Customer Reviews

Mankind's Worst Fear

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I tried to like this book and after about halfway through, decided that I couldn't take it anymore. The main characters all seemed to be the same person with different names and it was hard to distinguish one from another. There were characters named Baider, Paider and Kaider in the novel and that only added to my confusion.

The 2 main characters (Who could have been the same guy from all the lack of differentiation in their personalities/descriptions) spent all their time pondering their and their crewmate's relationships while fighting off aliens. Maybe its just me but if I am dodging aliens and running for my life, I am not wondering if one of my crew members is sleeping with the gorgeous doctor on board the ship...and thats another thing...everyone in the book seems to be extremely well built and drop dead handsome or Supermodel material...what, there are no ugly people in the future?
One guy seems to start out white then suddenly he's described as African-American and then the book later speaks of his pale complexion....what's that all about? All the women in the book spend their time crying over the smallest incident or completely breaking down and cracking under pressure so that the males in the book feel repeatedly obligated to comfort them, put their arms around them and tell them it will be alright.
The locals of the future apparently speak redneck and after reading several chapters of words written like they are spoken as in "Yuens folks git long now, ain't no cause fer alarm..." (I made that line up, but you get the picture), I just couldn't take it anymore.

Anyways, thats my 2 cents worth. Based on the other reviews, some people enjoyed it and at $0.99 it wasn't like I was angry for throwing away a ton of money on it, but I jist cain't see tossing money away fer no gosh darn good reason.....sorry, couldn't resist :)

The idea of this story was interesting but I disliked the writer's style. The storyline was confusing to follow, all of the characters seemed similar, and the descriptions seemed very stilted and dry. Also, it was annoying that the author had one of the characters repeatedly pondering the relationship between two of his colleages but never seemed to come to a conclusion. Everytime, it came up in the storyline I was thinking, didn't he already go over this? Usually when I read great story I become so immersed in it that it's like watching a movie, this book was a struggle to get into. Sorry for the bad review but I just didn't enjoy.

Mankind's Worst Fear--a SciFi gem. Quirky and pacifist scientific underwater exploration team meets by-the-book, military unit from Mars--three hundred years in Earth's future. These unlikely groups form an uneasy alliance, at the end of time, in a desperate search for a means to reverse the mistakes of the past.
With mankind's insatiable lust for knowledge and off-world expansionism, it was bound to happen. We dug too deep beneath Mars' mysterious red crust. Our curiosity and greed sets off an ancient burglar alarm, alerting the alien race that left it there, and triggers the near extermination of our planet. For, like humans, the aliens will not allow another race to gain enough knowledge and technology to threaten their dominance.
Mankind's Worst Fear is a joyride through future tech, and good, old-fashioned, human determination. The story tracks two separate but converging plot lines: the science teams' danger-filled journey inland through hostile tribes of humans; and the Mars teams' action-packed, space hijacking of an alien vessel on its way to finish off the last human life on Earth.
Mankind's Worst Fear celebrates man's strengths, while acknowledging the weaknesses that make us human. The tension of the twin plotlines holds the reader prisoner to turning the pages, even long after bedtime. And, when the two factions finally meet, an inferno of action chains you to the story until the very last word.
Remember to breathe.

The plot is fantastic, but the stilted, childlike writing style made this book unbearable to finish.

This was painful to read. The characters were very shallow with emotions inappropriate to the situation they were in. When one character dies, the thoughts of their friend revolves around the "musky aroma of a girls nutty brown hair" who is consoling them. I couldn't help but laugh out loud.

From the first chapter, Mankind's Worst Fear is captivating and fast paced. The two-pronged, well crafted story keeps the reader eagerly anticipating the outcome. Erickson gets creative with classic sci-fi themes (time-travel, space exploration, alien races), but the plot will hold the interest of any reader. For a first novel, Minkind's Worst Fear packs a punch and proves to be a satisfying journey.

I figured for 89 cents....no big deal. To sum it up: people are in space and on mars, aliens who speak Hebrew arrive, a quantum leap in time, now humans in Oregon are hicks (nor far from the truth), The non-hicks thank god and heaven....blah blah blah. That's as far as I could stand this book.

I'm only about a third of the way through this novel, and while I like the plot thus far, I'm having a hard time settling into the story. Unfortunately, I'm the type of reader that gets distracted by things like typos. So far, I have found numerous examples of these, and as a result, I keep getting jarred out of the story just when I think I'm finally getting into it. For example, I just read a sentence where the word "conger" (a type of eel) was used as opposed to "conjure." I'm not sure if these types of errors are present only in the Kindle edition, or in the print edition again, but I personally find them detrimental to my enjoyment of the story.

I would love to give this book at least a 4 star rating. However, there are a too many things wrong with it that cannot be overlooked. First of all it sometimes felt like it was written by two or more different people; one who writes well, one not so good, and a really bad one whose style is quite juvenile. The knowledge of the science is very good most of the time and some of the writing is sometimes so sophisticated it made me think that this was an experienced writer but then it would go downhill again.

There are a number of typos, misspellings, and wrong use of words, for example: their instead of they're, conger (an eel) where the word should have been conjure. One of the major characters from the Mars site named Clapton just disappears about half way through the story after the capture by the aliens - no I don't mean the aliens killed him or something else dire happened to him - the author just forgot him. Also it would seem to me that a nuclear winter lasting 300 or more years would not have resulted in just a colder climate in Oregon but an all out ice age.

I know writers (and obviously editors) tend to get lazy due to the use of spell checkers but for goodness sake, USE A GRAMMAR CHECKER as well.

Like I said, I would have given 4 stars due to the plot, action, and the interesting take on time travel but . . .

The premise of this book is neat: a crew of an experimental sub goes through something extraordinary and finds themselves in a future where society has broken down. At the same time, a few survivors of an alien attack on Mars must make their way back to Earth via capture by the aliens. It was interesting at first but I found many of the characters were easily interchangeable, mainly the leaders of the two groups and the military men on Mars. In fact, one of the latter was so easily overlooked as to stop existing in the middle of the book! He wasn't killed, didn't wander off of the space ship and get lost, no suspended animation or the equivalent; he just stopped existing in the story. Clapton, where are you?

The characters also seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the opposite sex even though their lives are all in danger almost constantly. The female who is nominally in charge of the sub when the captain and 3 other members of the crew go ashore, is so worried about the captain (though not the other 3 people) that she sends two more people out into the unknown to find him. And none of the other crew members went, "Wait. What?"

Now the captain phones home and says, "we're fine but you need to recall those men because there are bands of dangerous people wandering around who could kill them." This news is passed onto our two wandering rescuers who promptly throw more wood on their fire. If this is the gene pool for humanity, we're in serious trouble.

At this point, I don't think I'll finish the book even though I'm 60% through it. I have too many others interesting books on my list to fight my way through this.