Curtis C. ChenRecensioni

Fun and snappy. Feels like a first novel. I liked how the voice walked the line between sympathetic and sarcastically obnoxious. I'll read the next one.

My apologies to the authors for the low rating, which reflects mostly my difficulty with the unusual format. I was reading the e-book version, and clearly it's actually designed as a serial, with each portion of the story delivered separately, and loses something in book format.

That said, I found the setting complex and interesting: a post-war Tokyo divided into a Chinese-occupied half and a US peacekeeper regulated (?) half. The main characters are a Japanese police officer and a US peacekeeper working as partners to deal with a separate crime in each "episode." In the background arc are political machinations and underground conspiracies on all sides.

However, I found the episodic mysteries generally unsatisfying and the background arc confusing and left hanging at the end of the book to await the next "season" for further development. Again, I'm sorry I couldn't have enjoyed this one more because the premise is interesting.

A terrific book, with a surprising premise. Kangaroo, an unlikely hero, with unique skills, gets entangled into galactic politics.

Highly recommended for lovers of humorous science fiction.

Great fun, light-hearted science fiction. Kangaroo has a second round of adventures, more dangerous than the first. Not totally plausible but the ride is fun. The secondary characters are excellent and the plot has twists and turns.

Highly recommended.

The one and only reason it took me so long to read this book was the fact that it was a print copy and most nights it’s easier for me to read on my Kindle. I have a lot of print books languishing because of this, but this year I’m determined to work my way through them. Anyway, I loved this one and fortunately have the next one in the series ready to go!

This is a fun episodic story from Serial Box. It wasn't what I expected going in: for some reason I was expecting more sci-fi, less murder mystery. I still enjoyed it a lot, I just had to adjust my expectation of what I was going to get from each episode. Actually, that's probably my biggest issue with this as a series: I kept having to adjust my expectations. The first few episodes are very episodic, with few things other than the characters and general setting carrying over, with everything being neatly tied up by the end of the episode. And then there was a switch, and there were major plot points left unresolved between episodes. Ultimately, this left us with the final two episodes getting almost no resolution at all. In that, it reminds me of a TV series that ends on a "to be continued" plot so that you'll watch the next season. Now, I already knew there was going to be a Season Two for Ninth Step Station, since it was released before I started listening to this serial. However, based on the early episodes of this story, I didn't expect quite so little resolution at the end of Episode 10.

That said... I still really enjoyed the story. I feel it was well-written, with the different authors somehow managing to have a unified flow and feel to each story. It was very well crafted, and the audio version—narrated by the wonderful Emily Woo Zeller—was the perfect way to experience this serial.

Fun, imaginative sci-fi future with really good main characters. Listened to this as an audiobook on the Serialbox app.

Meh. Silly, not bad. Felt more like watching unrealistic kids cartoons on a Saturday than reading good science fiction.

Love this series

Very enjoyable story about two teams competing to build the AI that will create a habitat for humanity on Mars. It was more about the personalities of the team members, though, and less about the mechanics of creating the AI. If you're expecting much information about the actual robots, or the tech advances (as shown in the teams' equipment), or the reason behind the need to colonize Mars in the first place, you won't see much of that. But as a character study, it's really enjoyable. And it starts to touch on some of the other issues that come up when you look into creating a fully independent AI, too. I'm looking forward to Season 2. (I'm assuming there will be one, since this was definitely billed as Season 1.)

A serialized crime novel written by a team of authors, à la a TV series. Set in the near future, Japan has been invaded by China after being struck by a devastating earthquake; Tokyo is a divided city, with China controlling one half and US peacekeeping forces the other. In an effort to foster trust between the Japanese and the US forces, peacekeeper Emma Higashi is seconded to the Toyko police and partnered with detective Miyako Koreda.

Sound complicated? It is, but the writers never really manage to make the stakes seem as high as they should be. Each episode reads like a standard procedural, albeit with slightly futuristic trappings, and the political situation is given short shrift for most of the season. There's some interesting stuff going on, and Higashi and Koreda are well-written, but I'm not sure if it's enough to bring me back for season two.

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Title: Waypoint Kangaroo
Series: Kangaroo #1
Author: Curtis Chen
Rating: 1 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 321
Format: Digital Edition

My Thoughts:

Due to some of the subject matter, I will not be reading any more by this author.

★☆☆☆☆

James Bond meets Star Trek, with a lot of the downsides of both book series. Honestly, Waypoint Kangaroo reads more like a script to a movie that I would love, so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for that, but it falls short on a literary level.

The plot runs very smoothly. It features a classic interplanetary civil war in the backstory, a plausible futuristic society in a future where mankind has colonized this solar system, if no where else, it has a fun super-power that hasn't been covered extensively in comic books, but best of all it features non-existent technology that doesn't stray from the realms of possible.

Seriously, the technology is the coolest part of this book. Most of it revolves around cell phones, radios, and computers implanted in soldiers, spies, and veterans and it asks questions about how that will affect their lives. Kangaroo, the hero, is a fantastic twist on the technological questions asked because he has all that, plus the ability to open small portals to another dimension, called "the Pocket." (Hence, the name)

However cool the plot and the technology might be, it falls short on a literary level. Kangaroo could really be more compelling than the standard James Bond action-snarker. The prose seems weirdly spartan, which alone sets it apart from the science fiction classics.

I thought the first book of the series, "Waypoint Kangaroo" was an excellet first book. Curtis Chen returns to the same characters, in this very satisfying follow-up novel. Kangaroo (whose real name has yet to be reveled) is a reluctant agent for the US government, with a 'super-power". He can, by use of his mind, open up a portal into a 'pocket' universe, (hence his code name). A pretty handy ability when you're out in the field, as anything you need (tools, money, food, a troop of space marines) can be held in the pocket until you need them. The first book was full of big concents, like the attempted crash of a large spaceship into Mars, while this story, while still big, has more personal accounts in it. We learn more about Kangaroo (how he came to be an agent, what kind of training he's had, who is coworkers are). The same crackling wit displayed in the first novel survives, especially with Kangarro always making puns and references from 20th century Earth (which he knows from the library of that era films he grew up with) that nobody else (except for us of course) understands.

I highly recommend this work.

This book is a tasty genre casserole. It's a murder mystery spy adventure with a protagonist with a superpower in space. There's also some political intrigue and a bit of romance. I know this sounds like it couldn't possibly work, but it does. At least well enough. The superpower stretched my capacity for suspending disbelief a bit tight, but not to the breaking point. And the first person, present tense narrative is not something that normally appeals to me, but the story and the characters kept me interested throughout. I quite enjoyed the ride.

When I sat down to write this, there were only 13 reviews but they were all 5 stars! There's not much I can add to what's already been written except to add my applause to the rest.

Very entertaining. Never drags. I had to stop myself from flipping ahead to see what happens. Super, but bumbling spy, code named Kangaroo narrates the story. He never seems to take himself or his job too seriously, but for all he's supposed to be bumbling, he gets the job done. Saves the space ship and gets the girl (even though she didn't think she needed saving). When I finished I looked to the title pages to find Chen's other books. They're aren't any. The book goes up a notch in my estimation since it's a debut novel. Fine work.