Severance

By Chris Bucholz

After 240 years traveling toward Tau Prius and a new planet to colonize, the inhabitants of the generation ship Argos are bored and aimless. They join groups such as the Markers and the Breeders, have costumed orgies, and test the limits of drugs, alcohol, and pain just to pass the time.

To Laura Stein, they’re morons and, other than a small handful of friends, she’d rather spend time with her meat plant than with any of her fellow passengers. But when one of her subordinates is murdered while out on a job, Laura takes it as her responsibility to find out what happened. She expects to find a personal grudge or a drug deal gone wrong, but instead stumbles upon a conspiracy that could tear the ship in two.

Labelled a terrorist and used as a pawn in the ultimate struggle for control, Laura, with help from her friend Bruce and clues left by a geneticist from the past, digs deep into the inner working of the ship, shimmying her way through ductwork, rallying the begrudged passengers to rise up and fight, and peeking into an unsavory past to learn the truth and save their future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apex Book Company
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310731112

Reviews for Severance

[kayreads-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Overall this book is worth reading. It has tons of different characters, fighting, military conspiracy, and a unique plot. However, I did find many points within the book where I almost decided to put it down. Even with the massive amount of technical description I still found it difficult to immerse myself into the story, I also had a difficult time with the lack of description of physical traits of characters which again made the story less believable and less relatable. I felt there was too much description of non-essential information and less investment in characters and their relationship to the environment around them. The book has a very interesting plot and great story line but I think the backdrop of dumb and herd like communities takes away from the intelligence of the story. I recommend this to people who like to read something different but care less about the likability of characters.

[irapearson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this well enough. It's a good read and it's short and fast paced. I guess I expected it to be funnier or weirder, possibly because I know that the author, Chris Bucholz, writes for Cracked.com, and because I loved his fellow Cracked columnist David Wong's two novels and imagined this would be more of the same.But Severance is just a straight up sci-fi novel (with a few humorous bits peppered throughout). It's all about a villainous plot to separate a generation ship into two pieces and leave the less desirable, idiotic 99% adrift in space. Think Douglas Adams's B-Ark filled with hairdressers and phone-sanitizers, only these guys spend their days recreationally pissing on each other and competitively vomiting instead of doing something useful like cleaning telephones. We follow Laura Stein and her best buddy, Bruce, both petty thieves and scoundrels, definite anti-hero types, as they try to prevent very bad things from happening.This is one of those times where the main character is female and it's just not a big deal at all. It's barely relevant to the plot. I'm making a bigger deal out of it than Bucholz did. Laura Stein is a pretty fascinating character, although she probably doesn't pass the Bechdel test and as a male I'm not particularly qualified to comment on her femininity.I think my 3.5 star rating might be just a bit low and maybe unfair because of my disappointment over the lack of zaniness, but I'm not going to change it now. Still, I would recommend Severance.

[momferg01 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book; the writing was fast paced and witty - at times I literally laughed out loud. The premise was interesting, I don't want to give away the plot so I won't go into exactly what happened during the book. Suffice it to say that the main characters were believably crazy, especially given their circumstances. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone that likes science fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

[rouge2507 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A generation ship with its load of spoiled, bored would-be colonists is reaching for the end of its planned trip. But something is strange and one of its inhabitants is getting curios. She is bored, and has a lot of time to spend, so she turns into an investigator, and hell breaks loose...A little too long for what it has has to tell (a general problem with a lot of the recent literature), so the reading feels slow, in particular at the beginning. Furthermore the humor is a little crude and juvenile. But the plot is original and involved enough to be entertaining.

[meiloslyther · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved the world, and the way the reader is just immersed in it is very well done. The plot itself is solid and would have been incredibly engaging if it wasn't for the piecemeal way it was put together. There was just too much jumping around between characters (not to mention way too many characters) and it was hard to keep track of what was going on. However, I loved Laura and Bruce's characterization, and the epilogue left me liking the book a lot more (and not just because it was fulfilling).

[bkjake · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Stein is the archetypal loner (mostly), intelligent (but not overly so) and otherwise unremarkable. She works maintenance on a generation ship nearing the end of its journey between the stars. Most of the rest of the people on the ship are worryingly dull (no spoiler, but there is a significant reason for this), but for a few that all seem to be slightly crazy and/or her friends. Add in a few megalomaniacs, a dastardly plot, lots of cannon fodder, and more than a few legal and illegal substances, and you get a fun action-mystery between the stars. I only gave this four and a half stars because it was just missing that "you gotta read this, share it with everyone" factor.

[frankerrington · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

eview CopyMulti-generational space travel. There are so many places to go with a story with that as your basic premise. The journey to the third planet around the star Tau Prius has been in progress for close to 240 years, about as long as it's been since the United States declared it's independence from England. Think of the stories that could be told.The story Severance gives us, about the spaceship Argo and its denizens, really left me disappointed. I've never read anything by by Chris Bucholz, but he's got some interesting credentials, by day, he works as a writer for video game developer Stardock, with his latest projects being Galactic Civilizations and Star Control. Sounds cool, right? Chris also writes for Cracked.com, an online humor site. So I'm expecting Science Fiction with a touch of humor. Well, it just never comes together for me. Thematically, it's sci-fi with some occasional lighthearted banter from two of the principal characters.The story started with Laura Stein and Bruce Redenbach going to great lengths to prank a club/society/street-gang known as the Markers. A group that would distinguish themselves from their peers by "pissing on things and off people." The prank involved them using their skills and access, as maintenance workers, to "mark" the living room of of the leader of the group with the urine of an underling and let the chips fall where they may. Problem is, that little story is never mentioned again. I would have like to have known the outcome of this little incident.What soon follows is a murder, a mystery, and a plot that could endanger some fifty-thousand of the ship's inhabitants. On the surface it all sounds rather exciting, but I didn't find it terribly entertaining nor did I find any of the characters to be particularly likable.From the Apex Book Company, Severance, is available in both paperback and digital formats from a wide variety of online retailers. If you would like to sample the book, the first chapter is available online at the Apex Book Company's website.For me, Severance was just OK. As always, your mileage may vary.

[ronincats · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my January ER book, a science fiction novel about a generation ship approaching its final destination. NOT a YA novel, it has mature (?) protagonists, an underlying mystery, and lots of action. I have to confess that I really liked it. I liked the habitat building and the characters a lot, and the idiosyncratities of the plot that made it different from any other story set in this type of setting that I've read.

[reading_fox · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is. Most of the jokes seem to be visual pratfalls based on the characters in question having lowered IQ. This isn't really a joking matter and not something that is appropriate in a diverse society. It's also wrong in that low IQ isn't necessarily associated with an inability to consider short-term consequences which seems to be the main driving force for the author. The attempt at a biological explanation for this too late in the plot turned out to be wrong as well, although not as spectacularly as the author's attempt to describe the characters walking around the outside of the ship, for his reference people in Australia don't fall off the world, neither do astronauts have to hang on upside-down to the surface of a ship that has gravity. I do prefer my SF novels to come with some dusting of social commentary, as that was how the genre developed, but this was a particularly poor attempt at communicating that scientists shouldn't meddle with that which they don't fully understand. Which is of course fairly idiotic argument to be making in the first place. Colonisation of remote star systems remains verdant ground for SF and generational ships are a frequent solution to the problem, with their own set of challenges distinct from cryo-preservation or breaking the lightspeed constant. This generational ship is apparently gong to run out of fuel when it attempts to decelerate to land and so the captain (but not the mayor) implement the cunning Plan B to split the ship in to reducing it's mass to allow the smaller fragment to land safely. Very Very bizarrely this Plan B does not call for all the inhabitants to squeeze into the smaller fragment (a tiny mass change) but instead calls to abandon 50k people to shoot on into space on an endless journey. It's a huge oversight and never mentioned. Eventually a few people figure out what is going on and attempt to stop it. Meanwhile the reader is treated to flashbacks a generation or two before when this was first mentioned. However they don't reveal anything that hasn't already been discovered in the main plot and so are a complete waste of pages. They would have made an intriguing prologue if gathered together instead of being scattered throughout the main text.Although an interesting idea it wasn't developed or explained in any kind of manner that made it interesting, the characters were all stilted and one dimensional, although the prose itself was at least well written there were still a few proof reading errors and word slips that made it through.Not recommended.

[andibook-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a lot better than I expected. The writing is a little bit clunky, but Bucholz more than makes up for it. The world building is fantastic, the characters are realistic, nothing is over-dramatic, and the mystery just sucked me right in. There are little tiny hints of Douglas Adams' influence -- ramshackle technology, a silly little metaphor here and there, and a storyline that jumps around and doesn't always go where you're expecting. The main character has a meat plant named Mr. Beefy and the first sentence involves a bag of urine. How could you go wrong?

[guide2_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting premise, but the mix of comedy with sci-fi left me wanting more of both.

[steven.wade · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What happens when you ship thousands of people into space to populate a new frontier? This is definitely a possibility. The main character, a woman who's been tampered with by science, stumbles through thwarting the annihilation of the spaceship by unscrupulous military and government foes. There's comedy, tragedy, and some well thought out realism in this story. I enjoyed reading it.

[alliebadger · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed Severance. I received it from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers, and the main reason I requested it was because the author writes for Cracked. I assumed the book would be sharp and witty, which it was. I really appreciated the uniqueness of the plot – conspiracy on a colony-bound spaceship – and the writing style. It’s funny and clever and doesn’t assume you’re an idiot. I also appreciated the fact that the mysterious conspiracy that will clearly come into being isn’t held until the end – it comes out a third of the way into the book. This keeps up a nice level of excitement and intrigue. My one complaint is that it’s sometimes hard to follow his descriptions of the ship itself and the technical aspects that the characters understand. Sometimes I couldn’t picture what was happening because I didn’t know how pitons worked, let alone in low gravity. Overall though, if you’re a science fiction fan and you like wit, definitely pick this one up.