Two things this week for Friday Fandom. First, I think I’ve found another writer I can read. I’m super picky about fiction writers and I have a hard time finding stuff I like. Although I’ve read my share of sci-fi and fantasy books, they’ve come from a fairly select group of writers. I’m not the type of fan that can read through 25 Star Trek or Star Wars books just because of the franchise. At some point later I’ll have to post about my favorite writers.

Anyway, Jack McDevitt – awesome writer. Last week I was looking for a new book and happened upon Chindi. I had seen it before and it looked interesting. Not only did this book have great reviews, but so did his other stuff, so I bought it.

I was not disappointed. I blew through it in one week (with my busy schedule, that’s good). It’s exactly the kind of sci-fi I like. As one reviewer put it, you get the sense of wonder and excitement that the early sci-fi writers gave us, and it’s definitely a page-turner. In short, an Academy ship is sent out to check out what might be an alien signal coming from a neutron star. Hutch, the female captain takes a group of Contact Society members in a kind of favor-type mission to check it out, not expecting much.

It turns out to be this great discovery of a network of alien satellites. They follow the links and make some amazing discoveries, suffering excitement and tragedy along the way. I don’t want to give too much away, so that’s the premise of the book. Essentially the mission gets pulled further and further out chasing this network, and the group has some wild encounters.

If you look at the reviews on Amazon, it’s surprisingly even across the board, with plenty of negative reviews actually. I think many of the people don’t quite understand the space opera. It’s not supposed to be hard science fiction and you expect to see some characters that are somewhat shallow. The fun is supposed to be in the story and the over the top events that happen. In that sense, I think it succeeds.

Another writer I like is Orson Scott Card, and his book Ender’s Game is a sci-fi legend. Well this week Marvel released issue 1 of a limited 5 issue series on the book.

I stopped and picked it up and read it last night. Card himself said it was a great adaptation of the story, better than he could have done himself. That’s quite a statement. And it’s incredibly hard to sum up a novel in a 5-issue comic series. I found issue one to be pretty good. The writing was pretty well done, obviously they cover tons of ground in one issue, going through all of Ender’s pre-battle school issues so they can get into the meat in issue two.

The art was good, but the one problem I have with it is the coloring. All I can say is somebody loves their PhotoShop. The coloring was awful. Since when do sausages have specular highlights? The colorist knows a few tricks/techniques and he completely overdoes it with them. And he doesn’t know how to use PhotoShop to do a good coloring job without leaving “brush strokes” all over the place. Imagine an oil painting where the brush strokes are all over the place. Essentially that is what you have – you can literally see circles where he began a stroke. While some of this is unavoidable, it’s just all over the place.

Maybe this bothers me moreso because I’m an artist and I know the tool, not sure. It didn’t ruin the book for me, I’ll follow the series, but I would call it an unfortunate aspect of the book. I’d still say pick it up if you like the story.

Hope you folks like Bob, he’s going to be a central figure in this story arc.