Book Review: The Goat and the Robot

Title: The Goat and the Robot 

Author: S.H. Steele

Date: 2023

Publisher: Dream Write

This book contains neither goats nor robots. It's about "supernaturals," people with special abilities that have been defined as supernatural although one character's special power consists of feeling stressed in the presence of other supernaturals. Verity, the narrator, has the more impressive power of dematerializing herself to become invisible or walk through walls. She and two other supernaturals work in Project Chimera, a semi-secret agency that sends them out to help supernaturals in distress. This book doesn't say that these people are genetic chimeras, but now that each of them has been assigned a normal human partner, the three teams are code-named Goat, Lion, and Serpent. 

Verity drops lots of little extrovert-to-introvert put-downs about her computer-geek colleague's "robot stare" and so on. What the story has in the way of comic irony is that geeky Reva answers some of the team's questions before Verity does. 

I find the main premise of this extensive series--a future where none of today's hot science topics is still interesting to anybody, where computers work just as they do today, where global government and "trans-humanism" and gene splicing and artificial intelligence and gender confusion have all been forgotten--more interesting than the author seems to find it. I would have enjoyed the explanation of how the future came out this way, but it's not in this book, if it's been written at all.

When people are nice enough to send me advance copies of new books, I like to rave. In this book's case, unfortunately...It's acceptable as a sort of hybrid, or chimera, of science fiction, mystery, adventure, fantasy, young-adult novel, and ghost story. It's not likely to be regarded as a classic of any of these genres. It is likely to entertain readers of the genres during commuting or waiting time. The purpose of The Goat and the Robot, specifically, is to attract readers to buy the whole series, and it fails to make me want the whole series, but your mileage might vary.