ASF Book Review #4 'If I Wake'

Welcome to my first Australian Speculative Fiction book review of 2019. Honestly I'm rather excited about all the great books I'm planning to read this year, and there's so many exciting books on their way too.

The book I'm reviewing today is 'If I Wake' by Nikki Moyes. 'If I Wake' was her debut novel, released in 2016, and it's a really impressive debut. Here is the cover:

'If I Wake' is a powerful tale of a bullied teen in High School, Lucy. Her favourite class at school is History, but even there she isn't safe from being ridiculed and bullied by the other students. Lucy gets little sympathy or support from her stressed single mother, who herself is lonely and is fighting her own battles.

Lucy's only happy place in her dreams. Every year since the disaster of her eleventh birthday party, Lucy's dreams have taken her to the past. Each time a different location, a different century, but there is always one constant. Will. Actually, there are two constants. She only wakes up in the real world after she dies in her dreams. Despite the constant dangers in these dreams, because of her constant and unquestioned friendship with Will, her acceptance by his family, she much prefers the dreams over her lonely and friendless life.

Things go from bad to worse for Lucy when her mum gets a new boyfriend, Frank. Not only has the bullying at school got worse, but now she feels unwelcome in her own home. It seems like an unendurable eternity before her upcoming seventeenth birthday, her next chance to visit Will. Something has to break, and in the end, it's Lucy. Against all these struggles, without a friend in the world, her thought turn to suicide. But she doesn't want to leave without seeing Will one last time.

There's a lot of really good things about this book, it's powerful, it's accessible, it's written well. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of time travel stories where the characters go back in time. This is because they are very predictable, people meet Napoleon, kill Hitler, help some American president. blah blah blah. But this book handles it differently. Lucy finds different incarnations of Will; Wu, Walker, Villius, Wilhelm, William, Billy and Willis. They are regular people, struggling with the dangers of their time, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

As previously mentioned, each of Lucy's dreams ends when she dies in the dream. In one of those dreams, Lucy was killed when a military base was attacked in an air raid, and after that dream, Lucy became afraid of aeroplanes. I really liked that element, yet at the same time I was disappointed, because that hadn't happened before. In a previous dream, Lucy died after being bitten by a snake, but there wasn't any mention of her becoming afraid of snakes after that. It's only a minor criticism, but I would have liked it if she brought something like that back from each dream.

All in all though, I really enjoyed 'If I Wake' and thing it's a really good debut! I am looking forward to reading Moyes' upcoming novel 'The Destroyer' - hopefully that will be released soon!

To find out more about what Nikki is up to, find her on twitter @NikkiNovelist, or her FB author page here.

For other Aussie Spec Fic book reviews, have a look at the Aussie Speculative Fiction website.

A Brief History of my Favourite Authors Part 1

As an author, one thing that I get asked a lot it "who inspired you?" and I haven't been able to give a decent answer.

The assumption, of course, is that there's an author whose books left such an impression on me that I (at least on some level) was inspired to copy them.  Well not copy them, but do what they do.

And that's not how it went at all.  I have loved reading from a very young age.  Books, puzzles and model aeroplanes were my life as a kid.  I don't know when it dawned on me that writing books was an actual option.  But by then I'd read such amazing books that I was over-awed.  I knew that there was no way I could write anything nearly as good as my heroes, so why bother?

The first authors whose worlds I fell in love with were Asimov and Clarke.  I pretty much only read science fiction at that point.  After  staying up after my bedtime, reading them by torchlight under my covers in our Wandiligong home, Asimov's short stories and novels kept me up at night, on my bunk sometimes in fear, sometimes in wonder, but mostly giddy with the absolute genius behind it.  Despite a lot of his works being 'hard' sci-fi, it was written in such an accessible manner that even an eleven-year-old understood it.  The worlds he dreamt up, the future histories of humanity, the perfect mysteries, the bizarre and humorous, and the deep characters.  Any writer would consider themselves lucky to come up with one idea as good as any of his, and he had hundreds.  He is probably most famous for the Foundation series, but if I had to choose just one Asimov piece to take with me to a desert island, it would be Nightfall.  I usually try promote Australian authors here, but if you haven't read Nightfall, do yourself a favour.

Like Asimov, Clarke is an author who wrote hard sci-fi, and is probably most famous for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood's end.  The book by Arthur C. Clarke that to this day astounds me is Rendezvous with Rama.  I used to read it with my mum and  liked it so much that as soon as I finished reading it I went right back to the start.  It was so well written, the mystery, the fear, the adventure.  Having a great first line is amazing.  But ending a book with a final sentence that gives you that 'oh my God' moment, there's nothing better.  I'm not going to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't read it, because if you haven't, you're going to get yourself a copy now. 

  

Amongst others, Asimov and Clarke wrote pieces that challenged so many of my preconceptions of the world, the origin and nature of humanity, and the origin and nature of the universe.  And between them, what questions about the Earth, about the solar system, about the universe, did they not ask?  If I wanted to be a science-fiction writer, what could I do that they had not already done?  Not only were they sci-fi writers, but they were also scientists.  I knew I wasn't smart enough to be a scientist, and if you had to be a scientist to write science fiction, there wasn't much hope for me.  That's a idea that kinda stuck with me, that you have to be a scientist to write science fiction.  From a twelve-year-old's perspective, you think that makes sense. And you have to admit, there's a certain logic to it.  It's funny how having these little ideas in your head, unchallenged, almost too small to notice, can make a difference to someone's life.   

From Sci-Fi I turned to Fantasy, and the cycle continues.  Stay tuned for Part 2 when I talk about the fantasy books that changed my life.