The Sword of Damocles.

While I've been using my Cover to Cover segment to spur myself back into reading, my goals run a little deeper than that. Short term, I want it to shock my reading habit back to life, which I have to say it's done beautifully. But long term? I want to use it to maintain that habit with a plethora of new and interesting titles coming at me each month. But while I enjoy the opportunity to pick up and check out titles I never would have touched otherwise, and have already discovered some fantastic authors and stories because of it, I don't want to rely on those twelve books a year alone. I want to expand, I want to get back into reading stuff that I personally would have picked up as well. Admittedly so far most of this has been other titles in the same series as, or from the author who wrote the last suggested book I covered, assuming it was good of course, but after I purchased Shift Amazon sent me an interesting email. Because I'd purchased from the sci-fi section of their store, they were offering me a selection of four titles for 99p each. Two of them looked mediocre, but I decided to pick up The Woodcutter and Damocles because their synopsis looked interesting, and at that price... How can you not?

I don't really have much to say about The Woodcutter. It sells itself as a noir re-imagining of fairy tales, but ultimately doesn't bring much atmosphere, character or original ideas to the table. It leans heavily on its fairy tale references, and doesn't really attempt to revel in film noir convention to mix it up a little. To be honest, if you want a pulp style murder mystery with fairy tales, go out and buy book one of Fables. It's far superior to The Woodcutter and you'll be introducing yourself to an utterly fantastic series of comics to boot.

Damocles on the other hand, is much more interesting. It tells the story of Meg, a linguist on a one way mission from Earth following the trail of an ancient message that extra-terrestrials seeded human DNA throughout the universe, and Loul, a weather analyst who finds his life turned upside down by the arrival of honest to goodness aliens on his home planet Didet. At it's heart, Damocles is a first contact novel, as the crew of the Damocles is forced to abandon ship and land on the planet surface without being anywhere near ready too. And the spine that holds it all upright is the interactions between Meg and Loul and how they bond and come to understand each other over the course of the story.

To tip my hat to the book, it does a really good job of dodging some clichés and shows a very different first contact from the typical Hollywood one. Rather than the military blazing in and locking the aliens so deep in an underground bunker they'll never see light again, and if they do it'll be the cold, unblinking LEDs above the dissection table, the sides managed to broker an uneasy truce and begin the long hard process of trying to communicate with each other. This is where the book shines, with a lot of thought put into how easy it is for misunderstandings to happen, but also for common ground to be shared. Language is displayed as a complex and necessary tool that we seriously take for granted, but at the same time even though two cultures could be entire solar systems apart, to the point they don't even sleep the same way, there are some ideas and gestures that transcend language.

I also must commend S.G. Redling for not linking Meg and Loul romantically by the end. They're incompatible aliens, both with love interests already (although I have to admit, most of the book I clean forgot Loul even had one she'd been shown and mentioned so little) but the bond between them was becoming so strong that I was seeing the 'And as her team departed, Meg stayed behind with Loul and had little hybrid babies and they all lived happily ever after' ending becoming more and more of a reality in my head. Thankfully that was dodged, and I can't help feel the two main characters bond is stronger for it.

But the problem is, beyond this interesting, more sedate and scientific first contact approach and the relationship of the main characters, there's not much else. This is really a book I wish I could have done a full Cover to Cover on, because while I like the detailed, meticulous look at two cultures colliding and trying to paper over the cracks with limited resources, and while I admire the author for choosing a different route than the humans trapped on a strange world, surrounded by hostile aliens and they have to escape or DIE! There really is nothing else of note.

The characters aren't very memorable. You have angry engineer, reasonable geologist, chisel chinned captain awesome, the pilot (who is gone most of the book, because, you know, the captain always goes down with their ship) and Loul's gaggle of mates that like I said above, completely slipped my mind the moment they slipped off the page and only came back into it the moment they returned. In fact, I have this horrible feeling I'm forgetting one of the crew in this sum up right now. I think Meg's love interest is a reasonable scientist and there was a geologist too. Bloody hell, I only read this book a week ago and the fact I'm floundering so much should tell you everything you need to know. And to be clear, we're talking about the main crew here, Meg's deep space family who are there the entire book, not a bunch of side characters you only see once or twice.

But I could forgive that very easily, just like I could forgive the repetitive nature of the chapters as the same events are repeated scene for scene from the point of view of both Meg and Loul. What I can't forgive is the complete lack of drama or momentum. The initial spark that led to the humans being on the planet and collecting information, this ancient message about aliens having created humans and other humanoids across the universe, is nothing but fluff and scene setting.It's a means to an end, it gets Meg into position and continues to give her a grander reason to break the language barrier with Loul. Otherwise it's largely irrelevant and never becomes expanded on beyond 'Oh! We found humanoids, I guess it's true!' This is reflected best in the ending of the novel that just seems rather flat. Life goes on for Loul, except he gets a new job, and Meg just carries on rumbling through space with no sense of adventure or real excitement for what's to come.

Even if that concept was just window dressing, even the small chance something dramatic and exciting happening on the planet's surface is usually introduced suddenly and then short lived. Every time something threatened to upset the dynamic and take Loul away from Meg, or Meg away from Loul, and endanger everything they were working towards one of two things would happen. If the humans were being antsy or could solve the problem? Meg would talk to her crew and smooth things over. If the Didet were being antsy or could solve a problem? Loul would talk to the Generals in charge of the mission and smooth things over. Once I got wise to this pattern, even the sudden jolt of panic towards the end as it looked like the humans would be stuck on Didet forever was really inconsequential because it had become clear this was just a novel where things worked out, and even if they didn't work out at least on some level Meg and Loul would be happy. Considering I had no reason to care much about anyone else, their feelings didn't matter so much.

Of course, the fact that the greater context to their mission was kind of sketchy didn't help in this matter. It's clear the Damocles is on a one way trip, and if I'm reading the text correctly, there's no guarantee that even the information they're collecting will ever reach Earth. So stuck on Didet, carrying on their mission to get to the root of the ancient message, it didn't really matter. It seemed they were so far out that contact back with Earth was a shot in the deepest, blackest dark imaginable so you had to wonder what it was really all for.

Geez. I didn't really want to write this much on this book. I wasn't aiming to give a review or an impression, just to state a dilemma and ask a question. I enjoyed every little bit of watching Loul and Meg build up a rapport and I loved how infectiously it spread to the rest of the crew and the Didet workforce around them. It was fascinating and spot on, and I can't praise the way she took such a tight focus and showed the frustrations and pure joy of both characters as they tried to crack one another's habits, eating patterns, sleeping patterns, language barriers. I also love the fact that at one point, the characters need a boat. But the simple matter of asking for a boat comes completely undone when they realise the Didet have never been out to sea, so they have no concept of what a boat is let alone a word for it. All that stuff is wonderful, and I will praise S. G. Redling profusely for it.

However... Is that enough? Can you sacrifice everything else in the novel to produce one interesting and engaging take on a single aspect, that still manages to get it's legs snared in the repetition from chapter to chapter? I'm not entirely sure it is. I'm not sure if Damocles is part of a longer series, but looking back there are elements of it feeling like a piece of a novel rather than a coherent story. As much as enjoyed the parts that I did, for me they couldn't make up for what was missing, and considering how wonderful those parts were I can't help but wonder if I'm being unfair to it.

Looking at reviews for the novel just enforces the idea that I'm in some strange minority. This book is pulling a heck of a lot of five stars on Good Reads and rarely dips below a four in the individual reviews. Somebody even noted in a review that ' Someone complained about the lack of anything happening in the story. If your expecting big space battles, best you look elsewhere' and to be honest, I think that's a bit disparaging. Personally speaking, I never wanted a big space battle, I never wanted a space opera, and I never wanted that overly cliché 'escape from the alien bunker and get off this rock!' plot I described above. I just wanted something that upped the ante in a meaningful way, raised the stakes and kept them raised, maybe something that tore Loul and Meg apart, seriously disrupted their work, and see them work through it as characters and grow as a result. I'm not sure that's too much to ask, but as I noted I'm in a minority, and who knows? Perhaps just exceptionally nailing one thing is all you have to do.