Stjepan Varesevac Cobets

As the only survivor of a battle that went horribly wrong (but acquitted of any wrongdoing and later promoted to Brigadier), Henry Broncon still carries a weight of guilt that he was the one who lived. So he jumps at the chance to redeem himself when he's chosen for a mission to solve the mystery of the missing scientists and military personnel on the planet Godeena. He gathers a team comprised mostly of criminal misfits and together they take on the perilous assignment.

Elements I liked:
The story has great elements of mystery and peril and many intense action scenes, especially the climactic scenes. The characters are interesting, with varied back-stories, although I would've liked to get to know them a little more in depth. The descriptions are vivid and very detailed, especially of the military hardware. The story moves along at a great pace, drawing the reader in to join Henry and his team on this mysterious and hazardous mission.

Elements I struggled with:
Especially further along in the story, the translation still seemed uneven, making the writing in spots look pretty rough. Typos and missing words, odd phrasing and random verb tense changes, and an instance of a couple of repeated paragraphs that slipped past editing - all of these tended to break the flow of the story. The lackluster descriptions when meeting the female characters (either 'beautiful' or 'gorgeous') quickly became grating. And a couple of details felt a little off: the spacesuits that weren't designed with provisions for relieving oneself when needed; and how quickly the team gained 'complete faith' in the commander and were considered ready for such a mission.

Overall:
I did enjoy the story. It's an engaging and entertaining military sci-fi read - quite the adventure!
(This is a review of the 2022 edition of the book. Rating: 3.5 stars rounded to 4.)… (más)

(This is a review of the second edition of the book.)

Victoria wakes up in a strange place, with no knowledge of how she came there or even where *there* is. She’s alone, with only instructions that send her out to follow a path through a forest into an even deeper mystery.

I found this short, fast read very entertaining, with an underlying, relevant message. The world-building is interesting and the future tech is well detailed without being overwhelming. The intriguing premise is what drew me to read the story.

A few things did bother me in my reading: words that needed to be plural, jumps between past and present tense (sometimes from one sentence to the next), and what looked like word-choice errors. An example of the latter is a “pillar over twenty centimeters in diameter” that is “huge” and dominates the center of a room. The size seems off for the descriptions. A little extra polishing would nicely fix these distracting problems.

In spite of these issues, the story is an enjoyable read. And I loved the nice little twist at the end!

(Read February 2021)… (más)

Right away, “The Dream of the Forest” drops you into a futuristic world with holographic home assistants, anti-gravity suitcases, and cars that can drive themselves (with today’s kinks worked out.) And yet age-old relationship problems can never be solved by technology, as we see as Helen and Leon’s fractured life is revealed.

I liked the slow meting out of information in this one. The concept of a ruined earth with a highly advanced civilization living above them up in the clouds intrigued me right away. Helen and Arn make an interesting pair as they play off one another. Helen knows everything there is to know about the technological cities up in the clouds, and the history of the natural disasters that caused mankind to flee to them, and yet throw her in a forest and she’s so helpless she can’t walk a short distance or bit off a bit of jerky. Arn is a survivalist and shaman who has lived his life on the ground, abandoned after the rescue ships stopped coming, and while he knows everything about earth, he knows next to nothing about Helen’s life. It certainly makes for a fun interplay as they set off on their journey to return Helen home!

There are lots of characters in this one, and as our main group of survivors journey deeper into the woods and make new discoveries, you’re on the edge of your seat, hoping disaster won’t strike, intrigued by what tidbit of history they’ll discover next. I found the discovery in the bunker particularly cool. The one thing I found a bit tricky was the use of the tribal dialect with apostrophes replacing vowels sometimes five times in each sentence. While this was cool in the way it distinguished the Earth language from the heavenly city language, if you have vision problems and rely on a screen reader or TTS, the way TTS is unable to make sense of it makes the passages where the native tribes are speaking nearly impossible to decipher. Still, overall an interesting story. I look forward to more from this author!

Trigger Warnings: graphic rape

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader.
… (más)