Panatier is clearly a gifted writer with an unusual way of looking at the world. I haven’t read his debut novel, The Phlebotomist, as my book blogging buddies confirmed that it is on the horror side of dark – and right now, I cannot deal with that. But once I’m better, it’s definitely on my ‘To Read’ list. This one, however, is right up my alley. Poor old Ben is on track to be one of the most unusual of this year’s protagonists that I’ll encounter. He’s afflicted with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the mating habits of insects, along with all sorts of other details regarding their lives. I learnt – thanks to one of the many, many footnotes – about the Australian Peacock spider, known as the ‘sparklemuffin’, which has now become a term of endearment in our household. Look it up – it is the most fantastical little creature.

The trouble is, that from the time he could talk, Ben is driven to share these facts, along with his other hyper-obsession about watches, with anyone and everyone who’ll listen. As well as those who won’t. It doesn’t win him friends, or even make him a particularly nice person. Although, he has got a friend – dear Patton, who has to be one of the kindest people I’ve encountered in a book, without coming across as unbearable. Indeed, Patton insists on accompanying Ben when he goes to meet up with someone who professes to suffer from the same problem. Quite rightly, Patton suspects a trap and wants to be there to look out for his buddy.

It doesn’t come as a massive surprise when they’re abducted by an alien, who is going to sell Ben for the contents in his head. There is also a parallel narrative about an alien pipe-fitter called Naecia, who has suffered the same fate. The resulting adventure takes us on a familiar journey with nasty, destructive aliens and a bunch of plucky protagonists trying to save the galaxy. So far, so familiar. What sets this one apart is Panatier’s quirky writing style, riddled with jokey allusions and footnotes, many of which are genuinely funny. Some… not so much. I enjoyed much of the humour and a lot of the nerdy scientific stuff – this one is on the harder side of sci fi genre – and all of the character development, which is outstanding.

I did feel that the pace stuttered a tad about two-thirds of the way through. Some of the humour by then was a bit annoyingly predictable, while I felt the techie details around what was going wrong and how to fix it got a tad too involved. However, Panatier managed to land the ending in a wonderfully poignant way that will stick in my memory for a very long time. So although this wasn’t a flawless read, it’s one that will definitely stay with me. And I’m looking forward to seeing what this clever, original writer does next. While I obtained an arc of Stringers from the publishers via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
9/10

This book is a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of Hitchhikers Guide, and this has a lot of the same vibe. Lots of technical science detail bogs things down just a bit, but the humor and action more than makes up for it. I laughed out loud several times because it's an absolutely hilarious read. The footnotes are especially good. Highly recommended!

Thanks to the publisher Angry Robot, the author Chris Panatier, and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

https://onereadingnurse.com/2022/04/10/stringers-by-chris-panatier-arc-review/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CcJHfeArr_G/

Thank you so much to Angry Robot for the free early read of Stringers by Chris Panatier! As always, all opinions are my own!

Stringers features two friends, just regular guys on Earth that get abducted by an exceedingly snarky space bounty hunter. Ben knows every factoid ever about bug sex, Patton is a stoner, and the bounty hunter lures them into a trap to sell Ben to an inter-dimensional alien race

So…wow. I mean just wow. The book is dense on the science and puzzle content which slowed the reading down. Some of the really technical parts I was tempted to skim, but I stuck with it and felt rewarded.

There is also plenty of adventure, banter, brutality, and discovery to keep the plot moving. The bounty hunter, named Aptat, is a great example of a morally gray character that kinds of just ends up being self serving.

In not skimming, I learned that Stringers is actually a super smart book where the layers are revealed slowly and expanded on slowly as the characters learn their own mysteries. There are two points of view, Ben and Naecia, as well as interludes that make sense later on

Character wise – Ben is pretty funny and Patton is the loyal friend. If nothing else his friendship and loyalty make him a worthy character, always looking out for Ben whether or not he deserves it. I enjoy books where everyday beings are forced into heroics, or discover their capability for bravery and heroics. Naecia just wanted to help her family and probably got the shit end of the abduction spectrum, but none of the Stringers fared too well.

The only thing I didn’t love was a weird but blessedly brief episode of feeding and excrement tubes, it went wayyy beyond toilet humor into something a little gross.

One thing I did love? A jar of pickles that oddly enough became a character in itself for a bit. Also – mixing serious themes with humor is always good, if not mentally draining.

With new alien races, technology worthy of a sci-fi classic, and enough bug sex facts to keep it relatively light – even if I don’t want to know what the author’s search history looks like 😂 – this is also a surprisingly deep story of a galaxy in extreme danger

And.you definitely want to read the footnotes
#imwithpatton

This is the story of Ben, who is a fairly normal guy living a fairly normal life. The only thing that doesn't make Ben a normal guy is that for some reason, he has a wealth of knowledge about bugs, fish, and wristwatches in his brain with no explanation. He also knows about the Chime, but he has no idea what it is or why it's important. He's tried for years to find an answer, or at least someone else who has the same affliction as he does. One night on a message board, he does see a post from someone with a very similar condition, and he agrees to meet them. Little does he know that he's about to be abducted by an alien bounty hunter and brought on a crazy adventure.

I liked Stringers. It was entertaining and fun. Ben is an easy character to root for, and I quite liked hearing about his crazy space adventure. I also thought that Aptat and Naecia were great characters who entertained me a lot in between Ben's chapters. There is some really solid banter between the two of them, which is something I latch onto in books a lot.

There are a lot of footnotes in this book, and while they did add, among other things, an element of humor, I found, in the beginning at any rate, that there were just a *lot* of them and so I ended up skipping some of them. This is largely due to how the kindle handles footnotes. I think had I read the physical version this would have been different. I also think this would be a fantastic book in audio, depending on how the footnotes were handled.

All told, I enjoyed Stringers and I would recommend it to someone who likes unique and often humorous sci-fi. I had 4/5 stars of fun with Stringers, and I can't wait to see what Chris Panatier writes next!~

Stringers is an exciting, fast-paced, and fun space opera with a villain that balances humour with evilness, interesting and memorable characters, and many many comedic elements.

A lot of the time humour in books can make you cringe. I applaud anyone who tries because chances are half the people (or more) won’t find it funny. This book, though, entirely worked for me. It’s not a comedy with sci-fi elements, but a sci-fi with more jokes than usual. It’s not a satire or a parody, but it’s a great balance between silly and serious. It’s compared to Hitchhiker’s Guide, but while there are similar elements (unwitting human man is taken into space by aliens) the tone and trajectory are quite different.

The characters' goals change throughout the novel, but the story maintains its tension and tone. The novel touches on serious subjects but never too much that we forget it's more in the romp category than space opera, but it’s not too much of a romp that it loses its narrative purpose. It’s a book about friendship as well as survival. In that vein, it reminds me of Shaun of the Dead.

The humour is a mix of absurdity and wordplay. We have moments like when a person while being abducted eats an entire baggie of shrooms, a running joke about a jar of pickles that serves a narrative purpose, and then these weird foot-notes that I’ll admit I’m not sure what they were for but I found them very enjoyable.

The characters are what made the story for me. While Ben and Patton are the main characters with their own compelling plotline (the friendship one), the side-plot (which is given almost as much focus) with Naecia was my favourite aspect of the story. I loved that she was a) an alien b) take-charge but also just a normal person and c) not a love interest “prize” for the main character.

But it could also be that I loved her storyline because it was the one featuring Aptat, the bad guy. If you want a villain who wavers between chaotic neutral and chaotic evil, but is somehow also very very funny, this is the book for you. I loved Aptat. I loved their sad backstory. I loved their deranged take on life, and I shipped them and Naecia so hard, despite it being highly problematic.

I also liked Izairis, the lesbian, hacker, swearing nun. She was in the story just enough to be funny but not enough that she became over-the-top.

When it came to the story, it’s a space opera through and through (complete with new planets and save the universe goals), but one thing I would have liked would have been more explanation of how the universe functioned. I couldn’t entirely picture the universe that the characters lived in. Granted, most of the time is spent in spaceships, which might be why, but I could have handled a few info-dumps from Naecia or the other aliens imparting said info. It just felt like the one city they go to is like the only city, even though it clearly was not.

But, aside from that, I really enjoyed the novel. I even liked the “in cyberspace” scenes, which is a trope I’m generally not fond of. And, of course, though humour is subjective, I found this book incredibly funny.

The nitty-gritty: Full of effortless humor, imaginative world-building, and complex characters, Stringers is a smart, bold sci-fi adventure—with pickles.

"The Chime sounded, like, well, a chime. A really big chime. But still. If there truly was a sound evil enough to destroy the galaxy, wouldn’t it be something like pre-Black Album Metallica, or Justin Bieber? This was a…a doorbell. He sighed. From the bathrooms to the pending End of Everything, outer space had so far been one disappointment after another."

In 2020 I read The Phlebotomist, which was one of my top five favorite books of the year, and since then I’ve been dying to read Chris Panatier’s next book. Stringers, out next week, is a completely different animal, different in both tone and genre. Even so, the bones of the writer himself are still present, and even if I didn’t enjoy the story quite as much, it’s clear than Chris Panatier is the real deal. Stringers is a wacky, irreverent, mad-cap sci-fi adventure that falls firmly into the "absurd" category of speculative fiction. And while “wacky” and “absurd” aren’t usually elements that work for me, Stringers has a lot more to offer readers. It’s clever as hell, and hysterically funny too. And yes, it also tugged at my heartstrings, especially at the end.

The story revolves around a man named Ben who makes fishing flies for a living. He’s your average, normal guy, except for one thing—-Ben knows absolutely everything about insects and animals, including their sex lives, but he has no idea where this information comes from. It’s just there, in his head. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of timepieces, intricate facts about watches and clocks that are completely useless. Ben also knows there is something called the Chime, but he doesn’t know what it is or why it might be important.

But Ben can’t leave well enough alone and so he spends all his free time searching the internet for clues about his affliction, hoping a message left in a chat room might lead to answers, or at least catch the attention of someone else out there who has the same, useless information rattling around in their brain. And one day, it happens. He meets someone named EarthBro_99 who seems to be just like Ben. Even more shocking, EarthBro_99 brings up the Chime, something Ben has never mentioned to anyone. When his new friend suggests meeting up to exchange information, Ben readily agrees, taking along his best friend Patton for protection. 

But EarthBro_99 turns out to be an alien named Aptat, and before Ben knows it, he and Patton have been kidnapped. Aptat explains that Ben is a Stringer, someone who carries the knowledge of other lives in his head. Aptat needs Ben because he knows about the Chime. He’s a bounty hunter and he’s made a deal to sell Ben to a race called the Scythin, aliens who are looking for something called the Note of Jecca. Ben may not know exactly what the Chime is, but through a process called dredging, that buried information can be “dredged” up from his subconscious.

Not surprisingly, Ben isn’t too happy with these events, but luckily another Stringer named Naecia steps in to help. With the Scythin after them, Aptat determined to cash in on his bounty, and the fate of all the worlds hinging on whether or not Ben can find the Note of Jecca, Ben, Patton and Naecia find themselves in a dangerous race for their lives. 

Stringers is a great combination of interesting characters, humor and complex plot, and it has much more depth than you would expect from such a funny story. The characters, while frustrating at times, ended up really growing on me. Ben is unremarkable—-except he’s actually remarkable in ways that most people wouldn’t understand, and so he becomes the reluctant hero of the story. I also loved his friendship with Patton, a stoner with no real redeeming qualities, but who turns out to be a steadfast friend to Ben and the most sympathetic of all the characters. Then there is Aptat, our non-binary alien, who I didn’t like at all in the beginning. And yet they became one of my favorite characters by the end of the story-–go figure! Aptat and Naecia made a fantastic duo, and it was a toss-up as to whether I liked their chapters or Ben’s better.

Chris uses footnotes in his story, and not all readers are going to like them (although to be fair, it’s easy to ignore them if you want). I personally think they worked really well with the story and added a lot of humor. Through these footnotes we see how Ben’s brain copes with thousands of trivial facts about insects and animals, which come to him at the worst times and act almost like a counterpoint to Ben’s normal thoughts:

“Male millipedes inject sperm through a pair of modified legs called gonopods.

File under “stuff I wish I didn’t know.”

Sorry, Ben, that file is full.”

Some of the footnotes show Ben responding to these facts and it was pretty funny! The bottom line is Ben has no control over these bizarre facts, and I thought it was the perfect way to explain his weird knowledge.

Panatier’s writing was so good, full of clever moments that I wish I saw more of in fiction, to be honest. For example, a couple things show up in the beginning and carry through the entire story to the end, like Patton’s jar of pickles—and many jokes revolve around those pickles!—and a fancy fishing fly that Ben finds in his pocket. The author inserts several chapters throughout the story from another point of view, a woman simply known as the instrument maker. At first these chapters made no sense and didn’t have any connection to what was going on with Ben, but later the meaning becomes clear, and it blew me away!

A couple of things didn’t quite work for me, though, but these are personal preferences and should in no way deter you from reading this book (unless, of course, they are your personal preferences as well!) I do not like “potty” humor at all, and unfortunately Ben and Patton find themselves in an awful situation on the Scythin ship where potty humor comes out in full force. Both men are put in skin tight space suits, and in order to deal with eating and, um, elimination, tubes are inserted in the appropriate places to deal with their bodily functions. In addition, Ben is rewarded with “nectar” a food source that includes feel good, addictive drugs. The whole thing was sort of icky and went on far too long for me (it seemed never ending at the time), and I was so relieved when the tubes were finally removed.

I also found the first half of the story to be a bit confusing at times. There is a lot of information to set up and quite a few characters to introduce. In addition to Ben’s chapters, Naecia’s story is told in alternating chapters, and although their stories eventually converge, they spend quite a bit of time apart on different adventures. The author’s vivid imagination is in full force here, but there are all kinds of new things to absorb and remember, including the intricate world of Stringers and how the dredge works to access information. But once you reach the half-way point, the story takes off like a rocket, and when Ben and Naecia start working together to save the world, I could barely put the book down.

I absolutely loved the ending, and while it certainly wasn’t the ending I was expecting, it made perfect sense with the rest of the story. Readers who appreciate a well-rounded, humorous sci-fi story, both challenging and accessible, should not miss Stringers.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

Sadly I’m going to have to DNF this book. I made it to 60% but I have been reading it for weeks and it has been a bit of a struggle, because this is not the book for me.
I was looking forward to this book when I read praise that it was reminiscent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And while I see the similarities in the start of the plot, I guess Adams’ humor is a lot more my style than Panatier’s humor. I found most of the jokes childish or just not funny at all, and the constant bug fact footnotes interrupted the flow of the story, and mostly bored me. Also a lot of them were pretty gross. As for the characters I liked the side characters more than main character Ben, I found him often pretty unlikeable. The worldbuilding was strange (lots of concepts and words were used with no explanation or were not explained until halfway through the book), and the plot started confusing me more and more. Granted, the plot might have all made sense in the end, but I have no interest anymore to find out. It’s a miss for me.

Horny insects and tick tocks(1). Are they both now wandering aimlessly around your brain? Welcome to Ben Sullivan’s world(2).

Ben’s brain is chock-a-block with super helpful fun facts that are entirely appropriate to discuss with any audience, like hermaphroditic traumatic insemination(3).

So, our Ben. Is he one of those people with an obsession that’s laser focused on very specific, not so mainstream topics? Sort of, but his obsession isn’t about bug sex or timepieces, although to hear him talk, you may beg to differ. No, our Ben’s obsession is about how the hell he knows so much detailed information about topics he’s never actually researched. He has no idea how he knows what he knows and it’s not for lack of trying to figure it out.

“Every waking moment is a constant barrage of intrusive thoughts with even the most innocuous stimuli churning up commentary from deep within the folds of my brain.”

Sounds exhausting, right?

“And it’s exhausting.”

Good thing Ben has quite possibly the most understanding best friend in all the worlds, Patton(4).

This is the story of the Shopkeeper and the Pipefitter. There’s also Insectoid Boba Fett and some other folk that are out of this world. Then you’ve got some VIP’s(5), expert level LEGO and the Fray(6) to look forward to(7).

Ben is a man after my own heart.

“I subscribed to the canceling-out method of eating, where you eat as much junk as you want, so long as you cancel it out with something healthy.”

And, let’s be honest. Doesn’t knowing that the water boatman has been certified by Guinness as having the World’s Loudest Penis enrich your life?

This read was so much fun. It gave me the action and the humour I was hoping for but then it went above and beyond, granting me a new favourite swear combo(8).

The best advice I can give you as you prepare to spend some quality time with Ben? Whatever you do, don’t cross the tubes.

The other best advice I can give you? Stay tuned after the book for the acknowledgements. Included are a list of bands the author listened to as this story journeyed from their brain to the page. If you need me I’ll be hanging out in the forest with Jonathan Hultén. When I return I’ll be making my way through the rest of the list.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Angry Robot for the opportunity to read(9) this book(10).

1. The telling time variety.
2. It’s a world with lots of swearing so if you’re not a fan, perhaps this isn’t the book for you. And you may want to avoid the rest of this review while you’re at it.
3. Which give the term fucked in the head a whole new meaning.
4. Handy hint: We love Patton.
5. Very Important Pickles.
6. Not the band.
7. This book should also probably come with a warning for people who have emetophobia. If that’s you, look away. Now.
8. Shitfuck. One word. Use it in a sentence today. I have.
9. Did I mention this book has footnotes?
10. So many footnotes.

I really enjoyed this for the most part but I don't think I understood a lot of what was going on. This is definitely for people who like the science side of science fiction, as well as for the people like me who love the crazy adventure side.
There's some mind warping concepts, some great characters, brilliant flashes of humour and the best travelled jar of pickles in the universe.
I'll definitely be recommending this one.

STRINGERS by Chris Panatier is my first introduction to this author. It was fantastic first impression because at 23% in, I was adding his debut novel, The Phlebotomist, to my TBR.

This science fiction standalone novel is one of many anticipated reads coming out this year from Angry Robot Books. Why did I read it? The blurb. Completely sold me even though I knew nothing about this author at the time. Boy, did it pay off!

This book is about a fellow named Ben. Ben has always been a very odd sort, but not for the usual reasons - he can rattle off facts about insects (mostly concerning the manner in which they have sex), animals and wristwatches. Yes, wristwatches. Funny thing is, he didn't *learn* these facts, he was *born* with them.

"It was a form of paralysis, arresting all of the other things I might have done with my life if I hadn't been so simple-minded about solving the mystery of my jumbled psyche."

Ben has never stopped searching the ends of the internet trying to find out why he is this way, or at least find someone else like him....which lands him and his best (and only) friend Patton in a whole mess of trouble. Like, abducted by aliens that want to probe you kind of trouble. Think Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back...but in space.

This book is absolutely hysterical. The first night I started it, I read a quarter of it and my cheeks actually hurt from grinning and laughing the majority of the time. For those of you who only dabble a little in the sci fi genre, it's a bit more involved than Blake Crouch or Andy Weir, but it doesn't lose you in its explanation. Well, I do think my brain took a couple vacations, but Ben and Patton were on vacation with me, if you're picking up what I'm putting down.

I loved the humor, loved the story - wouldn't change a single thing. It is VERY important to read the footnotes...I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. You'll also need a mirror in the second half of the book - yeah, this one is interactive!

Superb. 10/10 will reread many times in the coming years - I was given an eBook ARC to read and review, provided by Angry Robot Books, but I will be purchasing a physical copy with my own money because I have to have this one in my collection. This is a book that I'll use to come out of a reading slump or to help ease me out of mourning when I finish a series that sends me into a tailspin of despair.

You cannot go wrong picking this one up.

Stringers by Chris Panatier is an out-there, witty novel about Ben. Ben possesses useless knowledge about animals and wristwattches but he has no idea how he knows all of this. He knows about the Chime but can't tell you what it is or why it's important. This knowledge could get him in a whole heap of trouble. After he and his best friend Patton are abducted by an alien bounty hunter, Ben finds out how much he is worth and how dangerous he can be.

Panatier has shown us a sense of humour that is particularly divisive, in my opinion. There seems to be a childish joke on most pages which seems to be a little Douglas Adam but not as well-executed. Eventually, these grew stale and took me out of the story. The writing and pacing were well-versed and the characters varied and engaging. The story itself was wild but heartfelt but there were desperate attempts to be too manic that became unfocused.

Stringers was an okay book and would be recommended for a fun and fast ride.

An absurd manic romp through space by Ben, a man with too much insight on insect intimacy and his kind but bumbling stoner pal, Patton. This book is a combination of Jasper Fforde and "John Dies at the End" by David Wong.

To the positives - this is not a standard story. Chris shows off his writing chops and provides his fresh, unique voice throughout. The scenario, while wild, was explained enough that built up the world. I found Ben's unique ability (outside of his ingrained knowledge) funny, as the rotating objects in your mind is a common meme.

Unfortunately, Chris pulled a lot of mileage from an ever-companion jar of pickles that never clicked. This element and some other jokes felt tacked in as random early-00's humor to spice up the scenes.

Also, the use of footnotes were a struggle - flipping back and forth is always jarring for a fluid narrative, and they didn't build to anywhere. Most were a few throwaway sentences where Ben would give the scientific name for animals, with only little humor added.
I had hoped Ben's inner voice was more cuttingly sarcastic or something to give an offset from his outer dialogue to liven up or give purpose to these tangents.

The scale of this story really zooms out from beginning, moving from an bizarre but relatable scene into a galaxy-wide threat, and I almost wish it hadn't. The first third of the story was the most compelling to me - the introduction of wacky characters and setting, but this tone gets more somber and less wacky as the stakes increase, and the jokes start to feel shallow in this new light.

I love a book where your average human ends up in extraordinary circumstances. Especially when their first reaction is humor and brains. Go humanity!

STRINGERS is quick, witty, and exuberant. Ben possesses useless but vast knowledge about animals and wristwatches. He knows A LOT; he just can't explain how he knows any of it. Do you want to discover the mating habits of Brazilian bark lice? He's your guy? Wanna learn about butterfly's toothed vaginas? He's your guy. Or about creatures that eat and defecate through the same orifice? Yeah, you guessed it. Ben's your guy.

He also knows about the Chime. He can't tell you what it is or why it's important, but the fact that he knows gets him in trouble. I'll be more specific - a trash-talking alien bounty hunter abducts Ben and his best friend, Patton. And so the adventure begins.

Panatier's sense of humor won't appeal to everyone. Gross facts about insects' intimate lives and fart jokes appear on almost every page. I found them tiring but, to be fair, Panatier's writing is intelligent and the pacing excellent. His extraterrestrials are varied and extraordinary, and the story is engaging. So, if you like your stories on the wild side, you'll probably love this heartfelt cosmic romp. On the other hand, if stories driven by manic energy and dozens of unfocused asides tend to tire you, you might want to skip this one.

What else? There are footnotes here. Mostly funny and interesting. But they're LEGION, and exhausting. They fit the whimsical and wild narrative. They contain a lot of cool facts. For me, though, there are just too many and I felt they distracted me from the flow of the story. The world-building goes in-depth and is fascinating, and the changes in a tone fit the story well.

All in all, STRINGERS is an entertaining book, but not for everyone. I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to readers looking for something fast, wild, and surprising. Fans of odd wristwatches and insect trivia will also be delighted.

Consigned to the tedium of working in a bait shop, Ben has little going on in his life. His days are spent engineering the perfect fly fishing lures, while his evenings are spent trying to work out just how the hell he knows how to make the perfect fishing lures (amongst other bizarre trivia which he couldn’t possibly know naturally), or getting stoned with his best friend Patton. Ben’s life takes a turn for the terminally interesting when a flesh construct bounty hunter shows up and abducts him, hoping to use Ben’s knowledge of “The Chime” to land a big pay day. Of course, that might depend on whether Ben can remember what the Chime actually is, or what he’s supposed to do with it.

Ben is “aided” in his quest - possibly a slightly charitable term in this case - by the loyal Patton, who has unwittingly volunteered to accompany him on his travels across space. The relationship between Ben and Patton is a source of plenty of the comedy throughout (spoilers - Stringers is pretty damn funny), with the lumbering stoner playing the comedy sidekick role to an absolute T. There’s a bit of a Peter Parker and Ned vibe to the pair, if Peter was considerably less super and considerably more flawed and Ned was constantly ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms. Both are easy to root for from the off - regardless of whether or not you’ve ever worked in a retail environment, Ben’s deadpan comments to frequent browser (and never purchaser) Jim will make you like him instantly, and Patton is, quite simply, the king of the loveable goofballs.

Just like with The Phlebotomist, it’s difficult to get too much into the plot of Stringers without running the risk of spoilers, and Panatier has done such a good job with the whole affable obfuscation bit on Twitter that it seems a shame to shed too much light on things now. It’s even kept up as we get into the book itself; a warning that you’ll need a mirror later on turns out not to be a joke (it’s perfectly justified, incredibly), and cryptic foreshadowing abounds. Oh, and if you’ve seen anything on the socials of Panatier’s trivia on bug sex - or, as I like to call it, bumping uglies at the ugly bug ball - rest assured, all that had a point. Stringers is replete with footnotes which are by turns informative, amusing, gross or frequently all of the above. They’re often on the theme of bug sex, and the fourth wall isn’t so much broken as it is gleefully demolished repeatedly throughout them. Ben likes to argue with his own brain you see, which proves to be another rich vein of comedic gold.

While carefully skirting around some of the details of the plot, what I can say is that things get considerably more epic than you might expect, Panatier showing that he’s equally as adept at crafting an entire universe for a comedy-tinged space opera as he was at creating the unsettling dystopian world of The Phlebotomist. It’s another mash up of a few different ideas too - there’s a heist movie feel to some elements, as a team with specialised skills comes together to track down Ben, as well as the buddy movie feel of Ben and Patton’s relationship, plus plenty of large scale action packed moments. There’s some extremely in-depth world building in there too, with some deep ideas to chew over. Crucially, all these elements just mesh seamlessly; it never feels like things are novel just for the sake of being novel.

In case it wasn’t clear by this point, I loved Stringers. It’s playful in its narrative approach, it’s stuffed full of loveable characters and wonderfully constructed relationships, and its humour is perfectly pitched. On top of that, it has some very cool ideas about the nature of existence, and manages to build up to a climactic finish worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. A big hearted work of fertile imagination.

Wow. Where to begin! First of all, thank you for this early copy. This book was so much fun! I have never read a comedic sci-fi book and I had the best time. There was action, comedy and even some mystery. My favorite chracter was Aptat. They were hilarious! It was funny all of the shows and music, etc. they took from earth and implemented into their life. I also thought Patton was a great character. What I loved about this book was the theme of friendship despite the troubles they were faced with. Patton was so loyal even when his circumstances put him on the brink of death. I loved how an unlikely group of friends can come together to save a galaxy. This was a super fun sci-fi that I cannot wait to reccomend!

If you’d like to add some levity to your day, pick up a copy of STRINGERS by Chris Panatier! The writing is strong, the story itself is hilarious yet thought provoking, the characters are well developed and endearing, and the ridiculous footnotes about insect’s sexy parts will have you laughing out loud!

This well-paced, alien abduction based space opera was written in first person POV via Ben, and 3rd person POV via a couple of other characters, including a mysterious instrument maker from another time and place. The instrument maker’s POV had me baffled for most of the book, but after the big reveal, I totally understood why her POV was included and I got a little teary eyed.

If you like laugh out loud space operas, rag-tag crews, and random yet funny facts about insects and watches, then you will love this book! 🛸

I received a free e-ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Does It All.........

One blurb for this book promises "humor, action, and a memorable cast of characters". Mission accomplished.

The humor runs from fart jokes to subtle wordplay, edgy throwaways, and deadpan humor. The action is space opera-y, but often with tongue in cheek. Except sometimes it's cool, and clever, and high-tech in a convincing science-garble fashion. As to the memorable cast, our two heroes have surprising depth and appeal, and the book is long enough to allow the reader to see them and appreciate them from a number of different angles. Our heroine space-pipefitter is the strong and silent type who brings an appropriate level of hard-boiled competence to the project. The aliens are all over the place, but the Stringer hunter who kidnaps our heroes is a stone cold hoot, and steals every page he's on.

There's a lot going on here, but it's handy and helpful that there's a bit of monologuing by the kidnapper early on that explains Stringers, explains what's happened, and pretty much lays out the roadmap for what's going to happen. That's swell, because there are lots of clever twists and turns and wrinkles to the tale, and the author saves the reader from too much head scratching about what's going on.

So, I got a kick out of this. Space opera humor is very, very hard to pull off, and this book aced the task, and even offered lots of graceful little side bits and digressions that made the whole project very satisfying.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

It was a delight, even if I had to read more about bug private parts that I ever wanted to.

This book has more complexity than the brief summary suggests, as well as a good deal of humor.

It’s been tricky finding science fiction to my liking. This book is a shining example of that. While traditionally I do strive for a certain degree of objectivity in my reviews, first and foremost they are meant to represent a personal reading experience, and thus…while this technically might be a perfectly good sci-fi adventure, it really, really didn’t work for me.
Objectively speaking, it has the mad manic energy of a contemporary space romp and the intricately convoluted intrigue of a space opera and the wildly contrived quirk of “look how quirky we are, we’re going to do footnotes, copious amounts of footnotes that’ll make it look like the protagonist might be talking to himself, but is he, really”. And that might be enough for some readers. It wasn’t enough for this one.
Random facts about the animal kingdom (which the protagonist of this novel is loaded with), sure, yeah. The rest…no, thank you.
I did try, I really did. But it was just so hyper, so busy, so over the top, that it managed to leave me completely indifferent. Most of the time it was just turning pages. Sometimes there were some fun things occurring on those pages, but honestly, I don’t think I can even do an accurate plot summary for this and that’s after 400 pages.
For some reason the publisher, Angry Robot, has decided that 400 is a proper length for a science fiction novel and that’s all they do. Personally, I believe that to be much too long, not to mention peculiarly inflexible. Although far be it for me to argue with a robot. It was certainly much too long for this novel, even though technically about 6% of it is taken up by footnotes, all those freaking footnotes.
It’s an inventive novel, it might even be clever, although in that “look how clever I am” way, but it’s exhausting and really kind of hyper, like hyped up on its own energy. For me, contrived cleverness and animal trivia aside, it barely amused and mostly ended up being a waste of time.
It was easy to tell the sort of book this was meant to be…a wacky, whimsical, humorous space adventure that gets a lot of mileage out of a jar of pickles, it just didn’t quite get there.
It stands to mention…I don’t normally like space operas, and I am particular about my science fiction, so my opinion might very well be a minority one and must be considered as such. Which is to say, user mileage may vary. Thanks Netgalley.