Review: Vigil's End

Subtitle: "Book One of the Ninth Day of Man"

"The story does not seek to instruct, nor to proselytize or influence, or to make judgments. It is a story to entertain through magic of the engagement of your imagination with mine. And, perhaps it also to remind us all that we might consider on occasion, each in our own terms, that within the vast Universe that we mostly ignore, indeed, we are part." From the Prologue.

In reviewing this story (I use the term loosely) I first need to address the author. Buy a dictionary because by saying this book does not seek to proselytize you are either lying or do not know the meaning of the word. You contradicted yourself within two tortuously constructed sentences of your declaration by saying it was to remind, us, the readers "we are part". A trite phrase repeated twice in the postscript after the epilogue just in case we missed it. That is just the first of many abuses of the English language throughout your text. I do not mean what you probably think of as the 'charmingly naive but scientific' dialog from the "guardians of Sanctuary".

I'm now going to do the same thing the author did by saying that I am not here to point out the basic science flaws in this 'story' as it would be far too easy. Since I just lied here are a few choice phrases from the book. "Scientists first detected the armada of rogue asteroids advancing from the Alpha Centauri star grouping in the year 2214 of their chrono-calendar system." That bit of laughable science is on page 11. With quite a number of listening adjetives since this is a 'Chronicler' reading a file to a character named Josuah the novelist continues to dump phrases like, "one thousand kilometers or more would pass through the coincident orbit of Earth", "calculated to be-certitude", "volumetric holograph", and "Limited human and other carbon life", for the next three pages. Other amusing mistakes include putting earth into a deep freeze/ice age sort of thing due to all the clouds for 600 years with no oxygen. Anyone who understands global warming want to take this error? Here's a hint, it isn't cold on Venus under all those clouds. Next up learn something about DNA variation rather than assuming that differences in phenotype are indicative of huge amounts of diversity. Hint: There is more genetic diversity in Africa than all the rest of the world. And calling people things like "Negroid", "Caucasian", "Indo-Caucasian", and "Mongoloid" has not been good science since about 1945.

But that's not the worst thing about this book. The worst thing is leaden writing that would not be out of place in a high school creative writing course from the pen of an adolescent badly imitating the style in his favorite roleplaying game tie in novel. It is atrociously bad and not in the bad but funny way that is sometimes fun to read, just deadly boring. Which is why I'm having trouble figuring out what to say about this novel of clueless people resurrected "re-incepted" 600 years in the future by dippy techno mystics who declare any bits of life to be a sign of "the ninth day of man", even though they frequently say they don't know what that means.

I'm a person who actually likes reading history textbooks. Comparing this prose to a textbook would be an insult as the average textbook is much more engaging and has more plot. Vigil's End is less readable than Battlefield Earth, more preachy than the average didactic libertarian tract, and has less plot than the novelization of a porno movie. If anyone wants DASFA's signed copy sent by the author please claim it soon as it would probably be more valuable for the energy content of its pages.