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 28, 2011
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 7/10PROS:- I thought the plot was incredibly interesting. It kept me completely off balance for the first several chapters, and then even after I figured out the gist of the story, I was never bored. There are some definite parallels to the Matrix storyline, but this has some clever twists and unique developments.- Julian is nerdy and adorable. He's very intelligent and is into electronic engineering, and he shows the slightest hints of social awkwardness at times. But Jeremey is crazy about him and hardly seems to notice his shortcomings, which I loved.- The descriptions of the sexual effect that Jeremey has on other people once he's been "turned" are hilarious. And although I wasn't a fan of how most of the intimate moments that occur between Jeremey and Julian are "necessary" rather than DESIRED on Jeremey's part, that angle of the story actually started to amuse me after a while. Dean is clever about coming up with ways to "force" Jeremey into sexual situations that he doesn't (yet) realize he likes.- There are a number of immortal characters in the story, and all of them come from different eras and still carry remnants from the historical periods during which they grew up. One of them plays a harpsichord, for example, which I thought was quite funny.CONS:- I'm not generally a fan of present tense, mostly because a lot of authors have a tendency to revert back to past tense at odd moments in their stories. Dean certainly struggles with this--and not just from one chapter to the next or one scene to another. Even at the sentence level, past and present tense are often mixed: "now I wish I could hear them. Or not. I needed a distraction"; "His life is turning upside down. [Heck], MY life was turning upside down"; "The Esseren were dealing with her spinal cord now. Damion gingerly pulls her upper body to hold in his lap"; etc.- On a few occasions, Dean gets so deep into his descriptions that several important details are revealed in too-quick succession and get lost in a jumble of words. In addition, parts of the story that seem momentous fall a little flat because they're rushed through so that the story can move on to the next interesting occurrence.- I would say that the number of typos in this story is just a little above average for books in this genre. One particular typo occurs multiple times, though, and calls attention to itself every time: many times throughout the book, the letter d is replaced by a capital R. So we get things like this: "Knowledge creates power, which can be dangerous if not tempered by wisRom." At first I thought this must be intentional, like maybe "wisRom" was a Deanism--a word the author created that belongs in this particular story. But then it appears elsewhere too: "It'd be too ranRom"; "The godfather stood, Rominant"; "There's an inflatable Rome covering the top level"; and so on.Overall comments: I don't have a mathematical or scientific or electronically gifted bone in my body, so I can't comment on how plausible the science fiction aspect is or how well the technological advancements in the story all fit together. All I know is that the plot was interesting enough to me that the book had no problem holding my attention, and the romance was tentative and sweet. The writing here could have been better, but if I were rating only the plot, I would give it five stars.