Review - Space Academy Dropouts by C.T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus
Preamble
I will be perfectly frank about how my encounter with this book came about (my ex-wife probably has a few choice words to say about my unremitting honesty and it will not be remitting today). I saw co-author C.T. Phipps talk about Space Academy Dropouts in a Facebook group I’m in, I looked at it, thought it seemed funny, added it to my TBR list, and then literally moments later C.T. Phipps messaged me to ask me if I’d consider doing a ‘review exchange,’ wherein he’d read my stuff and give it an honest review it and vice versa. He had seen my review of Tropical Punch by S.C. Jensen and liked it, apparently. Bizarre synchronicity aside, C.T. offered to give me a review copy but I was seconds away from purchasing Space Academy Dropouts and did just that.
I am glad I gave him and Michael Suttkus the ducats.
The foregoing has no bearing on my review – I approached it as I do all of the books I read and review.
A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. It’s either five stars or nothing these days – if I don’t like it, no review. Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.
Take from that what you will.
Review – 5/5
“We really should have gone to visit Doctor No and enjoyed the multispecies brothel.”
Douglas Adams has a lot to answer for, particularly where concerns the mixture of literature and sci-fi comedy. He may or may not be the first, and there is a certain Britishness about his work (don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about), but the litmus test for sci-fi comedy books is probably Adams. I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a teenager and fell in love. It wasn’t ‘laugh out loud’ funny, but the stuff that makes me chortle audibly tends to be the puerile and bawdy and juvenile stuff people like Christopher Moore in his Pocket series or those degenerates who write the Shingles books weave. The Adams school of literary humour is more of a clever, witty, tongue-in-cheek, ‘do you see what I did there?’ type of humour. It might not leave you in stitches but it does put a smile on your face.
Phipps and Suttkus definitely channel a bit of Adams in Space Academy Dropouts, but it’s far more American than the seminal sci-fi humour series. Like the colonies, Space Academy Dropouts is a melting pot: sci-fi, fantasy, pop culture, and gaming references, as well as being a damn fine action novel in its own right.
First, the character of Vance Turbo, who legally gave himself that name rather than Vannevar James Tagawa (that’s what they call a ‘second paragraph of the book joke’), is eminently likeable. A blatant riff on the whole Captain Kirk thang, he is raised up to Captain status almost immediately, in spite of the fact that he gets dumped from the Starfleet Academy in the first couple of pages. He has a strong sense of morality, though it is skewed by some of the shady stuff he has gotten up to.
All of that is in the past, though, because his captaincy comes about after he is shanghaied, pressganged, and otherwise forced onto a mission with a secret black ops branch of the interstellar government to save the universe from the threat of rogue space nukes on the backdrop of a futuristic iron curtain. Everything feels familiar, even though this is a century or so in the future and is filled with murderous aliens who want to kill Vance and AI infatuated with Vance who find perfect replicant sexbot bodies and shag him.
In spite of doing quite well with the lay-dees, Vance is like Rodney Dangerfield, getting no respect from anyone, and somehow managing to ‘fail upward,’ as one of his alien crew members put it in the novel. It’s one big successful gaffe to another, with a plethora of people invading his mind and having telepathic conversations with him and interrupting his thought processes in a cleverly written way. Vance was raised on a diet of old sci-fi and movies from the 20th century, which means that the references to literally anything any nerd worth their salt would be aware of are everywhere (it’s told in first person from Vance’s POV).
Like I said, it would have been easy for the authors to press the ‘silly joke’ button over and over again and call it a day, but you end up caring for Vance and his team of misfits. They’re all a bit strange – a cat human hybrid bounty hunter, the AI who thinks he’s the best because he isn’t whatever word they used for racist against AI in the book, the old flame who is doing an alien Chad who hates Vance, who is arguably himself a nerd Chad of some sort (like Kirk, maybe?), and even some kind of ‘enlightened’ being called an Ethereal, who is some kind of modified human.
It’s light, it’s fun, it’s worth the read if you at all have even a passing interest in sci-fi or nerd culture. Phipps and Suttkus are clearly intelligent dudes, discussing issues of morality and philosophy at times with tongue firmly in cheek throughout, as well as having kick-ass tech and some pretty hot human on sexbot action.
Sweet, sweet, human on sexbot action.
Check it out on the ‘zon here.