Rusty's Reviews > 7th Sigma

Goddammit. I was sure I was going to flip out over this book before I started. That’s the second time this has happened to me this year, where I have a book set aside to enjoy as my absolute favorite book of all time candidate. It’s hard to do that with a book I’ve never read, but I knew that Stephen Gould has written some pretty adored books, I know my son read Jumper and thought it was pretty great, and I heard Mr Gould in an interview a few times and thought he made a pretty good sell on whatever book he happened to be talking about at the time.

I remember this one from an interview with him a few years ago. It’s been on my watch list for a long time. I found it used last summer and picked it up for a dollar or two and have had it hidden away on my to-be-read pile since then. And I’d been waiting for that perfect time to sit back and enjoy.

So when my wife went away last week I thought it was time to dive into something new, but something that I was really looking forward to. I wanted to get caught up in something the way I did with the Dresden Files books when I read them several years ago. I’ve probably talked about them before in one of my reviews, but that series saved me during a pretty awful time in my life. I poured through every book in that series (at the time) in about a week. It was, seriously, better than any therapy I could have imagined.

I’m not going through any personal drama now, but I was alone, and kinda bored. And thought it would be great to get lost in some made up world for a while. No humans were around to ask me to take out the trash, or walk the dog, or ask me to watch a lifetime movie about a young divorcee that learns about the true meaning of Christmas. Nope, just me and whatever book I feel like reading. Sweet.

This one, it’s about a young boy that was living as a runaway in the American West in an alternate earth where some small outbreak of autonomous insect-sized robots have gone nutty, devouring every significant source of metal they can find. If you happen to have metal tooth fillings and you’re in the wrong place, a swarm of those little buggers will eat all that metal up. Oh and if happen to be unlucky enough to have that metal filled tooth in your mouth, then those little buggers will probably eat you up too. Same goes for a pacemaker, or jewelry, or a belt buckle, or zipper, or the pipes below your house, or the mine in the hills…. And those robots reproduce almost continually. They’re a swarm that has taken over a giant chunk of the American West.

Like I said, this young boy lives amongst the robobugs. He isn’t the only one. It’s not hard to do as long as you are willing to live without electronics or any other modern convenience you might be able to think of. There are thousands of folks living this way, clustered in small towns and all avoiding those bugs the best they can.

Great premise. I’m sold on it all over again.

Except for the problem is that this novel isn’t about any of that stuff. It’s about a teenage ninja cowboy. Almost like a Jedi, I guess. He wanders the deserts of the American West solving crimes and ninja kicking badguys.

That, in of itself, is a-okay with me too. Except that almost every chapter is a standalone adventure. Young boy ninja kicks horse thief, Young boy ninja kicks Donkey abuser, Young boy ninja kicks meth dealers… this is wish fulfillment of the highest order. There is no plot to this book at all, that I could discern. Just adventure after adventure of our wunderkind kicking ass, ninja style, and dispensing the wisdom of the ancients… also communing with animals and understanding the robobugs on a gut level.

Only once does our young hero face any real danger, and I’m flummoxed to no end as to how this thing got produced as it was. I’ve come across a number of books like this in the past year or two. Just characters that wander about being superhuman.

In fact, it reminds me of that John Ringo book I reviewed a few months ago. That one was about a teenage girl that could do almost anything. While I hated that one with some all-time epic hatred, this book is actually readable. Gould writes readable prose, and by readable, I mean silky smooth, my eyes just glide over the page, soaking in each word effortlessly, and he’s got a million dollar premise to tell his stories in.

I just wish he chose to tell an interesting story.

If I could sum up my frustration in an understandable way, I guess it would be like having finding out Michael Jordan is going to be at the mall. You rush out to the mall to see him, because, you know, he’s one of the greatest basketball players of all time, and you find out that he just wants to sell you his twelve-step course on how to get rich with real estate.

That is what this book is to me, Michael Jordan selling real estate. You think at first, Ohmygod. It’sMichaelJordan.He’sthemostamazingbasketballplayereverandhe’stalkingtome, but slowly, you realize he’s just some old dude trying to steal your money with some real estate scam.