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    Ebook385 pages5 hours

    Embedded

    By Dan Abnett

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The colony planet of Eighty-Six looks as dull as all its fellow new worlds to journalist Lex Falk, but when he gets the runaround from the military, his interest is piqued. He gets chipped inside the head of a combat veteran. When the soldier is killed however, Falk must use all his resourcefulness to get back home again... and blow the lid off the whole damn thing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOsprey Publishing Ltd
    Release dateMar 29, 2011
    ISBN9780857660923
    Author

    Dan Abnett

    Award-winning British author Dan Abnett has been a New York Times best-seller seven times and won the Best Comic Writer award in 2003. He has written more than fifty books — including best-selling Warhammer 40,000 novels and tie-in fiction for Doctor Who, Torchwood and Primeval. He co-created Death’s Head and Knights of Pendragon for Marvel UK in the 1980s, and contributed extensively to the UK’s illustrious 2000AD. He has also written Iron Man, New Mutants, Doctor Strange and Punisher for Marvel, and worked on some of Marvel’s epic cosmic comics including the Annihilation and War of Kings events, and the Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy series. Abnett is also known for his work on major games such as Alien: Isolation and Shadow of Mordor. He has returned to Marvel’s cosmos on Guardians 3000 and Guardians of Infinity.

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    Reviews for Embedded

    3.5/5

    52 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It was pretty good & I think if I was more of a war book fan, I would have given it another star. As it was, the jargon, both future & military, were a bit much - necessary & well done, but just too much at times. Some of the jargon had me laughing, though. Patches to make cussing turn into trademarked names. A very innovative idea. I don't think it was followed through with as well as it could have been or dropped from the story soon enough, so it turned into a distraction.

      That's pretty much how the whole book felt to me - a lot of good ideas & spots of writing that just didn't quite come together as well as I would have liked. I'll have to try another book by this author because this one had a lot of promise. It could be that he's British. That's enough to make or break humor sometimes for me.
    • 4/5
      It reminds me of scenes from a Vietnam movie. There's a group of soldiers trying to escape the jungle whole dragging some child who can unlock nuclear codes with their mind away from the Viet-Cong and Soviet spies. Throw in an alien spaceship and this is close to it. I liked but it near the end it almost falls apart. When see why everyone is fighting that's when it makes sense. It's not something that should lead to as equal but it can if Abnett wanted it too.
    • 2/5
      Embedded is set in a future where humans have begun to colonize other planets. Eighty-Six is the most recent settlement and it's where universe-weary, award-winning journalist Lex Falk has arrived to investigate rumors of political unrest and a military lockdown on all information leaving the planet. Falk's clout gets him embedded with the military, but it's not until he's approached by a clandestine party that can actually embed him into the body of Nestor Bloom, a combat soldier, that he gets the real story about what's happening on Eighty-Six.Elmore Leonard famously advised "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." If Dan Abnett had taken this approach, the novel could have been about 150 pages shorter and far more enjoyable. He has apparently never met a simile that he's not keen on rubbing up against. The book is far too descriptive and I know many people might argue that such is necessary for believable world-building, a sentiment with which I might normally agree. If you're going to present me with an alien world, I want to see it. The problem here is that Eighty-Six isn't much different from Earth. There are no alien life forms, no exotic landscapes, no cultural clashes. And yet Abnett is always keen to tell us what shade of blue the sky is and what the green trees in the forest look like. Other than the existence of "blurds" (some form of insect/bird hybrid), there's really nothing unusual about the setting. And there's nothing particularly futuristic other than the ubiquitous presence of a poison called Insect-Aside and apparently inorganic foodstuffs that always end with the suffix "-effect" (such as chicken parmigiana-effect, which can be washed down with a can of tasty NoCal cola-effect). Even the tech through which Falk is embedded into Bloom is clichéd--Falk is suspended in a Jung tank, which is just a clever name for the science fiction trope of a womb-like tank in which Falk is suspended in a viscous, amniotic-like liquid. None of this is particularly bad, but none of it is particularly good--and it's been done much better before. The book takes forever to get going, developing characters and relationships that are promptly jettisoned as soon as Falk is embedded within Bloom. The actual embedding--the part of the story with the most promise--missed out on so many opportunities to explore the psychological issues of dwelling within another's mind. If Bloom and Falk had been inhabiting the same consciousness throughout most of the narrative, there could have been some really standout scenes. However, Falk is simply a repressed observer, a passenger, within Bloom until Bloom is shot in the head. At this point, Bloom becomes an unconscious passenger in his own body and Falk has to take over, a plot that still has some possibility as Falk is not a trained soldier. However, every time Falk gets into a jam, Bloom's muscle memory arrives to save the day, allowing Falk to blast his way out of every inconvenience with which he comes into contact. When Bloom is shot and his persona disappears, the book basically becomes a stripped down version of Avatar, only without the aliens. Other issues include:1. From what I can tell, the U.S. is now the United Status (no explanation is given for this) and the army with which Falk is embedded seems to be U.S. As a result, all of the British spellings for words seemed incongruous and often jarring. A minor pet peeve, I understand, but there it is.2. So we're apparently centuries into the future, colonizing planets, and the two dominant powers are the U.S. and the Bloc, who speak Russian and whose military vehicles are all adorned with red stars. That's right--we're fighting a Cold War with the Communist Bloc in outerspace. I might forgive this in a piece of 1950's science fiction, but in 2013? We can't come up with a fresh new narrative for who the bad guys are?3. It is never made clear as to how Bloom's body is still functioning after he's been shot in the head, right below the eye. The mental image I kept getting as Falk tried to will Bloom's body to do his bidding was Weekend at Bernie's in military garb. 4. The ending. What. The. Freek&#174. So, in the last 10 pages, Falk actually, against all plot odds, discovers something half ass interesting. But that's the thing--only half ass. We don't get the whole ass. What he finds is only hinted at and the repercussions are ambiguous. Basically, it took 400 pages to get to the real story and then it just stops. I wanted to hit something and hit something hard when I reached the end.5. The whole use of Freek&#174 as a linguistic patch that prohibits a person from using any expletive other than "Freek." In the end, I can only offer this advice: read John Scalzi.Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder
    • 3/5
      I was fortunate to receive an early review copy of Embedded by Dan Abnett. The story is about a cold war gone hot on an alien world and the reporter who is there to experience it.Embedded is military sci-fi with a couple of innovative twists. It is told through the eyes of a reporter, Lex Falk. Falk is a successful, jaded reporter who has bounced around from planet to planet. He becomes convinced there is a story at his latest stop, a big story. When he gets the run-around from the military authorities, he agrees to a secret radical procedure that allows him to share the consciousness of a soldier in the field. An accident leaves him in control of the soldier’s body and forces him to attempt to get to safety while at the same time discovering the secret to what turns a centuries long cold war into a real one.Some of the story techniques were more annoying than clever. New words are made up with their meanings left to be intuited, but they are not very intuitive and are never defined. None of the characters have a great deal of depth, but a few of the female characters are especially thin. They show up with minimal explanation, move the story along a little and then disappear. The description of the planet was good, but could have been explored more. It felt half-finished. A little less reporter angst and a little more world-building might have been a better balance.The action sequences are fairly well done and carry the story along at a pretty good clip for the last half of the book. The description of sharing consciousness with another person was also very well done; especially a sequence where Falk is lost in the memories of the soldier leaving both Falk and the reader somewhat disoriented. The technology is sufficiently futuristic making for battles that are a lot of fun to read. The concept of military sci-fi told through the eyes of a non-soldier is an interesting one. The story doesn’t quite deliver on the intriguing premise, but is still a worthwhile read.
    • 2/5
      Dan Abnett has a large following for his military science fiction, so I gave one a try. I guess I'd say that it passed a few hours.It had a fairly interesting premise: a jaded veteran reporter, Lex Falk, tries a new technology that allows his mind to ride piggy-back in the mind of a combat trooper, Private Bloom. An ambush damages Bloom's mind, so Falk must try to survive in hostile territory with the muscle memory of a combatant but only his own—decidedly non-military—mental skillset.As far as action goes, this book delivered reasonably well. From the time the mission begins until just a couple of pages from the end, it's a fairly non-stop shoot 'em up. Abnett sets up a rational premise for the conflict, makes the ensuing scenes fast-paced and somewhat breathless, and manages to stay comfortably out of the danger zone of "Oh, come on...no way they got out of that!" About the only black mark I'd give the plot is the ending, which is very abrupt and doesn't provide a feeling of closure on everything that has happened.From a character point of view, the novel has a bit less to offer. The characters are flat, stereotypical grunts or flat, stereotypical government bureaucrats or flat, stereotypical...you get the idea. Even Falk's hard-bitten reporter persona is only given a skim coat at the beginning of the book and then goes on autopilot. About the only depth that does occur is that we get to watch Falk struggle a (small) amount with the moral question of having his link to Bloom severed, probably saving his own life, versus trying to get Bloom's body to safety so that doctors can try to save him.Abnett does make a few token passes at media responsibility, big business cover ups, government corruption and the like, but they are really just pro forma and don't really impinge upon the reader to any great extent.Beyond that, I have to say that I found the concept of mental implants that allowed corporations to use your speech as an advertising medium quite funny.This isn't a book with any depth, so my recommendation would depend upon what you are looking for. If you're looking for a quick beach read, this is light enough that you might want to give it a try. If you're looking for the better quality military science fiction, the kind that makes you think a bit, you might want to browse further.
    • 1/5
      Okay plot and premise. Horrible prose. Infodumps, random replacement of normal words with future ones. Tortured similes and dull characters.