SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Night Music by Tobias F. Cabral: https://t.co/0z5BGb9egF
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) March 21, 2023
Short Review: 7.5 out of 10 - A Self-Published Sci-Fi Novel that revels in the strange wonder of an alien transformation of Mars, Night Music is hard to categorize as it follows a team of
1/3
Short Review (cont): humans who investigate the loss of communication from a scientific base on Mars and have to figure out how to make it there. A strange short book, but I liked it.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) March 21, 2023
2/3
Night Music is a short self-published science fiction novel by author Tobias F. Cabral. The novel is now part of this year's Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (#SPSFC2 - See my earlier SPSFC2 reviews here), of which I a Judge, and has made the Semifinals, meaning it was one of the 30 top books submitted to the competition. Now the book, which I knew nothing about going in, is part of my group's semifinal pool of books to review and rank for possible elevation into the Finals.
Given the novel's place as a semifinalist, I had decent expectations for Night Music, and the novel certainly intrigued enough to kind of meet them. This is a novel of a future world where a team is sent from their deployment near the moon to investigate the loss of communication from a scientific base on Mars...a loss of communication that seems to have been caused by alien influence. The result is a novel that is less about conflict with some antagonist, but more about exploration and discovery and wonder, as our protagonist Seth and the rest of the team find more and more strange things occurring on Mars. There isn't really a plot arc here...or even much of character arcs (although character development does happen), and yet Night Music manages to weave it all together with wonder and fascination in a way to still be oddly enthralling.
More specifics after the jump.
--------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------
Months ago, Humanity lost contact with the experimental Zubrin Outpost on Mars. In response, an unmanned probe, named Samaritan, was sent to investigate only to itself wind up being destroyed. But before it's loss, Samaritan sent back pictures, pictures that displayed a Mars that is being drastically transformed in bizarre alien ways, ways that shock humanity's knowledge of science and technology.
To investigate, a team is sent out from deployment on the moon: pilots Seth and Nadia, mission commander and medical officer Nick, "Catastrophe Geology" specialist Tanaka; exobiologist Luczac, and liaison to Consortium headquarters Ellison. But as the team gets closer and closer to Mars, what they find there is far beyond what they could have expected, a planet whose changes are utterly unreal and inhuman, and present strange dangers to their ship trying to approach from orbit.
In order to find answers however, they may need to make planetfall on Mars, a step that will expose them to more strange and bizarre dangers, and an alien presence who is very different....
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Night Music is a short novel and it's one that is kind of hard to describe, since it doesn't really feature an overarching plot or conflict, even within its character development. The story is mostly told in third person from the perspective of Seth, although at a few points, when the cast is separated, it temporarily follows some of the other characters. At the same time, while Seth's perspective largely centers things, the story really uses that perspective not to showcase some grand plot or character development about Seth but to showcase a perspective of what he is seeing on and around Mars and the wonder and change it reveals in everyone. This is helped of course by Seth's character - he didn't go into engineering like his famous father and instead went into piloting because of the thrill of flying and is known for his focus of the views from flight as well as his love of music, and that focus largely means he doesn't really get to know some of the people around him.
And that allows us the reader to get a clear view of the wonderous changes happening to Mars, theorized here to come from an energy pulse sent along the cosmos to try to terraform the planet into an environment more fitting for its alien origins, as it drastically changes in ways that are shocking and fascinating. The description here works really well at demonstrating the strangeness and curiosity that Mars is becoming and how it is both dangerous and just something the crew wants to find out more of, and the crew's reactions to it all and how it affects their personalities, with Seth and Nadia becoming closer and Seth realizing he wants to now more about her, and other crew members revealing more about each other and changing....as they all try to accomplish their mission safely, because they all care about each other. And the book is only helped by how much the crew cares for one another and how they thus try to work together to figure out both what's going on and how they can get closer to investigate...and what they can do for the lost crew members fo the Zubrin Outpost if they find them.
There's really not much more to say here - this isn't really a deep book and there's no conflict really but the way it all works out just somehow works - even for a reader like myself who isn't that into descriptive fiction. I'm not sure if this deserves to be a finalist, but i can easily see why it made the SPSFC2 semifinalist, and if it makes the finals I won't be that disappointed. A hard book to describe but one worth your time.
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