Customer Reviews

MindWar

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was expecting more from this book. The author's overuse of slang concocted
to look like text messaging really sounded more like kid-speak. Yes, the characters were teens, but they were supposed to be gaining maturity from their telepathy, not losing it. I finished the book, but I'm not likely to buy another of Bain's books.

The book's story is good and you'll think about it afterwards. The problem is that you have a simple mother as one of the main characters. How could be that a mother encourage her 13 years old daughter to have sex? When you read this among other things that parents wouldn't allow their children do the book start swooping so fast you can't even catch it.

Some of the negative reviews here portray this book in a worse light than I found it. The basic premise is that an act of terrorisim which placed a new nerve agent in school lunches resulted in an unanticipated reaction which caused the nerve agent to selectively bind to the mirror neurons in broca's region of the brain, the neurons which model the behavior of others and thereby provide intuitive perception of the moods and thoughts of others. Hypertrophic growth of this region results in some of the affected children to develop, over years, enhanced perception - "mind reading" but of a plausible and limited sort. As a science fiction premise, this isnt bad at all. The complaints of some readers seem to fail to take into account that the author specifically writes these kids to be different from normal 13-year-olds. Their use of slang is mentioned as a deliberate exaggeration of normal teen slang to disguise their conversations. The kids, being more perceptive by orders of magnitude, are more aware of "grown up" topics including sexuality. One reviewer took exception that a parent in the series "condones underage sexuality." It's a book, people. In the book one of the parents recognizes how the kids are absorbing information most kids that age miss, and, suspecting her daughter will mature more rapidly than usual, suggests she start birth control. It's a reasonable exploration of the consequences of the original premise. Overall (and despite the awful cliched title) I found the book to be interesting, original, suprisingly grounded in real science and consistent with the "what if" tenets of classic hard or "speculative" science fiction. Worth a read.

I soldiered through this book - forced myself to finish it. The editing is rough, but I knew Bain's following first met and embraced him in the (very new) world of web publishing, and I'm all right with wading through a few typos and misused words to get to a good story. The problem is, there's only the most rudimentary of stories to be had here. Painfully wooden characters limp along on the page, never even threatening to come to life. His zeal is commendable (dozens of his books - with unbelievably bad cover art - are available on Amazon), but the man barely writes at a sixth grade level. But wait: there's more!

The central premise of the book is that psychic 13-year-olds are as mature as non-psychic 18-year-olds... well, because they're PSYCHIC. No more complex argument is made - he simply repeats the premise, again and again. It's so... because it's so! This would be easier to palette if his 13-year-old girls (they're in their underwear for much of the book) behaved more maturely. Besides the physical responses, birth control methods, and seductions the girls engage in, there's not much to set them apart from real 13-year-old girls. As I'm sure you're starting to gather, the effect is unsettling. A hop and a skip from kiddy porn.

The writing itself is on par with the worst I have ever read. I can only guess that Bain's success online is due to the fetishist nature of his series "The Sex Gates", which showcases sex scenes between people who have magically/pseudo-scientifically switched genders.

Don't let the juvenile quality of the writing confuse you... this is not for children. I was pretty alarmed when a friend suggested that preteens/teens might be the target audience. If his intentions are innocent, the ineptness of his delivery renders the fact irrelevant.