cdm72's Full Review: James Allen Starkloff - Planet Movers Inc
When your business entails building and moving planets around and the government has suddenly placed a moratorium on doing just that, what’s a company president to do? Downsize. But when you’ve got 15,000 people on your payroll and 10,000 of them have to go . . . well, that’s a lot of unemployment to be paying out. So the next question is, how do you get rid of that many people without letting them know you’re getting rid of them? Yeal Komal, president and CEO of Planet Movers, Inc. has a plan. Expand the capacity of one of their movers, and ship them all out to do a job that will never get done, in a system it’ll take them years to reach. Tell them they’ll be the new Adams and Eves of some new world, and once they’re gone, forget all about them.
That’s the premise of James Allen Starkloff’s PLANET MOVERS, INC. Set in the same world as Starkloff’s earlier novel I.T. THE INNER TERRESTRIAL, PLANET MOVERS INC. picks up about a thousand years later. Hundreds of years ago, the world went through a 20-year period of constant meteorite storms which left the world in ruin. Technology is lost, history is lost, everything is gone and must be learned again. So when our story starts this time, we’ve got far-reaching space travel and planet moving, but people are still using paper to write on and black and white television. They’ve concentrated all their efforts on space and have advanced no further in terrestrial technology than the early 1950s. It’s a strange world to live in.
But soon two garbage collectors discover a small box in space and when they inadvertently activate it, they find SARA, the supercomputer from I.T. who covered the entire Earth in a grid and who ran everything. (SARA was thought destroyed at the end of I.T.). SARA promises them wealth beyond their imagination if they can get her to an R&D lab. It’s in the hands of someone with the means to build her a more suitable housing that SARA hopes to regain her place at the top of the world. It’s then she meets Yeal Komal who, after losing most of his fortune from Planet Movers, Inc. plans to use SARA to reclaim HIS place.
PLANET MOVERS, INC. is a very short book--176 pages--and Starkloff packs a lot of stuff into its pages. SARA uses old computer servers, thought by the public to be nothing but junk because they couldn’t possibly imply people in the past were more advanced than they are in 3002. But SARA knows they’re real and she uses them to find out everything that happened while she was deactivated. Meanwhile, Yeal is getting richer and richer and loving every second of it. SARA discovers research indicating there were androids built before the technology crash, androids that could feel, see, hear, smell, taste. She has a body for herself built and she and Yeal fall in love--actually SARA falls in love, Yeal just feels trapped by his need for power and SARA’s ability to make him powerful. In the end, SARA gives Yeal a birthday present that goes very, very wrong and it‘s a mad rush to escape Earth. And in the midst of all this, SARA and Yeal have created the internet. But the idea of home computers is so absurd, people are forming lines around the block at all the libraries with Info Centers. People are selling their place in line for 200 credits, they take off work to do thirty minutes worth of research, they travel to other planets hoping the lines there aren’t so long. Starkloff’s definitely put some thought into his book and come away with a smart, satirical look at our own dependence on this thing that allows us to chat in real-time with people around the world and has put unlimited information at our fingertips. I enjoyed that aspect of this novel very much.
Now on to a few things I didn’t so much enjoy.
First, Planet Movers, Inc. is really more a Planet BUILDERS. The idea of the title is that they move planets--and they CAN do this, after the planets are built, they’re moved into orbit and their rotation is established--but really, they’re more builders than movers.
Second, once SARA is established, the whole idea of Project Eden--the shipping off of those sorry 10,000 employees--becomes just another subplot. I was looking forward to further exploring that theme.
Third, when SARA is reactivated, she wants to resume control of the world, but by the end of the book, she just wants Yeal to be in love with her. Whatever happened to her delusions of grandeur? It seemed like he got halfway through the book and decided on this other approach to the character.
Finally, there were passages in here I had to force myself through. No, the writing wasn’t bad, that’s not what I mean, there weren’t boring patches I couldn’t slog through, that’s not what I mean, either. The entire book was enjoyable and I read it in just 2 days. What I mean is, the way some things were phrased was difficult for me to not rearrange them in my head. For example:
“Good, now put away my lunch,” corrosively snapped Zia. or
“No, dufus! If it were alien, we wouldn’t be able to read it. Don’t you read the magazine, ‘Aliens from Outer space’?” authoritatively asked Merc. or
“You’re on her. It was Mover Two,” proudly stated Captain Cadel.
It was this backwards phrasing that took some getting used to--that’s not true, I didn’t get used to it and every time I read it, I tried to reword it in my head: Captain Cadel proudly stated, or Zia snapped corrosively. I don’t know if that was a stylistic choice or just a simple mistake, but whatever it was, it wasn’t for me. However, PLANET MOVERS, INC. isn’t the first book I’ve had similar problems with and it won’t be the last, so I’ll let it go and concentrate on the story.
I also wish we’d seen a little more of the solar system since it’s said there are now 588 planets orbiting our sun, but we see Earth, Mars, and one or two other minor planets. With such a huge array, the possibilities should have been limitless, but we’re glued to just these few locations.
PLANET MOVERS, INC. was self-published by the author through Xlibris, and while I disagree with Xlibris’s methods (they offer publishing, that’s it. No editing, no promotion, just a book in the hand--and as such, you get a book like PLANET MOVERS, INC, a book that COULD have been really good, but is merely good) they do prove what I’ve said all along about self-publishing companies; they let readers in on some books that otherwise we might not get to read simply because some of the bigger publishing companies don’t want to take the risk or the time to whip them into shape. And that’s too bad. Starkloff’s got the talent, he just needs help with the finer details.
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