James Field

I received Gathering Clouds through Making Connections ARR: Science Fiction for an honest review, thank you.



The blurb to this book pretty much tells what the story is about so I won’t go into that very much. The two main characters are the Cloud brothers, Russell, a martial arts expert, and Trevor, the genius who creates the Cloud. The story is mainly told through their eyes with switching viewpoints.

I found Gathering Clouds to be an entertaining science fiction book. It’s a very quick read with excellent editing and formatting. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to read an eBook where the people involved took the time to make sure that the book is well edited and the formatting is correct. I would give high marks just for this alone.

The dialogue, characterizations and action are different from what I’ve read before. I don’t know if I would call them campy, but the speech patterns, characterizations, and events are larger than life. It took me a while to get used to the style, but eventually I did. It reminds me of a comic book or children’s cartoon where the characters talk in louder than normal voices with exaggerated facial expressions. This makes the book well suited for young adults and especially for young males, because all the heroes are male, there isn’t a single female involved sadly.

This book was a fun read. I’d recommend it to anyone, especially boys, interested in science fiction, and anyone who enjoys over the top characters literally having out of this world adventures.


… (más)

I generally like my sci-fi serious and deep. This collection of short stories is more like a British TV comedy series, which I seldom watch. In print however, I found the humor almost perfect. I loved the characters, Alf and Bert, and the mysterious Cloud brothers. And all the sci-fi/fantasy concepts are covered: quantum theory and multiple universes, time travel and the grandfather paradox, teleportation, telepathy, recursion, proof of the existence of God, ghosts, witches, robots, aliens, and artificial intelligence. Not only is the tone and style of these stories excellent, many of the sentences were memorable. A description of an old witch: “Her scrawny neck was thin as a drainpipe packed inside a crumpled sock.” It was a dark and stormy night: “Thunder chased all other sounds into hiding.” I was impressed, and will check out this author for his other works.… (más)

While riding the tube, Francis is witness to a horrible accident - an accident that leaves him confused and slightly traumatized. On top of that, he's having vision problems - he sees dead people - and the carnation attached to his lapel is slowly wilting.

Without giving away too much of this extremely short tale, I'll say that it had a very Twilight Zone feel to it - meaning something odd is amiss, the something odd combined with how the story is written makes you envision the plot and characters in black & white, and even though you know what's going to happen, the story is odd enough that the reader is compelled to keep reading.

Good story. 3 1/2 stars… (más)