SF/F Review: Substrate Phantoms by Jessica Reisman https://t.co/cYTS3PA41e Short Review: 6.5 out of 10 (1/3)— garik16 (@garik16) February 20, 2018
Short Review: In the future, when a mysterious alien entity finds itself in Jhinsei's head, he & a son of the rich family desperate to get their hands on the entity find themselves searching for answers about who they truly are. Fascinating Plot but execution falls flat (2/3)— garik16 (@garik16) February 20, 2018
Substrate Phantoms is one of a subtype of books that I tend to give the same grade (6.5 out of 10): Books with very interesting ideas and setups that just, for me at least, don't wind up working out. It's not a very long book, but it quickly sets up an interesting (albeit obviously not unique) premise of First Contact - where one of our main characters winds up housing the mind of another being inside his own head. The problem is that, again, this is a short book, and the payoff for all of the various plot threads comes rather abruptly and as such fails to make a particular impact.
I sometimes refer to books as a dichotomy - with some books emphasizing plots and other books emphasizing characters. Obviously this is a vast oversimplification (the best books have both), but Substrate Phantoms is more heavily on the plot side of the scale - despite splitting the book between POVs in the heads of its two main characters, the more important protagonist honestly felt more like a shell than a fully realized character and the second main character is still more defined by the plot than by any of his own attributes. As I mentioned, this isn't by itself a bad thing, but if you're looking for great characters here, I didn't find it.
More after the jump:
When a strange derelict ship shows up at the Space Station "Termagenti," weird technology glitches start occurring near where the ship is docked. When a tube near the ship malfunctions, a team of technicians is sent to repair it....only to encounter a strange phenomena that seems to bond the team's minds together....just before the tube explodes, killing all but one: the young adopted ward of the team, Kiyr Jhinsei.
18 months later, Jhinsei has been cleared of any physical or mental problems from the incident, but clearly something has changed within him. For one, he seems to have the minds of his former team in his head, talking to him. For another, it seems like something more - and possibly alien - is in his head, possibly sharing his body now. In order to truly find out what is going on, Jhinsei will have to more seriously investigate the derelict, but does he truly want to open up the memories such a thing will provoke?
At the same time, Tiyo Mheth is the second son of one of the most powerful families in the galaxy, which basically runs Termagenti station. Mheth is the less favored son and has tried to maintain an irreverent joking tone in the face of his father's seriousness. But when Mheth stumbles on to conspiracies involving his father and brother involving the derelict, he starts to wonder whether he has a responsibility to stop them. Can he, the failure of the family, really act as the family's conscience?
As Jhinsei and Mheth investigate their own selves and what they really must do in their situations, their paths will cross, and in the face of dangers the two will attempt to discover what their purposes really are.
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This is a really hard book to describe the plot - the amazon summary for instance spoils an event that occurs 2/3 of the way through the book (it's not a major deal but it's unnecessary IMO) and doesn't mention the second protagonist at all. But I've done the best I can above.
That second protagonist, Mheth, is easily the most well rounded character in Substrate Phantoms. It's easy to understand who he is and why he struggles and in a future world that is very different but still somewhat similar to ours, it's easy to picture him. He's a guy who has his entire world pulled out from under him - although it's thanks to his own curiosity rather than by accident or ignorance - and his struggles to decide how he handles the situation and to figure out who he himself is are compelling.
Most of the plot setup is extremely interesting as well. Reisman does an excellent job with description - so as the characters - Mostly Jhinsei- encounter new things/people and inhuman experiences, it always seems as far out as the characters find it. A lot of this book is descriptions of sensations and colored perspectives, but the writing is excellent enough that it never feels boring in any way - and that's particularly impressive because I'm not one for over-description.
That said, the book has two main issues which prevented it from being a success for me. Main Protagonist Jhinsei's plot arc is believable....but also acted in such a way that made it hard for me to really care about him individually as a character (as opposed to the things he winds up carrying). At the end of the story, with the plot done, he's basically just a shell - and while Mheth is that to some extent as well, at least I have some idea who Mheth is at that point. Again, it's an odd situation - I never disliked Jhinsei or wasn't interested in what happens to him enough to want to stop reading, but when it was all over I found myself really disappointed in what I found there.
And while I've mentioned above that I enjoyed the plot setup for the book, the book comes to a conclusion of the plot incredibly quickly. The book features two "antagonists", and both are dealt with in extremely short succession, with the end of one of the antagonists really raising a question of "What was the point of all of this?" It's as if the author decided she wanted the book to be only 300 pages so she made sure the book would not go over that limit. I shouldn't be feeling "is that it?" at the end of a plotline that I was very interested in, but I did here.
Others may like Substrate Phantoms more, but for me, it just didn't come together in the end. And that was a disappointment.
That second protagonist, Mheth, is easily the most well rounded character in Substrate Phantoms. It's easy to understand who he is and why he struggles and in a future world that is very different but still somewhat similar to ours, it's easy to picture him. He's a guy who has his entire world pulled out from under him - although it's thanks to his own curiosity rather than by accident or ignorance - and his struggles to decide how he handles the situation and to figure out who he himself is are compelling.
Most of the plot setup is extremely interesting as well. Reisman does an excellent job with description - so as the characters - Mostly Jhinsei- encounter new things/people and inhuman experiences, it always seems as far out as the characters find it. A lot of this book is descriptions of sensations and colored perspectives, but the writing is excellent enough that it never feels boring in any way - and that's particularly impressive because I'm not one for over-description.
That said, the book has two main issues which prevented it from being a success for me. Main Protagonist Jhinsei's plot arc is believable....but also acted in such a way that made it hard for me to really care about him individually as a character (as opposed to the things he winds up carrying). At the end of the story, with the plot done, he's basically just a shell - and while Mheth is that to some extent as well, at least I have some idea who Mheth is at that point. Again, it's an odd situation - I never disliked Jhinsei or wasn't interested in what happens to him enough to want to stop reading, but when it was all over I found myself really disappointed in what I found there.
And while I've mentioned above that I enjoyed the plot setup for the book, the book comes to a conclusion of the plot incredibly quickly. The book features two "antagonists", and both are dealt with in extremely short succession, with the end of one of the antagonists really raising a question of "What was the point of all of this?" It's as if the author decided she wanted the book to be only 300 pages so she made sure the book would not go over that limit. I shouldn't be feeling "is that it?" at the end of a plotline that I was very interested in, but I did here.
Others may like Substrate Phantoms more, but for me, it just didn't come together in the end. And that was a disappointment.
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