Showing posts with label Blaze Ward. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blaze Ward. Show all posts

Friday, February 17, 2023

Latency (Hunter Bureau #2) ★★☆☆☆

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Latency
Series: Hunter Bureau #2
Author: Blaze Ward
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 197
Words: 62K

When I read and reviewed the first book, I mentioned that there were key words or phrases that usually only came from a political side that was completely opposed to everything I stand for in terms of morals, principles and guiding principles. So instead of either brushing it off or making a mountain out of a molehill, as I was reading, I just highlighted stuff that caught my eye. That’s mostly what this review will contain, is quotes from the book. I am not trying to provide context within the story or anything like that. I’m planning on hiding it all behind the Details code so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.

Location 147: (speaking of handguns)Greyson’s grandfather had had something like that, demilled when the aliens decided to make humans safer.

Location 378: Back when the US was a thing and had an army they liked to sic on weaker nations.

Location 611: be allowed

Location 726: And they hadn’t done androgynous in those days. Being less than stridently hetero in the late 20th Century was an invitation to get beat up. Fucking barbarians.

Location 793: The bits that were left were generally the ones the Army had found useful as tools. Deliberate cruelty. Premeditated self-defense.

Location 972: Universal Basic Income kept people from starving,

Location 1184: Mostly, ex-special forces, so knuckleheads who liked to solve problems with extreme firepower.

Location 1332: Honest men got no reason to bolt,

Location 1904: Superfast trains had already worked in other countries because the governments had been able to get right of way. In the old United States, NIMBY had delayed everything for so long that it was never economical to actually build. Not In My Back Yard. Then the middle-class bastards had the audacity to complain about bad roads and crowded….

Location 2135: Greyson was just old enough to remember the great awakening in this culture, when everyone discovered that there were more options than white-bread hetero. Folks like that had always been there, but for the longest time the power structure in his country had come down hard on anyone deviating from the strict party line, both legally as well as socially.

Location 2277: would still be the rest of his lifetime and maybe all of Rachel’s before the planet started cooling down again, but hopefully they’d managed to save it in time.

Location 2686: Back in the bleak days of a War on Crime that was a thinly-veiled War on Black People that had started before 1618 and never really been forced to subside until aliens landed and threatened to crack heads together.

Location 2849: Sandwiches he brought from home instead of lunch out.

Location 2927: where a young white boy like him had had no business being.

Location 2951: But then, most men didn’t know how to deal with a woman who was tougher than they were, and probably smarter.

Location 3206: If Greyson had shown some of his otherwise private political leanings with the places he had mailed his packages, that was between him and God. And God supposedly loved everyone, so Greyson figured he was on safe ground

I read to the end of the book and with all of those quotes decided that I won’t be reading any more by Mister Blaze Ward. Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to replace this series with. Choices, choices, choices.

★★☆☆☆

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Mirrors (Hunter Bureau #1) ★★★☆☆

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Mirrors
Series: Hunter Bureau #1
Author: Blaze Ward
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 146
Words: 49K

Sometime in the future, when mankind has almost destroyed himself, aliens give us a chance at survival. At a cost. We are no longer our own masters or owners of our own planet. While not in vile slavery per se, we ARE in servitude. We are the playground for aliens who can shape change and thus is born the Hunter Bureau.

Normally shape changers work alone, but this time they got smart. A pair come to Earth and one of them tries to take over a Hunter, only to be foiled by his own inexperience. He then takes over a retired Hunter while his partner begins setting things up so they can play in peace for years to come.

The problem is, the Hunter is no weak minded fool and the alien shape changer finds himself being taken over from the inside out. In the end, they form a mutual symbiosis and decide to hide the fact that the worlds top Hunter is now an alien shape changer. For the good of humanity of course.

The writing style for this book. Staccato. Bambambam. Like a gun. Going off. Right. In your ear. Choppy sentences. Cut off like a machete was taken to them. It was like the author was skipping whole sentences because he knew what he meant but as a reader it was incredibly frustrating. There were multiple instances where I had to read several paragraphs several times to figure out what in the world was going on. That’s just bad writing.

There were also a couple of key words that I only see used by people of certain political persuasions that I vehemently disagree with. I’ll be the first to admit that I could be reading too much into things, so I’m not giving that much weight in my judgment for this book. I didn’t even bother to record what they were so as not to take that idea with me into the next book.

The story itself was pretty interesting though. Realizing that the main character ISN’T the main character we thought he was amused me and I have to admit, I thought it was clever. In many ways, this reminded me of Timothy Zahn’s Quadrail series and the protagonist, Frank Compton. That same dry voice, that same almost emotionless state of being, it just struck me. But thankfully Ward does a bit better at characterization here so it’s not quite THAT dry or emotionless 😀

Good enough for 3stars and giving the next book a chance. By no means a great book or world changing though.

★★★☆☆