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bonzabar's review
4.0
A solid, well written cyberpunk noir thriller. I found the ending to be both surprising and thought provoking. I would gladly recommend this book.
scruffymorris's review
3.0
Shadow of a dead star is a novel which has elements of crime, cyberpunk, horror and science fiction. Unfortunately it falls back on a lot of clichés from all of these genres.
The characters and plot are all very typical of a detective noir story. The central character Agent Walken is a tough man who has an unshakeable moral code and an ugly past. He predictably finds himself caught in a conspiracy set up by powers larger than he is. We also have familiar characters such as the police chief, the journalist, the gang boss and the head of a corporation all who have questionable motives.
The setting of the story is Seattle, 2078. It’s a very familiar Blade Runner type dystopian future where technology has gotten out of control and corporations hold all the real power. Despite it being quite a familiar environment Michael Shean does a very good job of bringing it all to life. Throughout the book we see people, who have been turned into mindless drones and sex toys and corpses that have been mutilated by technology. The horror of it all is described in vivid detail and is actually very well written.
It’s not a bad book it’s just that some more original characters and a less predictable plot would have gone a long way. To be fair the ending did surprise me as some pretty big science fiction ideas are introduced, but again these ideas were conveyed in a very long monologue typical of detective noir. The ideas are good though so the next book in the series shows a lot of promise. I don’t think I’ll be reading it though since Shadow of a Dead Star was a flawed novel.
For more of my reviews please visit http://www.scruffyfiction.co.uk
The characters and plot are all very typical of a detective noir story. The central character Agent Walken is a tough man who has an unshakeable moral code and an ugly past. He predictably finds himself caught in a conspiracy set up by powers larger than he is. We also have familiar characters such as the police chief, the journalist, the gang boss and the head of a corporation all who have questionable motives.
The setting of the story is Seattle, 2078. It’s a very familiar Blade Runner type dystopian future where technology has gotten out of control and corporations hold all the real power. Despite it being quite a familiar environment Michael Shean does a very good job of bringing it all to life. Throughout the book we see people, who have been turned into mindless drones and sex toys and corpses that have been mutilated by technology. The horror of it all is described in vivid detail and is actually very well written.
It’s not a bad book it’s just that some more original characters and a less predictable plot would have gone a long way. To be fair the ending did surprise me as some pretty big science fiction ideas are introduced, but again these ideas were conveyed in a very long monologue typical of detective noir. The ideas are good though so the next book in the series shows a lot of promise. I don’t think I’ll be reading it though since Shadow of a Dead Star was a flawed novel.
For more of my reviews please visit http://www.scruffyfiction.co.uk
cyberhuman's review
4.0
Mild spoiler alert!
Shadow of a Dead Star is a futuristic detective story, set in a world where technological enhancements to the human body and mind have become commonplace, at least in certain portions of humanity: cops (legally) and criminals (illegally). The main character is, interestingly, an unenhanced cop, working in the good old way by intuition. And boy, does he get himself into a fix! Not just a single fix, but a rapidly developing sequence, each time with higher stakes.
Indeed, rather than being a traditional detective tale about a single case that gets solved toward the end, this story is divided into a successive ladder of cases, each, when resolved, leading toward the next one, and ultimately into an intriguing sequel. [spoiler]Starting with the ethical issues of modified some unfortunate girls' brains to turn them into highly lucrative sex slaves, the story leads on to military applications, to zombies (yes, really!), to aliens.[/spoiler] As a result, the ending lacks the resolution clarity, leaving too many loose ends flapping in the wind, and you don't get to appreciate the relevance of the book's title until the very end. But the perspective that opens then! Considering that several cases actually end up resolved (and quite dramatically), it may be a decent trade-off.
With a well imagined future, good characterization, and fast pace, this book will satisfy many a science fiction fan.
Shadow of a Dead Star is a futuristic detective story, set in a world where technological enhancements to the human body and mind have become commonplace, at least in certain portions of humanity: cops (legally) and criminals (illegally). The main character is, interestingly, an unenhanced cop, working in the good old way by intuition. And boy, does he get himself into a fix! Not just a single fix, but a rapidly developing sequence, each time with higher stakes.
Indeed, rather than being a traditional detective tale about a single case that gets solved toward the end, this story is divided into a successive ladder of cases, each, when resolved, leading toward the next one, and ultimately into an intriguing sequel. [spoiler]Starting with the ethical issues of modified some unfortunate girls' brains to turn them into highly lucrative sex slaves, the story leads on to military applications, to zombies (yes, really!), to aliens.[/spoiler] As a result, the ending lacks the resolution clarity, leaving too many loose ends flapping in the wind, and you don't get to appreciate the relevance of the book's title until the very end. But the perspective that opens then! Considering that several cases actually end up resolved (and quite dramatically), it may be a decent trade-off.
With a well imagined future, good characterization, and fast pace, this book will satisfy many a science fiction fan.
wilovebooks's review against another edition
5.0
This is dark, gritty, futuristic sci-fi. A fast-paced detective thriller set in a dystopian future. The scary part is that it seems so plausible. The story just pulled me in so that I could not stop reading and I was completely blown away by the ending. Can't wait to see what direction the next book takes.
dtaylorbooks's review against another edition
How did we end up here?
This was part of my Curiosity Quills intake that I got about a year ago. It’s a bit outside of my normal reading repertoire but it sounds dark and gritty and something that I would like anyway so I decided to go for it. The worst that I could happen was that I didn’t like it.
DNF
And really I stopped reading it not because I didn’t like what I was reading but I just wasn’t connecting with it. I got a little more than fifty pages in and I found myself skimming most of it. I found the writing to be a bit more concerned with technicalities of weapons, maneuvers and detail-oriented world-building than building me a good story with characters that I gave a damn about. The shock factor of this sexually deviant deviant technology-driven world where little girls are zombified with computers and turned into sex slaves isn’t a shocking enough element alone to keep me interested. It’s not really that far-fetched for this future story. There was nothing about Walken that hooked me into his character; I knew nothing about him except he was some kind of federal agent and the sex trade sickened him. Not enough. I knew more about the schematics of his ceramic (lost me on that one) gun than I did about him. I don’t want to connect with an inanimate object; I want to connect with a person and I wasn’t getting it.
The writing was pretty decent and I didn’t have any issues with the pace of the story. I just felt the focus was off and I was getting too much of things I didn’t care about and not enough of the stuff I should have.
This was part of my Curiosity Quills intake that I got about a year ago. It’s a bit outside of my normal reading repertoire but it sounds dark and gritty and something that I would like anyway so I decided to go for it. The worst that I could happen was that I didn’t like it.
DNF
And really I stopped reading it not because I didn’t like what I was reading but I just wasn’t connecting with it. I got a little more than fifty pages in and I found myself skimming most of it. I found the writing to be a bit more concerned with technicalities of weapons, maneuvers and detail-oriented world-building than building me a good story with characters that I gave a damn about. The shock factor of this sexually deviant deviant technology-driven world where little girls are zombified with computers and turned into sex slaves isn’t a shocking enough element alone to keep me interested. It’s not really that far-fetched for this future story. There was nothing about Walken that hooked me into his character; I knew nothing about him except he was some kind of federal agent and the sex trade sickened him. Not enough. I knew more about the schematics of his ceramic (lost me on that one) gun than I did about him. I don’t want to connect with an inanimate object; I want to connect with a person and I wasn’t getting it.
The writing was pretty decent and I didn’t have any issues with the pace of the story. I just felt the focus was off and I was getting too much of things I didn’t care about and not enough of the stuff I should have.
jhereg707's review against another edition
3.0
Started with some ... interesting punctuation and grammatical errors. The story felt disjointed and rushed but entertaining. A fast read for those that can sit and read for a bit.
bsparx's review
4.0
You can find this review, along with others, at Bookish Ardour.
Shadow of A Dead Star is one of those stories I have to let simmer in my subconscious for a while even when I feel a need to speak about it straight away. There’s plenty of reasons for such a reaction, but I think this time for me it’s more about direction and how many unsettling visions were crammed into it.
I use the term crammed for there was a lot of disturbing images present, the idea of the sex dolls made from children being only one of them, but it didn’t feel as if I was being bombarded with upsetting subjects to the point of emotional overload. The story isn’t about ways to unsettle the reader at all. The input was more about questioning and filtering the after effects, much like when you watch a movie with intense scenes, but the story itself is not purposely making you cringe.
I found this to be an interesting narrative to read for me because I’m always in two minds about a couple of the genres it falls into, cyberpunk and crime. With cyberpunk I’m never sure if I’m actually going to like it even when I think I should, thanks to how much I love dystopia and technology messing with the mind, but there are other aspects I’m not sure about. Crime fiction is something I’m usually only won over with if it has a supernatural, or paranormal edge to it, or has something to do with serial killers.
The crime story didn’t interest me so much as the conspiracy behind it and the tantalising glimpses of humanity being taken over by another force. There’s something funky going on the whole way through the story and that is what held me. Don’t get me wrong, the crime concept is an interesting one and would definitely make a good crime story in itself, but there was a definite loss of focus in importance with that area when it came to Walken questioning everything.
When it comes to the cyberpunk side of things, I believe this is where I really appreciated the story, and I find myself wanting to read more in the genre because of it. There were components to the technological side of it which reminded me of awesome games (thanks to not reading genres like this in books) I have played and loved, like Mass Effect, and if a book is going to remind me of ME then I’m pretty much hooked by that alone. That’s not all it has going for it, but the point of my little digression was I’m now interested in discovering more cyberpunk because of Shadow of A Dead Star.
As for the characters, I don’t like Walken who is the main protagonist, but he is still readable. He has a purpose, there’s plenty of conflict and obstacles for him to encounter, so the story doesn’t lose out completely. And while I don’t like characters that say babe or baby often, I preferred one of the characters that showed up later on. It was when Walken went somewhere else that I realised this and at which point the momentum tapered off for me. The story appeared to take a different turn than expected, not necessarily a bad thing, but it felt as if the narrative was dividing into two stories. Due to being so close to the end when this occurred, the momentum and interest I had didn’t pick up again till right at the end.
And what an intriguing ending. Parts of it were somewhat predictable for me, but that may be thanks to my desire for a majority of stories to end a certain way, and yet I still loved the ending. It’s a definite cliffhanger and I’m so glad Shadow of A Dead Star is the first in a trilogy. I believe I may also be more interested in the story to come compared to what I’ve read so far. I have been left perplexed about it and I have a definite need to read the next one.
I recommend Shadow of A Dead Star if you’re thinking of dipping your toes into cyberpunk, have a penchant for fiction with a conspiracy edge, or like your mind to be messed with without going too far.
Shadow of A Dead Star is one of those stories I have to let simmer in my subconscious for a while even when I feel a need to speak about it straight away. There’s plenty of reasons for such a reaction, but I think this time for me it’s more about direction and how many unsettling visions were crammed into it.
I use the term crammed for there was a lot of disturbing images present, the idea of the sex dolls made from children being only one of them, but it didn’t feel as if I was being bombarded with upsetting subjects to the point of emotional overload. The story isn’t about ways to unsettle the reader at all. The input was more about questioning and filtering the after effects, much like when you watch a movie with intense scenes, but the story itself is not purposely making you cringe.
I found this to be an interesting narrative to read for me because I’m always in two minds about a couple of the genres it falls into, cyberpunk and crime. With cyberpunk I’m never sure if I’m actually going to like it even when I think I should, thanks to how much I love dystopia and technology messing with the mind, but there are other aspects I’m not sure about. Crime fiction is something I’m usually only won over with if it has a supernatural, or paranormal edge to it, or has something to do with serial killers.
The crime story didn’t interest me so much as the conspiracy behind it and the tantalising glimpses of humanity being taken over by another force. There’s something funky going on the whole way through the story and that is what held me. Don’t get me wrong, the crime concept is an interesting one and would definitely make a good crime story in itself, but there was a definite loss of focus in importance with that area when it came to Walken questioning everything.
When it comes to the cyberpunk side of things, I believe this is where I really appreciated the story, and I find myself wanting to read more in the genre because of it. There were components to the technological side of it which reminded me of awesome games (thanks to not reading genres like this in books) I have played and loved, like Mass Effect, and if a book is going to remind me of ME then I’m pretty much hooked by that alone. That’s not all it has going for it, but the point of my little digression was I’m now interested in discovering more cyberpunk because of Shadow of A Dead Star.
As for the characters, I don’t like Walken who is the main protagonist, but he is still readable. He has a purpose, there’s plenty of conflict and obstacles for him to encounter, so the story doesn’t lose out completely. And while I don’t like characters that say babe or baby often, I preferred one of the characters that showed up later on. It was when Walken went somewhere else that I realised this and at which point the momentum tapered off for me. The story appeared to take a different turn than expected, not necessarily a bad thing, but it felt as if the narrative was dividing into two stories. Due to being so close to the end when this occurred, the momentum and interest I had didn’t pick up again till right at the end.
And what an intriguing ending. Parts of it were somewhat predictable for me, but that may be thanks to my desire for a majority of stories to end a certain way, and yet I still loved the ending. It’s a definite cliffhanger and I’m so glad Shadow of A Dead Star is the first in a trilogy. I believe I may also be more interested in the story to come compared to what I’ve read so far. I have been left perplexed about it and I have a definite need to read the next one.
I recommend Shadow of A Dead Star if you’re thinking of dipping your toes into cyberpunk, have a penchant for fiction with a conspiracy edge, or like your mind to be messed with without going too far.
whalleyrulz's review
4.0
Somewhere between the horrible Citizens United court case and realizing Google not only powered my search engine but also built my phone and browser, I stopped reading cyberpunk. It seemed irrelevant, really, to pick up books that were "what if the past tried to describe today" because they'd all skew more violent than reality. Cyberpunk was a genre, and I say was, that existed to point out if we don't watch out, we'll all be owned by corporations and kept under heel by militarized, private-interest police forces.
We didn't watch out. Sorry, Gibson, Dick, and Stephenson. Our bad.
Michael Shean's Shadow of a Dead Star shows we've still got some watching out to do. It is a corporate dystopic book written post-Google; it latches onto science fiction harder than earlier cyberpunk stories would, but it kind of has to. Which, unfortunately, means there's a bit of a learning curve at the start; a bit more infodumps than you'd usually read, a bit more information you have to chew. It's worth the work; break through that and you'll read a rich, dark, solid, dark, realistic, dark, well-planned view of The World That Might Be. It's not just a good story, it's a warning. That's wha...
oh, what did I say dark a lot? This book's dark.
The root of decent cyberpunk stories almost has to be in noir. A detective, or cop, or hacker, or journalist, should be investigating a dark crime that an interconnected series of shitheads are all tied up together to hide. Shadow follows Thomas Walken, an agent of an information agency, as he investigates some Princess Dolls - children who have been mindwiped, technologically modified, and sold as sex toys. That kind of dark.
It has all the trappings of a first novel - a protagonist who is always right, an awkward learning curve, a rush to the ending - but Shadow of a Dead Star succeeds where others have failed in building a real world full of believable characters following realistic motivations. It's also full of that kind of specifically weird imagery that I just love. Michael Shean didn't write a perfect novel with this, but he wrote a damn sight better than a lot of other people's firsts, and I'm definitely starting the sequel this week.
Final note: if you want a standalone book, don't read this. Thomas Walken's story ends here, all wrapped up. Wonderland's doesn't. At all. I can't, in good faith, recommend this to people who don't want to get into a series.
We didn't watch out. Sorry, Gibson, Dick, and Stephenson. Our bad.
Michael Shean's Shadow of a Dead Star shows we've still got some watching out to do. It is a corporate dystopic book written post-Google; it latches onto science fiction harder than earlier cyberpunk stories would, but it kind of has to. Which, unfortunately, means there's a bit of a learning curve at the start; a bit more infodumps than you'd usually read, a bit more information you have to chew. It's worth the work; break through that and you'll read a rich, dark, solid, dark, realistic, dark, well-planned view of The World That Might Be. It's not just a good story, it's a warning. That's wha...
oh, what did I say dark a lot? This book's dark.
The root of decent cyberpunk stories almost has to be in noir. A detective, or cop, or hacker, or journalist, should be investigating a dark crime that an interconnected series of shitheads are all tied up together to hide. Shadow follows Thomas Walken, an agent of an information agency, as he investigates some Princess Dolls - children who have been mindwiped, technologically modified, and sold as sex toys. That kind of dark.
It has all the trappings of a first novel - a protagonist who is always right, an awkward learning curve, a rush to the ending - but Shadow of a Dead Star succeeds where others have failed in building a real world full of believable characters following realistic motivations. It's also full of that kind of specifically weird imagery that I just love. Michael Shean didn't write a perfect novel with this, but he wrote a damn sight better than a lot of other people's firsts, and I'm definitely starting the sequel this week.
Final note: if you want a standalone book, don't read this. Thomas Walken's story ends here, all wrapped up. Wonderland's doesn't. At all. I can't, in good faith, recommend this to people who don't want to get into a series.
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