Fear the Sky (The Fear Saga)

An alien race wants some lebensraum, and decides that Earth – minus the original inhabitants – will fit the bill nicely. But they’re worried about our multitudes of nuclear weapons, primarily in terms of damaging the planet after the humans are exterminated. So they send an advance party of satellites and androids to neutralize the threat before the main force arrives. There’s more, but there’s also no point in wasting my effort or your time describing it.

Here’s the thing. The #1 rule in writing good science fiction is, “Know Your Science”. Right from the git-go, there is a scene where a civilian is doing some meteor tracking in an Air Force phased array site. The author clearly knows absolutely nothing about this radar technology, but that doesn’t prevent him from (improperly) describing it. He fills pages and chapters with all sorts of misinformation about technologies, particularly military weapons. At one point he has two people loaded in a B2 bomber’s ejection seat, following their standard training. Now, I haven’t flown in a B2, but I have flown in Martin Baker seats, and I guarantee there is no way – much less training for it – to eject two people in a single seat.

Most of the book involves military people, locations, equipment, and doctrine. Sadly, this author has clearly learned about the military from watching bad movies and TV shows. He spotlights most military personnel, especially the senior officers, as inept buffoons. He has people doing things they would never do, and sometimes things they couldn’t possibly do. You can’t take a random major and civilian, strap them into a B2, and have them fly a combat mission halfway across the world. In bizzaro-world maybe, but not in this one. Imagine someone growing up in a mud hut in some third world country, who has never left his village, and whose only exposure to medicine has been watching a couple Marcus Welby reruns. Now imagine that person writing a modern medical thriller set in a big city hospital. That’s how well this author is qualified to write this book.

The dialogue is another weak spot. Most of it is at the maturity level commonly found in middle school cafeterias. It’s just flat painful to read. To describe the characters as cardboard would be doing a horrible disservice to cardboard. The book itself is horribly bloated; the author crams about 200 pages of material into over 500 printed pages. There is no publisher listed which makes me believe this is self-published, and it shows. Typos, incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, you name it: this book screams out that it never came within miles of a competent editor.

On the (only) plus side, this first of three novels at least offers a decent ending, and doesn’t just randomly stop in the middle of the action.

John W. Campbell – if you could have convinced him to even touch this thing – could have tightened it up into a decent novel. What you have instead is pretty much a picture-less, silly comic book. Anyone who compares this favourably to “classic sci-fi” has clearly never read any. I’ll give the author an “A” for initiative, “D” for effort, and “F” for results. It isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but I think it’s got the 2014 award locked up.

I read chapters 1 through 8 and stopped there. The storyline was interesting but I found myself skimming because the author is just too wordy. For me to enjoy a story I need to savor the words and phrases. They need to be either tight, dense with meaning or lyrical. This author does not accomplish either. There was so much needless fluff here that the first eight chapters could easily be condensed to three.

The SPELLING ERRORS - MY GOD! I just looked at the reviews and noticed that several others have commented on it. Note to reviewers: these are spelling errors, not typos. One does not mistype "piqued" as "peaked". I read the Kindle version but I assume it is a digitized form of the paperback published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Dear publishers: please find an editor. This is the Western world, not Bangladesh or Kyrgyzstan, and this sloppiness is ridiculous.

Engaging story and interesting characters, with original elements I'd not seen in other "aliens out to get us" stories. BUT... OMG this book is wordy. The sheer amount of detail is overwhelming and the editors should have used a firmer hand. I appreciate wanting to provide good descriptions and authentic-sounding technology but it really did make this an impossibly slow read. For example, the author takes four paragraphs to describe, in painstaking detail, how a character disables an electronic lock on a front door. Completely non-essential plot detail that could have been done in 2 sentences. If you like detail or don't mind skimming over when your eyes start to cross, I recommend because the story is good.

The storyline is interesting, but the writing is unbearably awful. Instead of showing characteristics and emotions through dialogue and action, the author describes everything bluntly and simply in an omniscient presence. The only way he knows how to convey his characters' emotions is by describing the type of smile they wear on their faces. He frequently repeats his favorite words again and again, writes phrases like "the massive rock mass", and consistently selects the not-quite-correct synonyms, like an over-eager first-time thesaurus user. In general, his language is clunky and uneven, shifting quickly from complex words to colloquialisms and back again. If poor writing drives you crazy, avoid this book.

it was ok. It started with a lot of promise, and the first third of the book was fairly good, but then I felt the book became predictable once one of the bad guys (keeping it generic to limit spoilers) basically revealed the whole alien plan. At that point, coupled with the fact that some pov characters were the primary antagonists, led to a book that left few if any surprises. I finished the book, because I was curious to see how the book ended and was hoping for a plot twist that never came. In short, after the first third of the book, my heart didn't race and I felt there was little to no suspense and was frequently saying to myself (who cares?)

Could not get past the first several pages. The author needs an editor badly. Very very badly. There MAY be an interesting story in there but the slog through turgid prose just isn't worth it. And heck, lets be honest, the characters are often just...stupid. Inane. Lame. As in bearing no resemblance to possible reality.

The story is interesting but the lousy grammar make this an often painful read.

"The fact that he was also working on something that was so cutting edge also helped make up for the fact that he was also, frankly, well outside his area of expertise."

Amazon suggested this book after I finished another sci-fi first contact book. I was iffy in the beginning because it moves slow and is wordy in a lot of parts, but once things start rolling, it's hard to put the book down. I'm not a professional editor, so typos and grammar mistakes don't make me want to scream because I get what he's trying to write. That's the risk we take when reading self published books.

Without giving out spoilers, the plot is an advanced race is running out of room on their planet and discovered the technology to travel to other worlds. They find our planet and decide it's the best choice, so they send out an advanced team to make sure the humans didn't wreck the planet before the huge armada got there to wipe humans out.

Neal, who is the nerdy science guy spending his days watching for the next big thing, notices something funny about the approaching "meteors" and from there starts the craziness.

There are some parts of the book where I'm like...how did these fools not get us all killed already? They did stupid things when they knew they were being watch such as completely disappearing after a certain incident. You don't think that's suspicious?

And I skimmed a lot of the action scenes because it was just too wordy. I felt like there was an entire chapter to describe the 2 second fight between two of the characters in the book. While I enjoyed it the first time learning how fast these "beings" operate, I feel like we didn't need to keep being reminded of how much they could get done in just 1 second of real time.

I'm still giving it 5 stars because 5 stars on Amazon means that I loved it! Even though I skimmed through the wordy parts and noticed some typos, I still loved it! It would be 1am and I would need to get up to work, but my Kindle would tell me there were 12 minutes in the next chapter and I justified reading the next chapter each and every time!

I just downloaded the second book and can't wait to see what happens after the ending events of Fear the Sky! You have a fan!

Cannot, get passed the, horible spelling and grammar giving up on page 36..........

Too bad though. I thought the plot line sounded interesting.......

Really great story well written on a par level with the Clark, Heinlein and Herbert quality SF-