Tuesday, June 27, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Percival Gynt and the Conspiracy of Days by Drew Melbourne




Percival Gynt and the Conspiracy of Days is a Science Fantasy novel by Drew Melbourne and one of our finalists in this year's Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (#SPSFC2 - See my earlier SPSFC2 reviews here). In addition to being Science Fantasy (meaning the novel is Science Fiction but set in a setting where magic is very real and prominent in the setting as well), the novel follows a trend in this competition of being one that peppers its setting with jokey comments, attributes, and ideas alongside a plot that is more a thriller than a comedy. For those who have read my reviews before, or have read them as I judged books in the SPSFC, well you may note that such comedic stylings are often kind of wasted on me, although if done really well I have been swayed into enjoying them. And well, one book this really reminded me of - K Eason's "How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse" - actually managed to do that, so even as I got through the first act of this book I was hopeful Percival Gynt would manage to accomplish that feat.

Unfortunately, it did not quite manage to do that. None of the absurd bits, jokes about the future of our society, or just things in general really made me smile all that much, and the plot of Percival Gynt never really gets that interesting, even if it's put together mostly well. The main character in Percival is enjoyable at times, as are some others, but the book insists upon a mutual romantic interest between two characters pretty much immediately despite portraying basically no chemistry on page between them, which made it hard to care about actions those characters take due to their sudden love and caring for one another. Add in a final act that sort of disposes of the biggest antagonists with a whimper and then deus ex machinas away all the remaining lost plot threads/consequences of certain actions, and well, the result was a book that was never "bad" but also just made me shrug when I finished it. I want more from books that are supposed to be challengers to win a competition, and I didn't find it here.


Plot Summary:
Percival Gynt is an ordinary accountant in the year 20018.  Or so he would prefer people to believe, despite the fact that his tragic history is frequently in the news on its yearly anniversary (the 20th of which is coming up!).

But when a strange beautiful woman comes up to him as he awaits the train to work, asks him a strange question, and gives him a surprise kiss, Percival Gynt finds himself thrown into an adventure. For the woman is the last known link to a child whose protection is paramount to the safety of the universe...a child who has recently been abducted by Space Nazis (not that they call themselves that).

Soon Percival, the woman (a magician named Tarot) and a space cop named Um will find themselves on a quest to stop the Space Nazis from getting the other thing they need - a secret that is the key to the Conspiracy of Days that once threatened the entire universe - before the universe itself finds itself doomed to extinction once more. Yet the biggest threat to the universe may not be the doomsday device sought by the nazis...but the dark secrets of Percival's past itself, secrets that are not what everyone else (including Percival) actually believes...   
Percival Gynt is the type of story that I see a lot these days, especially in the SPSFC competition: a story that has an ostensibly serious plot (even if it's not dealing with serious themes in any way) but is told in a way that is filled with constant jokes - whether those jokes be in the narration, the silliness of the setting, or how the characters act.  It's a type of plot that I am unfortunately a bad audience for - there have been books of that nature that I have enjoyed, but usually it's despite the humor, rather than because of it....the number of these books I've read that have actually made me laugh and smile is rather low compared to the amount that I've read that are trying.  And well, Percival Gynt isn't one of the fortunate exceptions, as the silly jokey aspects never really amused me all that much . 

So what's left if not for the humor?  Well, what you have her is a science fantasy story, where magic is as real as the story's sci-fi setting (although the science fiction nature often manifests in just more advanced versions of our modern tech like apple watches or google) that is also kind of a thriller, as our protagonists go from scene to scene trying to figure out the way to stay ahead of the antagonist space nazis and to save the day.  And the book is written well enough to keep you reading and to hook you in, with there being a number of surprises along the way and hinted at mysteries that will keep you guessing.  There's nothing in the twists or plot threads that is all that SUPER interesting mind you - and the character and relationship development is largely forgettable or done rather poorly: a decent part of Percival's motivations very quickly become the love he feels for Tarot and vice versa, and this book does absolutely no work in making the two of them having romantic chemistry feel believable whatsoever.  Nor does the ending really hit very well - one major antagonist just dies suddenly despite being built up to be unstoppable just as the best chance for stopping them was supposedly lost, and the other big threat is something they figure out how to deal with all of a sudden out of nowhere, even if the solution is at least marginally clever (and then it's followed by some bad deus ex machinas to try and make this a truly happy ending). 

The paragraph above is probably me going a bit too hard on Percival Gynt.  There's one character - the three armed cop/agent named "Um" - who I actually enjoyed a good bit and found his parts amusing or charming, so whenever he took center stage, it was at least kind of enjoyable.  And the book is never bad in any sense.  But there isn't really anything here I'd rank as better than average either.  For some people, for whom the jokes work better or haven't been seen before in a lot of other books, Percival Gynt might work pretty well, so I guess I can see how this became a finalist.  But for me, it's more of a miss than anything, alas.  


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