Review: "Bypass Gemini"

If you follow my reviews here, or on Goodreads, you'll know that I rarely give a book 5 stars.  Maybe I'm overly critical, maybe I'm just too damn picky, but few books--in my opinion--deserve top marks.

Joseph Lallo's "Bypass Gemini" deserves 5 stars.

Mr. Lallo was a fellow finalist in the "Kindle Book Review's Top Indie Books of 2012".  We exchanged books as a professional courtesy.  I am now convinced I got the better end of that exchange. This book was well written, had excellent pacing, and possessed enough dry wit and bad puns to have me laughing well past my bedtime.

The title character is a good boy who made bad choices and is now struggling though adulthood paying for those choices.  He works multiple jobs to make ends meet--or not meet, as the case may be.  Hair-raising chases, impressive flight maneuvers, and a whopping portion of pure dumb luck keep the hero, and the reader, hopping from one planet to the next.

There's plenty in this book that could have turned out cliched and cloying, but Lallo's style leaves it feeling fresh and innovative.  There's the ex who's not quite over the hero ( and he's not anywhere near over her), evil corporate overlords, baffling arrays of technological advances, a smartass computer, and even a certifiably (with a certificate to prove it!) mad scientist.  Oh--and there's the Funk.  I won't spoil that bit, because it is a hidden gem in this book that deserves a proper reveal.

Make no mistake, this is true science fiction, not just a space-based action novel.  The genius in "Bypass Gemini", though, is that the science is coupled with dissembling sarcasm that puts the lay-reader at ease.  There's plenty of "nerd porn" for hard science fans, but it is not provided in a droning litany destined to bore senseless the average reader.  Here's a perfect example:

"Bigger, beefier versions of the same things that made his delivery bike work, the repulsors used the interplay between two tangible energy fields to create a synchronized wave pattern capable of instituting temporary charge differences between the vehicle and road surface for the purposes of facilitating the attraction and repulsion necessary to maintain an approximately constant distance.

In other words, he had traction now."

There are a few editing flaws in the book ( two weirdly truncated sentences that may very well be blamed on html formatting errors) but they give this work a level of authenticity instead of distracting the reader.  My Kindle version was well formatted with proper chapter links and design.  This is the type of self published work that lends credibility to the genre.

If you love science fiction, action, adventures, technology, or just a good chase scene, you cannot afford to miss this story.  "Bypass Gemini" is easily the best science fiction book I've read in the past year.