Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Review: Kludged Singularity by Tony L Joy



Genre: Technothriller

Description:

“Alan is wasting his time in technical support, dreaming of the future. Accidentally releasing an advanced computer worm wasn’t how he imagined it would start. Now he’s just trying to hold everything together with digital duct tape and wishful thinking.

His employer’s sinister secrets throw a wrench in those plans as he learns the technological singularity is imminent. When ‘working to live’ takes on a literal meaning Alan realizes the future may not be as bright as he’d hoped.
Alan fights to guide the future of humanity before control, and freedom, slip from his fingers forever.”

Author:

“Tony L Joy currently lives in Colorado and has spent his adult life explaining increasingly less comprehensible computer problems to similarly less comprehensible people in exchange for money. When not exchanging knowledge for currency, he writes stories and books”

Appraisal:

The primary reason I didn’t rate this book one or possibly even two stars more is that it is lacking in polish. The proofreader needed to take another pass or two through it as there were numerous minor errors that kept throwing me out of the story when I’d have to re-read a sentence after mentally tripping over the place where a small word was missing or a minor typo jumped out at me.

That said, if you’re not sensitive to those kind of issues (or you’re willing to overlook them) there is an interesting story here. It invokes some interesting questions about whether technology can be taken too far, morality and ethics in a changing world, and even what it takes to make something human. A good technothriller will have you excited about what technology can possibly do some day (and for my tastes it shouldn’t be too far out there, so seemingly plausible), but also provide a counterpoint, cautioning us to be careful. The story in Kludged Singularity hits that balance well.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Some adult language.

Format/Typo Issues:

Way too many issues that should have been caught in copyediting and proofreading. None serious, but the sheer number was way more than is reasonable.

Rating: *** Three Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 100-105,000 words

4 comments:

Tony L Joy said...

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and review Kludged Singularity! I'm glad you enjoyed the story despite the challenges from poor proofreading.

I did want to note that the current published edition is much cleaner, the review copy and initial publication was definitely plagued with typos. Thanks to the reviewers and initial readers bringing the issues to my attention I was able to get another proofreader to go through it and produce cleaner copy for future readers.

- Tony L Joy

BooksAndPals said...

Glad to hear that, Tony.

Judi Moore said...

I'm allergic to under-proofread books. But am sampling on your promise that the glitches have been fixed, Tony :-)

Tony L Joy said...

I hope that my book delivers a mistake-free reading experience now, but if you do find anything please let me know so I can fix it and switch my proofreader for future books.