How Oscar Indigo Broke the Universe (and Put It Back Together Again). By David Teague. Harper. $16.99.
Daniel Coldstar #1: The Relic War. By Stel Pavlou. Harper. $16.99.
Excitement is not enough for some authors of novels for preteens – to
keep things interesting, they like to add a heaping helping of funny stuff, or
at least a touch of it here and there. That this will be the combination in
David Teague’s latest book is obvious from its lengthy and partly parenthetical
title. The story itself is less unusual, being focused, as so many preteen
novels are, on the usual tropes of self-discovery, teamwork, honesty,
friendship – all that good stuff that really is good stuff but that comes up so often in books like this that it
tends to wear thinner than it does in real life (where it comes up much less
frequently). In any case, the plot here turns on one specific fantasy element:
Oscar Indigo comes into possession of a watch that can stop time. This is not
science fiction but fantasy: how and why the watch works, and all that stuff,
is quite irrelevant. What matters is that Oscar is a team-oriented baseball
player who in fact does not play at all: he is a perpetual bench-warmer who has
never had a hit. But that is all right with him, because he is brimming with
team spirit and as such has great value to everybody – as the star player,
Lourdes, tells him directly. The problem is that Oscar wants so much to help
the team that, when Lourdes is injured and Oscar has to fill in for her, Oscar
uses his watch to stop time long enough to arrange a game-winning home run.
That does indeed help the team and, not coincidentally, turn Oscar into a hero.
But of course Oscar knows he cheated, sort of, by rearranging the universe, so
he feels bad – but nowhere near as bad as he is going to feel when he finds out
the consequences of his time stopping. Those include flying reptiles out of the
dinosaur age, a tsunami, and, ummmm, a second sun. Something is wrong, very
wrong, and Oscar knows just what it is and just why. What he does not know,
what he must figure out, is what to do to set things right. That sets him on a
typical fantasy quest, in the course of which he encounters some bit players who
are actually more intriguing in many ways than rather dull Oscar himself. One
is Dr. Smiley, who is neither more nor less than the keeper of the universe – a
keeper who likes things tidy, which they are not when the time is out of joint
(so to speak). Another is the octogenarian woman who once struck out Babe Ruth,
Eleanor Ethel Ellington, and if you have not heard of her, you must be living
in some other universe. Which is kind of the point of How Oscar Indigo Broke the Universe (and Put It Back Together Again).
It is not the main point, though: the primary thing here is the usual
affirmation of goodness and team spirit and friendship and all the rest. And
all that is well and good, except for the nagging sensation readers may have of
having heard all that good stuff before. If they do have that feeling, it is
not a case of remaking the universe – it is simply one of remaking story arcs
in ways that leave the fundamentals unchanged.
The
story arc of the first book in the planned Daniel
Coldstar series is a familiar one as well: much of The Relic War strongly echoes Star
Wars. Stel Pavlou uses an old trick of exposition by having the protagonist
start out with few memories and gradually regain them, thus bringing readers
into the story as the central character himself figures out what is going on.
The whole thing starts when Daniel awakens in one of the underground “relic
mines,” where kids known as “grubs” search endlessly for mysterious artifacts
left behind by some unknown past race and now desired by the usual brutal and
evil overlords, or rather Overseers, as they are called here. Daniel does not
recognize anyone when he awakens, but the other grubs seem to know him and are
surprised to find him among them “again.” So we know Daniel has a past, probably
one of some importance, to ferret out. One of the grubs, Blink, helps Daniel
understand what is going on in the mines and what he is supposed to do. But as
Daniel remembers bits of the past, he starts thinking of escape and the future.
Helpfully, Daniel finds a relic powerful enough to defeat the Overseers –
Pavlou introduces more-obvious authorial manipulation of the story than is
really necessary. Eventually Daniel escapes from the mine, stows away on a
cargo spaceship, and finds a mentor in the form of a robotic rat, who
eventually connects Daniel with good guys known as Truth Seekers and their
organization, the Guild of Truth. If this sounds both confusing and overly
complex, that is because it is – and it is obvious, too, with the Guild of Truth
quite clearly a white-hat organization while the evil Sinjas (whose name
includes “sin” and sounds like “ninjas”) are equally clearly black-hat
constructions. Pavlou strives to keep the book moving smartly along with
occasional forays into humor and lots of short chapters with cliffhanger
conclusions. But The Relic War is
mostly a collection of clichés, with dialogue that readers interested in the
fantasy/SF genre will find irritatingly familiar (especially when villains are
speaking) and with entirely arbitrary “weird characters” (such as ones with
fingernails instead of hair) tossed in to diversify the cast a bit. Some of the
terms in The Relic War are confusing
enough so the back-of-book glossary is helpful, if not absolutely necessary.
And it is possible that this series opener is so sprawling and confusing
because Pavlou wants to gets all the basics of his imagined universe out there
for greater exploration later. Hopefully, if that is the case, future Daniel Coldstar volumes will have
greater originality in both plot and characterization than does The Relic War.
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