An unusual take on Star Trek fandom and Afghanistan via Kipling's The Man Who Would be King - not unenjoyable but I'm still not really sure I understood what I was reading. Cautiously recommended for fans of Adam Roberts off the wall humour and puns. ( )

Yeah, no. I'm a Kipling fan, and a Star Trek fan, and a former resident of Kabul...and this really didn't work for me. Lots of puns, starting with the title, but none really struck me as amusing; the bits where the author more or less used Kipling's language for a scene (Chillingwood coming down the mountain, in particular) are interesting but don't make this story worth reading. No, I have no idea what the author thinks the Zone is - and the typo in that climactic sentence really distracts from what he's trying to say, anyway (there were a few others earlier, of the same type - words, but not the intended ones). Mildly interesting setting, but it doesn't go anywhere. Overall eh. ( )

A NewCon Press novella obtained free from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme in exchange for an honest review.

An interesting variant on Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King. A strange zone has appeared in Afghanistan which is death to those who enter it. One day, the UN observer meets a couple of cos-players who believe that the zone is set up for aliens not humans (the exact fandom is fairly obvious from the title). They cross into the zone and disappear. Sometime later, an old beggar in Kabul is found to be one of the pair, and she tells the story of what happened to them to the UN observer.

Interesting and rather fun. Recommended.

This novella takes the structure of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, combines it in with the themes of the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic and mixes in some Star Trek fandom culture to create a rather odd story. An anomalous zone has appeared in Afghanistan where both electronic devices and people behave erratically and people who enter don’t come out alive. Two Star Trek fans believe that whatever has caused the zone was affecting people because they were human, and therefore by getting themselves surgically altered to appear like aliens from their favourite show they can enter safely. It was entertainingly written and a fun read, though it does feel like the author came up with a pun title and then tried to create a story around it. The only trouble I had with it was that I didn’t quite know what was going on by the end of the story. The final lines of the story has the narrator saying that he now knows what the zone is, and that I as the reader did too. But unfortunately, the narrator was wrong, I hadn’t a clue what the zone was. If the story was supposed to have made it obvious by that point then it didn’t quite manage it for me, so it meant it ended up slightly disappointing.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a story 'The Man Who Would be King': I've never read that one but I have seen the 1975 film with Sean Connery and Michael Caine which strongly influences this book. But rather than the Afghanistan in the time of the British Empire it's a near future Afghanistan where a strange zone has developed which affects both mechanical and biological systems. Nobody has returned out of it alive. Until, that is, two travellers decide that it is the humanity of previous explorers that is the problem, and that if they can persuade the zone that they are not human then all will be well.

As a pastiche of 'The Man who Would be King' this works quite well. There are also lot of references for the general sci-fi fan, with numerous Star Trek references, and it apparently also pays homage to [Roadside Picnic] (but I've never read this one so can't comment). But I had absolutely no idea what was going on outside this. I've really enjoyed some of Adam Roberts other works, but this wasn't one of his better ones. And definitely gets the prize for worst cover too ... ( )