KICKSTARTER RETROSPECTIVE: STRIFE and A SOFTER WORLD

So this is a new series where I look back at my Kickstarters (2 at a time) and give a retrospective on where are they now.

A Softer World 4- Lets Do Something Wrong: So the first Kickstarter I backed (and how I found out about Kickstarter) was due to a webcomic I was reading (A Softer World). This is a great comic which seems to set up a normal scenario then twists it via a few photographic panels. This kickstarter gave me a flask and a book. The Kickstarter was cool, although you miss the alt-text (what you get when you leave your mouse cursor over the comic) if memory serves me correctly. All up, a good Kickstarter, although I think I eventually wore out the flask (I drank cordial from it because it looked cool, not alcohol).

Strife- Legacy of the Eternals: This was a perfect information game where the conceit was that it was like war (play a card to beat the other), but your champion inherits traits from your last champion (i.e. bonus power, an ability, etc.). It was a better idea than it was in execution. The rulebook needed more examples and the special ability rules needed to be a bit clearer. There was a follow-up Strife that could be combined, but it didn't interest me too much. I did sell this off eventually as better games for 2 players were available.

The Girl With All Gifts

The Girl With All Gifts opens just like the title. There's a girl. She seems pretty smart and may well be gifted. Her name is Melanie and she appears initially to be much like any other child. She goes to school, she has a favourite teacher and she enjoys stories. There's just one big difference. Melanie lives in an underground army base. Every morning she is muzzled and strapped into a wheelchair. Along with the other children that live at the base, they’re tested to see what information is retained and understood. Carey tantalisingly drip feeds information, keeping the real truth hidden for a considerable amount of time. You're drawn into the strange world that Melanie inhabits.

Melanie is presents as innocent and alone, struggling to understand the cold and hostile environment she regards as home. Carey controls the reveal skilfully, so when it's revealed, you're already completely sucked into the story and wholeheartedly cheering Melanie on.

Then the narrative switches gears, focusing on a variety of perspectives. Here the book loses its pace. The other character are fleshed out generic post apocalyptic archetypes. Have the grumpy soldier, a narrow minded doctor, the outsider who cares to much and the guy who will die first. Carey gives enough layers of complexity and meaning to these characters, but they’’re never as full realized as Melanie. I can't say I was invested in them enough for them to live. Except the grump soldier, I did grow to like him and his “I’m too old for this shit’’ approach to helpfulness.
 
The horror here is graphic in it descriptions, painting a world of sombre dread. The book builds ideas on violence, endurance and survive against all the odds to create a vividly post apocalyptic world. Eventually the books narrative and characterisation settles into a predictable pattern halfway in. With the inevitable demise of various characters. However by this point I was engaged enough to be continue reading. The book quests was fairly predictable, except the ending which Carey delivers with both pathos and a sense of detached irony. Carey presents you with hope but it comes at a price, challenging you to think about boundaries and the darker side of our instinct to survive.

3 and a half lonely post apocalyptic waffles out of 5

Book Review - Red Shirts

In the distant future the starship Intrepid seeks out new worlds and boldly goes where no man has gone before. However, as newly assigned Ensign Andrew Dahl soon discovers, it is the low-ranking crew members that die more often aboard the Intrepid than brain cells on a Friday night pub crawl, while the senior officers always survive without a scratch. 

If you have ever watched an episode or two of Star Trek you’ll know that it's always the crew member with a redshirt, that dies when the crew beams down to a planet or any other location that's not on the bridge of the ship. Why is that? That's the question Redshirts poses to the reader. 

Scalzi took what could be a one-joke premise from Star Trek about disposable extras with a short shelf life, and he turned that concept into a funny and interesting examination on the nature of fiction and free will. I don’t want to spoil much about the plot because the twists and turns are part of the fun and I enjoyed how the book went off in a couple of surprising directions. I did find Scalzi’s writing style a bit odd. It seems to skip almost any kind of descriptive writing to focus almost exclusively on dialogue or exposition in the interest of rushing through the main story. 

 It felt more like I was reading a script for a TV show than a book and I found it rather annoying that there isn’t much description about what the ship or the characters look like. I would just imagine generic looking Star Trek characters to give the world some more depth. While I was completely into the story of the crew fighting against their fate, a few more details about what they looked like would have been welcome. 

Red Shirts is compulsively readable, but it feels a bit thin. The codex at the end of the book is more enjoyable than the book as it helps to fill in the remaining plot points left from the main story. This book also clearly shows that Scalzi can be a great writer when he is not feeling lazy.

Red Shirts receives 2 and half accidently-killed-by-a-freak-accident waffles.