The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Betelgeuse Volume 2 The Caves and Volume 3 The Other

Leo

Cinebook

Leo’s Worlds Of Aldebaran saga gets to the 5th and 6th Cinebook volumes (and the 10th story – 5 entitled Aldebaran, 5 entitled Betelgeuse) and I’ve lost all patience with it. I’ve reviewed the whole series so far (here and here) and found myself increasingly frustrated with the whole series.

There’s so much imagination here, so much invention on Leo’s part, yet all he seems to do is lead us ever so slowly towards something undetermined, using the same stylistic and narrative shifts from book to book. It’s become far more soap opera than sci-fi by this point and to be honest I was struggling to even get to the end of the first book here, never mind see it through to the frankly inconclusive conclusion.

I’ve scrabbled around online looking to see if the Aldebaran saga continues after Betelgeuse and haven’t come up with any real answers. If it is the end of the saga, it’s a remarkably low key finale, where essentially everyone shuffles off to do other things. But the whole two volumes leading up to it had very little going on, and I really don’t care if it continues or not.

(Kim meets a conveniently knowledgeable alien race, cue lots and lots of exposition…. from Betelgeuse The Other, published by Cinebook)

The Caves and The Others finds Kim, one of the blue capsule derived immortals from Aldebaran, seemingly chosen by the alien Mantris race to be humanity’s ambassadors, stuck inside Betelgeuse’s cave structure, yet again menaced by some alien creature or other. She escapes of course and eventually, through the intervention of yet another convenient exposition spouting alien species find at least some of the answers that she was looking for.

There’s a point in The Caves where Kim laments that she “can’t stand it anymore“. She’s talking about the deaths that seem to happen all the time to her. I could say the same, lamenting those all too obvious deaths of supporting characters that seem so pre-planned and telegraphed as to make the actual event merely a confirmation of the foreshadowing than something dramatic.

(I know just how she feels. Ahhhhh! indeed. Kim’s frustrations echo my own. from Betelgeuse The Caves, published by Cinebook)

So no, Leo’s Aldebaran saga did very little for me, something I realised with the very first volume:

“It’s a real slow burn of a read, and prone to passages that just play too slowly, with swaths of expositionary text replacing any real plot movement. It’s packed full of accidental meetings, co-incidences replacing plot developments – and it gets annoying at times. ….This one may well be one solely for the dedicated sci-fi and fantasy purists.”

To be honest, I should have left it there. I’d have been spared a not particularly enjoyable series. But, like a lot of Cinebook volumes, I know it’s hugely successful and was picked for English publication for a reason. But personally, I just can’t see why.