Fiction Analysis - 'Illusion of Control' by Kenny Ching

A Post-apocalyptic Old Testament Story

Michael P. Marpaung

Jul 13, 2023

Author’s Note: Fiction Analysis is back once more. This time I want to cover a book series that I’ve enjoyed.

Warning: As always, there will be spoilers. I will try to keep it to a minimum, but it’s honestly unavoidable.

Get the book of Amazon. [BTW, the kindle edition is free]

Introduction

The cool thing about Indie books (or Indie whatever for that matter) is that you don’t know what you’re going to get. For better or worse, a lot of ideas that authors came up with get rejected by publishers. Perhaps some authors were able to get their works published but at the expense of having their unique voices watered down.

I opened this analysis with that because I think pitching Illusion of Control to a publisher would have been a terribly difficult task. I doubt the average publisher would be open to a “post-apocalyptic Old Testament story” (as I put it in the blurb).

Like many things I ended up getting into, I was only aware of this book thanks to Twitter. One of the writers I followed on Twitter talked about this book and mentioned how it was free on Amazon Kindle. Not wanting to miss out on a free e-book, I decided to take the author up on that offer.

And here we are. Needless to say, I enjoyed the book because otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered writing an analysis on it. Furthermore, I enjoyed the book so much that I also read its two sequels. Indeed, this book is the first part of the Chronicles of Gog book series. I intend to make an analysis of the two sequels also, but one book at a time.

To those new to Fiction Analysis, I will be analyzing this book from three angles: the setting, the characters, and the story.

Setting

Illusion of Control takes place in Gog, a postapocalyptic city which the populace were divided into two classes of people: the elite Triopolites and the underclass Kukazi. But I’ll just let the book speak for itself:

In the postapocalyptic city of Gog, two people groups live in what remains of the city. The powerful, wealthy, and technologically superior Triopolites live in lavish towers and are guarded by lavish security forces. The lower-class Kukazi live on the margins of the decaying city, surviving by any means necessary.
Yu-El is the leader of the Kukazi, both spiritually and politically. After discovering a heinous internal political scandal, Yu-El has committed his first public execution, leading to fear and uncertainty among the Kukazi.

By the way, that’s the whole prologue of the book. Not even 100 words. As someone who writes flash fiction and microfiction stories, I must say I’m impressed by the author’s brevity.

Also, an interesting thing about the apocalypse event in the Chronicles of Gog series is that we don’t really know what had happened all those years ago. It’s something that adds to the mystery of the setting.

This is where I must talk about the “gimmick” of this book (and the Chronicles of Gog series as a whole) – it’s a retelling of the First Book of Samuel (or Kings if you read the Douay-Rheims), but in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting. Thus, readers will see nanomachines, genetically engineered giants, and nuclear fallout but in an Old Testament story.

It’s a cool idea. And with an Old Testament story, we also get Old Testament characters.

Characters

Now I want to talk about the characters. First of all, this book has a lot of characters. Given that this is a retelling of 1 Samuel, readers might expect characters who are more or less “expies” of these Old Testament characters. And they would be right.

Here, I would like to enlist the help of someone who had reviewed the book on Amazon:

As you can see, much of the characters in the book have their own counterparts in 1 Samuel. However, Mr. Ching was also able to put his own twist in some of the characters. Furthermore, there are some characters who do not have a clear Biblical counterpart.

One of the “original character” in the book is Andrew Andartè, one of the Triumvirs of the Triopolites alongside his sister Egypt and a gruff military man named Sejanus. Andrew is clearly the antagonist of the story given that the Triopolites (Philistines) were oppressing the Kukazi (Israelites). To add to the drama, he has a history with Yu-El, the priest who leads the Kukazi.

But as bad as the Andrew is, he is nowhere near as bad as Egypt, who simply lacks humanity. Out of the three triumvirs, she is the most monstrous. With the other triumvirs (Andrew and Sejanus), readers can find some degree of nobility. No such thing for Egypt.

As for the heroes of the story, there doesn’t seem to be one clear protagonist. Initially, Yu-El takes center stage. But then the story’s spotlight drifts towards Wu and Tavian, the Saul and David figure respectively.

As I said earlier, there are a lot of characters in this book. But despite that, Mr. Ching did well in giving each of them proper characterizations.

Story

Now we move on to the story of the book.

Illusion of Control focuses on the conflict between the Triopolites and the Kukazi. As its name suggests, the book centered around the Triopolites’ attempt to control of the city of Gog and the unruly Kukazi.

Political intrigue abounds as triumvir Andrew attempted to enlist the help of the priest Yu-El in getting the Kukazi to make peace with the Triopolites. But it failed, setting the stage for the larger conflict between the two factions.

More importantly, this also sets the stage for the crowning of Wu as the King of the Kukazi by Yu-El. This was not exactly a decision that was well received, given that up to this point, Wu seemed to be a bum who spends more of his time playing basketball than doing anything productive.

But in addition to this political intrigue, we also get into a subplot involving Tavian. Here, we see Tavian’s friendship with Wu’s son Lu (shades of David and Jonathan). We also see the romance between Tavian and Abby, the daughter of triumvir Sejanus (Abigail was one of David’s wives in the Old Testament, though she was not a Philistine, so this is an interesting use of the character by the author). Here, the three of them got into some shenanigans that quickly escalated into something serious.

It’s clear the author was trying to go for the “Biblical narrative” kind of writing. Thus, the authors move from one character to another, and the story moves pretty quickly. There are a lot of things happening in the book even though it’s not even 200 pages long.

I can certainly understand if readers find the whole narrative moving too quickly for their liking. Personally, I loved it. However, I’m also used to “classical narrative” wherein the story moves quickly and the author didn’t dwell too much on a particular scene.

Conclusion

One thing to keep in mind about Illusion of Control is that it’s the first book of a series. I mention this because the book ended on a cliffhanger. I can understand if people are annoyed by this decision. But I’m willing to give Mr. Ching a pass for this because this book is free on Kindle, so I see this book as a preview of things to come.

And that was Illusion of Control by Kenny Ching. I blasted through this book in a single night. I like how unique the concept is, and the author managed to do it justice. If you have a Kindle account, just take a gander and see if you like it.

But I’m not done yet. I’m planning to do an analysis of the other two books in the series. Yes readers, this’ll be a miniseries of reviews. Just keep an eye out for next month. God willing, I’ll be able to release the Fiction Analysis of All Bow Down.