Samhain Publishing, $3.50, ISBN 1-59998-695-7
Sci-fi Romance, 2007

Do we have a winner for the most bizarre first line ever?

Wet and glistening, Cahn Dal’s head slurped out of the gelatin sac.

The gelatin sac, or Ball, can also turn itself into a shiny thing with a shell and even better, it can talk. Via some method that the author wisely doesn’t elaborate in this short story, the “temporal bio-mechanical” Ball brings our heroine Cahn Dal to the year 2456 CE, whatever CE means. Maybe they also pipe in music through the Ball when she is “traveling” through the time, like a radio station during one’s flight, heh, I don’t know. At any rate, Cahn is on a mission. She is to… um, tinker with a scientific formula equation that will alter the course of the future, only to encounter Alexander Roen, a traitor of the Coalition who nonetheless can still turn Cahn’s mojo on.

This is an interesting story, although with this story being as short as it is means that many of the promises in the interesting premise remain unfulfilled. I almost scream when I come across the obligatory sex scene because it is taking away precious space that could have been used to develop the ideas in the story better.

At any rate, I find the non-romantic aspects of 7% and Rising so much more interesting than the underdeveloped characters or their romance. Still, with it being as short as it is, this one remains an intriguing teaser rather than a satisfying story. It doesn’t even feel like a complete story to me. It’s just… short, rushed, and as interesting as it is and as much as I want to like it, vaguely unsatisfying.

It seems that this author intends to write longer stories only for contemporary romances under the name Kim Rees. I wonder what will happen if Kim Knox decides to write a longer paranormal story.