Brandon Q. Morris

Morris, Brandon Q. The Disturbance. Translated by Sián Robertson. Kindle, 2021.
Brandon Morris writes novels with a hard-science edge that I like. I just wish he were a better novelist. Like others of his novels, The Disturbance has an intriguing premise. An astronomical anomaly is detected several light-days from Earth. It is headed our way, so a mission is launched to investigate. It is billed as the longest manned flight in history. But it isn’t. The crew is told that they are humans, but halfway to their target, they discover they are actually androids with no need to breathe or consume the food that has been packed for them. They feel betrayed and face an existential crisis about their mission. Sadly, character development, dialogue, and plotting are not done well enough to let the novel reach its potential. 3.5 stars.… (altro)

Morris. Brandon Q. The Enceladus Mission. Translated by Frank Dietz. Ice Moon No. 1. Hard-SF.com, 2017.
The Enceladus Mission is a rather straightforward hard science fiction story about a trip to the moons of Saturn that is quickly organized when evidence of biological life is detected there. Our protagonist, Martin, is an unlikely space explorer. He is a nerdish expert in fluid dynamics with some computer skills. But if you need to tunnel through a glacier, he is your guy. Set in the very near future, the story does a good job of describing what an international manned mission to the outer planets would be like twenty years from now. For example, there are two weak AIs on board, Siri and Watson, yes, that Siri and Watson. Both are frustrating to use. The book should be as entertaining as The Martian, but it isn’t, because prose style matters. Author Brandon Morris, who has a day job as a technical editor, writes prose so lifeless the book was an effort to finish. Some of its stylistic infelicity may be the result of its translation from German. 3 stars.… (altro)