Customer Reviews

Quasar 169: Silver Sphere Sightings

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I read a lot of scifi, so I'm always looking for something new and I think I've found something interesting with Quasar 169: Silver Sphere Sightings. It has three stories in it which begin the ongoing story of Alex Roglitz, a sort of X-Files like cop, who gets saddled with a new partner called a Quasar. She's the weird thing about the stories because she's basically a person's dream-self set free in our world. She can fly and walk through walls and do all the things people can do in their dreams. She looks 14, though, but Alex knows she's older but not how old, and he starts to think maybe he's got a crush on her. Anyway, in the first story he meets up with her and they have to solve a weird case where this alien kid is supposed to've raped and killed an earth woman, but he has no memory of it. Alex takes him in, but then the dead woman shows up to post bail for him! Alex finds her body is still at the morgue, but the fingerprints of the woman who did bail match! It's a pretty strange story, but it moves fast, and E.D. (author) is great with wit and dialogue, but there's a lot of cussing in it, so I wouldn't recommend it for kids. In the second story there are these weird people trying to make their own Quasars like Amanda (Alex's partner) and they lure Alex to their secret lab so they can turn him into one, to! He doesn't have Amanda with him, but she gets summoned accidentally and then it's a race against time as the scientists find out Alex isn't quite wired the same as you and me. E.D. can write some really powerful, surreal lines surrounding all the bad things that have happened to Alex over the years and how he's being pushed slowly toward insanity. In just a few words, he conveys a lot and keeps the story brisk. In the last story Alex is "possesed" by the same aliens that abducted his mother from right in front of him when he was little. There's a lot of creativity here as Alex goes over the edge and has hallucinations and weird dreams, and the writing in this one reminds me a little bit of Stephen King. Sometimes the last two stories are a little hard to follow because of all the back and forth going on between reality and fantasy, but if you like surreal stuff along the lines of Lovecraft or Phil Dick, then this author's work seems like a lot of fun. Overall, I've read better stuff, this guy's no master, but his ideas are unique, he has a really vivid imagination, the dialogue is very realistic as well as the way the characters react to all the weird things that keep happening to them, and there are times I laughed out loud. This is supposed to be the first in a series of books about Alex and Amanda and as long as the quality stays the same or better, then I hope there will be a lot more! We need more scifi series without the conventional spaceships or too much medievel-type fantasy thrown in. E.D. delivers!

What I most appreciate about the people who've read my Quasar stories is the recurring comment, "I've never read anything quite like this before." I've read quite a bit of sci-fi, and I haven't come across anything similar either-an achievement I'm quite proud of. It's about a policing agency for space aliens in New York City, but it's not Men In Black. It's about technology that can turn your nightly dreams into reality, but it isn't Dreamscape. It's about a nearing-forty guy falling for a girl less than half his age, and it isn't Lolita! One story couldn't contain all the complexities of hero Alex Roglitz and his quest to learn what happened when his mother was abducted by Silver Sphere aliens when he was only a child or how that single event changed his life forever in the most twisted and disturbing ways. Follow a man as he delves deep within his own psyche, searching his soul-if he can even find and identify it-in a dream-like world where aliens lurk in many guises and every lie contains a hint of truth and the clues to help regain his sanity. Laugh, squirm, get turned on by Silver Sphere Sightings. It ain't the X-Files, either, but you're on the right track...