Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have a collection I call "Too Terrible To Read." This "trilogy" is in it. I'm going to be blunt because V. Daniels illustrates a trend in new fiction, at least speculative fiction, on Amazon that disturbs me and should disturb every reader. Amazon, in some important ways, is complicit, so listen up, Amazon. When I was a kid, Sci Fi writers had a long list of periodicals with editors who paid small amounts for promising fiction. Every month, most of them carried part of a serialized novel or novella. We knew because they told us we were getting only part of it. We accepted the custom and impatiently waited for the mailman to bring next month's installment. Most of those pulp monthlies have long since disappeared. Now we have "self-publishing" or more aptly, vanity publishing. It's cheap, it can be done without a staff of any kind. Submissions don't run the risk of an editor/publisher's rejection. Have a friend read your file and compliment you on your wonderful story - are they going to be honest? Have a friend or your long suffering spouse look the file over for obvious typos, run it through the spell checker, and upload it. I don't write for a living, so I don't know the details (look at my review of "Eon" for another problem with Amazon editions). A fortunate writer will come up with a good tale which can survive a bad telling of it. The rest will make a few bucks, or not, and be able to say, "I published a book once." Not having a professional editor criticize your work, a good one who is intrigued with your story, actually help put it into respectable shape, leaves the author who has only a passing acquaintance with style, syntax, punctuation, grammar, on his own, unable to see his errors. Then there are lapses in logic, the bane of the eager author who tries hard, as in this case, to be technical without the background to do it. Plausibility suffers. I've got news for wannabes: the best sci-fi writers had the background for it or were willing to go out to find help when their own knowledge wasn't up to the task their imaginations set for them. It's hard, demanding, exacting work, this writing business. If you're not willing to do that hard work, you're perpetrating a con. If there's no science to support an idea, then the pseudo science the author makes up to tell his tale, has to have an internal logic. Screw that up and the whole project becomes ludicrous. I'll admit that I slogged through the first part of the "Interstellar Age" just so I could write this review. It's not fair to anyone to be unfamiliar with your subject. I also confess that I couldn't bring myself to read the rest of it, although I did 'thumb" through parts two and three, finding even more of the errors Daniels made in the first part. Mr. Daniels, if you are going to try to support your story with science, get it right. For example, you run through the calculations needed to derive the specific gravity of a body in space. M^3 is not a unit of area. (Just one example among dozens.) Don't tell me in this paragraph that your character is confident he's figured something out, only to tell me in the next one, he's not sure. And, unless there's a very good reason (there can be) to tell me the same thing twice, tell me once - never three times. Assume I'm as intelligent as you are, have a memory, or can go back to look if I forget. This author's career has been, how shall I say it, eclectic to a fault. He's added publishing a book to his wide ranging, if shallow, resume. He should move on or go back to school, learn how to write, and do a lot of serious reading to learn how the craft should be organized before he tries again. As for Amazon: I suspect they don't want to take on the responsibilities of publisher. But, Amazon, you are that. You have your own imprint - Kindle Editions. You must, to protect your customers, at least lay down minimum standards of spelling, and typo free files. To be fair to us, who have to buy the books sight unseen (samples are gamed, and you know it) you should develop a list of editors to whom you can refer the writers who want to push their books on Amazon. Not only are you letting us down, you're contributing to the decay of reading (and writing) skills among those whose schools already have left them only semi-illiterate. We learn by example. It the examples we're given are wanting, even our own ability to discriminate between the good and bad erodes. It should be your policy to be up front about whether a "book," in reality, an installment, is going to be part of a larger work - a serial. The grand game on Amazon is serialization to be capped by "omnibus editions." Give us credit for what we've already bought if we choose to buy the final product. And as a matter of ethics, if a manuscript is corrected or re-edited, those who bought early in good faith (assumed) should be given the "improved" manuscript every time.