Incursions

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

This blurb concerns Incursions book 1: Incarceration.

If you could buy superhuman abilities, but they might kill you—or worse—would you do it?

Ten years ago, in a world not so different from our own, people with powerful abilities appeared. The new powers were dangerous, dangerous to acquire—dangerous to have—dangerous to wield. World governments raced to find and eradicate the abilities and those who possess them while using the media to rule by fear. Whereas corporations sought to exploit the abilities for profit.

Raz Owens was living the dream - a rising star at a job he enjoys, a girlfriend he loves, but it all comes crashing down when Raz disregards his late father's advice. He is pulled into a chaotic underworld of clandestine labs, shadow organizations, and super-powered criminals. Used as a human test subject in a place where few survive the day, he must last long enough to escape.

His only advantage? A power that seems nearly useless—a heads-up display.

Contains: monsters, violence, death, dismemberment, gamelit, superpowers, superpower consequences, good guys, bad guys, good guys who might be bad guys, bad guys who think they are good guys, good guys that might go bad, bad guys that might turn good, guns for hire, competence, incompetence, continence, incontinence, conspiracies, and some of what I just said wasn't true.

This story is written in third person limited POV. That means you can expect to know many of the thoughts and inner dialog of one character, and only see the actions of other characters. This POV does include scenes without the main character, and thus the reader can and will know things the main character does not. Further, this means characters act on what they know, which is almost always less than the reader knows.

Something else to know. These books do not hold your hand. If you're reading it and thinking "Gosh, why aren't 'they' doing some 'obvious' thing." Bad news. You probably missed something that explains exactly that. If you're seeking a light read that doesn't ask much of you as the reader, you're invited and very welcome to come on in, but this might not be the story for you.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2019
Author: Taykaim

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.2/ 5.0
Followers: 1,036
Views: 467,697

Chapters(130 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(10)

dbfassbinderRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Reviewed as of Chapter 16.
Incursions is an interesting beast. It's a world of super powers, where you can get testing to see what your natural affinities are. There are gritty elements, like superpowered mercenaries, evil shadowy corporations and the like, right alongside villains with comic book powers and technology. There are a lot of characters and subplots, and the perspective jumps around frequently. Incursions rewards patience. Don't expect to stick with a character for more than a chapter or three at a time. It does seem to be building up to something big. Looking forward to seeing it all crash together. It feels like it's going to be a big, exciting scene once all these players do collide.
The prose is solid. I dinged a half star for some minor tense agreements that I've seen crop up a couple of times. That's really it, though.
Polvane the EraserRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Started reading and reached the most recent chapter in less than a week.
Complicated and convoluted plot, interesting characters that are easy to care about, and nice world-building.
All in all a great story. Reminds me a lot of Julian May's Pliocene Exile / Intervention / Galactic Milieu series.
Caveats: Time travel. Not everyone likes time travel.
RatticusRexRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
There is much to enjoy in this story. The MC isn't stupid, or juvenile, or mo motivated by high-school issues. He is an adult and acts like one. Worries about his career lead him to brush up against something that pulls him into a dire situation. The characters are interesting people doing interesting things for interesting reasons which is what I look for in entertainment. The world and the backstory/situation is intriguing and creative. I want to know what happens with the MC and the other major characters, so I'll be following and favoriting this title.
crusaderbondRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
A bit confusing in parts but I really like how the story is going.
I think an easy way to reduce confusion would be using a header before each change in perspective. Perhaps denoting the time, location, and organization involved?
Lovely story though, I'll be waiting with bated breath!
A.BelRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Full disclosure, the author and I work together to edit and polish each other's stories, so I've seen a lot more of the story than probably anyone else.
Regarding the story. The world is a darker reflection of ours, similar enough to be familiar, but a few more clicks further on the dystopia meter in multiple areas.
Something the author does that is a bit unusual in the genre is focus on making super powers work within the constraints of reality and physics. A great example of this is that a character who can transform into metal, suddenly has to weigh several thousand pounds, and this changes how they move and affect the world around them. So the existence of the power might not be understood, but how that ability works in the real world has been modeled with care.
Main character is presented as and considers himself to be an everyman. As events unfold, it appears he might just be more of a chosen one.
The major side storylines include a powerful individual who might be a supervillain or superhero and a paramilitary mercenary group with a fair number of super-powered members.
There is clearly more happening in the world, and some of that is shown in the side stories. This is generally an origin story, with super powers and a system, told in an unusual way.
In my opinion, his work starts above average for RR, and then he keeps working on it until it's much better than that.
I can say with confidence that if you read something that looks like a mistake or continuity error, don't be so sure.
I can't speak about every writer on RR, but I can say that for already having a finished story ready when he started posting the story, Taykaim continues to polish and evaluate the story for improvements far beyond what most writers appear to.
Recently he's begun reintroducing some deleted scenes that were pulled for various reasons. So far all of them are good, and would have been better included in the first place. I suspect that many writers would not bother with this level of
One MageRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Let me start by saying that I really enjoy the story so far. It is a really fun take on super powers and how they grow and work together. What we have in incursions is a superhero story that starts with a slow, traumatic origin and builds up a realistic hero in a semi-dark, fast changing environment. Now let's do a breakdown of my perspective.
Characters: The MC and major side characters are overall pretty great with plenty of skills balanced by flaws that make them realistic. Where they tend to lose their shine is in some glaring inconsistencies that don't make as much sense in their context. Two examples of this are the MC and Midnight. Midnight is supposed to be this one man army who has built up an organization that is skillfully working together with the help of experts in various fields of reconaissance and anomaly intervention but he is completely oblivious to Mercator, who he knows wants to eat people, catching and eating people and seems completely in the dark about the guy running another shadow organization kidnapping and torturing powered people. It seems like the disconnect is either in the way Midnight is presented or a lack of insight into why these things are getting past him. (Yes he lost his crew recently but these are things it seems he should have known before that). The MC wildly alternates between completely overthinking things in a supremely rational way that allows him to piece together significant insights from the barest of information and then forgetting to ask how long it will take to integrate new abilities, how often it is safe to upgrade himself or how much catalyst something will take.
Overall, I still really enjoy the characters and characterization of the MC and major side characters. The minor side characters that crop up in their own full interludes are far more difficult for me to understand personally but more on that below.
Setting: The world seems to be close enough in setting to modern earth with some easy to understand diffe
Andrew MRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
I like the mc. Lots of viewpoints but if you can keep them in mind they can and often do provide meaningful context.
Crown RoyalRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
As my title says, there is definitely a good story here. The main problem I have and I think a lot of others have is the extra, sometimes unnecessary seeming information we're getting.
Having some alternate pov's is not necessarily a bad thing. Even having almost half the chapters be focused on other characters can still work if done right.
The problem I have is that it seems like a lot of the information we're given in those other chapters could easily be summed up in a couple sentences and the extra fluff thrown out. This is particularly frustrating when the MC is in a bad situation for the entire first arc and I at least, want to see some progress on what's happeneing with them and how they're going to improve their situation (as well as get their powers and use them - which took I think until something like 23 chapters? with at least half not even being focused on the MC). Instead of having a focus on that, we're given countless chapters about these mercs and all their preparations or little bits about his parents. And a lot of it just doesn't seem important at all. It's just fluff we need to wade through to get back to the part we actually care about. It's downright annoying.
Spoiler: Spoiler
We're given an entire chapter about a team's training methods, then almost all of them end up dead. We have a whole chapter dedidcated to a few people grieving over lost teamates we don't really care about, or a chapter devoted to a character helping someone else with work, when it's unusual for them to volunteer for such a thing. Most of this could easily be shortened, with a lot of the info discarded and the important stuff summarized. Then these chapters could be combined so we have less taking us away from what we are actually here to read about.
For example, the chapter where the one girl, Hex, offers to help wraith with his work could easily be discarded. A chapter shortly after has wraith talking to his bosses about what they found. It would be easy enou
DaruneAlbaneRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
Slow story progression n short chaps
Edit has improved
14 chaps worth of setup .. would give it a pass till at least it hits chap 100
Will change score later
Quite Possibly A CatRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
The general concept is nice. Unreliable super powers can be gained from some poorly understood substance. Oh and monsters are invading from another world.
But its also all over the place, and could probably be improved by focusing more on the main character. Also I feel like the writer probably needs a good amount of practice.
Still, I like the concept and am still reading it.