Indentured is a short science fiction tale by Scott McElhaney, the first book in a series called The Mystic Saga. I found it on Amazon’s Kindle store after buying Nathan Lowell’s Quarter Share; it was highly rated, and inexpensive, and so I decided to give it a try.

I do not plan to read the remaining books in the series.

First, a little about the book; and then some general remarks about the current state of the publishing world, and e-book publishing in particular.

Declan Singletree is injured during a vigilante raid on some big guys in the illegal drug business. He’s given an MRI. And the next thing he knows, he’s on board a starship, apparently en route to a colony planet where he’s going to be one of the first responders. Thing is, he’s not quite himself. According to what he was told, his MRI was recorded, and the recording was saved, and in order to come up with a quick supply of indentured servants the people behind the colony ship impressed his MRI records on a force grown clone, thus giving it his personality. He, of course, rebels, and looks for support.

Now, the MRI thing is absurd on the face of it. I do not believe that it will ever be possible to record personality in any electronic form; but certainly not as a standard MRI. If the author had done a little more work—that is, if he’d made something up, if he had told me that it was an Ultra-High-Resolution Rhodo-Magnetic Resonance Imager, based on fancy new technology, I might have bought it. C’mon, show some imagination!

The story doesn’t get any better from there. It seems that the sexy nurse who was kind to him in the hospital also had an MRI shortly after his, and a clone based on her recording is on the same ship. Declan is given four devices, which he’s to give to the nurse’s clone and other people he trusts to help in a rebellion. He immediately gives one of them to another clone whose only recommendation is that he’s too stupid to keep his head down while working against the authorities. In fact, stupidity is the rule of the day.

So, color me unimpressed.

Now, I know that the big thing in publishing is for new authors to bypass the traditional publishers by going straight to the e-book market with low prices: $0.99 to $4.99. I’m in favor of that, especially given that the publishers have largely abrogated their responsibilities with regard to editing and publicity anyway. However, it also means that you need to wade knee-deep through a lot of dreck in order to find the good stuff.

So I buy this book, which somehow has gotten four stars at Amazon (53 reviews), and it was a waste of my time.

At the risk of sounding like the lady who said, “The food here is awful—and the portions are so small!” I’ve got another complaint. Now, the book was $0.99; not a lot. But it was also remarkably short. In Kindle format, it’s maximum location is 1475. By comparison, Quarter Share, which is also very short, has a max location of 3167. The Alchemyst, a not terribly long juvenile by Michael Scott, has a max location of 4830. Jane Eyre clocks in at 8649.

In short, Indentured is a short story masquerading as a novel. And that brings me to a general problem with e-books in general.

When you’re looking at books at the bookstore, you can see immediately how thick the book is. Granted, it might have large print; it might have small print; it’s often worthwhile to check. But you can get an immediate notion of how much book you’re buying, without even thinking about it. That doesn’t happen when you’re looking at a book on Amazon. Amazon does tell you the “Print Length”, 94 pages in this case, if you go looking for that (and I will, from now on, when dealing with books by unknown authors)—but it’s not obvious. It should be.

And in this particular case, I hope I can be forgiven for thinking that the author is trying to take advantage of the $0.99 trend by breaking a full-sized novel up into surprisingly small $0.99 chunks, instead of simply giving me a decent piece of work at a decent price. (I’d not quite so put out if I hadn’t read a number of full-sized novels at $0.99.) I’d much rather he give me the whole thing at $3.99 or $5.99 than try to fool me like this.