"Stuck Station" is what the inhabitants of Containment Facility One have taken to calling their home. It’s called "Stuck Station" because they’re just as trapped there as the actual prisoner is. Stuck Station is a hyper-dimensional prison. The prisoner, known as the Destroyer, is a threat to every reality—it destroys universes. It wants to escape. The people assigned to man the station also want to escape. One of them learns how, and tries to lure an ex-boyfriend to the station in order to get away.
Author John Crandall is obviously influenced by Douglas Adams, but Stuck Station shouldn’t be considered a clone. It owes a lot to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in much the same way high fantasy owes a lot to The Lord of the Rings: just because a book can define a genre, that doesn’t mean other books are relegated to being pale copies. Stuck Station is a comedy, and it’s obviously a comedy in the tradition of Hitchhikers, but it stands on its own. It’s well-written, the characters are all distinct (though, given the genre, "believable" requires a certain redefinition of the term), the plot is interesting, and it’s FUNNY. The updates are short and breezy and so far I find myself liking all the characters, even the bad guys.
If you’re looking for a science fiction comedy, Stuck Station is strongly recommended.
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"Skyway Mechanix" is bizarre, in a good way. I’m still trying to put in words how it makes me feel—and the best I can come up with so far is "Imagine a kid growing up reading comic books and manga, watching Looney Toons and the Animanics, and then deciding to write a gangster story." Because "Skyway" has the farcical, ludicrous energy of Yakko, Wakko and Dot if they had grown up to be mob goons with guns and magic.
There’s a fast healing fifty-some year old woman who looks like she’s in her twenties and can pull guns out of a pocket dimension. There’s a witch who can shape shift, and might really be a fox. There’s a child who might be a robot, with purple eyes. There’s a sadistic mob goon. There’s a lot of fast-paced well described action that raises the tension constantly.
But because the magic is so abrupt and complete, and the details are kept mysterious as the action races along, it’s hard to tell where things are going. Each individual chapter has something interesting happen, and each one is fairly coherent on its own—and because it’s that interesting and energetic, I have strong hopes that sooner or later all these mad-cap details will string together into a cohesive story.
But in the meantime, it’s like watching short meaningless skits on a cartoon—they’re fun popcorn for themselves until a greater theme emerges. I don’t know how long fun popcorn can hold my attention, so I’m hoping the dots connect soon. But anyone who likes energetic, violent, strange stories should have a fun time with this.
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