The premise: ganked from BN.com: It is the polluted and gritty future, saved, sort of, by technofixes. Young skydiver Orr Sitka wants no more from life in future Alaska than he already has: a woman he loves and the chance to dive. When he makes a reckless, record-breaking jump that catapults him into celebrity, he’s courted by corporations that want to exploit his talent to make him a sports media star.

The dangerous jump that wins Orr infamy turns out to be a breaking point for his loving girlfriend, Dyce, who is wooed away by a promising job in the thriving underground city of Seattle, a world media center in a crumbling civilization. Separately, Orr and Dyce are sucked into nightmare lives that take a terrible toll on each of them. When Orr learns that Dyce has become addicted to virtual reality, controlled by an eccentric media billionaire and his decadent daughter, he does everything in his power to rescue her. But is Orr strong enough to get through to Dyce and break them both out of hell?

My Rating: 7 - Good Read

Anyone who was enamored and awed by Felix Baumgartner's Red Bull Stratos jump, let alone fans of skydiving in general, need to get their hands on this book. It's a quiet, futuristic fiction that manages to take so many little things and weave them into a believable, recognizable future. It's a character-driven novel that's complex as the world the characters live in, and if there's one flaw to the book, it's that the reader is never really sure what's going on and why until closer to the end of the book, when the stakes are revealed and all seems practically hopeless. It's a very good read, and one I'm glad I finally got around to. Also, Buckner lives in Tennessee, and I'm always happy to promote and support Tennessee authors in the genre, especially since there doesn't seem to be that many of them.

Of course, that's neither here nor there. It's a compelling read, and fans of the genre, readers who want something closer to home, something more believable than hard-edged military SF or eye-candy space opera, should definitely give this a shot.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. The full review may be found at my blog, and as always, comments and discussion are most welcome. Just click the link below to go directly to the full review!

REVIEW: M.M. Buckner's THE GRAVITY PILOT

Happy Birthday! ( )

"The Gravity Pilot" is an excellent Science Fiction novel with many layers. It's a love story (drawing loosely from the myth of Orpheus), a sports novel, and a dystopian tale. The main character, Orr, is an Alaskan skydiver who makes a record-breaking jump that catapults him to stardom. That same jump has caused him to lose his girlfriend, Dyce, who had asked him to choose between her and diving. Dyce leaves Orr and Alaska to take a job in subterranean Seattle, and with her departure, Orr loses a bit of himself. Dyce finds that the job of her dreams is more of a nightmare, and she becomes one of the countless people who are addicted to fully immersive simulated worlds.

Even in the future, in a world that has nearly been destroyed, people still love their sports stars and a father/daughter team are quick to jump on the chance to exploit the young skydiver. They use his talents to create more complex and addictive sim games, and the plot builds as Orr tries to save himself as well as Dyce.

Trying to explain any more of the plot than that would give away too much -- the story builds and plunges, dips and dives, and carries the reader on a path similar to some of the jumps that Orr makes. I definitely recommend it to Science Fiction fans. ( )