Whitechapel Gods by SM Peters
My first and biggest complaint is the lack of attention to detail. This is science fiction; this story is based on a society no one has ever seen before, based on a landscape tortured by a steam engine take over. Where is the detail? And not just with the settings, with the people as well... Who are these people, what makes them individuals? Some of the characters suffer from "the clacks" a disease that turns humans into machines...What do their mechanical parts look like? What exactly are Mamma Engine and Grandfather clock and where did they come from? The author relies too heavily on metaphors; at some point he needed to stop telling us what things were "like" and tell us what things were.
My second complaint is grammar flubs. Did an editor really approve some of these mistakes? Or is my e-edition just a little screwy? Commas are all over the place and dialogue markers are incorrectly utilized. Scene skipping is fine, but there should be some kind of marker in between paragraphs to imply the story is moving from one character's adventures to another.
Then there are discrepancies in the storyline; For example, the character of Bergen shoots a man in the head...A man who admitted the only reason he was alive to see Bergen was that his mechanical heart kept beating despite his severely broken body...Wouldn't a chest shot make more sense? Then the subtle differences in "gods" versus "Gods". If Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock are Gods...Or is it meant sarcastically, in which case lowercase "g" might be acceptable? There's also a reference to A Christmas Carol, which was written in the Victorian Era...So literary classics weren't hindered by the steampunk-apocalypse? And don't get me started on Heckler "the American"....There's southern and then there's Foghorn Leghorn...
Rating: 1/5
Originally posted on:
Dec 17, 2012
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