Jupiter Winds
The Jupiter Winds series, Book 1
C. J. Darlington
Mountainview Books, LLC
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Grey Alexander and her kid sister Rin have been scraping a living from the wilds of a land that used to be called America, ever since their parents disappeared on a hunting trip. They get by through selling contraband salvage - such as books printed before the conquest - on the black market... and their luck may have just run out. When Grey gets captured, she is brought before Commander Yurkutz, who demands to know the whereabouts of her mother and father. It turns out the elder Alexanders are not only alive, but fugitives on the planet Jupiter - which, despite official word, is perfectly habitable. Grey and Rin both find themselves involved in an interplanetary struggle for control of the cloud-shrouded world, a fight between the forces of Good and Evil itself.
REVIEW: This got many good reviews on Amazon, and it was on sale, so I picked it up. It started decently enough, with Grey and Rin as competent survivors in a future dystopia. I could even almost convince myself to swallow a habitable Jupiter for the sake of a decent story; I've read more extreme conceits, such as plays on the old idea of "aether" in space. Indeed, it can be fun to play with the impossible, if one has a story that supports it and knows it's playing - if the internal logic holds up, in other words. Unfortunately, that internal logic suddenly jumped down a massive black hole when the book revealed itself to be a fundamentalist Christian story with strong Creationist leanings. None of the reviews I read mentioned this. Suddenly, it wasn't just a storytelling conceit that Jupiter had land - one really was not supposed to know, let alone think about, the impossibility of a gas giant being basically a big Earth, complete with one G of gravity and breathable air. One wasn't supposed to question the secret plan of the society to which Grey's parents belonged, a sort of latter-day Noah cult... where Earth species are supposed to just slip right into an alien ecosystem (that looks suspiciously like Earth's, 'cause God was in a rut when creating the solar system I guess.) One was especially not supposed to question the idea that the good guys wanted to start fresh on Jupiter without interference from Mazdaar (suspiciously from the Middle East...wasn't the evil anti-Christian Middle Eastern civilization getting old hat in C. S. Lewis's day?) - yet Mazdaar has already gained a major foothold while the good guys are sitting around twiddling their thumbs with unlaunched ships until pushed by a crisis. What's the holdup, guys? It's a little late when the enemy has armed bases up and running and regular flights to the planet. Don't think, don't question, don't even look at the internal logic inconsistencies: this is a Lesson about Faith, not really a science fiction story.
Setting aside those issues, Grey and Rin aren't terrible characters, even if they do tend to be led around a little overmuch, and only really achieve successes when they give up and pray to the same god that let the Mazdaar overtake Earth until it's considered too evil for goodly folk to inhabit. (Then He graciously gives them a new world to repeat the same technological mistakes that are currently leading to our climate collapse... but that's another one of those internal logic things I suppose I wasn't supposed to question, 'cause God again.) It also made for a certain predictability in the storyline; I knew the main characters were blessedly protected, and I could peg the good guys and the traitors at first glance based on their faith or lack thereof, draining a lot of the tension. The experience was frustrating more than anything, because Gray and Rin and the initial setup could've carried a decent story without constantly having to drop to their knees in praise.
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