New Book Alert: Slipstream (Book 1 of The Slipstream Series) by Alice Godwin; Strange and Lovely Mixture of Science Fiction and Fantasy Found in Travel Through Cyberspace

 

New Book Alert: Slipstream (Book 1 of The Slipstream Series) by Alice Godwin; Strange and Lovely Mixture of Science Fiction and Fantasy Found in Travel Through Cyberspace

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Slipstream by Alice Godwin is a very odd, strange, but somehow lovely mixture of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Thanks to the ability for one character to travel through dimensions and cyberspace, these genres have the ability to exist side by side, sometimes at the exact same time.

Jo, a detective, is investigating the death of a woman that seems to be connected to the Rapturists, a religious cult that disappeared at the turn of the century but has returned. During Jo's investigation, she encounters Connor, a stranger with a close connection to the deceased.

Meanwhile, Raven, a young woman, is investigating her ability to physically travel through the web. Many can in this book, but what makes Raven different is that she can do it without a device. Because of this, she is sensitive to electromagnetic pulses around her and can see various realities shift around her side by side. She can see figures from what she calls the slipstream when others cannot.

Halo, a Japanese immigrant, just left his family and is settling down with a pushy and persistent girlfriend, Azura.

 While going out, he encounters Raven after one of her slipstream encounters.  Halo learns Raven's backstory that she is considered a "Carnie," an orphan with no familial connections who steals codes and information to earn a living. He is attracted to her and wants to help her.

Eventually, these plots converge and are revealed to be connected. They offer more details to Raven's history and abilities.

By far the most interesting character in this book is Raven. Her powers are explored to their fullest and while Science Fiction in origin seems almost to border on Fantasy and Magic in their presentation. 

One of her travels is to an in-between world that she calls Ghostlands (where she floats around like a spirit). There she encounters a leonine creature that she calls Ceriful. Ceriful acts as a guide through these alternate realities, but his behavior is ambiguous whether he is helping or hurting Raven.

After receiving a tapestry from and growing closer to Halo, Raven has slipstreams in which she encounters fairies and unicorns. It's fascinating that Raven's version of Slipstreaming often involves fantasy and magical characters.

If you think about it, Raven's interest in the fantastic makes sense. She is a young woman with no known family. She was forced to mature at a young age and lives in a futuristic society where magic and fantasy is no longer valued. Slipstreaming is Raven's way of living in a world of the impossible, to capture the magical aspects of fairy tales and legends that she could not find in the physical world. Slipstream helps Raven find a measure of power and control to these narratives that she is deprived from.

In a way, Raven is like a futuristic Anne Shirley, a girl with no biological family and a fully developed imagination who can't always separate fantasy from reality. Though Raven's slipstreaming gives her the ability to interact with them in a way that Anne was unable to.

For the imaginative Bookworm, or Science Fiction or Fantasy geek, slipstreaming would seem like an ultimate thrill. It seems like a way to literally travel through cyberspace and into the imaginative dream worlds that exist in our minds.

However, through Raven's experiences, the Reader learns that slipstream can be a curse. Raven can't always control where she goes or what appears before her. She is sometimes attacked by her own mental demons to the point that she is in danger of succumbing to insanity. 

We also learn her history in which she has been targeted and experimented on from the time that she was born. Even her family has been the target of experiments that resulted in her astronomical powers. 

The end results of the experiments on Raven are a frightened embittered woman with an amazing ability to see into different worlds and dimensions but can't trust her own mind.

New Book Alert: The Hunt For The Troll by Mark Richardson; Witty Engaging Cyber Search For A Mysterious Tech Savvy Creature

 

New Book Alert: The Hunt For The Troll by Mark Richardson; Witty Engaging Cyber Search For A Mysterious Tech Savvy Creature

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Mark Richardson's novel, The Hunt For The Troll is a witty engaging search for a troll in both terms: someone who deliberately provokes and disrupts others online and also takes the form of the monstrous figure from folklore (and has some very strange abilities beyond cyberspace implying that there could be something paranormal in the presentation).

The Narrator's first encounter with the Troll isn't through the Internet. It's in his sleep. He sees the Troll surrounded by a vast stream of binary code. The Troll informs his new friend that this conversation is taking place inside his mental processor on a cloud in the Internet. The Troll then tells the Narrator that "It's time to change the world."

The Troll is also seen in cyberspace and many people would like to see him apprehended so they solicit The Narrator to find and identity him.

The Narrator could be a second cousin to Corvus Okada from The Hysteria of Bodalis and Graham Weathered from Orange City. He is a tech genius with a big mouth and a sardonic sense of humor that gets him through his difficulties. He was a software programming prodigy when he got the attention of the Captain, a hacker with an idea for a start up company. The company did not exactly go the way of Facebook or Google, more like MySpace. It folded, leaving The Narrator and The Captain to go their separate ways. The Narrator ended up in Italy where he "became an expert in loafing."

When even loafing got boring, The Narrator returned to the United States, where he eventually accepted a job as a sweeper for an online gaming company called Centre Terrain. (Any similarities to any fantasy world created by J.R.R. Tolkien is completely intentional, he assures us. "The company's founders had hired a marketing team to come up with a deliberately catchy name, but after weeks of deliberation and dozens of focus groups, Centre Terrain was the best name that they came up with." )

The Narrator's job is to assume the form of Roma, a human warrior with "a physique that brought to mind Thor though Roma was darker and more brooding." Roma goes through the game and searches for problems or glitches in the system.

 It's an exciting fantasy world that The Narrator plugs himself into which is probably why while we learn much about him, we don't know his name. He feels like he's a nothing guy, one of several programmers. He doesn't have an identity beyond the one that he creates in Centre Terrain, the avatar in a world that isn't his. He isn't too far off from The Troll, a person hiding behind an online persona to give him a god-like presence.

Speaking of The Troll, since he and The Narrator have developed a connection there are many people that would like to use him to find The Troll. Many like The Narrator's boss Whitfield and Larry Gosling, a tech giant nicknamed The Architect, recruit The Narrator to hunt down the Troll. A big problem is that no one knows who the Troll is.

He doesn't leave a trace and many of his background information is purposely contradictory. 

The Narrator is able to put some clues together and profiles the Troll as someone who may have been an outcast, socially awkward, and a genius but not much of an opportunity to show it except through this mysterious avatar version of himself. Not unlike The Narrator himself.

 

That is probably why The Troll contacts The Narrator through the Internet and in his sleep. He sees a kindred spirit, someone who understands him. Together, they can create a new world that would allow them to come our from their alternate selves and be counted and accepted.

Mark Richardson presents an engaging hunt for a mythological creature but ends up becoming a hunt for one's purpose and identity. This is definitely a book that would please even the most disruptive of trolls.