I finished Here Be Dragons by Craig Alan. In many ways this was a great book. It had an interesting and pretty unusual story to tell. It gets high marks for being a self-contained story. I'm in favor of more science and less hand-wav'em* in a S.F. story, and this book was clearly that. I found the political situation to be believable, interesting, and thought provoking. This is pretty much a tour-de-force for a first time (or at least I'm assuming a first time) author. I thought the ending was utterly believable, even if it wasn't what I expected.
Negatively, I detested the continual flash backs. I can tolerate a high tension opening scene, which this book had, and then traveling back to see how this came to be. If we then get the story in order. This book does not do that. It tells a bit of the tale nearing the climax and then goes back 6 months in time showing how the pieces came to be on the board. Rinse and repeat several times. I felt this technique was used to bring a lot of the back story in while being interspersed with the action at the climax so that the back story wouldn't be seen as boring. In my opinion the back story was anything but boring, and the lack of it often made scenes of the climax less tense than they would have been if I would have had more known nuance. One particularly galling thing was that an important piece of technology is named but never described in the climatic scenes of the story. I googled the word a couple of times to see if I could get any hint of what was being talked about, but I saw nothing pointing me the right way. And then in one of the last flash backs the technology was described. I almost howled with frustration. It would have been so good to know earlier.
I also had a slightly negative reaction to the foreign language use in the book. Unless you have a little Spanish and a little Hebrew in your bag of tricks you miss a bit here and there. Fortunately, I have those, but I would guess that it is not common.
Overall, solid four stars out of five.
*There is one serious piece of hand-wav'em in that there is working anti-gravity in the story without any serious consideration as to how that could function
Negatively, I detested the continual flash backs. I can tolerate a high tension opening scene, which this book had, and then traveling back to see how this came to be. If we then get the story in order. This book does not do that. It tells a bit of the tale nearing the climax and then goes back 6 months in time showing how the pieces came to be on the board. Rinse and repeat several times. I felt this technique was used to bring a lot of the back story in while being interspersed with the action at the climax so that the back story wouldn't be seen as boring. In my opinion the back story was anything but boring, and the lack of it often made scenes of the climax less tense than they would have been if I would have had more known nuance. One particularly galling thing was that an important piece of technology is named but never described in the climatic scenes of the story. I googled the word a couple of times to see if I could get any hint of what was being talked about, but I saw nothing pointing me the right way. And then in one of the last flash backs the technology was described. I almost howled with frustration. It would have been so good to know earlier.
I also had a slightly negative reaction to the foreign language use in the book. Unless you have a little Spanish and a little Hebrew in your bag of tricks you miss a bit here and there. Fortunately, I have those, but I would guess that it is not common.
Overall, solid four stars out of five.
*There is one serious piece of hand-wav'em in that there is working anti-gravity in the story without any serious consideration as to how that could function