Reviews
Reviews of Terra Incognita
“5/5
Mark Ferguson’s Terra Incognita is as interesting as it is confounding, equally brilliant and baffling. It’s quite the read, but be forewarned, if you’re expecting to have your hand held, this may not be the book for you.
An incredibly high concept novel, Terra Incognita takes place in an alternate reality in which multiple alternate realities have fused into one. Following along so far? I hope so, we’re just getting started. Prior to the fusion, inhabitants of these alternate realities developed along their own paths – evolving at slightly different rates, reacting to different stimuli, or simply getting a head start of a few thousand years. Post fusion, traits that separate the ‘differently evolved’ from ‘normal’ humans became immediately obvious, and the cultural norms from these once separate realities don’t jive with the new world they find themselves in.
As tensions flare between these disparate pseudo-humans forced to co-exist, a calamity brews; the Krummholz is coming. A mysterious occurrence that appears to affect the unborn, Ferguson is cagey to let on too many details about the Krummholz, letting the reader know that it’s trouble and leaving the reader to make some educated guesses for themselves. That’s a recurring trait in this novel – leaving certain elements under-explained, while going into great detail on others. In some ways, the in media res narration makes for an exhilarating, satisfying read, almost as if you are learning another language by being immersed in a foreign culture. That said, there are times where you are left trying to piece together whatever the hell is going on. For the occasional lapses into ‘Huh?’ territory, everything pays off in the end, and you’ll have made the transition from scratching your head to nodding along.
I liken Terra Incognita to a book of myths from a far flung land. There is a lot left unsaid, but as in a book of myths, that which is left unsaid would be inherently understood by its audience. It’s an interesting tact, and one that I found fitting with the incredible level of creativity on display in this book. Mark Ferguson is a clever writer with an interesting voice. If you’re a fan of high concept sci-fi and are into notions of genetic manipulation, cultural conflict, sneaky double crosses, exciting fight scenes and cool technology, Terra Incognita comes highly recommended.”
-Sean Benham, author of White American and Bastard Son
“4/5
This is a challenging book, both in its length (474 pages), and (mostly) in its concepts. And the main concept / plot point is one which will leave your head spinning – just as it did the inhabitants of poor old Terra. You see, the physics of space have somehow changed and multiple different dimensions rotate through and over the earth like hands on a clock. Inhabitants of those dimensions (as well as those of Terra) can travel to the different ‘Scapes’ whenever they regularly appear. And since many of those inhabitants are not human and are on different timelines, it makes for (putting it lightly) some interesting situations. As far as I know this idea is totally unique and refreshing Sure, alternate dimensions and realities have been done before but never like this where there are many and they come in contact on a rotating, reoccurring basis.
A few of the races have some back story and are relatively easy to absorb, others are so bizarre and just plain alien that contact with them can cause insanity. I’m not going to spoil your fun in this regard so I won’t go into further.
I did find the book somewhat unnecessarily ‘wordy’ and despite that, difficult to understand at times. There is a central thread of intrigue among some of the races which was hard to fully comprehend. And often the story seems to narrate events which didn’t happen the way they were described previously – all part of the mystery I presume.
If I had to pigeonhole this into a genre I would pick fantasy, but it has strong elements of mystery, thriller, and science fiction. As I stated when I started that it is a challenge, but if you’re up for a mind bending adventure -which is decidedly not spoon fed to the reader, you’re in for a real rewarding treat.”
-Ed Morawski, author of Flit
“4/5 stars
Author Mark Ferguson skillfully transports the reader into a fantastical world of overlapping dimensional realities- a threatening world with alliances and adversaries among their various, sentient species and cultures, which are often exotic and sometimes bizarre.
The plot often involves dark intrigue, and foreboding mystery is well maintained throughout. The language is often evocative and the dialogue flowing and natural.
The reader may be challenged, at times, by the complexity of cultural/historical detail and the amount of interpretive thinking by characters about one another. On the other hand, some readers might regard this complexity as augmenting the richness of the story’s context and characters.
Overall, Terra Incognita is a worthy read, especially for sci-fi enthusiasts looking for a highly unusual and original story.”
-Peter Fratesi, author of The Symbol
“4/5 stars
Mark Ferguson’s descriptive, detailed writing drew me right into every scene as if I were watching it on a movie theater screen.
Terra Incognita is a roller coaster ride of cooperation, loyalty, betrayal, and sacrifice.
The story is filled with a large cast of unique, colorful, and sometimes grotesque, alien species—all intertwined with each other’s lives due to the “Dark Crystal-like” (Jim Henson, Frank Oz 1982 Muppet movie) great conjunctions of alternate realities. These alternate realities, originally parallel realities, begin to crash into each other due to a cataclysmic event referred to as the Loosing. This event caused the Earth, originally a 3-dimensional sphere, to become a 4-dimensional hypersphere, creating new surfaces that spread out like ripples on a pond, overlapping at various points.
Do yourself a favor and look for YouTube models for a better visual understanding of a hypersphere. Here is one: https://youtu.be/XFW769hqa1U
As the hypersphere continued to rotate, these overlapping points continually shifted, causing chaos in all things, from night and day to seasonal changes. As a result, landscapes changed, habitats became unstable, and mass species extinctions occurred.
Imagine, for instance, being a tree that normally drops its leaves in the fall, and grows new buds, then leaves and flowers in the spring. Now imagine that same tree, in our normal understanding of “time,” going from daylight to night in the space of what we would know as a couple of hours, summer to winter in the space of 5 hours, then to spring, perhaps 3 hours later, then back to summer 8 hours after that. How does it survive? In most cases . . . it doesn’t.
Touching on one of the main characters, child prodigy, Nemed’s, mental struggle to understand the nature of the conflict with the entities known only as Forteans in Chapter 5, is so artfully narrated that I felt as if I was surfing through his mind, completely wrapped up in that thought-provoking maze as he sought the one elusive puzzle piece that could complete the whole picture.
Providing background into the various cultures involved in this chaotic world, the author was detailed and thorough—sometimes a bit too thorough. There is quite a bit of moralizing that has the potential to become tedious; however, the intent behind it is valid. Any strength, taken to an extreme, becomes a weakness. Even the ability to think logically and critically can become a weakness when taken to an extreme. One only has to look at Vulcans who tamed their wildness with logic and reason at the expense of intimacy and other, more emotionally-intelligent traits.
Additionally, I am rather squeamish—horror, for instance, is a genre I tend to avoid. I was probably the only teenager who had to have her 3-year-old brother sit on her bed with her so she could “safely” finish Stephen King’s novel, The Shining, to the bitter end. In Terra Incognita, some of the scenes, particularly those involving creatures called Inrisus, are downright disgusting. The mysterious origins of the Forteans and the drive to expose them is a constant thread, however; and if you have the stomach to muddle through the depravity of the Inrisus, you can keep your attention on that Fortean mystery thread quite handily.
Effective editing could have improved the flow. Painful as this process can be, especially for an author as detailed and descriptive as Mark Ferguson, I think it would have been beneficial in the long run. That absolutely in no way takes away from his accomplishment, however. He has created an epic world, with a unique theme. Sit up and take notice. This is an up and coming author that has great potential.
For a more intimate look inside the creation of this novel, see my interview with the author, Mark Ferguson here: https://heathermurata.com/mark-ferguson”
-Heather Murata, author of Koraalen: Planetary Symbiosis
“4/5 stars
Spoiler free section:
You can tell from before the first chapter is done that this is going to be something strange and surreal. The book starts out deceptively whimsical, but it gets wilder as it goes. Just when you think that it is starting to get boring it hits you with something strange and shocking. It combines things like horrifying creatures and grim wars with silly anecdotes and bold-faced social commentary.
This novel takes its time setting up the universe and its rules. Despite the fact that it is a big and weird multiverse it mostly stuck to one area, I was starting to think that the author had wasted his idea. But the world was interesting, and a few crazy things were sprinkled in here and there, and that kept me going. Sometime after the halfway mark it really lays into the twists and turns and revelations. It got really wild toward the end.
Which brings me to the horror elements. Some of it is the kind of horror seen in stuff like I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream, there is also a nice helping of Lovecraft mixed in. A lot of writers have followed in the steps of Lovecraft by talking about extradimensional creatures. These horrible beings are always described in vague terms or said to be indescribable. That, or they are a Giger knockoff. This book actually describes these creatures. You may think that the way they are presented in this story is over the top or immature. I think that it is acceptable within the context of how those beings do things. Either way, I feel like the author should be given credit for at least trying.
A good deal of your enjoyment of this book will depend on how you feel about how the multiverse is handled. For example, detectives literally come from the Noir universe, that is what the dimension is called, and it is literally a Film Noir style universe. Some people might think that these kind of touches are cool, but others might think that they are stupid.
It is a very esoteric experience, mentions a lot of cryptids and paranormal ideals. Also talks about a thing which I am going to guess is based off of Chaos Magick. Political commentary is woven into the story. In one chapter there is an attack on both political extremes, followed closely by a playful jab at those forces that wish to destroy the wild west internet. It features heavy philosophical elements, many of them on the topic of religion and logic. These occasionally felt somewhat unnatural, but no more than what many scifi books are guilty of.
The story combines several different genres in a way that I don’t think I have ever seen. Elements of mystery, horror, scifi, fantasy, and the paranormal. Some of the conclusions that the detective comes to are a bit reaching. The noir detectives are not really detectives, they are espionage agents. This is as much a spy novel as anything else.
The story depicts a giant game of wits where superpowered foes must be defeated using clever plans. The good guys are forced to constantly maneuver themselves into a position were their enemy can’t harm them, while simultaneously guarding against their own allies, who are often less than friendly.
This sort of giant, paranoid cat and mouse game has been done before in things like Dune, and those tales often take it to extremes. When you are fighting that kind of war you take a lot of things into consideration, but again, I have to wonder just how far the suspicions would be taken. These characters are simultaneously playing several different games of 4d chess, and it is often unknown to them if they even have an opponent.
The book’s characters are almost omniscient, guessing motives and picking up on extremely subtle clues. And I don’t just mean the detectives, it is pretty much everyone. The logic seems to be that the nature of the world requires everyone to almost constantly be in a state of near 100% awareness. Characters communicate in this way, laying out strange clues that no sane person would pick up on. I imagine that it is hard to write characters like this, so I can forgive this issue.
Some sections are written in a very poetic style, you won’t find any amateurish descriptions here. This is at best very extravagant and at worst sludgy and makes it difficult to figure out what is going on. I had to look up several words, there were a few times where it was a bit too fancy, but nothing that ruined the experience. You will need to have a decent sized lexicon to read this book.
I could see a lot of people getting lost during the first chapter when it starts to talk about the unique multiverse of this novel. The concept is cool, but the mind-bending, esoteric nature of it may be difficult for some people to grasp. However, I feel like the strange and surreal stuff is the book’s strength.
The author’s main drive, at least in this work, is to present a concept and take that concept as far as it will go, examining it in extreme detail. The different societies are highly focused and nearly pure expressions. If a society is said to have an attribute then that fact is taken into account when it comes to every aspect of their existence, including the most trivial of minutia. I believe that this is what will make or break the book for a lot of people; some will drink in all of the rich detail and love every second of it, while others will think that it is too much and get bored. But when all of this set up is finally done the author sets things lose and it gets crazy.
Spoiler filled, deep dive analysis:
This is a book where a multi-faction conflict is examined in meticulous and vivid detail, while philosophical and ideological issues are discussed from several different viewpoints.
This is also a book where a Noir film detective beheads an axe wielding feminist with a lightsaber dildo.
I feel like there is a lot to unpack here. The sociopolitical commentary is rich and perhaps a bit goofy. The chaste, atheist detective that is driven by cold logic had me wondering if it was wish fulfillment or some kind of social comment about the I Never Left the Left, the Left Left Me community. The whole Noir civilization is atheistic, yes, the atheists literally wear fedoras and trench coats, I can’t help but think that this was done intentionally.
At some points it kind of feels like it was written by an angry young atheist who is also fascinated by the paranormal and is working out his feelings on the contradiction. Sometimes it feels like a devout atheist saw a ghost or a U.F.O. or maybe did L.S.D., and this is him trying to reconcile his beliefs. It is a horror story for atheists, there worst fears come true.
The Blues are very muchly western society, imperial Christianity and all of its evils. But at the same time the Noir scape is guilty of being evil because of their extreme atheism. So that side of things ended up being criticized and compared to the religious fanatics. And that idea plays a big part in this work, the rational skeptics becoming the very thing that they fear, again, it is a horror story for atheists.
But the Blues are reformed, and with that reform we get a critique of the Left as a whole. The weakness and decadence, the flaws of democracy, they are all talked about. This is a book for people who are aware of the culture war, especially its online fronts.
With the Scorpion we have an enemy that was made by the actions of the good guys. I think that he was meant to be an Osama Bin Laden type of figure, because he was originally equipped and trained by the CIA to fight the Soviets when they had their own version of Vietnam.
The Purples, the Inrisus, are literally cancer, they are living cancer cells. I wonder if this is a 4chan reference, as those fellows love to use that word, along with many others. I think so because they are the embodiment of that 4chan /POL/ type of idea that you win by caring the least and being the most contrarian. They are the ultimate expression of the dangers of a punk rock, “You can’t tell me what to do!” attitude. The fact that they are so powerful but waste it, that they rebel but end up trapped by that need to rebel. Like someone who makes smartass remarks that are useless and then hide behind the idea of using comedy to criticize authority. Or like the musician that always sings songs denouncing who ever happens to be in charge at the time, even if they had previously agreed with them.
The book is very concerned with the idea of corruption vs using the enemy’s resources against them. Nemed gets the tablet, which is blue corruption but gives him useful knowledge. Nemed was corrupted because he came to view his own people as backward, like a redneck going to college on a football scholarship and being corrupted by the communists that infest the institution. At the same time the blues’ tech is used against them because it can be hacked. The Larch folk are obsessed with avoiding outside influences, to the point of avoiding help from more advanced civilizations.
Machines and powers are always said to be a double-edged sword because they can spy on the user. The Forteans’ power corrupts but their network is used against them. I was surprised when it turned out that the Forteans were actually real. I thought that they would more or less be a moral panic, like the very idea of them was another form of corruption.
The purples heal people but corrupt them, the ability was too tempting, and the good guys used it and paid the price. They are an infection and a deal with the devil, easily the most entertaining part of the book. I think that the fact that the good guys were so quick to make such frequent use of Ianfu’s power is a statement in itself.
When the different Scapes interact it never seems to be a positive thing. The loosening is referred to by the people in the book as being when God left the universe. Each faction is involved in a cold war that has exactly as many sides as there are other factions. Alliances are next to meaningless, friendly groups are to be watched just as much as the enemy. It is interesting that the existence of other universes isn’t treated as wonderous, it is seen as a curse.
Lar is another example of corruption. Her feelings for Malone, her weakness and sin, wouldn’t have happened if the world hadn’t been loosened. We wouldn’t have the Scorpion, or the war that caused Blue society to turn ultra-liberal. The loosening seems to be a loss of balance. In between this and the issue of spirituality vs rationality I would say that this book promotes centrism.
Another concept is the Chaos Magick idea of tricking yourself into doing what you want. The new Malone feels a lot like that magick idea of becoming the better you. He is cool and fun but does get a bit cringy at times, which is a fault that such characters often suffer from (see the Joker and everyone who has ever done an impression of him). He goes from being a miserable retch, a guy who had given up on life, to a monster and I wasn’t sure if it was really a downgrade. This seems to express the fear that the young men who have been abandoned by society will go postal. I don’t think that the Inrisus made him that way, they more or less set that side of him free. He failed to be balanced, he went in one extreme direction and then in the other.
This magick comes to a head at the end of the book when characters are able to become gods with it. If God leaving the universe is what caused the loosening, then presumably it was a Fortean that went mad with power that caused it, and somehow ceased to exist in the process, or maybe exiled himself in the same way that Malone did. Again, corruption, this time by power.
Is it possible to find a balanced center point? Is it possible to avoid corruption? Yes, but not permanently. Lar can work with Malone and do good, but she will always fall in love with him. A person can have the power of a god and do good, but they will go mad with power. The book ends with Lar gaining that power. Will she use it and then lose it to avoid the corruption? Will she go to Malone in the hope of changing him back and get ensnared by his Purple corruption?
All in all, there are a lot of themes woven into this story.”
-Micah Z’Dar, author of The Orion Crucible and The Electric Archipelago
Reviews of CVU
“A psychedelic exploration of spirituality and pop culture references.
Most authors, including me, would have had their newly minted vampire stalking half-naked women around sorority houses or hunting young couples as they drive home from a shitty date. The author seems to have intentionally crafted a story that is calculated to deviate from the norm. Instead of being a wild tale of youth rebellion or wish fulfillment it is one where the protagonist is extremely cautious. This isn’t a power fantasy, the protagonist is very powerful, but it is made 100% clear that he would get his ass kicked in a fight with the vast majority of supernatural beings. The protagonist doesn’t deal with secret cabals of vampires, instead of a network of secret, ghoulish rulers he stumbles into a world of strange spirits and bizarre cryptids.
The author continues the atheistic centered, logic driven style of his previous work. For me this is a new lens through which to view the vampire mythos. I have seen atheist characters in ghost stories and tales of alien sieges, but I don’t think that I have ever seen it done with a vampire story, and certainly not as the protagonist. And the funny thing is that no matter what kind of crazy stuff happens, he still calls himself an atheist. I am reminded of a dirty cartoon I saw where Scully from the X-files is vehemently denying the existence of ETs, even as she is being railed by a Grey.
And just like his previous work, it certainly gets crazy! Vampires have certainly interacted with other supernatural beings in other works of fiction. But these creatures are other members of the Hammer Horror lineup, or at least the kind of things that are available in most costume shops. But in this story the author applies that good old atheist logic to the existence of supernatural beings. Why not all of them? And by all of them I mean all of them. I’m talking the old Amerindian legends, the stuff that you don’t see in Hollywood movies.
Other vampire stories have explored the internal logic of things like how faith effects the vampire. An example would be a star of David being used by a Jew the same way that a cross normally would. This story takes that to another level, with crosses or even wreaths on the side of the road radiating out that same energy. I will stop there so that I don’t give too much away. There is also an interesting concept that involves a kind of abstract mental conflict that I think a lot of people will enjoy. Also, the protagonist is not a Hollywood vampire, the same rules don’t apply to him. He is a vampire from the actual folklore and a big part of the story is about him finding out what the rules are.
It ends up becoming something that isn’t too dissimilar to an RPG or maybe a Shonen where the protag is constantly improving and advancing. Everywhere he goes he seems to run into some kind of obstacle. He rarely gets a break, everything wants to kill him, the world is against him. He spends a lot of time in pain. This may be unintentional, it may have a greater meaning. I find it to be interesting that, again, what would normally be a power fantasy involves massive amounts of pain and humiliation. In the middle it kind of devolves into the protag getting horrifically injured and then healing, this is one of the few problems that I found.
All in all, I would say that this is a unique take on an overused subgenre.”
-Micah Z’Dar, author of The Orion Crucible and The Electric Archipelago