Page One Review: The Personifid Project and Marcher Lord Press

I’m a week late on the CSFF blog tour. Maybe that counts me out, but I figure better late than never. In my defense, I feel spread too thin lately. Gandalf and I talked about it at Blogworld. I told him, “I feel stressed, Gandalf. Stretched thin. Like butter, spread over too much bread.” Then we went and shot off some fireworks in front of Treasure Island.

But enough apologizing. Special thanks to Randy Ingermanson for helping me remember what I’d forgotten this morning with his post about Jeff.

This month, we’re talking about Marcher Lord Press an ambitious, creative project from Jeff Gerke. He’s been around for awhile, working as an editor for Multnomah (now a division of Waterbrook and Random House), Strang (where he helped launch the Realms imprint), and NavPress (one of my personal favorites). These days, he does freelance writing and editing based out of his main site Where the Map Ends. If anyone can pull this off, Jeff is the man.

But the proof is in the pudding. Whatever that means. So, I had hoped to do a quick Page One (and Two) Review of the first scifi book from Marcher Lord Press, The Personifid Invasion. Unfortunately, there are no excerpts of this book available online. (Jeff, can you hook us up on this?)

You can read the editor’s description on Jeff’s site and the amazon.com page.

You can live forever in your new artificial body…but are you alone in it? In the future, you can transfer your consciousness insot an artificial body–known as a personifid–and cheat death indefinitely. But human beings aren’t the only ones who want those bodies–Interterrestrials have found that personifids will house them very well, too. Ashley is trapped in San Edhem, a city where Interterrestrials and humans struggle for control of the personifids. Can her siblings, Aphra and Antha, rescue her before she is lost to them forever? ** R. E. Bartlett lives in the North Island of New Zealand in a dairy-farming region. She is the author of “The Personifid Project” and several unpublished Christian novels. Her speculative stories are characterized by humor, realistic dialogue, and engaging fantastic worlds. ** Category: Christian science fiction

Thankfully, Christianbook.com has made the beginning of The Personifid Project available here. So we’ll look at that and assume Bartlett’s second book is comparable or better. So, go read the first two pages quickly and come back.

Done? Good.

Let’s talk about what her first book does well in the opening pages.

1) It begins in medias res, in the middle of things, with the standard reliable trick of a chase scene. We are quickly introduced to three characters: Aphra and Michael are chasing Ryan. We understand their motivation to find Ryan quickly, and we have the added weirdness of the crowd that parts easily for them.

2) The surprise comes on page two. Aphra talks to a dog, which bites her and gets “deactivated.” As a fan of scifi (and dogs), this peaks my interest. This is where the book hooks me to read more. At this point also, the narrative locks into a pretty good rhythm of dialogue, action, and ideas. Ideas are always important in scifi.

3) Here’s a specific example of ideas expressed succinctly and naturally through dialogue.

Aphra pushed the dog over in one swift movement. It toppled stiffly and fell with a soft thunk. Then she got up and carefully felt her arm, looking for any sign of blood showing through her sleeve. “Why did Ryan do that?”

“It’s a fear game,” Michael said. “You like those.”

“Not when it hurts!”

Michael’s comment that “It’s a fear game” is perfect scifi world building. It tells us just enough to want to know what he means. We understand the big picture, but not the fun scifi details. Even better, this bit of dialog raises the stakes from a playful chase to something with a bit more teeth. If pain and fear are involved, I’m a lot more interested because explosions probably aren’t far behind.

I like explosions.

Any hiccups caused by the narrative description (with pretty complex sentences and lots of dependent clauses) are not a problem for me as a reader–because I’m very interested in the world Bartlett is building and the dialog she is using to build that world.

These are voices I want to hear from. And they are in a world I want to learn about. Kudos to Jeff Gerke and Marcher Lord Press for giving Bartlett another platform to continue publishing about this world.

From a reader’s standpoint, I’m always glad to see good ideas finding an audience. From a practical standpoint, it’s fun to look out into the wild frontier of publishing and watch Jeff come out with guns blazing.

Here are the other folks who participated last week…

Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Kathy Brasby
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
Courtney
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Kameron M. Franklin
Andrea Graham
Todd Michael Greene
Katie Hart
Timothy Hicks
Joleen Howell
Jason Joyner
Kait
Mike Lynch
Terri Main
Margaret
Shannon McNear
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
John W. Otte
Steve Rice
Ashley Rutherford
Hanna Sandvig
Mirtika or Mir’s Here
Greg Slade
James Somers
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Laura Williams
Timothy Wise
Tina Kulesa
Jason Waguespac