Customer Reviews

Gunpowder (SIGNED LIMITED EDITION)

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I've read discussions about this book on Joe's blog from fall of last year, but it somehow slipped under my radar until last month. My heart leapt for joy when I discovered Joe had written a science fiction novella, and soared even higher when I found out it hadn't sold out.

Joe's latest prose book is a mere 80 pages long, but tells a great story of several genetically augmented children and their `mother' sent to terraform a barren world for later colonization. They've spent the last fourteen years of their lives together and were just learning to make some pretty crazy stuff, like blades of grass that were really blades. This is Joe Hill, after all. Anyhow, when the military comes to send their mother away and take over the operation, the kids don't really take it all that well.

Joe once again produces excellent work here that not only entertained me but inspired me as a writer just as he did with 20th Century Ghosts. I've definitely learned something about the craft of writing novellas and I've only read it once. If I had to find the one chink in this book's wall, it's that there wasn't enough space to get into what the kids did for free time (except screw with Charlie), or if they had any aspirations behind being tools of mankind, or what drew Elaine to leave Earth and be the boys' `mother'.

I honestly don't know if I'd have done anything different, though. Gunpowder would translate well to a graphic novel, and I hope it makes it into Joe's next collection of short work.

Gunpowder
By Joe Hill
PS Publishing
2008
ISBN 978-1-848630-14-7
81 pages (Novella - 22,600 words)

Gunpowder is an aptly named unstable planet out on the galactic fringe. It is a cold, bleak, desolate place selected for terraforming. The technicians, however, are not your run-of-the-mill scientists but a group of not-quite-human children who have had their DNA manipulated. They have been created to breathe and live in the atmosphere without mechanical means and, more importantly, they have psychic abilities that will help them achieve their goal. But they are outcasts from Earth and the hope is that they may one day save it from a future devoid of resources.

Then war comes to the galaxy and the boys' unique psyforming capabilities are enlisted by a mysterious stranger sent by the military. With nothing more than the power of their imaginations they can create the raw materials for missiles powerful enough to destroy moons. They can dream into existence spacecraft strong enough to fly through a supernova without being damaged. They can give the universe a military force so powerful that no one would dare defy it. And the military wants them as weapons. The question is... do they want to become soldiers for a society that has cast them off?

And one child, the deficient boy, without a psyforming ability and with the word VOID imprinted inside his glowing eyes, holds the key. What sacrifice might he make... for love?

Joe Hill's first published venture into the realm of Science Fiction rates a resounding YES! If Gunpowder is a prologue to more stories set in this same multi-verse I can only hope that they are published soon.

4 ½ out of 5 stars

The Alternative
Southeast Wisconsin

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