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C-Shapes
Eight years after a virus has left half of the population of the world mentally unstable, a man named Ethan Chase enters into a program to become a "Sitter", or caretaker, to two "Unstables". One of which, is a girl, a "Mirror", who believes that she leaves for Paris every Sunday and returns on Tuesday and often mimics and repeats the actions of those around her. The other, a highly functioning "Amnesiac" named Noah who is at one moment lucid and the next completely incoherent. As Ethan develops an unlikely, and looked down upon, friendship with his two cases - he begins to realize that line between being normal and abnormal are not that different as he is swept up in events far beyond his control.
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First published March 15, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 18, 2013
Great story and characters, poor editing. (Spelling and grammar check, anyone?)
May 17, 2019
C-Shapes by Matthew Fish
This is a sort of Dystopia novel, a genre that I'm only just warming up to. It contains many elements that look familiar to me already with the few novels I have read in this genre. I like this book a lot though, It had a character that I immediately identified with and then it had a lot of very good character development.
Ethan Chase, the protagonist and person telling the story is just an average guy who in fact prior to day of the great virus had been more of a deadbeat than anything else. Now he's decide to clean himself up and do something useful; if he can.
Imagine a world where half the population has been strricken with something that makes them all seem like a potential threat to humanity. Some suffer amnesia, some catatonia, some are mimics who drift from reality while mimicking those around them and some are downright psychotic. What they all have in common is that they are no longer able to function properly in society and eventually they all pose a threat of becoming what is called Aggro, a state of agitation where they become unstoppably aggressive and begin to kill.
This begins to sound almost like a military secret that has gone awry. An attempt at creating the perfect soldier's that is accidentally unleashed on the entire population. When they go aggro they seem to aggro together and almost seem linked somehow, again almost like the perfect army. But it's a virus and only half the population is afflicted. C-Shapes is a pharmaceutical company that has developed C-Alysium or calm as they call it. This controls the afflicted keeping them from going aggro.
Ethan has gotten the job of being the sitter for two cases of this affliction. One is a memory loss victim and the other is a mirror or mimic. We come into the story on his first day where he is expected to follow specific rules of conduct that seem quite simple and are enforced by graphic examples of what can happen when things go wrong. But imagine one of the cases being an old school friend who you once idolized and is now become debilitate and then imagine another who looks so frail and lost and becomes someone you're easily attracted to. This about sums up Ethan's first day at work. Since he is not supposed to become closely attached or emotionally involved; he's pretty much about to be blindsided.
But things aren't as they seem and Ethan is about to have rude awakening that's even worse than when his parents died from the virus. The world is poised at a moment of decision ready to kill off half of the population that poses such a threat to the rest. Ethan comes into possession of information that could change the way the world sees everything and he's not at all confident about his ability to complete the task he never signed up for.
All of that said I must once again raise a caution to those who insist on perfect grammar. This book will fail that test. My star system does not downgrade for those unless it seriously distracts me from the book. I have some friends though who will have that fingernail on chalkboard reaction too often in this book. I've marked 38 instance and there are likely more and that is more than I usually allow for, but I loved the plot and the character development I didn't feel there were any great out-in-left-field plot twists or that things were rushed along. But there are many odd sentence structures along with the 38 instances of missing words typos and incorrect words and double word that I think that mostly explains why many people didn't finish the book. If the editing had been just a bit tighter many of those people might have made it to the end and I think they would have been satisfied with the overall story.
This is a good novel for those not so picky people who love Dystopic SFF.
The first half of the book is the setup to how things look while the second is the slow reveal of how things really are and it all does fit as long as you don't get distracted by the typos. Given another thorough edit I'd have had no problem giving this a 5 star.
There are editors listed here and I hope they are reading the customer reviews carefully.
J.L. Dobias
This is a sort of Dystopia novel, a genre that I'm only just warming up to. It contains many elements that look familiar to me already with the few novels I have read in this genre. I like this book a lot though, It had a character that I immediately identified with and then it had a lot of very good character development.
Ethan Chase, the protagonist and person telling the story is just an average guy who in fact prior to day of the great virus had been more of a deadbeat than anything else. Now he's decide to clean himself up and do something useful; if he can.
Imagine a world where half the population has been strricken with something that makes them all seem like a potential threat to humanity. Some suffer amnesia, some catatonia, some are mimics who drift from reality while mimicking those around them and some are downright psychotic. What they all have in common is that they are no longer able to function properly in society and eventually they all pose a threat of becoming what is called Aggro, a state of agitation where they become unstoppably aggressive and begin to kill.
This begins to sound almost like a military secret that has gone awry. An attempt at creating the perfect soldier's that is accidentally unleashed on the entire population. When they go aggro they seem to aggro together and almost seem linked somehow, again almost like the perfect army. But it's a virus and only half the population is afflicted. C-Shapes is a pharmaceutical company that has developed C-Alysium or calm as they call it. This controls the afflicted keeping them from going aggro.
Ethan has gotten the job of being the sitter for two cases of this affliction. One is a memory loss victim and the other is a mirror or mimic. We come into the story on his first day where he is expected to follow specific rules of conduct that seem quite simple and are enforced by graphic examples of what can happen when things go wrong. But imagine one of the cases being an old school friend who you once idolized and is now become debilitate and then imagine another who looks so frail and lost and becomes someone you're easily attracted to. This about sums up Ethan's first day at work. Since he is not supposed to become closely attached or emotionally involved; he's pretty much about to be blindsided.
But things aren't as they seem and Ethan is about to have rude awakening that's even worse than when his parents died from the virus. The world is poised at a moment of decision ready to kill off half of the population that poses such a threat to the rest. Ethan comes into possession of information that could change the way the world sees everything and he's not at all confident about his ability to complete the task he never signed up for.
All of that said I must once again raise a caution to those who insist on perfect grammar. This book will fail that test. My star system does not downgrade for those unless it seriously distracts me from the book. I have some friends though who will have that fingernail on chalkboard reaction too often in this book. I've marked 38 instance and there are likely more and that is more than I usually allow for, but I loved the plot and the character development I didn't feel there were any great out-in-left-field plot twists or that things were rushed along. But there are many odd sentence structures along with the 38 instances of missing words typos and incorrect words and double word that I think that mostly explains why many people didn't finish the book. If the editing had been just a bit tighter many of those people might have made it to the end and I think they would have been satisfied with the overall story.
This is a good novel for those not so picky people who love Dystopic SFF.
The first half of the book is the setup to how things look while the second is the slow reveal of how things really are and it all does fit as long as you don't get distracted by the typos. Given another thorough edit I'd have had no problem giving this a 5 star.
There are editors listed here and I hope they are reading the customer reviews carefully.
J.L. Dobias
August 20, 2020
C-shapes is a science fiction book written by Matthew Fish, that tells the story about Ethan Chase, an ordinary nobody that gets job in the worlds largest corporation, C-shapes, whose mission it is to find a cure to a virus outbreak that swept the globe and made billions of people unstable. Ethan gets assigned to take daily care of two infected people and make sure they take their symptom suppressing medications. In contrast to the usual public approach to sick individuals, Ethan quickly develops a close friendship to both of these subjects, and he treats them much better than C-shapes caretakers usually does. As the story progresses, one of the infected individuals turn out to have a deep secret that quickly envelops Ethan, and he is forced to do change his life drastically.
I found the book to be okay written, but nothing too special. It did the job, but it didn’t make any parts of the story outstanding.
The story itself provided a different look to the usual virus outbreak with zombie wannabes story, which was nice. Care taking infected people? That’s new! Unfortunately, about halfway through, it turned into your regular ‘run from the zombies’ kind of story, of which it wasn’t outstanding in any way. In general, the entire virus part was too underdeveloped, as you ended up with more questions than answers, which in some cases was nice, but here didn’t really do enough to provide a deep world building background for the story to settle in. Why did the infected people sometimes go nuts? Why were there different kind of symptoms for infectees? Where did the virus originate and why did it become such a world spanning issue (After all, it seems quite a bit worse than SARS-CoV-2!)? Why was only one company working on a cure?
The story did put up some twists on why things was as they were, which was nice, but it didn’t push it nearly enough, and I felt that it could have been quite a bit more. As mentioned above, the second part of the story was mostly a ‘run from zombies’ kind of story, and was only carried by character interactions, and character development, but the characters themselves weren’t very developed, so I personally didn’t care too much about them. They were quite cliched, and that didn’t help at all. The main characters pick up a traveling partner towards the end, and he was an excellent example of the issue - He was completely one dimensional cliché guy, and quite frankly, extremely boring. His actions were always overly extreme for no good reason, other than his brief background description, and he wasn’t needed in the story at all.
And in the end, the ending was wrapped up, and it felt completely flat for me. We had hints of a mystery, but the mystery turned out to be very unexciting, and not on that explained any of the overall questions unfortunately. At least it provided and end for the characters.
The book did try to provide some answers to what it means to be human, but it didn’t go to deep into this unfortunately, as it would have suited the story. Instead it turned more into a repetitive ping pong of two loving people trying to convince each other that they were in love, which wasn’t really doing much for the story.
I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Matt Conlon. He did a fine job, with a clear voice and nice pacing. There were a few editing errors, with the narrator coughing, and short repeated sections, but nothing too major that took much away from the enjoyment fortunately.
Overall, an okay new take on an overdone genre, but one that ultimately ends up falling somewhat flat and doesn’t provide much over other similar stories. Don’t pick this if you simply have a virus outbreak story fetisch, but more if you want a simple and contained scifi story, that asks simple questions on what it means to be human.
I received this audiobook for free in return for a review. I have no affiliation with the author, the narrator, the publisher, or their pets (Although I am sure the latter are quite nice!).
I found the book to be okay written, but nothing too special. It did the job, but it didn’t make any parts of the story outstanding.
The story itself provided a different look to the usual virus outbreak with zombie wannabes story, which was nice. Care taking infected people? That’s new! Unfortunately, about halfway through, it turned into your regular ‘run from the zombies’ kind of story, of which it wasn’t outstanding in any way. In general, the entire virus part was too underdeveloped, as you ended up with more questions than answers, which in some cases was nice, but here didn’t really do enough to provide a deep world building background for the story to settle in. Why did the infected people sometimes go nuts? Why were there different kind of symptoms for infectees? Where did the virus originate and why did it become such a world spanning issue (After all, it seems quite a bit worse than SARS-CoV-2!)? Why was only one company working on a cure?
The story did put up some twists on why things was as they were, which was nice, but it didn’t push it nearly enough, and I felt that it could have been quite a bit more. As mentioned above, the second part of the story was mostly a ‘run from zombies’ kind of story, and was only carried by character interactions, and character development, but the characters themselves weren’t very developed, so I personally didn’t care too much about them. They were quite cliched, and that didn’t help at all. The main characters pick up a traveling partner towards the end, and he was an excellent example of the issue - He was completely one dimensional cliché guy, and quite frankly, extremely boring. His actions were always overly extreme for no good reason, other than his brief background description, and he wasn’t needed in the story at all.
And in the end, the ending was wrapped up, and it felt completely flat for me. We had hints of a mystery, but the mystery turned out to be very unexciting, and not on that explained any of the overall questions unfortunately. At least it provided and end for the characters.
The book did try to provide some answers to what it means to be human, but it didn’t go to deep into this unfortunately, as it would have suited the story. Instead it turned more into a repetitive ping pong of two loving people trying to convince each other that they were in love, which wasn’t really doing much for the story.
I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Matt Conlon. He did a fine job, with a clear voice and nice pacing. There were a few editing errors, with the narrator coughing, and short repeated sections, but nothing too major that took much away from the enjoyment fortunately.
Overall, an okay new take on an overdone genre, but one that ultimately ends up falling somewhat flat and doesn’t provide much over other similar stories. Don’t pick this if you simply have a virus outbreak story fetisch, but more if you want a simple and contained scifi story, that asks simple questions on what it means to be human.
I received this audiobook for free in return for a review. I have no affiliation with the author, the narrator, the publisher, or their pets (Although I am sure the latter are quite nice!).
March 16, 2022
I liked it
Well written. Really digs into some of the issues of being human and how some challenges are culturally and socially acceptable and others are not.
Well written. Really digs into some of the issues of being human and how some challenges are culturally and socially acceptable and others are not.
November 20, 2019
Okay this is another story that is "kinda" about zombies, but not really. Normally I really don't like stories like this but the story was actually really good so I didn't mind.
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS***
In this world, the zombie apocalypse already happened and we've cleaned up the mess and moved on with our lives. However some people are carriers of this disease and just have shown different symptoms. Some are catatonic, some are crazy, some repeat what others say and do. Everyone of these people has the chance to go "aggro" at anytime. Which means they turn into zombies and start chowing down on people. No one knows when someone will go aggro but they need to be watched constantly in case this does happen.
There is a company called "C-Shapes" who is working on a "cure" and they have people who go and take of people who have the disease and they call them "Sitters." Our main character falls in love with the girl he is taking care of. It ends up that he and the girl go on the run. They find safe places to hide and a few people are willing to help them, but most of the people decided they will just kill anyone with this disease.
The main character and the girl are left a vehicle and some money by an old friend of his named, "Noah" who was an investigative reporter and wanted to infiltrate C-Shapes and bring them down. Now my main complaints are about this vehicle that he left them. It just seems to be like Kit from Night Rider or the Black Beauty from Green Hornet, anything they need to be able to do, the car seems to be able to do. Want to know how if you're being followed? Just ask the car! Want to know what the current population of a city and how many infected are there? Just ask the car! It's just a little too convenient in my opinion.
Also this story came up when I did a search for "Zombies," and this bothers me because there are barely any zombies in it. There is mainly just the looming threat that at anytime there COULD be zombies. Also there are waaay too many spelling and grammatically mistakes for my tastes. I think this author really just needed to have someone read over this and edit it before it was published.
***END SPOILERS*** ***END SPOILERS*** ***END SPOILERS***
So other than those minor complaints, the overall story is pretty good and worth reading. However if you're looking for tons of zombies and zombie action, you may want to look elsewhere.
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS***
In this world, the zombie apocalypse already happened and we've cleaned up the mess and moved on with our lives. However some people are carriers of this disease and just have shown different symptoms. Some are catatonic, some are crazy, some repeat what others say and do. Everyone of these people has the chance to go "aggro" at anytime. Which means they turn into zombies and start chowing down on people. No one knows when someone will go aggro but they need to be watched constantly in case this does happen.
There is a company called "C-Shapes" who is working on a "cure" and they have people who go and take of people who have the disease and they call them "Sitters." Our main character falls in love with the girl he is taking care of. It ends up that he and the girl go on the run. They find safe places to hide and a few people are willing to help them, but most of the people decided they will just kill anyone with this disease.
The main character and the girl are left a vehicle and some money by an old friend of his named, "Noah" who was an investigative reporter and wanted to infiltrate C-Shapes and bring them down. Now my main complaints are about this vehicle that he left them. It just seems to be like Kit from Night Rider or the Black Beauty from Green Hornet, anything they need to be able to do, the car seems to be able to do. Want to know how if you're being followed? Just ask the car! Want to know what the current population of a city and how many infected are there? Just ask the car! It's just a little too convenient in my opinion.
Also this story came up when I did a search for "Zombies," and this bothers me because there are barely any zombies in it. There is mainly just the looming threat that at anytime there COULD be zombies. Also there are waaay too many spelling and grammatically mistakes for my tastes. I think this author really just needed to have someone read over this and edit it before it was published.
***END SPOILERS*** ***END SPOILERS*** ***END SPOILERS***
So other than those minor complaints, the overall story is pretty good and worth reading. However if you're looking for tons of zombies and zombie action, you may want to look elsewhere.
June 26, 2014
Pretty good.
Surprisingly, this is a post apocalyptic story that DOESN'T involve zombies; the idea behind this work being pretty unique. Written in first person, the author leads us, quite vividly, through the mindset of the narrator.
The author creates a brilliant landscape through which these characters move, while being faced with enormous obstacles and ever present danger.
Filled with plenty of action and drama, this story still moves along a romantic thread. My only complaint with this entire story actually being the first love scene, which tended to be extremely wordy and flowery; full of "bodice ripper" imagery. Aside from that, this was a very well written and entertaining book that I found difficult to put down.
(it does need a bit of editing though, with dropped and repeated words, and errant or missing quotation marks.)
Surprisingly, this is a post apocalyptic story that DOESN'T involve zombies; the idea behind this work being pretty unique. Written in first person, the author leads us, quite vividly, through the mindset of the narrator.
The author creates a brilliant landscape through which these characters move, while being faced with enormous obstacles and ever present danger.
Filled with plenty of action and drama, this story still moves along a romantic thread. My only complaint with this entire story actually being the first love scene, which tended to be extremely wordy and flowery; full of "bodice ripper" imagery. Aside from that, this was a very well written and entertaining book that I found difficult to put down.
(it does need a bit of editing though, with dropped and repeated words, and errant or missing quotation marks.)
May 6, 2013
An interesting story, with a virus causing much of the population to become "unstable," some being pretty much harmless, some a little less so, but all with the possibility to become super aggressive, almost zombie like.
The characters were, for the most part, pretty well written. I thought the journey towards the end was a little implausible and the ending a bit too pat.
Typos in the latter half of the book diminished my enjoyment. Whoever edited the first half shoulda stuck around.
The characters were, for the most part, pretty well written. I thought the journey towards the end was a little implausible and the ending a bit too pat.
Typos in the latter half of the book diminished my enjoyment. Whoever edited the first half shoulda stuck around.
August 25, 2016
Great story!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews