Book review: Futurelove by Summer Devon
Mar. 7th, 2006 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIf you can't tell by the title already, Futurelove is another Ellora's Cave special. As stories go, however, it was a lot better than the execrable Nyssa's Guardian. It's a time-travel story (which I normally loathe) and it rips its story straight out of the 1960s TV show, Time Tunnel.
At its core, the idea is simple: in 2300, time travel becomes possible, if energy-intensive. Human beings have been co-opted into a kind of hive-mind, and once in a while an operative is sent back in time because... actually, it's never quite clear why people are sent back in time, other than that they've been told by historical events that that's what they're supposed to do. Anyway, despite everyone being on a Brave New World/THX-1138 regimen of drugs to keep them sterile and emotionally uniform, there's a rebellion afoot to shut down time travel and "free the past."
We're introduced to Collins, our hero, a naive total geek who's anxiously looking forward to his first mission. He's memorized the assignment and has started taking a different collection of drugs to cause his hair to sprout and body odor to manifest. We get to see things from Collins's point of view, and he's embarrassed to be so "savage". He's talking to his mentor about his discomfort when rebels attempt to take the time machine. In the ensuing battle, his mentor dials in the coordinates and shoves Collins in.
Back in our time, our hero Collins tries to accomplish his mission, but he's sent back a day early. Bruised and bleeding from the battle he meets Candy, our heroine, who takes him home and cleans him up. And now we get Candy's view of Collins: He's the product of three centuries of engineering, a six-foot-five muscular Greek God who knows absolutely nothing about... anything. Oh, and despite its insignificance to the hive, Collin's dick is off the standard "large, but not too large" shelf.
I quickly figured out what Devon was writing: a tables-turned story. Many "Romance-with-a-capital-R" stories are about an experienced rake becoming enraptured by an inexperienced young woman and pledging himself to her even as he teaches her the art of love. Candy is no rake, but she's not inexperienced. Candy gets to teach Collins how to "do it," and Collins has to overcome the conditioning of his former environment, egged on by hormones he's never felt before. In that respect, the story actually works very well.
Devon tries too hard with her scifi. In one scene Collins is entranced by the idea that he gets to drink water, and later talks about the "forbidden food," sugar-- whereas these would be the easiest things for a hive to produce since they're so simple molecules and, as foodstuffs go, provide the best outcome for the least energy input. His reaction to meat is much more believable.
And the characters are reasonably believable. I liked both of them at first. By the end of the book, however, two things happen: Collins "graduates" to being the aggressor in bed-- and we lose all of his inner life. His charming geekiness is replaced with a self-assurance that he has everything he needs to survive in our century, when all he's demonstrated is his cocksmanship and martial arts abilities.
Devon floats a number of plot balloons and never quite recovers some of them. We never get a picture of hive or its masters, we never get a sense for why Candy believes his story even as she drags it out of him (the only "futuristic" thing he has is the smartcloth outfit he's wearing, and Devon actually handles that quite well) without any strong evidence. There are a couple of minor subplots about Candy's former boyfriend, and her name, both of which are introduced and then dropped hard. If this were a Journal Entry, I'd just keep writing, morphing the romantic introduction into a soap opera of further twists and turns, and trying to pick up the plot threads as I went along. But there's no indication that Devon is going to do that.
Still, as a thin tissue around which to wrap woman-as-aggressor love scenes, it works reasonably well, and the writing isn't nearly as embarrassingly full of clank and clatter as the last example.
At its core, the idea is simple: in 2300, time travel becomes possible, if energy-intensive. Human beings have been co-opted into a kind of hive-mind, and once in a while an operative is sent back in time because... actually, it's never quite clear why people are sent back in time, other than that they've been told by historical events that that's what they're supposed to do. Anyway, despite everyone being on a Brave New World/THX-1138 regimen of drugs to keep them sterile and emotionally uniform, there's a rebellion afoot to shut down time travel and "free the past."
We're introduced to Collins, our hero, a naive total geek who's anxiously looking forward to his first mission. He's memorized the assignment and has started taking a different collection of drugs to cause his hair to sprout and body odor to manifest. We get to see things from Collins's point of view, and he's embarrassed to be so "savage". He's talking to his mentor about his discomfort when rebels attempt to take the time machine. In the ensuing battle, his mentor dials in the coordinates and shoves Collins in.
Back in our time, our hero Collins tries to accomplish his mission, but he's sent back a day early. Bruised and bleeding from the battle he meets Candy, our heroine, who takes him home and cleans him up. And now we get Candy's view of Collins: He's the product of three centuries of engineering, a six-foot-five muscular Greek God who knows absolutely nothing about... anything. Oh, and despite its insignificance to the hive, Collin's dick is off the standard "large, but not too large" shelf.
I quickly figured out what Devon was writing: a tables-turned story. Many "Romance-with-a-capital-R" stories are about an experienced rake becoming enraptured by an inexperienced young woman and pledging himself to her even as he teaches her the art of love. Candy is no rake, but she's not inexperienced. Candy gets to teach Collins how to "do it," and Collins has to overcome the conditioning of his former environment, egged on by hormones he's never felt before. In that respect, the story actually works very well.
Devon tries too hard with her scifi. In one scene Collins is entranced by the idea that he gets to drink water, and later talks about the "forbidden food," sugar-- whereas these would be the easiest things for a hive to produce since they're so simple molecules and, as foodstuffs go, provide the best outcome for the least energy input. His reaction to meat is much more believable.
And the characters are reasonably believable. I liked both of them at first. By the end of the book, however, two things happen: Collins "graduates" to being the aggressor in bed-- and we lose all of his inner life. His charming geekiness is replaced with a self-assurance that he has everything he needs to survive in our century, when all he's demonstrated is his cocksmanship and martial arts abilities.
Devon floats a number of plot balloons and never quite recovers some of them. We never get a picture of hive or its masters, we never get a sense for why Candy believes his story even as she drags it out of him (the only "futuristic" thing he has is the smartcloth outfit he's wearing, and Devon actually handles that quite well) without any strong evidence. There are a couple of minor subplots about Candy's former boyfriend, and her name, both of which are introduced and then dropped hard. If this were a Journal Entry, I'd just keep writing, morphing the romantic introduction into a soap opera of further twists and turns, and trying to pick up the plot threads as I went along. But there's no indication that Devon is going to do that.
Still, as a thin tissue around which to wrap woman-as-aggressor love scenes, it works reasonably well, and the writing isn't nearly as embarrassingly full of clank and clatter as the last example.
