eBook Edition
Guardian eBook
PDF Format
Only $5.00 
Paperback Edition
Purchase
Guardian Author Signed Copy
£7.00 GBP ($11.00)*
P&P £1.50 GBP
PAYPAL
Do you like your Sci Fi with a sprinkling of action and a twist of romance? Then you will enjoy these books.
90 Day Money Back Guarantee
Guardian Reader Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars A Quick, Easy and Enjoyable Page Turner, 12 Jan 2011
By M. Thompson "Mike Thompson"
This review is from: Guardian (Kindle Edition)
"This is a fun book with an easy to follow plot and likeable characters, which is then all well set up for the sequel.
For most of the time, the story-world is believable except in a couple of places nearer the end of the book; however, suspension of belief for these minor areas does not detract from the story itself.
The main character, Tristan Taylor, meets up with a Dacain called Aurelia; they do not get along at first as the Dacain's enslave all who they come across. However, as they get to know each other on Earth and trying to get back to her planet, they fall in love. When they do finally get on board a Dacain ship there is an issue that then causes Tristan to begin 'his [epic] quest to end the rule of the dominant Dacain people and bring peace and equality to all races'.
The book has an easy pace to it, although, for me, I would have preferred rather more 'showing' by way of dialogue, rather than a fair amount of 'telling' (in this case it was OK).
This is a book that you can easily read to pass a few hours enjoyably".
5.0 out of 5 stars Guardian, 31 Dec 2009
By v6mj
"Brilliant debut from author Clive Osborne Rapley. I was gripped from start to finish & am eagerly awaiting another Tristan Taylor adventure."
5.0 out of 5 stars Impossible to put down, 14 Jun 2009
By Basil
"I've just read this book. The story is so good that I didn't want to put it down until it was finished. I do not usually read Sci Fi books so keeping me this enthralled was some achievement. It is certainly a good read and I would recommend it to everyone."
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Read, 29 May 2009
By Squealmiester "Neil" (UK)
"It's always hard looking for new authors and most often disappointing, but this turned out to be an exception, I found myself immersed in Tristan Taylors' world. When will there be another?"
5.0 out of 5 stars Guardian review, 25 May 2009
By M. Berdinner (UK)
"From the first page the action does not let up. I do not normally read Science fiction but this book caught my imagination and I found I had difficulty putting it down. Many books I read I skip through sections that are slow and don't add to the story. I found I did not need to do that with this book. It is fast paced with good characters and story line. I thoroughly recommend it."
3.0 out of 5 stars "It's a little simplistic, but quite enjoyable." 14 Dec 2010
By Mr. N. W. Moore "nicholaswmoore" (UK)
This review is from: Guardian (Paperback)
"A simple story with no unexpected twists or turns. Quite enjoyable in a wholesome sort of way."
Scribendi Professional Book Critique
Guardian Book Critique Notes for author Clive Osborne Rapley
Narrative Flow
Overall I think you have produced a very well written and marketable book, and I definitely think you should submit it to a traditional publishing house (or consider self-publishing if you choose that path). The story pulls the reader into the action and into the characters’ hearts and lives from the first page on, and that pace is kept throughout the entire book. I could sense that you as an author have an intuitive understanding of human nature, and that comes through in your character portrayals. Each one of your characters is believable and interesting on many levels.
Also effective is the way you portray the beautiful, elf-like aliens, the Dacians, as the ones who are actually cruel and vicious, and yet the scary-looking, ugly, reptilian Mylians are the innocent, enslaved, victimized ones. This upheaval of typical assumptions made about creatures and beings in books and movies, and in readers’ minds, is well done.
I love the way you also use this sort of reverse logic in portraying how each race sees the other race as alien; excellent statement on the typical “us vs. them” mentality.
Your descriptions are so vivid as to make the reader feel as though he or she is right in the center of the action. I especially loved this in Chapter 4, “Shipwrecked.” Your descriptions of the intimate scenes between Tristan and Aurelia are skillfully and beautifully done, so well done in fact that readers who might be a bit on the shy side, or reserved and conservative will still be drawn into the scenes without feeling awkward reading about them. I also loved how you portrayed Tristan and Aurelia as two perfect halves of one whole, with each naturally being stronger for the other when one is feeling weak, such as when Tristan used his survival skills to make camp and hunt and care for Aurelia’s broken leg, yet Aurelia was strong for Tristan when they were journeying through the desert and the heat would overcome him.
There was one sentence in Chapter 5, “Rescue,” that I was particularly grateful to see as a reader and impressed to see as an editor. Instead of dragging the reader through pages and pages of useless, agonizing suspense as to what would happen once Tristan and Aurelia became separated, you simply mention, “Tristan did not realise it, but he would not see her again for a very long time.”
I thought this was very skilfully done, because it allowed you to launch in a different direction in the story line and bring the fully focused reader with you. So often authors miss this point, and in an effort to strive for suspense they instead the reader to be constantly distracted from the path of that different direction because they’re worried about another character (“What happened to Aurelia?”).
Chapters 9 and 10 tend to be a little heavy on the battle sequences. They are action-packed and realistically portrayed and described, but some readers might lose interest, as it may seem like heavy reading to them.
Character Development
I especially liked the way you managed to capture the subtle interplay between men and women in the interactions between Tristan and Aurelia; even though this may have been written with the intent of describing just those characters’ interactions, as a reader I picked up on the subtle message of how “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” to use an old saying, and how we can seem almost like aliens to one another! Again, you may not have intended this, but it was an effective undertone to their dialogue.
