REVIEW: Constellation Chronicles: The Lost Civilization of Aries

Title: Constellation Chronicles: The Lost Civilization of Aries
Author: Vincent Lowry
Genre: science fiction
Price: $14.95
Publisher: Mill City Press
ISBN: 978-1-934937-35-8
Point of Sale: Author’s site Amazon.com
Reviewed by: Chris Gerrib

I recently received Vincent Lowry’s first novel, Constellation Chronicles: The Lost Civilization of Aries. It’s an interesting book, and one that I am finding difficult to review. From a technical point of view, the only flaw I see is a tendency to italicize brand names. Otherwise, the writing is clear and entertaining. Yet I still am a bit ambivalent about the book. I think part of my difficulty is that the book is really a novelization of Lowry’s so-far unproduced screenplay.

The plot of the book is simple enough. Glenn Sawyer is a teenager living in Rigel, New Mexico. Glenn’s a geek – interested in alien civilizations and flying saucers. Then one stormy night, something crashes in the desert outside town. Glenn, who happens to be driving by with his grade-school-aged sister, stops and investigates. The object proves to be some kind of spacecraft, and one of its occupants, a small furry biped, tags along for the ride back to Glenn’s house for dad’s digital camera. Due to various issues at the Sawyer house, Glenn returns alone to the spaceship, and meets the crew, who are giant creatures resembling polar bears.

This is the point where the plot and I part company. We are told that Glenn’s visit to the spaceship is no accident, and that the aliens are the survivors of a civilization destroyed in a war, a war which is on its way to Earth. Glenn’s help is required to save Earth from this threat.

Now, here’s where I’m having difficulties. If your exposure to science fiction is limited to movies and TV, this plot is believable, if a bit overdone (how many “Chosen Ones” are there, anyway?) If you get your science fiction from reading, the plot doesn’t work – at least not on paper. Whisk me along on an epic voyage, show me some pretty pictures and blow stuff up real good on screen, and I’d probably consider it okay.

Here are just a few of the TV tropes that I found irritating in the book:

* Crew of starship is in suspended animation, but they don’t wake up until after the ship has crashed. (Shouldn’t they wake up well before the ship approaches the planet?)
* Instant and fluent command of English by aliens.
* Space dogfights at extreme close range.
* Super-thick asteroid belts, or in this case, Kuiper belt.
* Captains of ships representing two warring alien races know each other’s name, and routinely communicate with each other during battle.

On the other hand, while not super believable, the book tells an entertaining tale. Lowry is a good writer, and Glenn seems to be a believable teen. Compared to, say, the latest Transformers movie, the plot is a marvel of believability and comprehension.

RATING 7/10

We Have A Winner, Take Two

Well, I thought we had a winner to last month's Free Book Friday. But having gone two weeks with no reply for a shipping address, I have decided to go back to the hat.

Our new winner is Daniel M. - congratulations!

ETA: The book is in the mail!

Real Life Reviewers -- c.anne.gardner

Mrsgiggles, on her blog today, makes a comparison between Online reviewers and "Real Life" Reviewers and the “Rules” of reviewing. I can’t post to her blog -- I don’t need yet another log-in, frankly -- so I thought I would address the issue here since we have been talking about reviewing at length in recent days.

In her post, a parallel is drawn between book reviews and scientific reviews, specifically equating scientific “peer” reviews to “respectable” and “established” literary critics and their tendency to be authors themselves. I agree with this to some extent. “Peer” reviews tend to be more objective in that the “peer” has certain academic knowledge and expertise a layman would not. In the scientific world, the layman would not even be remotely able to review the paper because they wouldn’t understand it. And so like the peer scientific review, the “peer” book review allows for greater technical depth; it addresses the writing directly, the theory, and not just the “thematic elements.” The business of authorship when it comes to art is a very different paradigm than science. The Layman’s opinion actually carries weight in this particular equation.

Now we can say that the academic review holds more value for the author and the layman's review is for the average reader. I agree, sort of, but I think the best reviews are a blending of the two, where both objective academic opinions are balanced with emotionally subjective preferences.

When it comes to rules, I only know one set of rules, and in my opinion, I feel they apply to both types of reviews. An author should definitely be discerning when it comes to who they submit a review query to. They will want a reviewer with experience in their particular genre. That’s just common sense. In Scientific Peer Reviews it works much the same way. Reviewing something outside your field of study is not a generally accepted practice. You simply don’t understand enough about the mechanics to review it with any level of competence. In book reviews, this level of academic competence is not required, anyone can pen a so-called review, and so we wind up with reviews that are 100% subjectively biased. In this case, it is entirely possible for the reviewer to not “get it.” I can sympathise with an author in this case. If a subjective reviewer’s “personal taste” is for lengthy detail, tons of characters, lots of parallel and intersecting plots, and thousands of pages, they may feel cheated or have some bias towards the shorter forms of fiction. They might not understand the mechanics fully and so might not be able to appreciate it for what it is, having instinctively “wanted” something else. I can see where an Author wouldn’t want that person reviewing their books simply because the subjective can and often does taint the review in a way that could be construed as unfair.

All that said, with respect to the “real” rules for writing a review, I see a lot of hack reviewers out there. We have all seen them, the reviewers who simply rephrase the cover blurb or give an in-depth plot synopsis. Those reviews are worthless because they lack insight. I think this one point is the key for writing a “respectable” review: Insight.

That said, I will leave everyone with the time honoured Academically Accepted Rules for Reviewing, which were established for the sole purpose of Literary Criticism. What is Literary Criticism you ask? Well, we can go as far back to Plato for the definition, but in essence: “Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature of various forms. A book review is the most common form of literary criticism. Often literary criticism deals with particular literary works. Modern literary criticism is frequently informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods, styles and goals.” This is a very refined Academic field of study; you can look it up.

Now for The Rules:

From John Updike: A Well Respected Literary Critic's Perspective

1. Try to understand what the author wishes to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

How to Write A Book Review: An Academic's Guide

David Louis Edelman and what authors want from reviewers: An Author's Perspective

1. Opinion
2. Honesty
3. Insight
4. Elaboration
5. Disclosure
6. No Anonymity
7. Originality
8. Accuracy
9. No Pandering
10. No Spoilers

So in reality, the perceived conflict has nothing to do with authors versus academic reviewers versus plebeians, even if it might seem that way. The conflict is between the “real” rules and the arbitrary ones. The “respectable” and “established” reviewers, as mrsgiggles calls them, are the reviewers who follow the academic rules of Literary Criticism. Sometimes they are authors and sometimes not, but all serious authors and reviewers know the real rules.

Cheryl Anne Gardner

Thoughts on The Craft -- c.anne.gardner

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. -- Allen Ginsberg

Depart too far from the norm of human experience and you bore the reader, who will no longer care what happens to your characters once they have stepped through a dozen dimensions of time and are consorting with twelve-sided green monsters somewhere in interstellar space. The true artist, who knows how to deal with elusive material, is more likely to work his tricks right in your living room, where the reality of familiar things lends strangeness to whatever he may conjure up.
-- Philip Van Doren


I love the Literary Fantastic in fiction. Yes, even to the extent of Tolkien’s hobbits, Adam's lunacy of space travel, Kafka’s human insect, and Carroll’s Wonderland, but much of the Fantastic that I am particularly attracted to is of the sort where human psychology goes very wrong, where the familiar becomes strange, where the world we live in somehow animates itself and turns upon us.

I have always been attracted to the Gothic and the Dark Romantic literary subgenres. Many of my mentors wrote with a Dark Romantic’s heavy hand: Poe, Lovecraft, Bataille, Kafka, Marquez, Ungar, even Shakespeare's tragedies ... the list could go on an on. Much of what strikes me about this style is the macabre and supernatural feel the stories have to them without necessarily being bona fide “horror” stories, which include supernatural creatures. In many of their works, the macabre and supernatural aspects of the story are firmly “grounded” in the human psyche. Man is the monster, and the natural world is the essence of supernatural. Write fiction with that logic and you cannot go wrong.

These authors have taken the vile aberrations of humanity and transformed them, some into allegory, some simply into a deeper look at the human psyche. Nevertheless, what all of these writers have in common is their ability to make the elusive not only tangible but relatable. These authors have been able to combine perfectly the ordinary and the extraordinary in such a way that we don’t question it. This goes back to my earlier discussion on subjective details. Fiction readers don’t necessarily want a state of the union, a “this is how things are” bricks and mortar view of the world. They want to feel the world through the characters. They want character perception, perception that is uniquely different than their own, and for that to happen, an author needs to provide detail which is fluid yet fully grounded in reality, is passionately associative and wildly dissociative, is sketchy yet vivid, and all the while, is plausible without a doubt. Tall order.

Yes, it is possible for an author to take great leaps of faith with credibility "if" they stay rooted in humanity. Kafka’s main character in The Metamorphosis awoke one morning and found he was a bug. Literally implausible but psychologically frightening because emotionally, it can happen. Another example is that the mirror is said to have two faces. How often do we struggle with our own reflection, and so Alice’s looking glass portal becomes very very real, and the philosophical conundrums she is presented with transcend the fantasy world. This type of transcendence is potent. So much so that we can sympathize with Dr. Jekyll’s struggle with his alter ego, Mr. Hyde.

There are many modern authors who have succeeded in this endeavour quite splendidly: Ellis' American Psycho, where the "status quo" has become surreal to the point of absurdity in that it not only creates the monster but allows the monster to "be" unrecognized and unnoticed; or Palahniuk's Fight Club, where the emasculated narrator feels alienated from prevailing social versimilitudes, ; or Johnson's Jesus' Son, where the nickname "fuckhead" defined the narrator's entire existence, and, more so than the heroin upon reflection, coloured his view of the world.

So, even straight literary fiction can benefit from the principles of the Literary Fantastic. When we struggle with humanity’s deep psychological, moral, and philosophical issues, we often find ourselves at odds with what is real or what we have naively perceived as being real. Nevertheless, we are innately capable of analysing our own "dream" logic. On a daily basis, when the world itself becomes dark and foreboding, when our fears manifest themselves, our personal perceptions of the world are often challenged, even negated. This is the realm of the fiction author. The realm where, with a little bit of prowess and a lot of finesse, the objective details can be manipulated and the truth can be exposed. This is the realm of the author who knows, as Clive Barker so eloquently put it, how to “tap the vein” no matter what genre you choose to write in.

Cheryl Anne Gardner

Serialization of Speculative Fiction -- A New Publishing Model -- Josh Vogt

From The Examiner
June 29, 10:47 AM
by Josh Vogt

Donation link for T.A. PrattThe publishing industry as a whole right now is one of many struggling through some economic hardships. Editors and agents alike have tightened their criteria for bringing on new authors, marketing budgets have been slashed, and, unfortunately, a lot of the industry's time-worn policies and procedures (such as a bookstore's ability to send back any unsold titles for a full refund) keep profit margins slim on all sides.

So far, people are looking to advances such as Print-on-Demand (POD) services and ebooks and e-readers (such as the Kindle) to relieve some of the burden print costs forces the industry to shoulder. However, there is another approach that seems to be gaining some notice: Free novel serializations.

Free, you ask? Well...yes. Free. No strings attached. Of course, there is the option to donate however much money you wish to the author, if you enjoy the story enough (or just out of the kindness of your heart). Read Full Article Here.
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We always hear the question: Why would an author, or anyone for that matter, give their hard work away for free? And most authors who do will say that it's all about building a platform, getting exposure, and gaining readership in the process. The author's hope is that, after the freebie, the readers will be happy enough to pay it forward by way of buying the author's work at a later time.

I question that logic sometimes myself. Well, maybe not the logic per se but more the psychological logic of the term "free" and how it relates to human behavior.

People love free stuff, so much so that quality often isn't really an issue. The fact that the "thing" is free seems to be more important, and it rarely affects their buying decision down the road. On the other hand, I think all authors should offer some sort of preview of their work. When I pick up a book by an author I have never heard of, I flip it and read some random pages. Why? I am looking for style. Regardless of a books subject matter, I tend to be more engaged by an author's style than anything else. If Poe wrote an auto-mechanics manual, I would probably love it. In any event, people have different preferences, so offering a preview is paramount, whether that be short stories for free, the prequel to a series you are writing, or even two or three chapters of the book you are selling.

Serialised fiction is a wonderful adaptation of the "freeview" idea, and it works better in some genres more so than others: speculative fiction of course, where world building is paramount, and romance as well, where storylines can span many generations of characters. Yes, like Dr. Who and Daytime Sopa Operas, but I don't know how well this will work for straight up literary fiction. However, free to read will get you attention, certainly, but I don't think used as a marketing tool by itself that it will equate to more book sales. You still have to promote the free-to-read. If the reader doesn't know it's out there, they won't find it, even if it is free. Not to mention: Free only keeps them so long, and the writing has to be engaging; beyond that, the author will still have to work the market in my opinion. Slapping up a freebie will get you traffic, but not everyone will continue through the tollbooth.

Of course, I don't have any hard data to compare the percentages of free reads to actual purchases over time, so I can only speculate based on my own author experiences and those of other writers I have spoken to on the subject. Commentary is welcome. Let us know how the "freeview" has worked for you.

Cheryl Anne Gardner
Chapter Previews for my own work can be found on Scribd and Amazon.