I recently finished reading the entire Oblivion Series by Joshua James and Daniel Young after picking it up in a free flash sale in early November, 2020.
My first take was these are comic books disguised as novels.
So I was torn: I liked elements of the books enough to finish all 1504 pages. At the same time, the books are riddled with persistent and avoidable flaws. Nearly every time I was in danger of becoming immersed in the story, one of them seemed to float by. All of this left me confused, a little annoyed and very conflicted.
On the strong side, it’s an interesting, layered plot which builds on standard space opera/alien-invasion themes with a couple of interesting twists. (Spoiler alert: humanity wins.) Inner battles in the face of attempted alien assimilation add some depth to otherwise boilerplate characters.
A few of the tropes get a little overdone—there is a pretty heavy-handed (although funny) alien deus ex machina which engendered some eye-rolling. And there’s plenty of shooting and spaceflight/space battles. The authors don’t take the story too seriously, which is probably for the better. And there are flashes of potential, like one of the best sentences I’ve read recently:
Armed with three flamethrowers and a map of the lunar sewer system, Sydal moved on.
Can an SF fan read that and not want to know more? I think not.
Weaknesses of the series unfortunately were remarkably consistent.
The worst offense: the authors sap vital nuances and drama out of the story by over-relying on telling us things from a detached point of view rather than narrating from the character’s point of view and letting the reader fill in the blanks. For example:
From Book 1 (Lost Mission): Saito stopped and looked up. A fireball erupted on one of the landings above. He felt his throat tighten. He knew the floor. He sprinted back up.
From Book 5 (Beyond Ruin): Ben ran towards the supply room exit. He was too nervous to look back and see if anything or anyone followed. All that mattered now was the mission, after his moral detour.
From Book 8 (Earth Arise): Clarissa didn’t know what to do, so all that was left was to improvise.
These should be moments of high drama. Instead, they’re flat and one-dimensional. This contributes to the sense I mentioned that the series was like a very, very long comic book transcribed into novel form.
Narrating from the character’s actual point of view might be harder to do consistently, but it would build a much better, richer read than constantly positioning the narrator as a mind-reader hovering just behind and above the characters.
In the same vein, there’s a lack of depth and nuance to how the characters often behave which is occasionally mind-boggling:
From Book 1 (Lost Mission): An explosion outside caused the floor to rumble and the windows to shake. Everyone at the party went to the windows.
This is a room full of military officers and they go towards a convenient potential source of shrapnel? No wonder the cultists achieve pretty much total strategic and tactical surprise.
The series is populated with people who just lack common sense—which also explains why father and son Saito, who are emotionally estranged from each other, have few visible relationship skills, and are, well, father and son, are going to be posted to the same ship with one under the other’s command for a critical, make-or-break mission.
The physics and weaponry are in the same vein. There’s some sort of inside joke going on with repetitively talking about “super heated bullets”—and…wait a second... Humanity has faster-than-light travel but still shoots bullets—in space? Possibly these weapons are issued by the same people who at some point have also handed out incendiary grenades for use, again, while fighting inside structures that are in space. And the inhabitents of the space station apparently cook with gas, which is convenient for our heros, but…what? Fire and oxygen mix well with a vacuum?
Did I mention I had seriously considered rooting for the cultists and aliens?
Character development suffers as well:
From Book 7 (Enter Abyss): Tomas, even after all they’d been through, was still a soldier. Like her, his loyalty to the UEF hadn’t wavered even though loyalty to each other, the group, was more important.
Except then, like two lines later (from position 924 to 928), we learn of Tomas:
His loyalty was to the group, much more than to the UEF.
This suggests he did waver, right? Or was it always stronger to the group, even though he’d been a solider in the UEF before the group? Or had he just not been that much into the UEF? It was (apparently) hard to explain.
That brings me to the next point. Although the books have been proofread by someone competent they desperately need the attention of an actual editor who could catch things like the examples above. Alternately, the authors could slow down and revise ruthlessly. Or both.
As a result, the series is littered with passages that sound like first drafts:
From Book 5 (Beyond Ruin): The barrier that kept the slightly-adjusted atmosphere of the city was just thin plasma. It wasn’t meant to keep anything out; it only kept in the air that human beings were accustomed to. Still, transitioning through it was strange. It was hard to explain.
Fine, but that should have been two sentences. And “it was hard to explain”—no. If you can’t explain it, try describing it and let the reader sort it out.
One of the reasons I kept going early on was that in the back of my head was a vague memory of reading other things by one of the authors and liking it more. After finishing the series I downloaded and read separate, stand-alone books by each author from their free books page. (Planet Hell by James, and short story collection Portal by Young.)
It clicked: I’d read Planet Hell before. Neither it nor Portal pretend to be great literature. They’re solid, entertaining writing. They were higher-quality, and often quite strong in all the ways and places Oblivion is not.
These are talented writers on their own, but somehow when smashed together they’re less than the sum of their parts. The authors opted for 1500 pages of mediocrity when they probably could have generated 500 really good pages for the same or similar level of effort.
I think their writing would benefit from slowing down and adopting more of the idea of deliberate practice—steady, conscious improvement of the writing craft, rather than a race to release words quickly.