A Bright Shore (The Eden Chronicles #1)

I don’t mind a bit of politics and social commentary in my books, and the post-apocalyptic genre tends to attract more than its fair share of conservative writers.
I am more of a liberal thinker, but I am not hostile to conservative thinking, if it is somewhat attached to reality.
I was a military man, I like guns, I read and write a lot about politics and I don’t always make everybody happy.
My threshold for political musings is pretty high, but this book is just too much.

The premise is a classic alt-right wet dream, but the writer is ill informed about his politics. What he described in the book was an authoritarian state, not a left or right wing state. The “left wing” part he left to our imagination based on anecdotes here and there.

He tried to color it toward left wing authoritarianism by having people make absurd declarations of hate of their own country (the USA, in case you live in more sane environs) but like many in the Alt-Right they tend to think in black and white terms, dehumanizing their opponents, and it comes through in this book to a level I found unpleasant and distasteful. Reality is rarely black and white. It has never been.

People so politically far gone cannot comprehend their political enemies as anything other than evil to the core. The result is cartoonish, unrealistic and boring.
There are conservative thinkers I disagree with, but I also know they are true patriots . I think they are wrong, I think their ‘solutions” are wrong, but I don’t hate them, and I expect that they also recognize that past our disagreements, we are both on the side of making our own country (or help our allies) to be better. To strive for a better society.
In the end, we both want America to succeed.
I can relate with that.

In this book, no one in government has any redeeming quality. All of them are dedicated to depersonalizing citizens into automatons (incidentally, a more fascist trait than a communist one, but I doubt the author could even explain either ideology without looking it up on wikipedia).

This is just unrealistic and lazy.

Unfortunately, this is how tragedies like the holocaust, Pol Pot, Pinochet and many others happen to humanity with regularity. When we forget common humanity, it is much easier to round up our enemies in concentration camps or walk into a public place with a loaded gun. We redefine humanity to “those that think like me”.
It’s lazy and dangerous.

I have read similar books in the past, where the author political allegiances and right wing leanings were a bit more exposed than most. But in some of those books, once the premise was established, the politics stopped.

Not here. I felt I was being preached to. Ironically, the very same sentiment his hero is subject to by society at large. It went on and on, mercilessly, to the point where I had to stop reading.
I don’t like abandoning a book, no matter how badly written. But I felt I had no choice because in every new page the author gave me more ammo to put holes in his “universe”.

Speaking of which, unless the book is in a parallel universe or was written years ago, the type of society described in the pages I have read is so far off from any conceivable, short term reality as to be barely more credible than an outright zombie apocalypse.

If one wants me to read a alt-right Turner diaries wanna be, at least tell me how we got there, don’t just describe this evil society were students pass the time badmouthing america, veterans are essentially shipped off to re-education camps and nobody seems to have a problem with it.

To go from where we are today, under a corrupt Trump administration and having almost half of America either uncaring or agreeing with a corrupt president, to the “worker’s hell” described in the book some seriously radical changes would have had to happen to America and the world.
Changes larger in magnitude than what Trump did. Yet if the book had an explanation, the author left it for someone with a stronger stomach for political fables than I have. And until now, I thought my stomach was made of cast iron.

But, as I write this, I realize that I stopped reading the book not so much because I found the description of this universe distasteful and unrealistic, but I left because it was mostly boring.
Simplistic? Yes. Political? Yes. Puerile? Yes. But the boredom was what got to me ultimately and for a book, especially a PA book, that’s unforgivable.

Otherwise save your money. I only made it through two chapters when I realized the foam-in-the-mouth hatred of “lefties” wasn’t going to abate. Please. Let me suggest The Forever War by Joe Halderman as a counterbalance to this.

Very interesting idea, if it could be real. SF as always been a way to explore alternate paths or possibilities, sadly we do seem to be on the path this story demonstrates. Students no longer really get a good education in the facts of history and much of history is be diluted down as to not offend someone, taking away many of it’s lessons. As a wise person once said, if you forget history, you are doomed to repeat it.

I’m still hoping that America will awaken to the reality that neither Left or Right are 100% correct, the real Solutions are historically somewhere in the middle.

Maybe if more Veterans get disgusted and start filling the political ranks, things will actually get accomplished and problems actually fixed. When Congress was 70% Veterans, they might not have all liked each other, but getting the Mission/Job done took priority. Now with less then 10% Veterans, everyone just stands around pointing fingers of blame and nothing gets done. 🙁

Quantum Mechanics meets Atlas Shrugged
As a staunch fiscal conservative and Atlas Shrugged devotee, I found S.M. Andersons A Bright Shore to be both an engaging and fun read. A wee bit tedious at times, it all came to a thundering conclusion with promises of more to come in future novels in the series. I wish the author had developed the Quantum Mechanics multiverse part of the story a bit more, but I somehow feel that will be done in the next books. Done with gusto, this could become an epic alternate universe opus!
Character development was excellent and caused just a bit of tedium. But I recognized that is necessary to adequately bring these dynamic characters to life. All in all a terrific cast of characters on both the good and bad side of the storyline.
No gratuitous violence, or sex although a few F-bombs sprinkled here and there, but they added to the overall realism.
Ive been wondering when someone would tackle the obvious Atlas Shrugged modern day dilemma and tie it in to the multiverse of Quantum Mechanics. Viola that day has come. Looking forward with eager anticipation to Mr. Andersons next book in this intriguing series: The sky universe is the limit. Well done sir, well done.

Very fun, dystopian, near future action/scifi. Being a bit lazy I’ve been going back through my favorite scifi audiobooks lately. A passing description of this story hooked me and without an audiobook edition, I figured I would see if it could keep my interest enough to make it through. That was last weekend.

This story covers an ambitious scope and scale. There is some great world building here. The scifi roots are reminiscent of Wildside, but the way they are used in the narrative arc keeps this story fresh. The political drama is something Ayn Rand would be proud of, there’s even a solid head nod to Atlas Shrugged towards the end. I found the characters in this story generally more compelling than those in Rand’s worlds. There’s a lot of deep motivational exploration that plays out more like the First Colony series.

Overall, this story stands on its own, on the shoulders of literary giants, but with new perspectives that make it more than worth a read. Very happy to see the next book is already out and I’ll be starting into that one shortly.

If I could make one change, I’d want more. Every character gets solid treatment, but I think the story would have been richer if it had a deeper treatment of fewer characters. Not my story to tell and I’m happy enough to keep reading more of the same the way it is.

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