💪 Tough Guys Patrick Sean Tomlinson / @stealthygeek / "Torque Wheeler" / @RealAutomanic / Kempesh / Padawan v2.5 - "Conservative" sci-fi author with TDS, armed "drunk with anger management issues" and terminated parental rights, actual tough guy, obese, paid Quasi, paid thousands to be repeatedly unbanned from Twitter
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- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
They've spent thousands terrorizing you huh? How would you know how much SWAT-For-Hire costs Pat?
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2020
Absurdity, child.
There's a fishmouth in the percolator:
“Fatrick, the time has come for you to seek the path. Your soul has set you face-to-face with the judgement debt, and you are now about to experience it in all its reality, wherein all things are like the stlakers, and your naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum, without circumference or center. Fatrick, in this moment, know yourself, and abide in that state… Look to Judge Sosnay. Find the light and pay Quasi.”
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- Joined
- Dec 14, 2022
Many people have already answered this, but I just want to add I wholeheartedly suggest this video. Not only is a *great* introduction to Greer, it is also hilarious! If you got 30 minutes to kill, it's a blast!
How...how is that even mathematically possible???? Not even his bots follow him back, Jesus.
Pig Lore time:
When it comes to Ethan, things get more personal (I'm on my cellphone right now, so I can't post the receipts, but I have them somewhere on my PC). I don't think the comics are the issue here.
Some Ethan Facts that probably affect how Piggy feels about him:
- He's a proto-brothermen: he first got childed in 2017, one year before the Pests.
- After that, he started mocking Pat.
- He's a Jesus loving conservative.
- He was part of the industry during Comicsgate, but "said fuck it, I'm out" and he still managed to do great on his own.
- He's very successful. His latest kickstarter got over US$600,000 from like 3000 backers. On the other hand, Fatty's latest project (his poison pallet chairs) got him over 600,001 humiliating messages and some new hilarious* images (see at the end of post).
- Ethan has a HOT milf wife (very naiiiice..). Pat has a butch lesbian who resents his inability to fill her vagina with gases.
- Ethan has a daughter he loves and cares for. Pat has herpes.
- Different garden-related approaches and techniques: Pat has a faucet and salts his yard. Our boy Ethan packs a 12 inch hose (so I've heard) and plows his wife.
Pat pretending hes not in pain in his "chairs" and more fish mouth memes
Edit: oh shit, quick update! It looks like our boy Ethan had health issues yesterday (source: Funsters):
I'm guessing and his lady had a 12 hour humping marathon ("he fucks with skill, child") and Ethan's heart felt the pain of caring the 12" juggernaut's weight (his wife affectionately calls it "Patty", cause it weights about 280 pounds and it stays up all night).
(Seriously though, I hope he's OK).
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- Joined
- Sep 27, 2019
Quasi has domesticated the cloudflare subpoena quash portion of the debt in Wisconsin, but may not have perfected the lien. There are still 2 other judgements, the google subpoena quash and the SFWA subpoena costs, awaiting domestication. Unlike Patso, Quasi retained competent attorneys, and he listens to them.
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2019
I get why you'd think this but it's not true at all. First, that'd be benching way less than body weight, an extremely easy thing. Heck, I've seen people with cerebral palsy do that.
I hit 275 for reps within my first 6 months of lifting. I was a fat beginner and absolutely looked the part.
He's very fat and very compulsively retarded so it's almost as if he has no choice in the matter.
Wrong as always, child. My substantial girth means anyone even remotely tipsy in a bar is likely to trip and fall into my rolls. Wait for the knock.
I can't tell if God simply hates intact rib cages or if He knows that some of us see existence as the absurd joke it is and wants to confirm the correctness of our perspectives.
Larry does have some skill with firearms, to be sure. He also writes books that people actually buy. He and Piggy diverge on those two things.
Things they do have in common: very fat, thin-skinned little bitches, copious self-inserts in their writing, on social media far too much, delusions of being tough guys, retardedly critical of anyone that doesn't think exactly the same way they do, and both are shitty authors.
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2021
DSP is an absolute asshole most of the time but there is one thing he does better than Patrick, he's willing to pretend to be polite. I think he absolutely got lucky, but he was likely throwing around a lot of "yes, sir", "no, sir", "I was not aware of that sir". He'll bitch and moan on stream after the fact, but he knows when it's time to act like a real mature adult and be polite.
Fatrick cannot take an L or swallow his pride. He always has to be right. What was it he screamed at the judge during the Andrew Trial? "I thought you'd be willing to hear my side"? He was so certain of the narrative he'd written in his pighead, he didn't even have a plan. Just yell at the Judge about the "felony harassment" and the judge will strike down all the stalker childs!
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2022
Some, Kinda like Mike Mentzer had a decent physique, Magnus Von Magnusson had some strength, and Wilt Chaberlain fucked some women.
Bwahahaha. Let me guess, you said something stupid to him on FB and he put you on blast?
For a "Shitty Author" hes managed to keep me entertained for dozens of books in three seperate series in two, arguably three genres.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2023
fellow funsters, The Ark, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 have crash landed, and here's my own hook for you: we finally discover the fate of Dr. Edmond Laraby, the missing man in this horrible misadventure!
from here on there'll be more generalized/summarized reviews of each chapter now that i have comfortably established one simple fact: Patrick is not a great author, but a great pretender. at least, i think that i established as much. i'm doing a three-parter because the complete lack of action and development killed the book in Chapter 3 and because while i was paging through 5 and 6, there was even less going on - and in this case, chapter 6 and 7 basically had no reason to be split up in the first place. Chapter 7 is basically Chapter 6, Part 2.
i'm still feeling out how to present the readview appropriately and try to keep it briefer to prepare for potentially covering the other two books in this series.
in the Chapter 7 Summary, i go on a tangent. most of it is as described, but there's something in there i want in the foreword: when did Patrick join up with SFWA? because after reading through as much as i have of The Ark, after really muscling through his folds, i ask a simple question: how did this chubby child ever gain any clout in this industry? that concern is going to weigh on my mind more heavily than his ass on the stools at Hooli's. without some incontrovertible evidence, i can't believe, even in jest, that Patrick's metrics (at least via Goodreads) are legitimate. he has to have been pumped by bots and fake scores. and then there's the whole matter of him getting Starshit Repo (emphasis on shit, which is the central theme to his personal sense of humor) published by Tor, which is pure insanity. his writing style demonstrably failed to evolve in the five years between these books. it's insane.
you'll love this update a lot, i think.
Chapter 1 | Tor Link | Page 2014
Chapter 2 & 3 | Tor Link | Page 2018
Chapter 4 | Tor Link | Page 2033
--E6: Chapter 6 is underway with Detective Bryan Benson being phoned at three in the morning by Chao Feng who bids him to the Command Module with all possible urgency - something's come up! Straight to the point (after some fat chewing), Chao Feng waves his hands and performs holo-magic to show him a dead body that's been found. I take a lot of issue with this set up because... that's it. He shows him a body but we get NOTHING pertinent about the environment it's been found in. The body COULD be the missing Laraby but there's literally nothing to work with here besides the fact that it is apparently a corpse. There's some jargon about it possibly being a meteor or a part of the Ark (foam, or a chunk of ablative plating) due to the heightened number of impacts they've had since entering Tau Ceti's Oort cloud but WHERE is this?
I had to re-read this entry a few more times just to make sure I understood correctly what Patrick is trying to convey:
*“Well, what else could it be? Unless you’re suggesting a meteor just happened to fall into formation with us at five percent lightspeed.”*
What is sincerely implied by this bonkers fucking writing is that a human body is trailing after the Ark at the same speed it's going. I'm about 90% certain this is completely impossible, if not simply implausible. The next dialogue snippets explain where they got this holo-image from: they have no reason to look anywhere but straight ahead with the cameras, but the render that Chao Feng is showing Benson comes from an "old collision avoidance radar leftover from construction that just happened to be pointed in the right direction". There's no ambient light because this human body-shaped anomaly is in vacuum.
It's 2700 meters out, gradually distancing itself as they speak. Benson asks if the Ark's own gravity well should have pulled it in, but Feng suggests that an earlier course correction may have separated the object. This is simultaneously completely unbelievable and a stroke of miraculous luck for the investigation that only Patrick could have conceived of it.
--E7: Benson surprises everyone, including himself, by volunteering to retrieve the object in an EVA suit despite the serious danger of traveling beyond the Ark's shields, but with only 90 minutes to spare there's only one man for the job!
--E8: We're introduced to a Samoan man named *Director Hekekia*, the chief of engineering aboard the Ark described as having a physique like a keg with arms. Ten minutes later, Benson's suited up and ready for a space-jaunt. Hekekia makes it clear that Benson is a passenger and has no manual control, as the EVA pod is being controlled from the Ark itself. They don't specifically say why they're doing this, but Benson reveals just after this he's never been in vacuum before, never been outside the Ark. The vac-suit itself is also not a true spacesuit, because its life-support systems are too large to fit inside the maintenance pod they're deploying, and will only be able to keep Benson alive for about half an hour if anything goes wrong.
We're breezing over a lot of meandering text about Benson thinking about old deep-sea documentaries and relating that to the experience of what he's doing. It's not bad, but it isn't very interesting, and it takes half a page to finally hit launch and immediately suffer a panic attack. Our protagonist has left the Ark for the first time and the realization is so intense that his vitals spike. Hekekia reins Bryan in, whirling the pod around to show him the Ark as a point of reference. Seeing the various modules (and the *Zero Finals* stadium, by the way), flags painted on the hull, atmo-shuttles and such helps calm the detective down.
In his mental turmoil, Benson settles on a module that is heavy-handedly exposited as the source of the Ark's propulsion: metric fucktons of thermonuclear bombs shoved out the back then exploded to thrust the colony ship forward. *More poop jokes, by the way.* There appears to be an average of one per chapter at this point. The Ark is moving at 15 km/s... and in 10 Days, *the Flip* will occur when they use their remaining payload to slow the ship.
So, the Ark has no engines and can't land itself. It would be nice to know how the fuck they got people aboard now, but I guess that was answered by the fleet of shuttles clamped on the outer hull. But the idea that the ship can't land sounds ridiculous. What a waste of good hardware that could be converted into a temporary city center of some kind, but I admit that's my limited opinion on the matter.
--E9: Hekekia and the engineers pilot Detective Benson closer to the object, illuminating it with the pod's floodlights. Turns out that, yes, it is a body. "One more for *the Clock*" as Benson puts it. Its identity is unconfirmed but Benson waits for it to gradually spin around, so that he can get a good look at its face.
And then.... AN EXPLOSION!!
--E10: Benson's EVA Pod suffers an impact that sends it reeling out the engineer's wireless signal range. I don't know how he knows that he's already out of signal range though because this was not mentioned even once beforehand. I didn't even know we were working within a wireless signal band, and what a weird thing that the word "wireless" is only written five times in the whole book. We're on Page 41 (as my reader indicates), by the way, and it won't be used again until Page 93 (for the last two times).
All I'm saying is that Patrick is presenting a completely dull catastrophe that he's abridged for our pleasure, cutting out dialogue and build-up and seizing what in his mind must be a good execution of momentum.
--E11: Command pipes in, informing Benson that connection is limited to emergency backup and that the main comms are down. Transmissions are set to voice-to-text. Benson reports that he's been struck by a meteor(ite?), suffered severe hull damage, and he's spinning untethered. He needs manual control restored. After some hoohaa back and forth, Benson receives instructions on how to activate manual, which he does, and then he attempts to stabilize. Things go from bad to worse, however, when a bright red warning flashes across the HUD: thruster propellant reserves are at 30%... and then a measly 10% by the time he gets things under control.
I want to take a moment to point out that Patrick's similes are extremely bland and improper. Good discipline would suggest not even saying "like a piñata" over voice-to-text comms in the first place, while the second is totally out of place and should have just been cut.
--E12: Benson makes another realization: the cabin has been compromised and his vac-suit has sealed up, saving his life. Command chimes in, ordering him to abort the recovery of the body and return to the Ark immediately. Any sensible person would do this, but not our brave protagonist, who belays that order and decides to go through with recovery! A good author would have established some stakes and characters already to make this a good scene. The problem is that there are no stakes and none of the cast are even remotely inspiring. The entire rest of the book, the entire plot itself, hinges on Benson doing this, so what is a dumb but brave move is really just dumb and contrived.
--E13: A thousand and one things happen at once over the course of this scene (nearly a whole page), almost all of it pointless and meandering - more shameless padding to get that coveted categorization of being a novelist. Also, blood wouldn't be *drenched* with adrenaline, it would be *saturated*, Patrick. All I can sum up with this is Benson making his way back to the body while suffering from acute onset ADHD.
--E14: Benson succeeds in identifying the corpse as none other than Dr. Edmond Laraby himself, whose twisted grimace reflects his last painful moments in life. After getting a grip on the body, he turns to the Ark and spends the last of the propellant, achieving a 2 meter/s relative speed to the Ark, which is currently a little over 3 kilometers away.
To pass the time and forget about oxygen deprivation, Benson studies Laraby's remains in detail: he's still in his lab scrubs, and missing a shoe. Benson hopes that an autopsy will shed some light on things if it can separate vacuum damage from the equation, but skeptically exposits that the Ark's two doctors (who both serve as coroners) have almost no experience (or none at all, the wording is vague as usual) with murder victims, something that he and they have in common.
Benson rules out suicide with myriad reasonings (and awkward grammar), and arrives at the easiest possible conclusion that blowing someone out of an airlock is a great way to hide a body and not commit suicide. Hiding the stench of decaying remains would be almost impossible (would it?) on the Ark, and there'd be no getting an unregistered cremation past the *reclamation techs*.
There's more questions, though. Laraby's home was sterilized, too clean, and locks on the Ark also double as surveillance devices (or are under camera surveillance). Shoving a body into space is a great way to get rid of evidence but why did it fail to clear the Ark's gravity well, and presumably remain within it for the last four days?
--E15: I sighed, I couldn't help it. The reason is, "extremely convenient plant system glitch that let Laraby's disappearance go unnoticed for hours".
In Chapter 1, a "Loss-of-Signal Alert" was mentioned by Chao Feng as having glitched out. The word 'glitch' never appears in the book between that moment, and now this. Patrick's incredible lack of narrative consistency strikes once again. This man should never take up sewing, every thread would be loose.
It annoys me because that alert was never, ever alluded or explicitly defined as being related to *the Plant* Neuralink and associated, ill-defined horseshit. What was ACTUALLY memorable was that Laraby was "off the grid", which is what is considered impossible. Laraby's disappearance was only reported because he didn't show up for work.
Benson's right: A FUCKING LOT of vexing questions have been raised by this reveal. For starters, and this is why I sighed, why does the glitch even matter if he could be taken off the grid? Did they also glitch him dying and his vital signs being reported to the fucking Command crew, or did they, I dunno, disable his Neuralink and take him off the grid before that? Two, why glitch the system, allude to "lots of things glitching lately" and never talk about that? You could have even subtly waved this off as the Crew letting things slip because of how close to landing the Ark is! I can only assume that Laraby's *plant* was deactivated because there's no possible motherfucking way he would not have been detected so close to the Ark otherwise.
Laraby has officially been confirmed dead for more than four days, at least, and his fate being revealed was as shitty as I expected it to be.
This is supposed to be sci-fi. A ton of great ways to commit a crime can be brainstormed. Patrick did no such thing. Even if you could shut down your brain or whatever, this is not a stimulating read because nobody in the story is intelligent, and only one of them has an actual motivation.
--E16: Bryan Benson cottons on to the fact that the Ark's gravity well is pulling him closer, something he failed to factor in before jetting in its direction. I'm not really sure all this mumbojumbo makes any sense at this point, because if Benson was outside the Ark's impact shielding, wouldn't he be outside the gravity well? How is it that he's remained trailing it for this long, especially after the impact caused him a serious crisis?
He touches base with Command, informing them that he's completed the recovery operation (not operationS, Patrick) and he's now in danger of crashing into the Ark. Chao Feng gets snooty with him, but nevertheless, his pod is drifting dangerously close to the habitation modules and his O2 levels are dropping rapidly.
Benson decides to deploy the reserve propellant to decelerate, harshly, knocking himself unconscious to avoid inflicting serious damage on the Ark. Something breaks and the chapter ends.
from here on there'll be more generalized/summarized reviews of each chapter now that i have comfortably established one simple fact: Patrick is not a great author, but a great pretender. at least, i think that i established as much. i'm doing a three-parter because the complete lack of action and development killed the book in Chapter 3 and because while i was paging through 5 and 6, there was even less going on - and in this case, chapter 6 and 7 basically had no reason to be split up in the first place. Chapter 7 is basically Chapter 6, Part 2.
i'm still feeling out how to present the readview appropriately and try to keep it briefer to prepare for potentially covering the other two books in this series.
in the Chapter 7 Summary, i go on a tangent. most of it is as described, but there's something in there i want in the foreword: when did Patrick join up with SFWA? because after reading through as much as i have of The Ark, after really muscling through his folds, i ask a simple question: how did this chubby child ever gain any clout in this industry? that concern is going to weigh on my mind more heavily than his ass on the stools at Hooli's. without some incontrovertible evidence, i can't believe, even in jest, that Patrick's metrics (at least via Goodreads) are legitimate. he has to have been pumped by bots and fake scores. and then there's the whole matter of him getting Starshit Repo (emphasis on shit, which is the central theme to his personal sense of humor) published by Tor, which is pure insanity. his writing style demonstrably failed to evolve in the five years between these books. it's insane.
you'll love this update a lot, i think.
Chapter 1 | Tor Link | Page 2014
Chapter 2 & 3 | Tor Link | Page 2018
Chapter 4 | Tor Link | Page 2033
==Characters Introduced in Order of Appearance; Character Status==
Bryan Benson,
A police(?) detective and our leading man, a gigasaurus who loves sports and evading responsibility, possibly taxation too.
Chao Feng,
The First Officer (of what?), and a douchedrinker according to Benson.
Lau,
The captain of Patrick's favorite Chinese sports team.
Edmond Laraby,
A missing geneticist, dead or alive off the grid.
Avelina Pereira da Silva,
Science Director; Head of Environmental Research & Development. Got her full name in Chapter 3
Vasquez,
Not to be confused with Vasquez from Aliens; a player in Patrick's favorite sports game.
Lindqvist,
A sports player not even worthy of description by Patrick. Must be a PCJ caricature.
Theresa Alexopolous,
A lieutenant, and a Duty Officer (of what?), sidekick to the Chad Bryan Benson.
Vikram Bahadur,
Chief Constable of the Chinatown District, on par with Bryan Benson. Definitely not a Sikh.
Nibiru,
Not a character, but a black hole on the edge of a solar system. Probably the best character, though, if it's anything like Black Hole Sun.
Devorah Feynman,
Curator of the Museum, wants to preserve humanity's culture by locating and securing authentic works of art.
Constable Korolev,
Theresa sent him to back-up Benson; a rookie that's greener than grass.
Chef Takahashi,
Probably Japanese. Probably a chef.
Magistrate Boswell,
Probably king of the douchedrinkers.
Salvador 'Sal' Kite
Old guy with "war stories"; criminal scum who paid the court a fine and/or served his sentence for participating in a massive art heist.
Old Benny
Criminal scum who has violated the law.
Director Hekekia,
Engineering genius or something. Big Samoan guy who speaks better than Benson.
--E1: Benson wakes up in Laraby's bed, energized by the fact he'd eaten the first real chicken meat produced in over two centuries, and there's something about Theresa's scent lingering on more than just the sheets. He prowls home before nightly hours end and the lights flip on, and we get more innuendo about how he could go for a jog but he'd already "gotten enough exercise" the night before... and then in the very next paragraph is him showering off the various leavings. Is this sci-fi or hen-ti? Anyway there's some Patrick Tomlinson-brand worldbuilding™ with implausible, poorly defined locations, and of course, we learn that Vikram Bahadur, chief constable of Chinatown, was also a *Zero Finals* champion, but for the opposing team.
--E2: We learn that the stationhouses on the Ark were built small; there's barely any room to conduct adequate law enforcement procedures... and there are no jails. The explanation is this: humanity was *so* optimistic about the Ark (nevermind that only 50,000 people got aboard in the midst of what can only be an unfathomably violent event) that they also commit very few crimes because criminal tendencies, antisocial traits and other negative predispositions were quietly rejected in the on-boarding process. Such tendencies couldn't possibly resurface in warlike humanity ever again!
Well, about that: there are a few edge cases on occasion, and the answer is to put them on house arrest and community service. They also probably get a maximum power stun-sticking to the ass to ensure a downtrend in recidivism. I don't believe any of this for a second.
--E3: First Officer (or Dooty Officer? haha gottem) Chao Feng finally materializes in the story to visit Detective Bryan Benson. It appears he's also infected with the *Zero Finals* space-virus too. Feng introduces a new character, *Magistrate Boswell*, possibly a judge but in space, who has declined Benson the warrant he needed to access Edmond Laraby's personal files. I don't remember when that request was made (probably Chapter 1) but the investigation has been cold for three days and now it's being stonewalled by someone real high up. Wonderful. Director da Silva gets mentioned as "screaming about lost productivity", too.
--E4: After some "playful" chatter between Benson and Theresa, there's an interlude/break where Benson leaves the stationhouse (without any prior mention or motivation to the characters or clues for the reader) and goes to Apartment #168, Chinatown, registered to a *Mr. Sal Kite* who has his doorbell disabled so he doesn't have to put up with funsters and anyone wanting to hear his "war stories". Sal steps away to bring some tea and honey, giving Benson time to notice the old fogey's art collection.
While conversing about this, there's a random drop about Sal being an "old criminal", which is then followed up with mention of his involvement in *the Heist*, and the naming of a new suspect in the case (probably), "Old Benny", who'd have fingered a piece like Laraby's authentic Monet in a heartbeat. We get a little background into *the Heist* as its known, that everyone involved except Sal (who was a minor) was executed (which I can only deduce to be a typo/logic failure because if everyone died there could be no plot currently), and then some more bullshit out of left-field in the form of Sal insinuating Benson was born in a tank, and implying most people are.
It's way too late to be dropping a massive revelation like that. It's unnatural, and Benson himself doesn't care. Instead, the two men enjoy some old-fashioned, authentic whiskey made from a still that the constables never found.
Oh, and a throwaway line about the ship having mandatory birth control, making Chapter 4's expository meandering about intercourse before marriage genuinely retarded.
--E5: The dialogue between Salvador and Benson dominates the chapter, and it's stilted due to a lack of build-up. Salvador rifles off everything right from the getgo, when Benson says he needs to find the missing man who owned the Monet. We as readers had no clues before we're going into an unearned minute of an elderly caricature spilling the beans and his life story too because the protagonist came to collect.
Benson asks why Sal 'did it', conspire in the Heist. Sal answers that they were young and wanted to "send a message to their self-appointed, nepotistic overlords" that "all of this" (he points to his artwork) belongs to everybody, revealing him and some his friends to be rather progressive on top of being firebrands. One "David Kimura" is mentioned in passing: he was a Crewman who resigned his post and entered the Ark's political sphere, campaigning on a platform of transparency for the Crew and privacy for the citizens. Kimura is described as a rabble-rouser who wanted to end implantations for children (such as *the Plant*), and won a seat on the Council based on his promise to give civilians the authority to elect Crewmen.
It'd be nice of Patrick to expand on what kind of implantations people get. There can't only be *the Plant*.
Kimura died less than a year into his first term, none of his plans coming together. Sal laments that "only just enough" *cattle* kids make it through the reigning Council's processes to give the plebs hope, but never enough to change things fundamentally. I have no idea why the Hell Theresa would call Benson an optimist who believes in humanity's goodness after this thorough reveal on this setting's equivalent to the fucking Deep State.
Sal finishes by explaining that some of the conspirators involved in *the Heist* were greedy, wanted to get rich by selling it all off, and that he won't identify any of the buyers for Benson. Our protagonist cuts a deal, however: in exchange for calling in a favor with Devorah Feynman to arrange Sal some after-hours private browsing time at the Museum, which he's currently banned for life from, he'll finally get a lead in Laraby's case.
Bryan Benson,
A police(?) detective and our leading man, a gigasaurus who loves sports and evading responsibility, possibly taxation too.
Chao Feng,
The First Officer (of what?), and a douchedrinker according to Benson.
Lau,
The captain of Patrick's favorite Chinese sports team.
Edmond Laraby,
A missing geneticist, dead or alive off the grid.
Avelina Pereira da Silva,
Science Director; Head of Environmental Research & Development. Got her full name in Chapter 3
Vasquez,
Not to be confused with Vasquez from Aliens; a player in Patrick's favorite sports game.
Lindqvist,
A sports player not even worthy of description by Patrick. Must be a PCJ caricature.
Theresa Alexopolous,
A lieutenant, and a Duty Officer (of what?), sidekick to the Chad Bryan Benson.
Vikram Bahadur,
Chief Constable of the Chinatown District, on par with Bryan Benson. Definitely not a Sikh.
Nibiru,
Not a character, but a black hole on the edge of a solar system. Probably the best character, though, if it's anything like Black Hole Sun.
Devorah Feynman,
Curator of the Museum, wants to preserve humanity's culture by locating and securing authentic works of art.
Constable Korolev,
Theresa sent him to back-up Benson; a rookie that's greener than grass.
Chef Takahashi,
Probably Japanese. Probably a chef.
Magistrate Boswell,
Probably king of the douchedrinkers.
Salvador 'Sal' Kite
Old guy with "war stories"; criminal scum who paid the court a fine and/or served his sentence for participating in a massive art heist.
Old Benny
Criminal scum who has violated the law.
Director Hekekia,
Engineering genius or something. Big Samoan guy who speaks better than Benson.
--E1: Benson wakes up in Laraby's bed, energized by the fact he'd eaten the first real chicken meat produced in over two centuries, and there's something about Theresa's scent lingering on more than just the sheets. He prowls home before nightly hours end and the lights flip on, and we get more innuendo about how he could go for a jog but he'd already "gotten enough exercise" the night before... and then in the very next paragraph is him showering off the various leavings. Is this sci-fi or hen-ti? Anyway there's some Patrick Tomlinson-brand worldbuilding™ with implausible, poorly defined locations, and of course, we learn that Vikram Bahadur, chief constable of Chinatown, was also a *Zero Finals* champion, but for the opposing team.
--E2: We learn that the stationhouses on the Ark were built small; there's barely any room to conduct adequate law enforcement procedures... and there are no jails. The explanation is this: humanity was *so* optimistic about the Ark (nevermind that only 50,000 people got aboard in the midst of what can only be an unfathomably violent event) that they also commit very few crimes because criminal tendencies, antisocial traits and other negative predispositions were quietly rejected in the on-boarding process. Such tendencies couldn't possibly resurface in warlike humanity ever again!
Well, about that: there are a few edge cases on occasion, and the answer is to put them on house arrest and community service. They also probably get a maximum power stun-sticking to the ass to ensure a downtrend in recidivism. I don't believe any of this for a second.
--E3: First Officer (or Dooty Officer? haha gottem) Chao Feng finally materializes in the story to visit Detective Bryan Benson. It appears he's also infected with the *Zero Finals* space-virus too. Feng introduces a new character, *Magistrate Boswell*, possibly a judge but in space, who has declined Benson the warrant he needed to access Edmond Laraby's personal files. I don't remember when that request was made (probably Chapter 1) but the investigation has been cold for three days and now it's being stonewalled by someone real high up. Wonderful. Director da Silva gets mentioned as "screaming about lost productivity", too.
--E4: After some "playful" chatter between Benson and Theresa, there's an interlude/break where Benson leaves the stationhouse (without any prior mention or motivation to the characters or clues for the reader) and goes to Apartment #168, Chinatown, registered to a *Mr. Sal Kite* who has his doorbell disabled so he doesn't have to put up with funsters and anyone wanting to hear his "war stories". Sal steps away to bring some tea and honey, giving Benson time to notice the old fogey's art collection.
While conversing about this, there's a random drop about Sal being an "old criminal", which is then followed up with mention of his involvement in *the Heist*, and the naming of a new suspect in the case (probably), "Old Benny", who'd have fingered a piece like Laraby's authentic Monet in a heartbeat. We get a little background into *the Heist* as its known, that everyone involved except Sal (who was a minor) was executed (which I can only deduce to be a typo/logic failure because if everyone died there could be no plot currently), and then some more bullshit out of left-field in the form of Sal insinuating Benson was born in a tank, and implying most people are.
It's way too late to be dropping a massive revelation like that. It's unnatural, and Benson himself doesn't care. Instead, the two men enjoy some old-fashioned, authentic whiskey made from a still that the constables never found.
Oh, and a throwaway line about the ship having mandatory birth control, making Chapter 4's expository meandering about intercourse before marriage genuinely retarded.
--E5: The dialogue between Salvador and Benson dominates the chapter, and it's stilted due to a lack of build-up. Salvador rifles off everything right from the getgo, when Benson says he needs to find the missing man who owned the Monet. We as readers had no clues before we're going into an unearned minute of an elderly caricature spilling the beans and his life story too because the protagonist came to collect.
Benson asks why Sal 'did it', conspire in the Heist. Sal answers that they were young and wanted to "send a message to their self-appointed, nepotistic overlords" that "all of this" (he points to his artwork) belongs to everybody, revealing him and some his friends to be rather progressive on top of being firebrands. One "David Kimura" is mentioned in passing: he was a Crewman who resigned his post and entered the Ark's political sphere, campaigning on a platform of transparency for the Crew and privacy for the citizens. Kimura is described as a rabble-rouser who wanted to end implantations for children (such as *the Plant*), and won a seat on the Council based on his promise to give civilians the authority to elect Crewmen.
It'd be nice of Patrick to expand on what kind of implantations people get. There can't only be *the Plant*.
Kimura died less than a year into his first term, none of his plans coming together. Sal laments that "only just enough" *cattle* kids make it through the reigning Council's processes to give the plebs hope, but never enough to change things fundamentally. I have no idea why the Hell Theresa would call Benson an optimist who believes in humanity's goodness after this thorough reveal on this setting's equivalent to the fucking Deep State.
Sal finishes by explaining that some of the conspirators involved in *the Heist* were greedy, wanted to get rich by selling it all off, and that he won't identify any of the buyers for Benson. Our protagonist cuts a deal, however: in exchange for calling in a favor with Devorah Feynman to arrange Sal some after-hours private browsing time at the Museum, which he's currently banned for life from, he'll finally get a lead in Laraby's case.
The investigation into Edmond Laraby's disappearance suffers a crippling blow with the suspiciousness of one of the Ark's Magistrates denying Benson's warrant for the missing geneticist's personal files. Immediately afterward, Benson heads to Chinatown to speak to an old thief named Salvador Kite, and offers to get him some browsing time at the Museum, his favorite place, in exchange for a list of buyers who purchased stolen artwork and a possible solid lead in the case.
Aside from the plot, what could be interesting topics are dropped haphazardly (humans are born in tanks in this setting!), adding yet another layer of complexity to the world. Salvador Kite manages to *be* a character, sort of, while Benson remains ever-aloof and dispassionate in his dealings.
Aside from the plot, what could be interesting topics are dropped haphazardly (humans are born in tanks in this setting!), adding yet another layer of complexity to the world. Salvador Kite manages to *be* a character, sort of, while Benson remains ever-aloof and dispassionate in his dealings.
--E6: Chapter 6 is underway with Detective Bryan Benson being phoned at three in the morning by Chao Feng who bids him to the Command Module with all possible urgency - something's come up! Straight to the point (after some fat chewing), Chao Feng waves his hands and performs holo-magic to show him a dead body that's been found. I take a lot of issue with this set up because... that's it. He shows him a body but we get NOTHING pertinent about the environment it's been found in. The body COULD be the missing Laraby but there's literally nothing to work with here besides the fact that it is apparently a corpse. There's some jargon about it possibly being a meteor or a part of the Ark (foam, or a chunk of ablative plating) due to the heightened number of impacts they've had since entering Tau Ceti's Oort cloud but WHERE is this?
I had to re-read this entry a few more times just to make sure I understood correctly what Patrick is trying to convey:
*“Well, what else could it be? Unless you’re suggesting a meteor just happened to fall into formation with us at five percent lightspeed.”*
What is sincerely implied by this bonkers fucking writing is that a human body is trailing after the Ark at the same speed it's going. I'm about 90% certain this is completely impossible, if not simply implausible. The next dialogue snippets explain where they got this holo-image from: they have no reason to look anywhere but straight ahead with the cameras, but the render that Chao Feng is showing Benson comes from an "old collision avoidance radar leftover from construction that just happened to be pointed in the right direction". There's no ambient light because this human body-shaped anomaly is in vacuum.
It's 2700 meters out, gradually distancing itself as they speak. Benson asks if the Ark's own gravity well should have pulled it in, but Feng suggests that an earlier course correction may have separated the object. This is simultaneously completely unbelievable and a stroke of miraculous luck for the investigation that only Patrick could have conceived of it.
--E7: Benson surprises everyone, including himself, by volunteering to retrieve the object in an EVA suit despite the serious danger of traveling beyond the Ark's shields, but with only 90 minutes to spare there's only one man for the job!
--E8: We're introduced to a Samoan man named *Director Hekekia*, the chief of engineering aboard the Ark described as having a physique like a keg with arms. Ten minutes later, Benson's suited up and ready for a space-jaunt. Hekekia makes it clear that Benson is a passenger and has no manual control, as the EVA pod is being controlled from the Ark itself. They don't specifically say why they're doing this, but Benson reveals just after this he's never been in vacuum before, never been outside the Ark. The vac-suit itself is also not a true spacesuit, because its life-support systems are too large to fit inside the maintenance pod they're deploying, and will only be able to keep Benson alive for about half an hour if anything goes wrong.
We're breezing over a lot of meandering text about Benson thinking about old deep-sea documentaries and relating that to the experience of what he's doing. It's not bad, but it isn't very interesting, and it takes half a page to finally hit launch and immediately suffer a panic attack. Our protagonist has left the Ark for the first time and the realization is so intense that his vitals spike. Hekekia reins Bryan in, whirling the pod around to show him the Ark as a point of reference. Seeing the various modules (and the *Zero Finals* stadium, by the way), flags painted on the hull, atmo-shuttles and such helps calm the detective down.
In his mental turmoil, Benson settles on a module that is heavy-handedly exposited as the source of the Ark's propulsion: metric fucktons of thermonuclear bombs shoved out the back then exploded to thrust the colony ship forward. *More poop jokes, by the way.* There appears to be an average of one per chapter at this point. The Ark is moving at 15 km/s... and in 10 Days, *the Flip* will occur when they use their remaining payload to slow the ship.
So, the Ark has no engines and can't land itself. It would be nice to know how the fuck they got people aboard now, but I guess that was answered by the fleet of shuttles clamped on the outer hull. But the idea that the ship can't land sounds ridiculous. What a waste of good hardware that could be converted into a temporary city center of some kind, but I admit that's my limited opinion on the matter.
--E9: Hekekia and the engineers pilot Detective Benson closer to the object, illuminating it with the pod's floodlights. Turns out that, yes, it is a body. "One more for *the Clock*" as Benson puts it. Its identity is unconfirmed but Benson waits for it to gradually spin around, so that he can get a good look at its face.
And then.... AN EXPLOSION!!
Chao Feng phones up Benson because something outside of the Ark has been found trailing with it in formation - yes, there is a human body that suddenly appeared on the exterior of the Ark, a location that none of the Ark's cameras could spot save for an old radar left behind from its construction. A small course correction is suggested to have dislodged the body from the Ark's gravity well, allowing it to be detected. Benson volunteers for a trip in an EVA Pod to go beyond the Ark's impact shielding array and identify the corpse despite the dangers.
And right at the end, BOOM! Something goes wrong! Something happens!
And right at the end, BOOM! Something goes wrong! Something happens!
--E10: Benson's EVA Pod suffers an impact that sends it reeling out the engineer's wireless signal range. I don't know how he knows that he's already out of signal range though because this was not mentioned even once beforehand. I didn't even know we were working within a wireless signal band, and what a weird thing that the word "wireless" is only written five times in the whole book. We're on Page 41 (as my reader indicates), by the way, and it won't be used again until Page 93 (for the last two times).
All I'm saying is that Patrick is presenting a completely dull catastrophe that he's abridged for our pleasure, cutting out dialogue and build-up and seizing what in his mind must be a good execution of momentum.
--E11: Command pipes in, informing Benson that connection is limited to emergency backup and that the main comms are down. Transmissions are set to voice-to-text. Benson reports that he's been struck by a meteor(ite?), suffered severe hull damage, and he's spinning untethered. He needs manual control restored. After some hoohaa back and forth, Benson receives instructions on how to activate manual, which he does, and then he attempts to stabilize. Things go from bad to worse, however, when a bright red warning flashes across the HUD: thruster propellant reserves are at 30%... and then a measly 10% by the time he gets things under control.
I want to take a moment to point out that Patrick's similes are extremely bland and improper. Good discipline would suggest not even saying "like a piñata" over voice-to-text comms in the first place, while the second is totally out of place and should have just been cut.
--E12: Benson makes another realization: the cabin has been compromised and his vac-suit has sealed up, saving his life. Command chimes in, ordering him to abort the recovery of the body and return to the Ark immediately. Any sensible person would do this, but not our brave protagonist, who belays that order and decides to go through with recovery! A good author would have established some stakes and characters already to make this a good scene. The problem is that there are no stakes and none of the cast are even remotely inspiring. The entire rest of the book, the entire plot itself, hinges on Benson doing this, so what is a dumb but brave move is really just dumb and contrived.
--E13: A thousand and one things happen at once over the course of this scene (nearly a whole page), almost all of it pointless and meandering - more shameless padding to get that coveted categorization of being a novelist. Also, blood wouldn't be *drenched* with adrenaline, it would be *saturated*, Patrick. All I can sum up with this is Benson making his way back to the body while suffering from acute onset ADHD.
--E14: Benson succeeds in identifying the corpse as none other than Dr. Edmond Laraby himself, whose twisted grimace reflects his last painful moments in life. After getting a grip on the body, he turns to the Ark and spends the last of the propellant, achieving a 2 meter/s relative speed to the Ark, which is currently a little over 3 kilometers away.
To pass the time and forget about oxygen deprivation, Benson studies Laraby's remains in detail: he's still in his lab scrubs, and missing a shoe. Benson hopes that an autopsy will shed some light on things if it can separate vacuum damage from the equation, but skeptically exposits that the Ark's two doctors (who both serve as coroners) have almost no experience (or none at all, the wording is vague as usual) with murder victims, something that he and they have in common.
Benson rules out suicide with myriad reasonings (and awkward grammar), and arrives at the easiest possible conclusion that blowing someone out of an airlock is a great way to hide a body and not commit suicide. Hiding the stench of decaying remains would be almost impossible (would it?) on the Ark, and there'd be no getting an unregistered cremation past the *reclamation techs*.
There's more questions, though. Laraby's home was sterilized, too clean, and locks on the Ark also double as surveillance devices (or are under camera surveillance). Shoving a body into space is a great way to get rid of evidence but why did it fail to clear the Ark's gravity well, and presumably remain within it for the last four days?
--E15: I sighed, I couldn't help it. The reason is, "extremely convenient plant system glitch that let Laraby's disappearance go unnoticed for hours".
In Chapter 1, a "Loss-of-Signal Alert" was mentioned by Chao Feng as having glitched out. The word 'glitch' never appears in the book between that moment, and now this. Patrick's incredible lack of narrative consistency strikes once again. This man should never take up sewing, every thread would be loose.
It annoys me because that alert was never, ever alluded or explicitly defined as being related to *the Plant* Neuralink and associated, ill-defined horseshit. What was ACTUALLY memorable was that Laraby was "off the grid", which is what is considered impossible. Laraby's disappearance was only reported because he didn't show up for work.
Benson's right: A FUCKING LOT of vexing questions have been raised by this reveal. For starters, and this is why I sighed, why does the glitch even matter if he could be taken off the grid? Did they also glitch him dying and his vital signs being reported to the fucking Command crew, or did they, I dunno, disable his Neuralink and take him off the grid before that? Two, why glitch the system, allude to "lots of things glitching lately" and never talk about that? You could have even subtly waved this off as the Crew letting things slip because of how close to landing the Ark is! I can only assume that Laraby's *plant* was deactivated because there's no possible motherfucking way he would not have been detected so close to the Ark otherwise.
Laraby has officially been confirmed dead for more than four days, at least, and his fate being revealed was as shitty as I expected it to be.
This is supposed to be sci-fi. A ton of great ways to commit a crime can be brainstormed. Patrick did no such thing. Even if you could shut down your brain or whatever, this is not a stimulating read because nobody in the story is intelligent, and only one of them has an actual motivation.
--E16: Bryan Benson cottons on to the fact that the Ark's gravity well is pulling him closer, something he failed to factor in before jetting in its direction. I'm not really sure all this mumbojumbo makes any sense at this point, because if Benson was outside the Ark's impact shielding, wouldn't he be outside the gravity well? How is it that he's remained trailing it for this long, especially after the impact caused him a serious crisis?
He touches base with Command, informing them that he's completed the recovery operation (not operationS, Patrick) and he's now in danger of crashing into the Ark. Chao Feng gets snooty with him, but nevertheless, his pod is drifting dangerously close to the habitation modules and his O2 levels are dropping rapidly.
Benson decides to deploy the reserve propellant to decelerate, harshly, knocking himself unconscious to avoid inflicting serious damage on the Ark. Something breaks and the chapter ends.
Chapter 7 is basically Chapter 6, Part 2, a drag-out battle of man vs. environment as Benson tries to return safely to the Ark with the mission and his EVA pod compromised. We don't get a satisfying conclusion to what could have been a brave, courageous act, only Benson succumbing at the last second without even a chance to give the thumbs up to the Samoan director guy. Oh well. There still hasn't been any killing in this book besides Laraby now and I don't count it because it occurred before the story actually began.
At this point I'd also like to mention something else: We've FINALLY done something in the plot, finally seen something worth a damn: Edmond Laraby is dead, his body was found floating in space in lockstep with the Ark. And that's it, because if you really start to think about it, you run into a ton of problems that exist because Patrick Tomlinson's writing is grossly incomprehensible.
Not only that, here's the word count he managed before he finally advanced his plot as of Chapter 7's conclusion: 24,022, or about 50 pages. My reader indicates I'm 25% done with the book. If you have been following along, if you've read even one of the readview posts in depth, just think about how much meandering nonsense we've muddled through, how many useless sequences of events we've enjoyed like prison, and none of the characters have so much as emerged from a shell or discovered ANYTHING. It is a sci-fi story with a setting in stasis. I've been reading other books in my spare time, like Empire of Silence, and I intimately, seamlessly connected with multiple characters and a vast interstellar universe in the first seven pages of it.
Something important to me as a reader is discovering things alongside the characters. They should be experiencing things new to them and I should be experiencing those events alongside them, and learning about the characters as those experiences unfold. Patrick has failed in this. I get that my preferences are my own, but looking at Patrick's Goodreads, it boggles the mind how The Ark has over a thousand ratings, 16 editions, and a 3.88 Average score. It's doubly bizarre that he managed to wedge himself onto Tor's shelf.
When did Patrick join SFWA? Are they responsible for this man's ludicrous claim to fame? I refuse to believe that his metrics aren't artificially generated. It's just not possible for him to have gained any clout on the back of this kind of writing, heaven forbid whatever he wrote between The Ark and Starship Repo. Or, worse, maybe it is all real, and maybe the industry has been *this shit* for this long and I never truly understood just how pathetic quality control has become.
At this point I'd also like to mention something else: We've FINALLY done something in the plot, finally seen something worth a damn: Edmond Laraby is dead, his body was found floating in space in lockstep with the Ark. And that's it, because if you really start to think about it, you run into a ton of problems that exist because Patrick Tomlinson's writing is grossly incomprehensible.
Not only that, here's the word count he managed before he finally advanced his plot as of Chapter 7's conclusion: 24,022, or about 50 pages. My reader indicates I'm 25% done with the book. If you have been following along, if you've read even one of the readview posts in depth, just think about how much meandering nonsense we've muddled through, how many useless sequences of events we've enjoyed like prison, and none of the characters have so much as emerged from a shell or discovered ANYTHING. It is a sci-fi story with a setting in stasis. I've been reading other books in my spare time, like Empire of Silence, and I intimately, seamlessly connected with multiple characters and a vast interstellar universe in the first seven pages of it.
Something important to me as a reader is discovering things alongside the characters. They should be experiencing things new to them and I should be experiencing those events alongside them, and learning about the characters as those experiences unfold. Patrick has failed in this. I get that my preferences are my own, but looking at Patrick's Goodreads, it boggles the mind how The Ark has over a thousand ratings, 16 editions, and a 3.88 Average score. It's doubly bizarre that he managed to wedge himself onto Tor's shelf.
When did Patrick join SFWA? Are they responsible for this man's ludicrous claim to fame? I refuse to believe that his metrics aren't artificially generated. It's just not possible for him to have gained any clout on the back of this kind of writing, heaven forbid whatever he wrote between The Ark and Starship Repo. Or, worse, maybe it is all real, and maybe the industry has been *this shit* for this long and I never truly understood just how pathetic quality control has become.
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- Joined
- Apr 6, 2023
These are the longest 10 days of my life. This is a new experience for me. I love to sleep and it's fixed in family lore that even as a kid I had to be actually shaken awake on Christmas morning so everyone could open their gifts.
Unless the interstate starts 500 yards from Pat's parking spot* there will be no escape, child.
He lives a full and active life he could easily draw inspiration from.
After all, he's 'into things'.
Fat by Every Medical Standard IN SPACE
Pink Fart Blanket IN SPACE
Toxic Adirondack IN SPACE
Tiny Tim IN SPACE
Fisher Price firearm IN SPACE
Welfare Check IN SPACE
I would very much like to see
30 Days in County IN SPACE.
* The Hovel doesn't even have a driveway. Pathetic.
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2021
Does Nigki even have a car ? Every pic I see it's the Rustang, his faggy British Triumph and some ancient rusted hulk of a Japanese motorcycle half under a tattered cover.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2023
i moused over the scroll bar in my reader and saw there's a few things at the back of the book that i will definitely be going over, but in the meantime here's the "about the author" bit.
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2017
There is nothing more peak Pat than listing his fucking Xitter tag in an 'About The Author.' Incredible.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
It's nice to see where Niki ranks in importance in Pat's world.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2023
oh, she gets mentioned in the acknowledgments... as his girlfriend. i guess they weren't loving husband and wife at the time.
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2021
It's 2700 meters out, gradually distancing itself as they speak. Benson asks if the Ark's own gravity well should have pulled it in, but Feng suggests that an earlier course correction may have separated the object. This is simultaneously completely unbelievable and a stroke of miraculous luck for the investigation that only Patrick could have conceived of it.
--E7: Benson surprises everyone, including himself, by volunteering to retrieve the object in an EVA suit despite the serious danger of traveling beyond the Ark's shields, but with only 90 minutes to spare there's only one man for the job!
Wow, Rick, way to plagiarise Carl Sagan. Or is this his idea of a "reference"?Fat Rick said:
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
I know Nikki is not exactly Ms. Personality, but "houseplant" is still a mean way to refer to her, Pat.
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2022
"a Triumph motorcycle bought specifically to embarrass and infuriate Harley riders" he's such a monumental faggot, as if any other biker of any kind pays attention to Rick other than to think "what a fat faggot".
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
Not as mean as putting a ring on her was. Or that time she got roped into owing large amounts of money.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021