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Book Review: Hive - Madders of Time Book One by D. L. Orton

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/book-review-hive-madders-of-time-book-one-by-d-l-orton/

What if, with your dying breath, you sent your lover back in time in order to change the fate of a ruined Earth? What if he sent a message back to his upinger self to help seduce you? What if the Government intercepted a mysterious orb full of treasures from another dimension? What if…?

This is a curious mish-mash of a book. Part sci-fi and part romance. I don't read enough romance to tell if that side of it is any good - it's all longing looks, furtive glances, and "what if"s. It was charming enough, but didn't really do anything for me. It is a fundamental part of the story, and not tacked on, so it doesn't feel superfluous.

The sci-fi side of things is relatively interesting. A multi-stranded story with just enough technobabble to be fun and a great set of provocations about how everything would work. Some of the post-apocalyptic challenges are neatly overcome and the God's eye-view helps keep the reader in suspense.

But the real let down is the characterisation. There's a supposedly British character who is about as realistic as Dick van Dyke! His dialogue is particularly risible. I'm not sure of any Brit who repeatedly says "Crikey Moses" or talks about his "sodding pajamas" - and absolutely no-one here refers to a telling-off as a "bolloxing". Similarly, one of the "men in black" is just a laughable caricature of every gruff-secret-agent trope.

As with so many books these days, it tries to set itself up to be an epic trilogy. The result is a slightly meandering tale without much tension behind it. There's a great story in there - if you can look past the stereotypes - but I thought it needed to be a lot tighter to be compelling.

Thanks to MindBuck Media for the review copy.

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WAYNE'S 2025 BOOKS: BOOK 5

Picks and Shovels
by Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic)

Huzzah! A new Martin Hench book! I was a proud backer of Cory Doctorow's Kickstarter to publish this work without the anti-consumer and anti-writer practises of the usual purveyor of the written word: our old frenemy Amazon. I chose the epub version (which I read using Calibre on my Android phone), and the only reason I didn't buy a physical copy is that I'd like to get all the Hench novels in paperback, and this book isn't in that format yet.

Anyway, Picks and Shovels takes Martin Hench wayback to the late 80s, when computers had to be programmed without monitors (the horror), when mobile phones were something seen only on Star Trek, and when Martin - sorry, Marty - is a boo-boo baby proto-accountant feeling his way into the big bad world of finance by way of the silicon highway introduced by personal computing.

It's an origin story both for Hench and Silicon Valley, and a great read. With a company whose founders read like the opening to a bad joke (a rabbi, a priest and a Mormon elder) and a rival company locked in a battle for dominance, Picks and Shovels shows us that consumer capture, enshittification, and hostile design has always been around, even when computers were beige and bulky.

As with all of Cory's works, you read and you learn and you have fun, all at the same time. He has a way of distilling some bigbrain ideas into smaller morsels for the rest of us to understand, and be entertaining at the same time. I smashed this book in a few days as it was eminently readable, and I just wanted to see what happened!

You don't have to read the first two Hench books (Red Team Blue and The Bezzle) to enjoy this one, but you really should anyway as they're all neat and Cory is the kind of writer that we should all be supporting in these uncertain pre-technofeudal times.

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