Far From Reality

Zaftan Entrepreneurs
Author - Hank Quense
Genre - Scifi/Fantasy
Pages - 343
ISBN - 9781456349










For my sanity, the title will be refered to as Z.E.

Z.E is a scifi/fantasy adventure that involves many characters point of views. It starts off with Yunta, an alien commander in charge of finding rare minerals on other planets and bringing them back to hers. However, things are not going too well and she stumbles upon the world of some pretty feisty natives.

MacDrakin is a dwarf miner who owns his own land, mines day in and out, and hopefully one day he dreams of finding a nice, pretty, ambitous dwarf female to settle down with. His world turns upside down when the aliens invade his planet, he then takes it upon himself (with his legendary battle-axe) to teach the aliens a lesson. Leslie Higginbottom (great name right?) is the constable of the town of Skensfirth and a half dwarf half human. She is a tough girl (arent all dwarves?) and i really liked her character alot. Shes witty and smart and just a tad unsure of things and thats what makes her likeable. We also see events unfold through a myrad of other people such as the assasin dagger, the militia crew, the Yuk leader Gorya and others. All adding charm to the book.

The aliens are harsh beings and i suppose they are to resemble squids as that is what MacDrakin and the others call them, Yunta the leader is merciless and driven only by her greed to advance in her station and make lots of money. There are some redeeming qualities to some of the aliens, Schtap for instance was not entirely all bad, he seemed more curious then hostile towards MacDrakin and his group. However, they were still rutheless in destroying homes and farmland with thier robots and machines and it was easy to root for the Skensfirth folk. The whole adventure was pure fun, there was loss, action, humor, a bit of romance and just an all-around great read.

The world that is built is a nice, lush one filled with mountains and animals and a variety of races such as elves, the dwarves, humans and half-pints, which i can only guess are like gnomes or halflings. There is magic also from both the land peoples and the aliens and it was interesting that they both worked in two diffrent ways.