This seems like a fairly standard sci-fi affair, but there’s a nice
mystery at the bottom of it, and there are some amusing elements tossed
into the mix. Thought you couldn’t find vampires and werewolves in
sci-fi? Think again. And it starts well, oh so well. But then... oh
dear. What a disappointment.
The characters are basic
cookie-cutter types. There’s the maverick captain with the tragic past
and an addiction problem, brilliant (of course), young, a risk-taker but
gets results. There’s the seasoned senior officer with the impeccable
career who suddenly and inexplicably goes rogue. There’s the beautiful
female second-in-command, who plays things strictly by the book. And so
on. It’s not that these are uninteresting, but there isn’t anything very
original about them either. Nevertheless, there’s a good rapport
between the various crew members, and a real feeling that they work well
together as a team. I enjoyed the early parts of the book very much -
the confidence and joking between the characters, the mysterious goings
on the team are investigating, the easy writing style without too much
techno-babble - all of this was very appealing.
There are some
oddities that jumped out at me. The hero goes into a crowded bar to meet
his friends but has trouble finding them. Erm, isn’t that a problem
that was solved by mobile phones? So why have spaceships in the future
lost the ability to track down individuals? The hero keeps his stash of
illegal drugs in a safe, opened purely by thumbprint. Well duh, there’s a
reason safes usually have a combination lock. And how many times must
this supposedly brilliant person forget to hide his pills away before he
gets the message?
And then there came a point about two thirds
of the way through where the hero does something so incredibly stupid
that I nearly tossed the book away. Now, I have no problem with
protagonists who take risks in order to further the plot. Sometimes an
author just has to have his characters do something radical to move
things along. But it has to be plausible. Here, the options are: 1) we
fail and we’re all screwed, totally; or 2) we succeed, and - well,
actually we’re probably all screwed just the same. In other words, the
likelihood of any realistic success is virtually zero. And from there
it’s all downhill, so that the options become: 1), 2), 3)... we’re all
screwed and this time we die, horribly, painfully. And the only way out
is the miraculous rescue out of nowhere (also known as deus ex machina).
No prizes for guessing what happens...
Now, maybe some readers
are less critical than me, and in between all the frankly stupid
decision-making is some quite dramatic action stuff - hand-to-hand
fighting through the corridors of space-ships, that sort of thing. And
for those who enjoy that, it may well compensate for the idiocy that
made it necessary. It’s unfortunate that the author’s grasp on sentence
structure breaks down at this point, and he develops a nasty habit of
breaking off entire clauses. Which is very irritating. And makes my
inner pedant scream. Which is quite unpleasant. Argh! Now, I understand
the effect he’s trying to achieve - in a particularly tense moment,
short choppy sentences work very well to increase the drama, but please,
please, please - let them be sentences, and not horrible bits and
pieces.
And then, right at the end, there’s a massive info-dump
revealing the mystery that set things off and what’s going on behind the
scenes, with the proviso that none of this may be true, it may just be a
clever ploy to suck the hero into the conspiracy of the title. Plus it
sets everything up for the next book in the series. It may not be a
surprise that I won’t be one of those breathlessly waiting for it to
download. Sorry, but this was too silly for words. I’m happy to accept
that the hero of a book is a brilliant risk-taker, but only if his
actions are in fact brilliant. The first two thirds of this book was
heading for four stars, but then it cratered, leaving it at two stars,
at best.
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