Official Review: HumEM by Dean Evans

[saturday+deviant]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "HumEM" by Dean Evans.]

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HumEM, by Dean Evans, is a science fiction/ utopian type of novel with the story taking place in a future population of creatures as they try to live their lives in harmony. These creatures, known as humEMs, are supposed to be the evolved species of humans living in a kind of stasis, where there is no entropy occurring in their lives. It has been 400 years since they began to live this way and they are trying to branch out to other planets and areas in space. However, this does not go as planned when they come in contact with entropy, or dark EMatter. The book also focuses on the specific story of Orion, a humEM who has just been reborn and is learning about his life and what he will be able to do to help TLC fight off the entropy that threatens all humEMs. His specific chapters are interspersed through a general view of the life of humEMs and it doesn‘t really start to make sense as to why his specific story is included until the second half of the book.

What I first liked about this book, was the connection that these beings were created from what humans are like now. So they are the “perfected” versions of humans that don’t die, but are reborn, and everything is in harmony with itself. Basically, this world that is created is a literal utopian world for these humEMs. And rather than there being a problems within themselves that creates discourse, the entropy that can effect these creatures is found in a more literal way through Dark Matter. The concept behind the book is an interesting one, I cannot dispute that. However, the execution of certain ideas was not as fluid as I would have enjoyed when reading the book [which I will discuss further into the review] and so the overall story was not as pleasing.

Another concept that I enjoyed throughout HumEM, though it’s a little more inconsequential, is the names of the various characters. At first I didn‘t really take notice of the specificity of the names, I was just trying to get into the world, but once I understood the premise of the book I became thoroughly entertained by the names themselves. Each character that is introduced in the book has a name whose origin is either a constellation or a star, like Arcturus and Orion. I thought that it added a nice layer to what was going on in the book, since all of these people live on planets; why not have star named people that live on planets, right?

As a disclaimer for the book in general, most of my dislikes were minor issues, that when piled together with other issues just make the book really annoying at points and I had trouble focusing on the story because of these irritations.

The first of many issues that I had with HumEM was the seven, yes seven, different sexes that these creatures could potentially have at rebirth. I would have no problem imagining that there can be different sexes, after all the world I live in now contains a whole lot of different genders and orientations that people identify with, however, in HumEM, I felt that this was added more as a shock factor or something that made these creatures different from your average homosapien. Then, because each gender has its own pronouns, the idea was difficult to follow. The gender that the person is also becomes the pronoun that they use when thinking or talking about themselves. So there are he’s and she’s, but also sexes like zhe, qhe, yhe, xhe, and ehe. Grammatically there is no change made between singular or plural, first or third person either, so I was just peeved by the third chapter having to translate in my mind what was being said.

On a similar note, grammatically speaking, I could not get used to the capitalization of EM throughout the book or the addition/changing of letters so that EM is present in an important word like EMergy instead of energy. I don’t think that the story would have been made any less interesting if energy had been used instead, but because these capitalizations were included, I was impeded from throwing myself into the world that Evans was trying to create. It is hard to change a lifetime of education on grammar and spelling to read a book; the capitalization was something that I though Evans could have left out.

While I was reading this book, I kept wishing that there was a glossary somewhere with all the new terms that were introduced in this book with their definitions so that I could have freshened up every once in a while. There is a lot of terminology introduced in this book, as with any book that has a new world with different ways of living that is not “normal” in the present. So I found myself a little frustrated when I had to stop and think about what a word could mean in the story when it wasn’t automatically clear. Again, this was a frustration that ebbed over time, but did not help in my getting involved in the story initially when a simple glossary would have probably fixed that.

Also, in HumEM, I had trouble understanding why there were so many people being introduced within in each chapter without any indication to their importance or relevance to the story. It didn’t help when I was already trying to understand what was going on in the story and defining words that were created specifically for the story. It all became overwhelming, which doesn’t help gain the readers interest in the story.

The last main issue that I had with HumEM for a solid quarter of the book was the lack of any culture for these people. They all live on their own planets, but their actual lifestyles were never described in the book. They wanted to be in harmony, but other than this desire, which they seemed to have achieved, they had no other motivation for living or continuing to expand as a species. What was the point of any of their lives? They were never described doing things for fun or whether they had relationships with other beings so I couldn’t connect myself to them; I had not a single thing in common with these humEMs other than the weak connection made to that of the planets. A book gets boring fast when all that it talks about is this fictional work they are doing towards expanding their civilization.

HumEM presents an entertaining idea for a novel dealing with the future of earth and its inhabitants that I still have high hopes for even if this particular version of the story left me wishing for a better execution. There are a lot of minor issues that could be easily fixed or tweaked, like the capitalization and the gender specific pronouns that diverge from current grammatical norms that mess with the flow of the book, but there is also the issue of a lack of character connections. I felt no pull towards these characters and really did not feel invested in what they were doing or what the outcome was for them. I think that if there had been some empathy towards these characters and their plight I may have given the book a rating of 2. However, this was not the case and because of this detachment, I would have to give HumEM, by Dean Evans, a rating of 1 out of 4.

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[ALRyder]

It's always hard for me to give a low rating. Thank you for being so thorough and honest with your review.