Crossover

Crossover
Joel Shepherd
Pyr Books

Crossover is the first book in the Cassandra Kresnov series, by Pyr author, Joel Shepherd. Even living in the UK, the number of good things I've heard about this new spec fic imprint is phenomenal! So it was with great pleasure that I dived into, from all accounts, a brilliant book...

Cassandra Kresnov -- Cassy -- is a an artificial human, created to fight for the League in the interstellar war between them and the larger Federation. She's a GI. She's not entirely like the others, though: she still has her ultra-strong body (nigh indestructible) but, as an experimental design, she has been given very high intelligence, with a brain based on that of a human...

Will her developed conscience be able to countenance the horrors of war, and if she flees, will she be able to survive hidden amongst humanity?

If I was somebody reading this review, I think that my little synopsis above would have put me off this book. It sounds just a little too much like "hard sci-fi" for my taste -- filled with techno-babble and God only knows what else. Scary! Must avoid! While I am indeed not massively keen on hard sci-fi, my fears about SF nearly always tend to be ill founded. One of things I've discovered since blogging is to give things a chance. I am extremely glad I gave Crossover the chance it deserved!

Not a short book (457 pages), Joel Shepherd has a short, snappy writing style which makes the story always seem to be hurtling along at the speed of a very angry thing running very fast indeed.

In a book filled with action and drama, Joel Shepherd still managed to inject humour into situations at just the right moments, and the dialogue, particularly when Cassy and Vanessa (a senior law enforcer with whom Cassy is later a member of her team) are involved, is witty and sharp. Anyone who quotes Oscar Wilde is OK in my book, be they "organic" or "artificial" -- and in Joel Shepherd's book, Cassy is more than OK: she's GI! (See what I did there? Wasn't it lame?) I really enjoyed the way Shepherd developed Cassy's character, particular as regards to her interactions with humans. All the characters were fleshed out well, actually, and it was great to read a book with a wide ethnic diversity -- characters that were actually different! I suppose in a book that does, essentially, explore what it means to be human, you can't have a single stereotypical race hogging all the lines!

I'll definitely be looking forward to reading the further two volumes in this series, though I do think that if you were so inclined, Crossover could be read as a stand-alone novel, with a nice conclusion and a sense of finality -- no massive cliffhangers, basically! It will be interesting to see what waits in store for Cassy and company next time around, and Breakaway (Book 2) is certainly on my must-read list. 9 out of 10. It will be interesting to see if any book from Pyr is the first to reach the hallowed 10/10!

For more info:

Amazon UK
Amazon US