science fiction books | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: Kiranis: Pawns of the Prophet (Kiranis #2) by Ronald A. Geobey

Kiranis: Pawns of the Prophet (KIranis #2) by Ronald A. Geobey

Temple Dark Books, 2022

ISBN: 9781838259464

Available: Paperback, Ebook

The saga continues…

The second volume in the Kiranis series, Pawns of the Prophet contains all of the elements that made Gods of Kiranis a breathtaking (or maddening) tale, depending on perspective. If you enjoyed the first book, there’s nothing in this one to dissuade readers from continuing the journey through one of the most unique sci-fi sagas ever written. New readers: you must read the first one before the second: you’ll be utterly lost, otherwise.

The story takes place 100 years after the first book, but ties into those events, and the scale of the story has widened further into the galaxy. Once again, it’s incredibly well written, with a multi-layered, extremely complex plotline. It’s split into large sections, each focusing on a particular group, but unlike last time, the parts run in a more linear fashion.

Enjoying the book will depend greatly on the reader, and HOW you approach it. There are some readers who will breeze through this and comprehend all the details and plot tie-ins with one shot, but they will probably be the minority, you’d almost have to have an eidetic memory. There is no fluff or filler, everything is written with a purpose, with items that show up halfway through the 400+ pages relating all the way back to the prologue. The details are important, but they are often quite spread out in how they relate to each other. That’s what makes this book a little tricky to read.

My personal approach? I’m a reader that likes to understand all the story links in the chain, I want to know how A connects to B, to C, all the way to the end. So, I read a few chapters, then read them again and took notes on what I considered important. No joke- I ended with 20 pages of notes, plus a list of characters with rough descriptions, it ran over sixty characters. It was a lot of extra time, but it helped immensely with connecting the plot points, I used my notes often for story comprehension. As a result, for me the story all made sense from beginning to end. Most readers probably won’t need to do this, but that’s what it took for me to fully enjoy the book, and it was well worth the extra time. This just helps to illustrate how intricate the plot is

Don’t let the above scare you away-there are plenty of readers who will read this for pure enjoyment, zip through and enjoy it to the end, although they might not know exactly how they got to the end, or what just happened. Fully grasping the author’s vision will likely take more time and thinking then it would for most books.

Bottom line: highly recommended: there really isn’t anything out there like this, and the journey’s barely begun, since there are supposed to be at least 4 more volumes. Do yourself a favor and take a chance on the series: epics like this are rare and deserve a look.

Recommended, highly so for lovers of elaborate stories.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Book Review: Sha’Kert by Ishmael Soledad

Sha’kert: End of Night by Ishmael Soledad

Temple Dark Publications, 2021

ISBN: 9781685132040

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

The future.

The polar ice caps have melted.

Those who survived…(whoops, that was Waterworld. Let me try again)

The future.

The Amish have crash-landed on a distant planet.

Those who survived…have adapted to a new world.

That’s the odd but entertaining genesis of Sha’kert, one of the more unusual sci-fi books of the past few years. It’s a creative, enjoyable read for fans of human conflict stories, brought down only a bit by a somewhat muddled ending.

It’s important to note that this is not a survival story in the same style of masterpieces like Verne’s Mysterious Island and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. There’s little detail concerning how the characters survive on a new world, while starting with minimal supplies. The story’s focus is the conflict between the Amish and another family that survived the crash, consisting of Greg, his wife Louise, and their daughter Penny. They aren’t Amish, but are the typical modern, tech-obsessed, cell phone-crazed family. A doubting Amish youth, Henry, also contributes as a character who is sort of in the middle. It’s the discord between old and new ways that the author concentrates on and he does a good job of it, presenting both sides without sounding preachy or political. In the story, all the characters need each other at first to survive, but once they get established and survival is ensured, strife ensues over the possibility of outside contact. Greg and Henry want to explore the planet in hope of finding others, while most Amish would prefer to have no contact with anything or anyone, preventing their being influenced by outside ideas. It’s why the left Earth in the first place: dealing with outsiders was becoming unavoidable. To the author’s credit, all the characters have viewpoints reasonably presented, and the book avoids coming off as biased towards either old or new ways. It’s an engrossing story of personal convictions, and the problems that stem from the inability to compromise.

It’s only the last quarter of the book that is a bit of a letdown. The communication between the characters and what they are trying to convey gets somewhat confusing, and the plot wanders away from the original premise with a new religious angle that doesn’t fit with the rest of the book. The story could have been wrapped up in a neater, less metaphysical fashion.

Bottom line: this is a good sci-fi tale that does well when it stays on focus, and has more meaning and material worth pondering over then the standard science fiction novel. Recommended.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson.