SciFi and Fantasy eBook Club discussion

I had a science-fiction book called 'Good Vibrations' up on Amazon Kindle for ten years. I only got three reviews in that time, all of them five stars, which was gratifying but sparse. Yesterday, I found a fourth 'review' of two stars, the new 'average' shown was 3.7 stars. When I went to look at the review--why the reviewer was so critical of my story--there was nothing to be seen. 'All reviews' showed only the three five-star ratings I had received. There was even a click for reviews with different numbers of stars, but 'two-star' turned up nothing. It was 'invisible.'

The bar chart that shows how many 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1-star reviews showed two bars, one at the 5-star and one at the 2-star levels. According to the chart the two-star review was counted as 43% of my reviews (???) and all the rest were 57%. I figure one out of four to be 25%, but that's not what Amazon shows on the page for my book and the impact of that bad review is disproportionately high. Mysteriously high, I might say.

If that bar chart is a mirror of customer ratings, it seems that yesterday's reviewer does not cast a reflection. In another genre, a character in that category would be called 'vampire.' It feels a little like that to me, now. Has anybody else experienced this? Patrick O'Connor

No experience with that situation. But it does sound like an interesting idea for a next sci-fi book where an alien entity assimilates a human form as a "reviewer" to market the planet Earth to an advanced galactic culture that is interested in experiencing some very unique and curious activities in a pseudo "vacation" experience. Just a thought!

See this bizarre planet! Its inhabitants irradiated it in the 1950's; now they're cooking it with CO2. What will they do next?

PT Barnum would have an intergalactic counterpart who would be able to spin this potential fiasco into an outreach of benevolent aliens attempting to save this poor species that has been so surprisingly ignorant of its reckless behavior.

He would need a human counterpart to make his point that we are capable of ignoring the common sense of listening to science. I'm thinking of someone who will be out of a job soon and a perfect representative for this position. But...we've got to get him out of the White House first...

Now, now, this is a science fiction story, so we will probably not want to include politics since it might reduce our audience. But someone who could interact with world leaders might be very capable of interacting and influencing galactic empires. It might be some sort of experience like running an international business, but in a somewhat broader scale. Now, that sounds like a challenge that this human might be interested in accepting!