Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

DNF #110: Pyramid of Consciousness (Dogs of Milkdromeda Book 1) by Chris Pendlebury.

This was one of the oddest books I've tried to read in a long time.

On the surface, it was just the worst kind of talking animal story: The dogs might as well have just been human. One of them even strictly followed a human religion.

The whole logic of the story made no sense: Humans needed to move to other planets, so they sent dogs out on spaceships to find a new one. (Apparently the dogs had been uplifted or gene-teched or something.) The dogs were put into artificial sleep between planets and then woken up when they came close to a likely planet so they could check it. Why not just send humans? The dogs were physically dogs, so how were they able to speak? Dog muzzles and tongues aren't made for human speech.

The story was so lacking in logic, I wondered if maybe it was supposed to be a parable or something. Then I checked the Goodreads page...

This series is a heady mix of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Peter Watt’s Blindsight, and Richard Adams’ Watership Down, with deep concepts exploring theology, quantum physics, and artificial intelligence. Brace yourself for tough questions like, "Do we all live in a simulated universe?", "What is God?", and "What happens when we die?".

Oh, and did we mention that you might even become a part of the story in The Feedback Loop?

The other half of the Goodreads page seems to selling an entirely different series by the author...

In the end, I think the author is full of hot air and puffery, that he's just trying to make his book look better than it is; I think my initial reaction was correct: This is just the worst kind of talking animal story.

DNF #111: The Deadlands: Hunted by Skye Melki-Wegner.

This book should have worked for me, but sadly did not. A "talking animal" story, but with dinosaurs.

50 years before the book starts, the dinosaur-killing meteor struck the Earth, but instead of killing off the dinosaurs, it... made them sentient. Yeah, that doesn't make much sense.

In those 50 years, the dinosaurs come up with a system of money, and all the herbivore species divide into two tribes and spend the whole 50 years at war. Yeah, that doesn't make much sense either.

Unfortunately the actions of the main character (Eleri, a small herbivore) made as little sense as the larger plot issues.

DNF #112: Distant Trails: Under Carico's Moons by Nan C Ballard.

There was nothing wrong with this one*! (What a relief.) The story just didn't hook me at all. An "Old West" story set on another planet, with just a little bit of tech and aliens mixed in with the Old West. Seemed like an interesting mix, but sadly it just wasn't holding my attention.

* There was one small thing wrong with this book. My rule is that if there's a typo on the first page, I stop reading it then and there. But what's the rule if the typo is before the first page? In the copyright blurb: "Copyright 202 by Nan..." That amused me. The writing/editing was fine though, so I didn't DNF it for that.

DNF #113: Dawn: A Slice-of-Life Reverse Isekai (My Children from Another World Book 1) by Payton Fletcher and _Glasses.

There's a trend I've been noticing. The longer a self-published book's title is, the worse the book is. I guess authors want to stuff as much into the title as they can for search optimization reasons.

Listing "_Glasses" as an author confused me, but turns out that's the online name he originally published this story under on some website...

To be fair, this book was edited mostly well enough. It had issues, but if I had loved the story, they wouldn't have bad enough to keep me from continuing. The problem was the story itself. It felt like this was part of a series, and so all the information was missing. Apparently the main character's wife was an alien? Was he an alien too? His triplets were alert, aware, and thinking like adults from the moment they were born. Was that normal for his/their species? Was it some trait from the dead wife? What was the world they were on? Who knows...