Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint vol 1 manhwa by Sleepy-C & singNsong
I kept hoping
the manhwa would come out as an e-book, but no such luck, so I finally caved and
bought a physical copy. My bookshelf is not thanking me.
This is an
excellent start to a series, if somewhat abrupt. No time is wasted with backstories.
We meet the protagonist, Kim Dokja on a subway train on his way home from work
as he finally finishes a book that he’s been reading for ten years, Three
Ways to Survive the Apocalypse. He’s been its sole reader the entire time, and
as he sends a thank you note for the author, he gets a free download in return,
after which the book disappears. And then the world ends.
It turns
out, the universe is a playground of constellations who watch the worlds and
their inhabitants struggle in their final moments for their amusement. The best they support and sponsor as their incarnations, until it’s
time to move to the next world. And everything is unfolding exactly like in Kim
Dokja’s book. But he’s not the protagonist. He’s not even someone who’s supposed
to be in the book, let alone survive the first scenario designed to kill as
many people as possible.
However, he
has the entire book at his disposal and knows how to play the game, which comes
with displays of dialogue boxes and experience points. And he’s granted a special skill: omniscient
reader’s viewpoint, which allows him to read the minds of his opponents. Armed
with this knowledge, he sets out to survive.
The first
book sets the scene and gives us a good idea of the kind of person Kim Dokja
is. He’s a survivor, not a victim, underdog, but not discouraged by it. I like
how he’s atop of things from the start, morally a bit grey, intelligent, and
cunning. Other characters are introduced as well, but only briefly. Art is beautiful
large-panel webtoon illustrations, and work in print too, which isn’t always
the case.
My only
complaint is the insistence of these English translations of switching the
order of Korean (and other Asian) names to western one with first name first
and family name second, as if readers are too stupid to know the cultural
difference, and leaving out the polite ways of addressing people that are
integral of these cultures. But it’s a minor thing; I can switch it back in my
mind—and in this review. I’ll definitely continue, even to the detriment of my
shelves.
Golden Dreg Boy: Book 1, the Slums by D.K. Dailey is a
post-apocalyptic YA sci-fi that takes place in near future San Francisco. I got a free
copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The book is set in a society wiped out by highly deadly diseases;
an unfortunate premise in the current world, as even the casual reader is
suddenly an expert in pandemics and herd immunology. The society is divided into
two to the golden, who have money and power, but have lost their immunity to diseases
(the science behind this seems to be based on the author’s faulty understanding
of vaccines and immunology), and the poor dregs who have somehow acquired congenital
immunity to all diseases in basically a generation. Even if you accept the idea
of hereditary immunity, which I don’t, the result of this divide would most
likely be that the totalitarian regime described in the book would force the
dregs to breed with the golden to boost up their immunity. Instead, the two are
segregated and if a dreg manages to pretend to be golden, they are instantly
sentenced to death. For their part, the dregs would have a bartering chip with
their genes they could use to get themselves better living conditions. None of
this happens. Fiction is fiction, but I’d like it to make sense within its own
world.
As it was, some suspension of disbelief was required to get
through the book. The main character is Kade, a teenager from the top of the
golden hierarchy—and there is a hierarchy. Everything is going well for him
until out of the blue—and it’s truly that—he’s arrested as a dreg infiltrator
and sentenced to death without a trial. To his shock, his family isn’t there to
rescue him, but the dregs are. He’s given a new life among them and in a true
manner of YA fiction questions everything he’s known to be true and learns he’s
been living in a lie. The betrayal of his family makes him eager to help his
new people to bring down the golden. The book is a bit too long for its plot,
but well-written enough to help through the slow bits.
I didn’t like Kade much. He came across like a condescending
teenage jerk in the beginning, interested only in breasts and kissing, and I
couldn’t get over the initial impression. Other characters were a bit two
dimensional and their presence didn’t improve him, and I couldn’t fathom his
fascination with Saya. It says a lot about my feelings that I sort of rooted
for the twist that happened in the end. But it helped him to get over himself,
so maybe he’ll be more interesting in the next book.
I recently joined NetGalley, a website that makes it easier
for publishers to get books in the hands of reviewers. Like everyone else, I
hope to get the next book of my favourite author before it’s published, but
that seldom happens. However, there are plenty of books available for immediate
download by authors I’ve never heard of before and books I wouldn’t come to
read otherwise. I’ve decided to give some of those a chance.
The first book I picked is The Paradise Factory, Cortex book 1 by Jim Keen.
It’s being marketed as cyberpunk, which I found very misleading, as there are
no cyberpunk elements. It’s more a post-apocalyptic sci-fi dystopia. The apocalypse in
this case is brought about by the invention of Mechanical Intelligence, a
machine that has made human workforce obsolete. Hundreds of millions are
without work and those lucky enough to be employed can lose their job on a
whim, with no social security to fall back on. That the humanity is still alive
and kicking is more because of stubbornness than for any discernible survival
skills.
The story follows Alice Yu, a Brooklyn cop in her twenties—I think—whose partner is
abducted right in front of her. Even though loyalty to one’s partner and
initiative are discouraged by her bosses, Alice goes after him. Traces lead to
Brooklyn Bridge, a lawless no-go-zone ruled by criminal empire. She knows she’ll
lose her job if she goes there, but she goes anyway.
Another story-line follows Red, a young boy who needs to
deliver a message over the Brooklyn Bridge, an errand that would pay well if
the other kids weren’t trying to kill him for it. The paths of Alice and Red
meet on the bridge and they team up.
The plot is straightforward: find the partner and save him.
Obstacles come in form of bridge security trying to kill Alice for their boss, a
crime lord who has a nefarious enterprise to conceal. The constant fights became
boring pretty soon, but Alice is fighting PTSD from her time as a Marine in
Mars, which gives some depth to her character. Because of what she considers a
personal failure in Mars, she decides that saving Red is more important than
finding her partner, a decision that Red disputes, forcing her to face her
past.
After all the fighting, the main conflict is solved
amazingly easily. If it hadn’t been for the chapter that followed, which showed
the truth of what was on the other side of the bridge and gave both the world
and the main characters some new depth, this would’ve been a solid three star
book. The ending changed that.
I had some issues with the book. One of them was with the way
the scenes were set. Namely that they weren’t. Every scene, especially in the
beginning, started right with the action or even a beat after it. For example,
the book starts a moment after Alice’s partner has been taken, when she is
fighting her injuries. No context was offered to where she was, why she was
there, and why her partner mattered so much to her. As it was, I had trouble
understanding Alice’s need to go after him other than the general ‘of course
she does’. Were they friends or was there a debt to pay? Was he a lover, a
mentor? In a world where such decision means a pretty certain death, it needs
to be a good reason. Causes were given later in the book, but it came too late as
I’d already formed my opinion.
Incidentally, I’m not a fan of a narrative where character
motivations, like the cause of Alice’s PTSD, are rationed and revealed after
they have already influenced character’s actions. It made the narrative style
very claustrophobic with too little to work on. I had to put the book down
fairly often just to clear my head. That fortunately changed towards the end of
the book when all the players were familiar and the plot began to move forward.
I had issue with the world-building as well. If the world is
that rigged against humanity, with no chances of survival, how come there are
so many humans left? Especially since there’s a constant winter (and where did that come from). Why are there
no riots? The only one seems to be planned by the bad guys for their benefit. The
idea of MI didn’t work well either. How could a machine replace the entire
workforce? All it seemed to be able to do is print human body parts. They are
so expensive that countries bankrupted themselves to get one, so they can’t be
in every factory for example. And if they are supremely intellect, how come one
of them could be fooled by a human? All the other technology seemed to be in
the service of humanity, like the intelligent jacket Alice was wearing, so why
was the humanity in such a bad state. Also, most of the technology appeared to
be micro-chip based, whereas MI seems to be based on a Babbagean difference
engine—a cool idea that would’ve
changed the entire world-building if everything was based on that; a
twenty-first century steampunk world powered by nuclear reactors.
All the issues aside, I liked the book enough to keep
reading through the claustrophobic chapters. I liked Alice from the start and
Red grew on me. Bad guys could have been more evil, but considering the ending,
there’s maybe some use for them in subsequent books. I’m not entirely sure I’ll
continue with the series, but I’m glad I read this one.
The Girl in Red by Christina Henry is the latest book in her
series of fairy tale retellings. This one is based on Little Red Riding Hood.
The book started with promise, but it ended up leading nowhere. It has no story
arch and no conclusion. It has a series of events, and then it ends.
The Girl in Red by Christina Henry
The Girl in Red is set in post-apocalyptic America. Most of the population has
been wiped away by a fast-spreading mysterious virus that causes a cough that
kills in a couple of days. Red, Cordelia, believes that the safest place is her
grandmother’s remote house, and she sets out to walk hundreds of miles there
through forests to avoid being taken to government quarantine camps. Militia
and people ready to do anything to survive are some of the obstacles she faces.
In Little Red Riding Hood, the journey through the perilous forest is only
a part of the story, and not even the major part. The important part is when
she reaches the safety of her grandmother’s house and finds that the wolf has
reached there first. That’s when the story happens.
The Girl in Red isn’t that book. We follow Red on her
perilous journey about two thirds of the way when it abruptly ends, followed by
an epilogue showing her reach her grandmother’s house safely. Scent of food
indicates that everything is well there. Along the way, there are two
encounters with the army ready to take Red to a camp. The third, the important
one that should take place after Red believes she’s reached safety, never
happens. The book just ends and the reader is left hanging, wondering if this
could possibly be the entire book. It is.
It seems like the author hasn’t really understood her source material. The
story doesn’t progress anywhere. There are obstacles on Red’s way, some that
force her to kill even, but they don’t form an arch. And the dangers she faces
are amazingly easily overcome too, especially considering the apocalyptic nature of
the setting.The major revelation to Red
seems to be that she’s the Huntsman, not the Little Red Riding Hood. That’s not
enough to carry a book.
In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf is a seductive force
that lures the hapless girl away from her path so that it can reach the
grandmother’s house first. But in this book, we never learn what the wolf is.
There’s the virus, but then there’s a monster too. I don’t know why the book
needed both, especially since they only serve as a catalyst for the story. It
would have been a different matter, if it had turned out that Red’s grandmother
has the monster incubating inside her too, but the story never reaches that
part of its arch. Instead, it ends just when we learn what the monster looks
like―though not why it exists in the first place.
Red is a disappointing character. She’s a twenty-year-old college student, but
she comes across as a teenager. She has all the makings of a diverse, something
for all character, but none of it has an impact on the story. She has a
prosthetic leg, so she’s not physically perfect. But the prosthesis is just a
prop. Worse, it’s the Chekhov’s gun alluded to throughout the story (‘I hope my
leg don’t give up on me’, ‘I hope I won’t trip’), but which is never fired. She
never falls because of it and it never lets her down at an important moment.
She walks and runs with a heavy backpack on without trouble, she kicks and
defeats grown men without any problems from her leg, and it never even chafes,
forcing her to stop. So what’s the point of giving her such vulnerability? None
that I could figure out.
Red is also black with mixed background, though with such a light skin and
straight hair that she can pass as a Latina, which the author finds important
to mention. Her skin colour has no impact on how she identifies, and apart from
some rednecks who attack her parents at the beginning of the book, the fact
that she’s black plays no role in the book. So what’s the point of mentioning her
skin colour? None.
On top of everything, Red is bisexual. The book has no
romance or sex, and although sexual violence is constantly hinted at, nothing
like that takes place. Why then would it matter that she’s attracted to both
men and women? It doesn’t. So Red only looks good on paper. Her diversity has
no purpose or impact on the story, which is highly disappointing.
Apart from her character, I found myself annoyed with little
details that don’t really matter. Her food comes in tin cans, which is highly
impractical on a long trek because they’re heavy and take a lot of space in a
backpack. She’s hiking for months, but no mention is made of such nuisances
like periods or the availability of toilet paper. How much sanitary products
can she fit in her backpack and still have room for food anyway? She also wins
all the fights she gets into without getting so much as slapped herself,
hacking her opponents to death with her axe. She’s not large or sporty, and has
only attended one self-defence class, yet she’s a killing machine all of a
sudden.
All in all, this is a deeply flawed book at its root. But
the story starts well, and as it’s told in two timelines, before and after, I
kept reading to find out what has led to Red’s current situation. It seems like
it’s going to something bigger, so I didn’t really notice the flaws until it
abruptly ends without delivering what it builds up to. So I gave it three
stars. I was going along with the story right to the sudden end, rooting for
Red. I just wish the rest of the story would have been there too.
