Are you ready for a rip-roaring space adventure?
Then this book is going to deliver. It is action packed, full of edge of the seat set pieces, and perhaps above all it is fun.
Nathan Telford is a young member of a family operated spacecraft, but for him life does not work out the way it is expected and he finds himself living with foster parents on a backwater but homely world.
Nathan, it seems, is pretty much a science fiction hero, clean cut, borderline genius, excellent in the field, with an unusual and as yet unexplained tick – his ‘prep’ that warns him of danger, he survives in hostile environments that no-one can live in and gets the girl of his dreams.
This could be the start of being someone who is too good to be true, but Strebor manages to deflect away from this by giving Nathan a few little character flaws that might not balance things out, but certainly add a little tarnish to the lustre. Amongst these are a need for vengeance, a temper that might be a little too hard to control, a willingness to kill, not talking about the past and perhaps being a little too clever for his own good.
All of this works well, and when it is thrown together with the other characters and the adventure that unfolds around them. As this is the first book in the series it is hard to say what the greater schemes the author may have, but what was refreshing here was the fact that it was not really an epic tale of empires clashing and the reordering of civilisation. Rather it is the story of people living and working in a functioning reality, doing jobs, that coincide with the life they are leading, or as they enter the military.
There is the feeling of the mission being of the mundane – not in the sense of boring, but in the sense that it is common place and that there are many such missions taking place across space, with a multitude of different powers working together with a few independent criminal factions and opposing political powers. When there are clashes on borders, that is where the fun begins.
The characters are, as a whole, well drawn, and interact well together. They are good enough to like or to start to understand, even when some are not a major part of the story Strebor has taken the time to invest them with character, and this can only help the novels flow. Any book that introduces a character you want to punch is a good one.
With all this being said, there were a few things that grated from me – but I need to emphasise it I just me, and I can see a logical reason for what I am about to say being so. The whole set up of the political powers and Strebor’s universe as a whole seem to be a little to heavily drawn on the modern world. The different powers all draw their names from modern countries or cities, and the setup could well be on similar to the Cold War.
Furthermore, the descriptions and types of spacecraft spring to mind different types of naval vessels or commercial boats, from submarines to tugs. With this taken into account it would work just as well as a war novel. Probably not as much fun though.
Finally, and not necessarily a bad thing, was the way initial setup grated. Over the course of the first few chapters we went from a family owned on operated ship (interesting idea and would have been nice to see more of); Prisoners/slaves of a rather vicious and brutal – borderline psychopathic – regime (I would have been quite happy to read a novel based around this); Escape from said regime, pursuit and final ‘getaway’ (Could have been a really tense and dramatic novel); and survivors on a plague world and the ultimate payoff of one of them being naturally immune – (Could have been a great and harrowing, bleak story of survival.) All this and not mention the rescue and the investigation into how he survived.
For me, the opening part of the novel was too fast, there was the potential of a lot more there and it seemed as though I was getting into the setup for something only to have it snatched away and another setup beginning and then repeat. Even after this, Nathan’s story seems to jump a lot, the reader being jumped through his life until he starts his service.
There are a few other things that are not resolved, undoubtedly in some of the later books and any of the above could be important things to be looked at in flashback later.
In summation it was an excellent read, and I will quite happily look up some more by Strebor. When the book pile shrinks.
@Droflet
