Hot Pinks by Samuel AstburyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hot Pinks is a fascinating story about a futuristic world that has been created by a group or organisation, or even an entity, known throughout the book as the AI. Although the term AI is never actually spelled out as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ the reader has to assume it means that, and that it may control the ‘new world’ with amazing efficiency. Humans are able to live on various, vast, areas of land that have been recreated by the AI to copy their locations and eras from the many once found on Earth. It was not clear to me whether it took place on Earth or some other planet.
Ellen and Chambers are the main characters who open the scene with what seems to be a battle in which they are scavenging for items to improve their lives. Their lives are up-ended somewhat after discovering an artificial girl that closely resembles their lost daughter, Leah. They adopt Leah hoping for an improved family life. When a dangerous character, known as Fielding, comes on the scene this completely disrupts their life and the tale is then one of endless chases from one generated land to another.
I would have enjoyed the story much more if there had not been so many typographical and editing problems all the way through the book. This included punctuation, grammar and misspellings. I also found the writing style often too irritating and over the top with its endless flowery descriptions. It was full of tautological terms for many adjectives, adverbs and nouns that became both tiring and puzzling. The repetition of words like ‘fizzing’ and ‘avuncular’ plus several others lends itself to obvious criticism. There were some occasions when the characters Ellen and Leah were confused in successive sentences, and a quick ‘Find and Replace’ in a word processor could have corrected this well before publishing.
It was a pity that such simple errors had been left in Astbury’s manuscript as the whole concept of the plot, as well as the ending is both intriguing and exciting. My overall rating has therefore been affected by them.
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