Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The prospect of finding another version of yourself on a parallel Earth is not only intriguing but it is alluring, tempting to play out in your mind when the cold blast of reality hits home that quite often your mistakes have the profound effect on shaping the world around you, and that outside influences can distort how the world may be seen.
To play the king and the pauper, the fool and the wise woman in the same breath of existence is an attractive flow of thought that shakes our grip on reality but also makes us understand that the flip of the coin can land anyway it wants. We choose a path but we can never help but wonder what would have happened if we had gone left instead of right, if we had said yes instead of the instant dismissal of possible fortune; how differently our heart might have heard through the passage of time, or if it would have succumb to the inevitable power of the Beat Surrender.
To write a novel requires many factors going in the right direction, to keep that set of characters first laid down and then return for a sequel is to understand that the process is out of your hands, it is the characters themselves that drive the story along, the writer or the artist is only a vessel into which the ideas flow; a return perhaps to the point of alternative Earth’s, the writer must show that the world is irrevocably changed, altered by a single thought placed in the mouth of a person who perhaps exists in place of the writer.
It is to Bob Stone, influenced no doubt, but not hindered by, the thought of alternate Earth’s and how they affect the way we view our world which makes his sequel to Missing beat, Beat Surrender, such a ravishing, pulse-driven read and one that captures the ideals set down in classic stories such as the Star Trek propositions and postulations that inhabit The City on The Edge of Forever and First Contact, the superb Doctor Who tale Inferno and perhaps to even the re-alinement of many a Marvel and D.C. Universe character caught up in the nexus of seeing a world in which history has changed because they did something different.
Causality runs deep in speculative fiction and it is one that is honed perfectly in Bob Stone’s Beat Surrender, the return of Joey Cale, the shock of seeing a character behave differently just because another path was taken, all slightly unnerving, all fractionally out of step with how we would associate them behaving. It is to this that Beat Surrender is to be praised, the observation sharp and appealing, that the writer has become something else, more than just a passionate author, he has become what all good writers should aspire to be, the voice to which such tales are told.
Truly magnificent, a voice in which we should all strive to be, no matter the genre or time in which we have.
Bob Stone’s Beat Surrender is out now and published by Beaten Track Publishing. Beat Surrender is available to purchase from Write Blend, South Road, Waterloo.
Ian D. Hall