Reviewed by Mark Steadman
The Universe of Lost Messages
The Charismites Book 2
By Janet Stinson
Dragon Moon Press
May 2024, 404 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-77400-062-5
The new book by Janet Stilson The Universe of Lost Messages tells the story of a group of people called “Charismites”. Charismites, as Stilson laboriously explains have almost supernatural powers of charisma. The plot follows a conspiracy by an organisation called the Fist seeking to harness their charm for nefarious ends. The mad storyline twists and turns so much that Stilson feels the need to explicate every detail. Take this passage describing an actress:
Nobody would miss diving into Nuhope’s metaverse theatres to watch any show she was in. Nuhorpe made so much money off Izz. No other performer came close to attracting the kind of revenue she did, even though a lot of them had massive followings.
She’s used three sentences there to say the same thing thrice. Other times she sees hell bent on Alan Partridge-esque metaphors:
It was weird, how the bad opinions that we’d always felt about each other had exploded into something so different in that dream. In real life, we were like two magnets that someone had tried to connect at the wrong ends.
Gosh I mean that must be awful, I mean just imagine being like a magnet connected at the wrong end, it just doesn’t bear thinking about. Decidedly not helping to shed light on the convoluted plot is the overwrought detail or technical language generously employed. Even the most ardent of science fiction fans must struggle with this:
I was working on the flubber. It’s this material with nano-scale macromolecular porosity that would make Diana’s facial expressions seem really human.
If this is aimed at the young adult market then what are they going to make of a description like that. Try picturing the character Sosh from the following passage in your head:
Not to be outdone, Sosh was wearing an evening gown with holographic fabric in a heavenly lapis lazuli blue design shot through with veins of white and gold.
Isn’t that a touch over-worded? About half the time the dialogue crawls along with condescending prose like this:
His most obsessive fan could recite every line of his screen appearances backwards they’d watched them so much . He was just about the first charismite ever created. It wasn’t a natural gift. He was cranked up on this substance called the juice. It was a chemical concoction that amplified his human levels of charm way off the spectrum of what was normally possible.
Determined, it seems, to make sure nobody is lost by the science fiction insanity going on. Stilson makes the mistake of writing too slowly. When the plot crawls along as it does it actually makes it harder to follow. A novel should bounce along at a certain clip. Each sentence imparting different and more information than the last. Take this passage:
“No it’s a hoax plain and simple”
“Like I reported before?”
“Precisely”
Patter like this just insults the reader. About nine of the 12 of those words were unnecessary. After you’ve read it you have the feeling that you must have missed something, for how can so many words mean so little. Thus you feel like reading the whole book twice, not sure why you’re not understanding what’s going on.
The Universe of Lost Messages per contra bulges at the seams with weird constructions or cliches:
“It ain’t like mastering inorganic chemistry”,“That wasn’t the first explosion that ripped my mind to pieces.”
Lucious told people to “Love everybody you can and pray for the rest.” People said that line for years and became kinder.
You get the idea, there’s a lot that could’ve been edited out.
About the reviewer: Mark Steadman writes book reviews and articles freelance. Before taking up writing he studied philosophy at Kings college London before working as a teacher. He now writes full-time.