Pagan Book Reviews

Synarchy
D.C.S.
SVT Publishing, 2009
216 pages

Note: This is a guest review by Bronwen Forbes, who graciously agreed to take on some of the extra review copies I had when I decided to go on semi-hiatus.

The second book on the stack that Lupa gave to me to guest review was Synarchy, a novel about the end of the world – the one currently scheduled for December 21, 2012.

As with most other fin de siècle tales, Synarchy features conspiracies, counter-conspiracies, power-hungry world leaders, intrigue, and super-advanced technology working to either bring about the end of the world or prevent the end of the world – all for the good of mankind. And this is only the first book in the series!

What makes Synarchy truly stand out from the other stories in the genre are an overabundance of appallingly amateur grammar and punctuation errors, frequent awkwardly constructed sentences, and too many character-building sentences that consist solely of a description of the person’s eye color. The fact that the author’s bio in the back of the book states that she is also working on a series of short stories based on the Synarchy 2012 txt roleplay game explains the abrupt descriptions, but does not excuse them.

A little digging on the Internet proved my suspicion that this is a self-published book – the basic grammar and punctuation issues alone speak of a total lack of an editor’s eye. I am aware that a lot of good books go unread by the general public because the established publishing companies don’t want to take a chance on an unknown author and/or niche market story. For those books and authors, I am all in favor of small press and self-publishing opportunities. I am also aware that a lot of stuff the established publishing companies reject they reject due to lack of unique story and basic writing skills.

That being said, the addition of ancient aliens (including one we referred to as the Norse God Loki) is a novel and interesting addition to the fin de siècle formula. Technogeeks may love this book and cope better with the Twitter-esque characters and odd sentence structure. Apparently this luddite curmudgeon reviewer is just not the target audience.

One and a half paws out of five.

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