Heretical Fishing, Book 1

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Imagine, if you will, Jason Asano from He Who Fights with Monsters (HWFWM) landing in a Beware of Chicken cultivation style universe, without the self-hatred and anti-government rhetoric of Jason. Keep some self-leveling animal companions for good measure, and an obsession with eating, and you’ll get a reasonable idea of what this is like.

Adding to the similarity is the same narrator, which doesn’t help to set this apart from HWFWM. The main character is type of person who is too good, like you have to suspend everything you know about what people are really like to believe this could be a person.

After being reborn into a new world after his untimely demise on Earth, one where the system is apparently broken, Fischer wants to keep doing what he had started on Earth. Namely, fishing as much as possible and being the nicest person you’d ever meet.

In the world he wakes to though, fishing is considered heretical because of people’s angst over the gods leaving the world some thousands of years ago. It seems now it’s more heretical from habit than anything else.

Fischer is a bit of a Mary-Sue type character, where he knows how to do everything and his great at everything. From interacting with people, fishing, woodwork, smithing, farming, you name it. He watched a few videos on YouTube once and knows how to do whatever he finds himself doing at the time.

But it works. The story is a cozy slice-of-life reminiscent of “Beware of Chicken”, where the MC wants to just do his thing and cultivation happens around him by accident. Sure, things just go his way like all the time so there is never any real sense of danger or raising the stakes, but not all stories need to be that, and for this slice-of-life, I think it works.

There’s a wider world which we get glimpses into, with cultivators forced into subservience by the crown. So cultivators aren’t unknown in the world, but are collared and kept by royals to fight their battles. Not a whole lot of time is spent on this, but I assume more will come out in later books.

The evolution of the pets was a fun addition. Like Big D, Rizzo, and Peppa from Beware of Chicken, Fischer has a number of animals spontaneously evolve around him and take him as their master.

Sergeant Snips, a crab, Corporal Claws, an otter, and a few others, including a wink to Cinnamon Bun were all fun and over-powered just by being around their master.

The narration was excellent, as expected from Heath Miller and Podium Audio, but Fisher was too much like Jason from HWFWM that I couldn’t stop thinking it was him all the way through.

This doesn’t help this book stand out at all, and I think that a different narrator than the go-to Aussie guy for this type of book would have elevated this beyond something that sounded like Jason on a side-quest.

Ultimately though, “Heretical Fishing” was enjoyable, and I look forward to the next one. I’d have enjoyed a more unique voice for Fischer, so it didn’t sound like a clone, but the story was easy to get into and listen to for hours at a time.