Speculative Fiction at best.
345842
Rather basic and unimaginative for Poe. I expected more from him. Ran too smooth and predictable. Needed more, was like he tired and gave up. Only rated it four stars by accident. It should have been two stars.
1650584
One could anticipate that a fully satisfying explanation for the replacement of Europe by "Darwinia" may not eventuate, and it was not for this that I read the novel. Rather, the impetus was the occurrence of such an event within an early twentieth century setting. Unfortunately the scientific, political and other ramifications of this were not adequately explored, and using the context to simply highlight that creationist beliefs are deficient represents a lost opportunity for the novel to be of greater relevance and significance (in terms of speculative fiction). However, it is the novel's progression into shallow violence and horror that are its weakest aspects, with the few passages producing "put the book down and ponder" moments belittled by juvenile accounts of humans morphing into bug-like aliens.
3002209
When I found this book at the library and read the precis on the back, I thought I had lucked out: sci-fi end-of-the-world setting meets gritty team of astronauts. About fifty pages in, I started to realize that I was reading a trite, G-rated sci-fi wannabe with cardboard cutouts for characters, created by an author who lacks the patience to develop any sort of credible plot. The book lacks figurative language, leading to a blur of grey, lackluster settings, and tosses together a bunch of people who, by page 150 or so, I was hoping would perish at the top of the lighthouse. I continued to read, partially because I was out of town and had nothing else for entertainment, partially because I was hoping that it would redeem itself with something amazing at the end, and partially out of masochism. When I finished the last page, I sighed and rolled my eyes. I look forward to not reading more books by Mr. Parrish.
3707668
I had a box of these old Gor paperbacks and just recently threw them away after reading Tarnsman.  Silly old fiction that is somewhat amusing but hardly anything I would suggest that others spend their time on.  It may have been good back in the day before there was actual 'science" in science fiction but this one really failed in all aspects for me.  The premise of an "alternate earth" on the other side of the sun....what more do I have to say?
4218625
The novel had too many implausibles for me to suspend disbelief.  Examples: Astronomers do not outwit spies.  Humans do not outwit 7.5 million year old entities whose brains operate a million times faster.  The rest of the world doesn't sit around and let the U.S. conduct negotiations with an alien that can destroy all of humanity.  And there is no "Hawaiian chic".
The story was essentially over by page 190 (of 371).  What you learn from the subsequent pages has no effect on the story's denouement.  Fat books sell better than skinny books, I guess.  If you're like me, by page 250 you'll be hoping for some friendly rutting among the astronomers to relieve the monotony, but your hopes will be in vain.
For good Benford, try Cosm or Timescape.  For good Benford with rutting politicians thrown in as a bonus, try Shiva Descending.
1055874
There's an old adage:  "You get what you pay for." I thought this book would be a pleasant diversion in waiting rooms or on buses.  I was wrong.

The collection is heavily weighted toward science fiction, fantasy, and YA thrillers.  That in itself would not be problematic, but the entries are (a) often not stories in their own right, but merely random samples from other writings and (b) of a stylistic and literary quality ranging from the mediocre to the unbearably insipid.  Save your money and....oh, wait.  Never mind.
3707353
This book is a mixed bag, but on the whole not a particularly appetizing one.  Firstly it is not really science fiction but rather odd of self concious experiment in weird fiction that suffers from creaky structure and half baked world building.  This is a universe naive physics featuring ostensibly biologic world/ships floating in a vacuum that requires continual thrust for movement and exhibits a very poor and inconsistent sense of gravity.

The setting is one of dying worlds made of dying flesh, where the walls bleed, the floors digest things, and with organ swapping grotesques as inhabitants. Where the only sex is ostensibly female biologically, with wombs and lactation, yet give birth asexuallt to bio mechanical parts at the direction of an inexplicable world organism.

The societies seem like attempts at the amoral and alien, yet are inhabited by characters who always seem somewhat vaguely horrified at the only world they have ever known.

The world building is a disaster, and the plot is like that of a video game.

The two POV characters consist of an amnesiac primary A-character whose concious existence begins at the moment of the readers appearance and whose adventures run on a rail of a plot that literally involves climbing levels and interacting with set pieces.  The B-character, who tells us constantly that she is treacherous, serves mostly as a source of explication, but chiefly withholds major elements of what is going on even as her first person narration constantly refers directly to them.  This sort of hiding of plot information from the reader has rarely been so blatant and contrived by a modern author.  And then that plot verges regularly on the maudlin as it goes on and has the subtlety of an 80s anime series.

On the plus side, Hurley is a propulsive writer, the book really moves and though her A character is largely a blank slate, hints of genuine pathos in her interactions with the far more interesting supporting characters. And most of all some of the basic ideas are quite good.  Though they frequently bring to mind late 50s to mid 70s big concept science fiction, include some genuinely good and thought provoking ideas.  All of this makes it very readable, and it is trying to be bigger than it is.
4220658
First of all, this novel should have been a short story, where P. Cook would hand over his idea to someone who can actually write.
The characters are either extremely cliche or have no more than two personality traits.  The space travel is based on bogus science that doesn't even seem plausible (I know this is a sci-fi novel, but many authors have succeeded at presenting a scientific world which makes some sort of sense) in order to finish up to a predictable punchline.  The aliens are either too mysterious to be described at all or are not interesting enough to actually read their descriptions.  The world that is found by the explorers is exactly the same as earth - which leaves me with a question: why read sci-fi if I am to find at best a skewed description of my real world?
I usually like novels dealing with space travel and exploration of new worlds and civilizations, but unfortunately, despite the amount of effort I put into giving this book a chance, I cannot say I like it at all.  The style is extremely choppy, things that happen are not explained at all or explained too much, certain characters are not necessary, and the plot doesn't really develop into anything.  You read the back of the book and you know everything you'd like to know about this novel.
It almost appears that this novel was written as a description of a grade B sci-fi movie the author could have watched once.  Unfortunately, the methods used to convey emotions, character traits, plot, and the mood are not always to be translated into the written form.  I wish the author better luck next time.  It would really help if he did some sort of research for his book, e.g. come up with plausible technology, make at least outlines for believable characters, and come up with a plot that would drive the novel to some extent.
I do not recommend this book to anyone - it'll leave you with a bad taste in your mouth and possibly spoil the fun of sci-fi for you.
2214627
I'm a casual fan of science fiction - I know what I like and otherwise steer fairly clear of the genre to avoid the inevitable allegations of puerility and geekdom that my wife throws at me for reading novels about spaceships and little green men.
Brian Aldiss is a prolific British Sci Fi writer who cares very much about his genre, and in particular believes it to have been unfairly maligned by people such as my wife.
While that's probably true, it adversely colours this book in two ways: Firstly, Aldiss writes far too intellectually and "worthily", meaning as writer he comes across as pretentious and (what is worse) dull; secondly he tends to relegate of material which isn't "serious" science fiction (but which is generally more entertaining) to other cateogories such as "fantasy" which, to his mind, don't count. I think this is the mistake: Science Fiction at its heart is a poular, pulp sort of genre, no amount of post facto rationalisation will alter the fact that it is Lucas and Spielberg who are the backbone of (cinematic) Science Fiction, not Kubrick and Tarkovsky.
It's a very heavy (physically as well as textually), long winded book. Having completed the first three or four chapters (in which Edgar Allen Poe gets a somewhat surprisingly extended mention) I have given up on the project of reading Trillion Dollar Spree from cover to cover, and now intend to use to dip into from time to time instead. Or, at any rate, just to stick on the bookshelf, comforted in the knowledge that it's there and I *can* dip into it from time to time, if I feel like it.
Olly Buxton
2853885
Pretty far fetched. No hurry to read any more of his works. Wild imagination with no substance. Three more words.
4386352
Each of the stories in this book, some of which were previously published as shorts in magazines, centers on a xenophobic and somewhat reluctant time traveler being sent through time to find things to appease/entertain the ruler and/or encourage funding for the time travel agency he works for. But unbeknownst to him or his agency, he is being sent not just backwards and forwards in time but sideways to parallel universes populated with creatures from myth and fiction.
The concept is interesting and it could have made for a very whimsical series of tales. Somehow it falls short. The potential isn't realized. Niven, a highly competent science fiction writer, was apparently trying to stretch himself to write fantasy after meeting with Terry Pratchett but Niven simply does not have Pratchett's skill with words and ideas necessary to pull this off.
2498477
I like this genre of scifi. But this reads sort of like a poorly executed Daniel Suarez fanfic. The dialog is stilted, the characters are flat, and the nerd pop culture references not as clever as the author seems to think.

Not recommended.
2526638
Silverberg has written some good short stories and Asimov has written hundreds of science books, so why is this book have neither plausible science nor decent characters, dialog or plot?

This novel has more filler in it than it does actual writing. The characters tell themselves and each other what has just happened every other page. Shame on you, Silverberg.

And I was amazed that, among the other ridiculous failures in logic here, that Asimov would expect us to believe that the planet causing the eclipse would be invisible with 5 other suns. Shame on Asimov.

And shame on me for reading this misbegotten stepchild of a padded out short story.

Good thing amazon allows kindle returns within 7 days. Thanks, amazon!
1914956
The basic racial division in this book is conceptually antiquated, as well as unrealistic, even if the story had been set in the 1960s. The plot had some twists and turns, most of which were predictable. I expected more from a seasoned fiction writer.
3146197
I have rarely seen a collection of reviews better predict my opinion of a book.  It was clear what this was before I ordered it:  pure, unadulterated space opera.  The authors found an underutilized niche in science fiction and exploited it:  all the action takes place in a solar system that is colonized, but without a faster than light drive and without interstellar travel (at least by humans.)  The universe is fun and not ridiculous by sf standards:  Mars is colonized and is kind of a super-power, and people have settled the asteroid belt and I thikn some moons of the gas giants.

The problem with the book is that the writing and the plotting are kind of awful.  It's kind of a pitiful pastiche of noir blended with familiar sf.  The hard-boiled cop, the virtuous leading man type, the mad scientist, the evil corporation.  At times it felt like the authors weren't even trying to bring the characters to life.  I don't think I'll be reading any more of this.

fyi along with the (very cheap) Kindle book, I got a free book by one of the authors, more of a straight fantasy.  Interesting, I guess, in that this world has many, many different reaces of people, including reptilian and fully furred people.  Might have been some room for something interesting there but I found it hard to work up enough interest to even remember which race was which.
4184362
This novel poses that type of spectacular `what if' scenario that keeps sophomores chatting away in their dorm rooms.  A man has a tumor, which causes him to lose his memory from age 12 to 35.  ("It was like making contact with aliens only to find that they'd been watching you for years.")  I guess I'm not a science fiction lover.

The plot, what there is of it, moves glacially slowly.  It is more of a set of scenes or descriptions than a story.  Just as it appears that the author is preparing to deal with the deep issues of how can he reconnect with his wife, career, friends, anything, the plot takes a bizarre turn into the Mojave dessert to the isolated lair of a mad scientist, who we are asked to believe is transferring memories from one person to another.  What seemed like a promising meditation on the meaning of memory devolved into a comic book plot line, only the bevy of bikini-clad young women was missing from this trope.  None of the characters is developed any deeper than the average action movie either.  The writing is extremely uneven with sections that evidence a sparkling intelligence to unskilled pages.  (On pages 70-71, sixteen sentences begin with He as well as two independent clauses.)  At least it is very short.
683385
"The Crimson Worlds Collection I," authored by Mr. Jay Allen, showcases the first three (3) books of his "Crimson Worlds," SciFi Saga. It also showcases Mr. Allen's inept writing, nearly total lack of basic writing skills, and his robust ignorance of known science and astrophysics, military strategy and tactics, and economics. The author has created a barely readable, often illiterate, tome of substandard, SciFi drivel.

The storyline is a few centuries in the near future, where Earth and humanity, has barely survived multiple wars. Sprawling, undemocratic governments have morphed into eight (8) "superpowers," controlled by oligarchs and religious zealots, that have created feral, barbaric, brutal populations as an unending pool for cheap labor and cannon fodder. The serendipitous discovery of "wormholes," have allowed the colonization of multiple interstellar systems, firmly under the dictatorial thumbs of the Earth governments. As "warfare" is prohibited within the Sol System, the colonies become the battleground. Every government is competing with each other, with no quarter given. Tactical and strategic nukes are tossed around with total abandon. Marine, Naval space warships, and other military and paramilitary units are shunted around, in order to control "wormhole gates," colonies, and obtain resources.

There are two (2) basic issues that makes these very bad books.

First and foremost, Mr. Allen cannot write. He is incapable of creating a cogent and coherent sentence. The writing borders on illiteracy. Runaway, run-on sentences become paragraphs. The lengthy list of words the author prefers to use, in order to equivocate and create "sentences," follow: of course, like, still, at least, so, though, probably, and many similar. The author's all time favorite is "but." The word "but" appears nearly as often as the use of a period. There are actual sentences that achieve usage of "but" twice. These are not stylistic nor a device for narratives. They are not just flaws or faults. They are WRONG. The author needlessly repeats throughout, either for "page-fill" or indicative of lack of reading comprehension. The obvious lack of both editing and proofreading are further indicators of bad, bad writing.

Secondly, Mr. Allen has attempted to create a storyline with a great arc, complicated and complex. He fails in execution due to his aforementioned inability to write and the scope of his ignorance. Science, astrophysics, human anatomy, military, economics, and other base knowledge, essential to Mr. Allen's self perceived "epic," are either at an inane, cartoon level or fully absent. The author apparently is a proponent of "ignorance is bliss."

After trudging through all three (3) books, hoping for improvement as the author perhaps matured, took some remedial writing courses, did some research by opening a book, "Googling," or speaking with someone who has actual knowledge, this reviewer was too optimistic. Mr. Allen's writing is evidence of the self absorbed, abject failure of so many self published SciFi author's.

Fortunately, the reviewer only wasted some empty time and the Kindle Unlimited Monthly fee.

The three (3) eBooks included in Volume I of "Crimson Worlds," are ALL HIGHLY NOT (caps intentional) recommended, repeat, NOT recommended. They were fully read via Kindle Unlimited.