STRINGERS by Chris Panatier – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Stringers by Chris Panatier
Published by Angry Robot on April 12 2022
Genres: Adult, Science fiction
Pages: 400
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads

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.