Bookworm Speaks!- Genestorm: City in the Sky
Bookworm Speaks!
Genestorm: City in the Sky
by Paul Kidd
*****
Acquired: Amazon Kindle Story
Series: Genestorm (Book 1)
Publisher: Kitsune Press (May 18, 2015)
E-Book: 376 Pages
Language: English
*****
The Story: The apocalypse has come and gone. The aftermath is a whole new world.
The world of the hybrids.
“Spark Town” is home to a community of colourful, hybridised citizens who thrive in the strange new world. But suddenly, a long lost menace from the past arises; swarms of nightmarish carnivorous creatures attack Spark Town, threatening to utterly extinguish every living thing in their path.
“Snapper” – shark mutant, prospector and latter-day hussar – leads a team of fellow explorers as they seek out the origins of the terrifying new invasions. The weapons needed for their town’s survival may still exist somewhere in long lost, ancient cities. But the cities are hidden behind barriers of lethal radiation.
The next invasion is coming – and time is running out.
The Review: Post Apocalyptic stories are very popular but a common criticism is that they can be rather formulaic and follow a distinct set of tropes
This story is based on a Tabletop Roleplaying Game of the same name.
The main character, a shark anthro named Snapper is a refreshing departure from a lot of Post-Apocalyptic fiction. Snapper may be a scavenger who wanders among the ruins of the Old World, but she is not some bitter loner. She’s bright and friendly, talks to her riding budgie(?), and she doesn’t just go into town to get a drink and sell loot, she has a home and she has a family in the form of her friends.
However Snapper has a few things working against her. She’s friendly and like Napoleonic history but that’s about it. Personality wise there is not much else there. This extends to the rest of the ensemble characters as well. At first its rather hard to tell which character is which at first. That slowly fades as more of the overall story takes shape. This is very much an adventure story based on a game, neither of those things are areas where deep, complex, characters are not always necessary. That’s what this story is…an adventure. A ragtag band of explorers go out into the wild to uncover the secrets of the
One of Bookworm’s favorite Post Apocalyptic franchises is the Fallout series of video games. While they are funny and creative, as bookworm gets older he realizes one of the main flaws is the people. More specifically, that they are essentially modern-day humans squatting makeshift housing among the ruins of civilization. It may be like that at first but civilization and culture are not static things, they change with the current of time. Old things are forgotten but new things are learned or relearned and new traditions come into being. This is what has happened here in this story. The world has began anew and a new civilization has taken the place of the old. The reader can feel it in the words.
That is what we have here. Spark Town is not some shantytown on the edge of a crumbling metropolis, it is a living, breathing town that may not have computers or automobiles, but it starting to rediscover technology and possesses a real sense of community. The sheer array of beings that inhabit the town as well as this world is superbly creative. The Genestorm basically took normal plant and animal life and threw it all in a blender and see what the result would be. This is not a desolate wasteland, it is a new world filled with life.
One of the problems Bookworm had with this book is that while the world building was good, it was difficult to actually visualize the characters. The character of Throckmorton stands in particular, a plant creature that is able to float by some means. Creative as the author might have been, maybe he should have teamed with an artist and created a few illustrations for all of these characters. It would have greatly aided the reader and thusly would have had to spend less time thinking “Okay what kind of being is he again?”
This leads into the main problem with the text: It is a lot to take in. A key part of world building, in Bookworm’s opinion, is balance. Striking a balance between making the world and characters creative and inventive while also leaving it grounded enough so that the reader can relate to it and not be confused. The whole narrative tends to lose focus at a few points. It stands to reason that the author had a few too many ideas and tried to work them into the text and the result is a clumsy one.
Bookworm is a visual reader, meaning that when he reads a story, he visualizes it in his head like he is watching a tv show. Half the time while reading this story, his head was spinning trying to figure what a coyote/jellyfish/turnip hybrid would look like. Maybe it was taken a bit too literally, suspension of disbelief was not suspended enough and there are illustrations from the franchise online, but the opinion remains that the text got a bit too fanciful for its own good.
Final Verdict: A little flat at a few points, but the world and adventure of this story keeps the reader turning the pages all the way to the end (metaphorically speaking).
Four Busby Hats out of Five
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