'Smallworld: A Science Fiction Adventure Comedy' by Dominic Green

Official Summary:
Mount Ararat isn't your average extrasolar agrarian colony. A world the size of an asteroid yet having Earth-standard gravity, Mount Ararat plays host to a strangely confident family whose children are protected by the Devil, a mechanical killing machine, from such passers-by as Mr von Trapp (an escapee from a penal colony), the Made (manufactured humans being hunted by the State), and the super-rich clients of a gravitational health spa established at Mount Ararat's South Pole. But it soon transpires that the Devil is harbouring an ancient and deadly secret.

Review:
I expected great things from Smallworld. Something about the title, the cover, the description, billed as both a science fiction and a comedy smack in the title, and by a Hugo nominee no less - it felt like it could have been literary magic. At very least engaging. And at very, very least maybe deliver a chuckle or two.

So it's with a small amount of regret that I must report that Smallworld sucked.

From a character naming convention that was little more than a cheap way of telling the audience what the character should be like, rather than having the character filled out enough to come to that conclusion on your own all the way to scenes that were about as coherent as an SNL skit that falls apart somewhere in the middle and ends with the comics running around like chimps - suffices to say there was very little here that didn't make me feel like the idiot in the room missing the joke.

Who knows? Maybe I AM that idiot. Maybe this novel was absolutely brilliant and my plebian mind just couldn't wrap itself around the 'bone-dry satire' that at least one reviewer points to being this author's forte. By the mid-point I was actively forcing myself to the end because I thought it might all come together in some amazing ah-ha moment. Unfortunately, it ended in such a ludicrous, out-of-the-blue, anticlimactic way it made me wish time travel had been invented so I could go back and warn my past self to avoid this complete waste of time. 

Bottom Line: I usually love this stuff. I'm a Monty Python addict and have a near religious appreciation for author's like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett and I just don't get this one. But then again, maybe I just don't get it or maybe it was the unreasonable expectations I had walking into it. Either way, save yourself the time and walk by this title.

'Something from the Nightside' (Nightside #1) by Simon R. Green

I'm not entirely sure why I picked up the first Nightside book by Simon Green entitled 'Something from the Nightside'. I guess it was because someone, somewhere, told me that it was a lot like Jim Butcher's Dresden Files... and boy, they weren't kidding.

These two series seem to share a lot of the same DNA. Both narrators are lonely, orphaned souls and while John Taylor of the Nightside makes his living as a private investigator with a knack for finding things and Dresden is a professional wizard with a knack, for well, being a wizard, that distinction comes to mean very little in the end. Frankly speaking, if we were pitting them up against each other I'd favor Dresden - if only because he has a dry sense of humor that just cracks me up while Taylor is just, well, dry.

But, this isn't a boxing match and I'm not going to discredit the series because I don't enjoy it as much as another one. And while I will recommend that if you haven't spent time reading either of them Dresden Files is probably the better way to spend your time, I can't say that the Nightside isn't a worthy entry into the genre.

What I will say is this: 'Something from the Nightside' does have some pretty terrific moments: A restaurant that's literally stuck in the 1960's, holes in reality that can bounce you into another timeline and a small group of strong characters that are sure to develop well over the long-haul. The novel also had a surprising ending that served as a great introduction for some additional characters that make a compelling argument to pick up the next book.

So here's the bottom line: If you're all caught up with Dresden, love a good private detective novel (complete with damsel in distress), and don't mind your detectives with a fantasy flair, this one is for you.