MCAH Online

As I promised, I am bringing you news of great indie or micropress books where I find them… and I ran into this one by complete accident, when it popped up on a random list on Amazon. Khe is one of those rare books involving aliens without humans and it’s a book that does it well. The aliens are believably non-human while not being completely impenetrable; the infodump is very natural, with the narrator explaining cultural or biological things as they arise without over-explaining them. It’s hard not to like the protagonist, too… she’s independent without being completely contra-societal in a society that has been engineered to keep people docile and trapped in their routines.

The setting is science fiction, and the plot itself science-heavy, though told through the eyes of people who have been kept ignorant of science in many ways. And honestly, the plot itself, while intriguing, wasn’t the star of the book; the aliens and the weight and believability of the world was.

If I have one complaint with Khe, it’s that it wraps up too swiftly for me. I’ve been trained to look at certain kinds of threats in science fiction/fantasy novels and gauge their difficulty level, like a gamer who’s memorized the levels of all the monster encounters available in the game. I didn’t expect this book to end quite so easily… but honestly I didn’t care. I liked the protagonist, I liked the book, and it’s the author’s first and I want whatever she does next. If you like my Jokka stories, go download a sample. I bet you’ll like Khe too.