"I am one of the judges of the special hybrid team Epic Space Stars for the SPSFC3 contest. This review is my personal opinion. Officially, it is still in the running for the contest, pending any official team announcements.

Status: Cut
Read: 8%

As a special part of the monstruous time commitment for the contest judges to read a mind boggling 50 books (half of them with only a 6 week timeline which is really tight), we agreed to try to reach 10% of each book sample. I am going further and trying to reach at least 20%, which gives books with slower starts a better chance. Alas, at almost 250,000 words, even reaching 25,000 words in this book feels more like a 60,000 word book. It's not just the length, it's the writing style that made the book feel much heavier.

I am aware it isn't fair to find the plot of a book at less than 10% going in. On the other hand, a well written short story can offer a compelling story in only 250 words. By reaching around 20,000 words, the section of the book that I reached should be more than enough word count to give you a feel about the protagonist (the book is successful in this aspect), where the plot is going (I never knew what the plot really was), and the worldbuilding (it was very scant).

From what I understood of the story, we have space expansion to Mars and some space stations on Saturn moons that are highly sought-after because of the promise of mining (and seeing the planet is real nice). There was some kind of 3D carbon printing gold rush, and everyone started to overbuild. For unclear reasons, the governments now banned all 3D printing technology and now even spaceships can't get spare parts. The worldbuilding certainly confused me a lot. Most of the Saturn moon inhabitants live under a universal basic income doing nothing all day except get in traffic jams because streets get closed for no reason, get drunk or sleep with prostitutes. I will talk further about the (almost nonexistant) female representation.

Apparently there was some scientist inspired by Nikola Tesla named Alex who invented some kind of interdimensional warp drive. The standard version that shortens space travel to Saturn and Neptune to just a few days is common use. But this other warp drive tech allows I suppose the ability to reach distant planetary systems or something. And some governments didn't like what he was doing so he got killed. His AI robots Aaron and Alex's waifu femenine AI Zoe have digital copies of his sort of illegal manifiesto invention book. And apparently there is an underground cult that worships this mysterious technology. Certain reliable people that have a beef against the government due to the 3D printing ban (which would probably be almost everyone with an entrepenurial spirit) obtain copies of the book and share it with others. I suppose the book later on will focus on how the 2 human protagonists Jeron and Lilli become aware each of them have a copy of the mysterious book and team up to find out if the technology works.

If this is the plot of the book, I think a mysterious banned warp drive tech is cool. It would make sense the inventor became silenced if he had discovered the warp drive can be activated very cheaply, and thus become a threat to corrupt governments that make money from toll booths. Most of the problems is that the book spends too much time with long endless paragraphs describing information that could be done in under 200 words. We are also further tossed left & right because the book goes back & forth, up & down and spins around POVs faster that I can blink my eyes. Yes, readers must brace themselves for the inevitable head hopping of characters in dual POV chapters without warning. And the flashbacks, they will pop up constantly and the timeline will be shooting around in diagonal directions as the chapter will be swooshing between two POVs and their respective two timelines of past & present like a washing machine.

One of the big timeline swooshing issues I had was the fact these past events should have been killed in the book's editing stage. Why is it important for the reader to know a relatively minor character like bartender Ted drank Amber beer? Is there some kind of psychic ability granting property to this brand of beer that lets people use the illegal free warp drive? Writing these internal thoughts are perfectly fine for a 1st draft. The author is learning about their creation just as much as the reader. But most authors when it is editing time decide to copy + paste these character background profiles into a separate file. Maybe something relevant to their past like a PTSD trigger makes them freeze and they have the hospital chat about what happened in the next chapter. This is the time to mention the secondary character's traumatic 1st day of highschool.

I would have been okayish about learning the minor character's Zodiac signs and or whether they were 3 minutes older than their twin sibling if the book is very short and these fillers avoid being distracting. It becomes a problem when I am reading an already very long book that is constantly head hopping and these past events are both insanely long and don't offer pivotal information to the overall plot. Even more if the plot is already hard to decipher. If the book had avoided so much head & timeline hopping, it could be shortened a whopping 30%! A 175,000 word book would still be very long, but massively tighter and manageable.

Now, let's get to the worldbuilding. Despite being such a long book, we learn more about the favorite brand of beer of secondary characters than anything about the Saturn moon where the first 10% of the story happens. Yep, I don't know anything about the fiction moon called Enphora. We know it has a nicer planet view side with more valuable real estate and the slums in the other side where Ted's tavern is located. Apparently this moon doesn't spin around, like Earth's moon. I'll accept this creative decision. But it would have been much cooler if there was a similar effect like the extant moons Janus and Epimetheus which occasionally collide with eachother and change their axis. Having religious ceremonies and buildings rushing to protect themselves from the expected gravitational pulls would have been very delightful for me. It's the same feeling I usually get reading books about distant fictitious planets that rotate around stars like the Sun. It is unusual to see fiction planets orbiting dual solar systems even though they are very common. In essence, I never got the vibe of this moon, only that it feels like a struggling steel city in Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvannia. Everyone eats frozen hamburgers and french fries. There are no hints of exotic Saturnian cuisine.

And now finally, the characters. I will start with Jeron. Along with the tried & true trope of being orphaned at a young age, Jeron is... sexually very promiscuous. At only 8 years of age, he stares at the chests of female classmates, dreams about boobs, frets and obsesses about boobs (this goes on for at least 3 pages of the backstory). He never cares about the boobs of adult women, only his classmates. We are hinted he tried to sexually harass or grope a classmate more than once with this text: And he never got to feel up one girl either, so his fascination with girls was a total waste of time as well.

Yeah, this gross behavior made it really hard for me to like him at all. The book further delves into Jeron's latent male toxicity when he is at the orphanage crying when he is alone. Never agrees to become close with anyone else and open up. But don't worry, he is constantly looking at the boobs of his female clients. Very professional. I am surprised he didn't grope the waitress Linda when he visited Ted's tavern.

Save for Jeron's off scene mom who never gets any screentime or his teachers, all of the women within the first 8% of the book are catalogued in 3 categories: waifu AI, woman that likes it when men stare at her boobs or prostitutes. I am still unsure where Linda falls into this system. Everyone seems to agree she is is not smart according to this text: Linda couldn't hold a conversation with a three year old, not because she's an idiot or something, but she just doesn't like people.

Aaaaannnnndddd, oookaaaaaaaayyyyyy.

Before I wrap up, we are presented to the new female coprotagonist Lilli who clearly belongs to the subdivision of women that enjoy it when men look at her boobs. She thinks it is fair game for men to grope women based on what the woman is wearing on a given day. Okaaaaaay... Not my cup of tea, but I guess it makes sense in the story because Lilli uses her physical charms to manipulate men. I found it highly unbelievable she was capable of magically rewiring a bunch of different colored cables in a customized haphazrdly built dashboard of a ship in 30 seconds without looking at the cabling master plan. In the real world, different colored network cables are usually the same and fully interchangeable. This means you need to offer a diagram logbook of the wiring design so that other IT workers know what each cable does. If not, it is just a question of guessing until the desired effect happens.

Well, I guess I covered my thoughts of this book so far. There are certainly readers that don't mind the issues I had. But among having a hard time concentrating on the plot by so much jumping around, I didn't like the protagonist at all. So, this book is a cut for me."