Empire State

The Empire State is at war, and has been for a long time. So long that most people, including private eye Rad Bradley, can't remember a time when it wasn't Wartime. Certainly as long as the city's science hero, The Skyguard, has been protecting it. This isn't really a novel about the Skyguard, though. It's a novel about a murder, one that Rad is hired to solve and which itself might threaten the very existence of the Empire State.

This was an incredibly fun novel. I'm as much a sucker for noirish detective stories as I am for parallel words and superheroes, so this was right up my alley to begin with. Beyond that, though, Adam Christopher does an incredible job of setting the mood of Empire State, a place where nothing quite feels right but you can't put your finger on why. Add in an apocalyptic-scale threat, steampunk superheroes, and gangsters, and you've got a great story.

Three stars means “I like” a book, even though it feels more like a “meh” when you see those three lonely stars up there on a review. However, in this case, it rings perfectly true: I liked Empire State.

I'm having some trouble being objective in this review, because I follow Adam Christopher on Twitter, he has been a friend to Sword and Laser, etc etc. But I had a hard time truly getting into this book as much as I wanted to.

Part of the problem is that the storyline is purposely convoluted. We're thrown into a world that features alternate dimensions, time-shifting, doppelgängers, and a murder mystery... all wrapped into one. The intentions and loyalties of the characters are constantly in flux, and I frankly found it hard to keep track.

This is not a book of hard science fiction: the science used to explain the “fissure” between these two worlds (or rather, the Origin and the Pocket) is murky at best, but that's not really the important thing here. Was it an entertaining story? Yes! Did I like the characters? I think so (when I understood what was happening)! Was the ending satisfying? Hmmm... mostly. Ended somewhat with a fizz rather than an explosion.

But overall, I thought the storyline was original and interesting. Though it felt a little unclear to me at times, it's entirely possible that this was a fault of mine, not the books.

Well... I kind of expected to like this one a lot more than I actually did. The tone and the style was great in a Rocketeer meets Noir detective way, but for some reason I just never really got invested in the story. The plot twists and turns all the time, and while usually that's a good thing, this time I sort of gave up following that early. Probably that's more a reflection of how numb my brain is lately than a failing of the author.

What I did like is that this book presents a mystery and femme fatales with no love story (except a weird add on at the end which I'm not counting). I liked the visuals that it conjured and absolutely every person's name.

What I didn't like is that the actual writing felt a bit stilted with a lot of simple sentences in a row and the author occasionally needing to spell out why something was important. I never really understood how anything worked, and there were so many plot points to follow that I kept forgetting who was connected to whom and why. Again, that may just be my brain on standardized test season.

If you like Golden Age Sci-Fi and Noir Detectives, you are the person this book was written for, but go into able to read in big chunks. Reading ten minutes hear and there just did not work for me.