Review: Angry Ghosts, F. Allen Farnham

Angry Ghosts, F. Allen Farnham, copyright 2009 from Cadre One Publishing.

This review is based on a free copy received from the publisher/author.

Synopsis: Seven hundred years after an alien invasion slaughters every living person on Earth, ships belonging to the conquering alien planet begin to disappear.  At the heart of the mystery of the disappearing vessels is a tiny group of descendants of the original human survivors, genetically enhanced and physically and mentally altered, who wage an ongoing secret war against the destroyers of the human race.  The story tracks the lives of three of these survivors—Gun Thompson, Geek Maiella, and Brick Argo—as they carry out their duties.  The day-to-day business of survival is thrown for a loop when they encounter and subdue a ship that turns out to be a colony ship carrying survivors from Earth, rather than an alien vessel.  The ongoing struggle to see whether the colonists will be able to integrate with the soldiers causes tension and more problems than either group might have envisioned.

Rating:

Review: There are some brilliant books in the sub-genre of Military SF: Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Ender’s Game.

This isn’t one of them.

At a scant 221 pages, Angry Ghosts puts most of its emphasis on action.  Character development and description are sparse, and the lack of characterization is an especially difficult obstacle to push past.  The characters, to a T, fit standard cardboard cut-out clichés familiar in science fiction: the overly emotional yet feisty female soldier, the stoic and steady commanding officer, the all-knowing and sympathetic counselor, the hard-assed and gruff general.  What characterization is evident is emotionally unconvincing.  As an example, one of the human colonists, whose wife has been tragically killed when the soldiers attack the colony ship in the mistaken belief that it belongs to the aliens, is initially portrayed as full of grief and rage, bounces to acceptance and understanding in a few short pages, is thrust right back to grief and rage when viewing a video of his wife being killed, and then returns to being understanding and gung-ho cheerful by the end of the novel.  The aliens are even more unknowable, vaguely described as blue-skinned, clawed, and reptilian, with stock alien names—chock-full of apostrophes—that would fit right into a Turkey City Lexicon entry.

The story is also hobbled by being told in present tense, a stylistic choice that can work well but rarely does, and simply falls flat in this particular instance.  Instead of coming off as more immediate and direct, it offers the same reading experience as a poorly-written Star Trek online RPG chat log.

Mindful of recent online discussions of race and gender in SF and fantasy, there appears to be little diversity among the characters of the novel.  The main female character is shown as both more emotional (and thus less stable) and physically weaker than her male counterparts.  The tiny handful of other female characters are hardly shown at all, and there are no visible characters of color or sexual orientation.  The lone nods to ethnic diversity are a pair of male characters—one Russian, one Spanish—and the Russian character’s wife, whose death is apparently for purposes of plot pathos.

There are problems from a purely mechanical point of view.  The website for the book’s publisher, Cadre One Publishing, is unabashed in proclaiming that the company “is a Micro-Publisher in the most literal sense, dedicated entirely to the Angry Ghosts series.”  One of the problems with self-publishing any work is that a manuscript so rarely receives the sharp overview an unbiased editor can grant.  Things like spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, point-of-view shifts, errors in punctuation and verb tenses are common throughout the novel.  Some of these are extremely basic and should have been caught in a casual read-through; for example, the phrase all right (as in, “Everything is all right now that the fire is out,”) was frequently rendered as alright, a mistake which most writers learn to avoid in elementary school.  There were also an alarming number of dropped indefinite articles throughout the book, which occasionally had the effect of making the story read as though it had been written by someone for whom English was not their native language.  Some of the wording was so awkward and bizarre that it forced me to stop in mid-read: “Thompson looks back with falling crest,” for example, instead of the character being crestfallen.  (And just in case you were wondering—no, that particular character is not one of the reptilian aliens, which would have made much more sense.)

The plot itself is not original, but neither is it unentertaining.  However, there are significant plot holes that make it hard to enjoy.  For example, the prologue describes the destruction of the human race by alien invaders, but nowhere in the book do we ever learn why the aliens attack.  The story also lags significantly in the beginning before getting down to the encounter with the human colony ship—the centerpiece of the plot.  A large part of the story—seventy pages—is spent describing the minutiae of the everyday activities of the three main characters, the grimness of their lives, and the seriousness of their ongoing guerilla war with the aliens.  Because of this, even at only 221 pages—almost a third shorter than the average SF book on the shelves in stores currently—the book feels too long, and drags in places.

This is made worse by the quick wrap-up and the cliffhanger ending.  The book, intended as the first in a series that is currently projected to go for at least three volumes, offers very little in the way of emotional closure in the end.  Like many first novels, Angry Ghosts suffers from a weak middle.  It also suffers from a weak beginning laden with purple prose, and a weak ending that leaves many plot threads still hanging.  Given the serious concern shown about the aliens at the beginning of the book, for example, none of the characters evince any further worry about them after the discovery of the colony ship, much more enmeshed in the subject of the colonists.  Considering that another alien vessel could discover their base at any time, this seems unlikely, and detracts from the overall tense tone of the story.

It’s telling that the author lists as one of the five reasons why people should read his book the fact that “The most flattering reviews have come from folks who ‘…don’t read sci-fi…’” This is not a good recommendation.  Readers familiar with the tropes of SF would instantly spot many of the clichés and ideas present in this novel, and be able to remember other books where they’ve read them done more originally and entertainingly.

Angry Ghosts is by far not the worst novel I’ve ever read, but it’s not one of the better ones, either.  The real crime is that there’s a germ of a story here that had the potential to be much more than it turned out to be.  Rewriting and proper editing could have eliminated most of the flaws in this book, and I hope that the next book in the series will be an improvement on this one, both for the sake of the author and that of his readers.