I hope this doesn't upset anyone on Chrons as I know there are some who rate this book but, for me, it is without doubt my worst read this year.
I persisted and finished this book as it was only 200 pages long. But that’s time I’ll never get back and I really should have quit fifty to a hundred pages in rather than suffer the pain. The reason I did persist was that the premise was a good and interesting one and I wanted to see its conclusion. Bad mistake; there is no conclusion, it ends on a cliffhanger with almost nothing resolved. I hate the way this is becoming more and more common nowadays. So far as I’m concerned a book should have an ending, a conclusion, if it doesn’t then it’s not a book it’s a part of a bigger book. In most book series that I have read (rather than abandoned) each volume has a conclusion that resolves much of the issues in that book whilst leaving a greater story arc to continue in the subsequent books. This is what authors like Asher, Weber, Bujold, Jack Campbell and many others have done, and done very satisfactorily for me. This book does not and it’s not just a cliffhanger it simply stops! I shall not be continuing despite the fact that it is, as I say, an interesting premise and I would like to see the final outcome.
I might almost have considered continuing were it not for the fact that it is compounded by dreadful writing, copy editing and editing in general. I really don’t understand what it is with most self-published authors that I have read, not all but certainly the overwhelming majority. Do they feel that the story they have to tell is so exquisitely important that it really doesn’t matter how it’s presented? Because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for not properly finishing the text after the writing is done. Time and again I have this complaint about such authors. Am I a total pedant that I expect the books I read to be adequately edited? This is a complaint that I rarely apply to traditionally published authors, although there are notable exceptions, and almost always apply to self-published ones, though again there are notable exceptions. Usually the biggest issue is they are either too lazy to take the time to edit out all the typos or maybe too tight to pay someone else to do it, but in this case whilst there were a significant number of such errors they paled into insignificance against all the other editing errors. There were whole threads of story that seemed to serve no purpose other than to show how clever Campbell has been in his Mars world building and had no relevance to the story being told. The book is 217 pages long and has 76 chapters; that’s an average of less than three pages per chapter! And each chapter is a scene and POV switch leaving the poor reader’s mind reeling especially with the sometimes bad head hopping going on even within a single chapter.
This book is not long but still it is padded out with so much irrelevant detail as well as irrelevant threads that it could easily have covered the same ground in no more than half the pages, probably a lot less. Now I know a little colour is required to put the flesh on the bones of a good book but sometimes a diet is called for; I mean I really don’t need to know the actual bands and track names the protagonists are listening to (all of whom seem to be conveniently enamoured of late twentieth and early twenty-first century music) and I certainly don’t need to be told the actual cards being turned over when one person is (rather inappropriately) playing solitaire to pass the time.
Presented as a hard science fiction story the science is often outright wrong! And some of the fundamental premises are just so implausible it’s staggering. In a Mars colony that contains the remaining fifty thousand remnants of the human race, still without the manufacturing base to build its own space ships they are sending those few that they have got out to mine the asteroid belt for metal. The colonists are sitting on an entire planet that can be comparatively simply and easily mined but, no, their few ships are sent out to the asteroid for weeks at a time to bring back just a few tens of tonnes of metal. Please! Ah but of course without that there would be no story. It is full of implausible aspects like this including one of my favourites that crops up time and again from, mostly, inexperienced authors; inappropriate unskilled person get elevated to sit alongside the real experts and puts them all to shame. In this case it is an astronomy student who has discovered an anomaly in near space and instead of sending a genuine expert like an astronomy professor up to the space station to help them figure it out, they send the student. Well of course they do because they will make an exciting, if implausible, hero.
Rant over; there is so much wrong with this story that I’ve still only scratched the surface. Sorry Mr Campbell but not recommended. I really should have stopped after the first 50 pages!
1/5 stars
I persisted and finished this book as it was only 200 pages long. But that’s time I’ll never get back and I really should have quit fifty to a hundred pages in rather than suffer the pain. The reason I did persist was that the premise was a good and interesting one and I wanted to see its conclusion. Bad mistake; there is no conclusion, it ends on a cliffhanger with almost nothing resolved. I hate the way this is becoming more and more common nowadays. So far as I’m concerned a book should have an ending, a conclusion, if it doesn’t then it’s not a book it’s a part of a bigger book. In most book series that I have read (rather than abandoned) each volume has a conclusion that resolves much of the issues in that book whilst leaving a greater story arc to continue in the subsequent books. This is what authors like Asher, Weber, Bujold, Jack Campbell and many others have done, and done very satisfactorily for me. This book does not and it’s not just a cliffhanger it simply stops! I shall not be continuing despite the fact that it is, as I say, an interesting premise and I would like to see the final outcome.
I might almost have considered continuing were it not for the fact that it is compounded by dreadful writing, copy editing and editing in general. I really don’t understand what it is with most self-published authors that I have read, not all but certainly the overwhelming majority. Do they feel that the story they have to tell is so exquisitely important that it really doesn’t matter how it’s presented? Because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for not properly finishing the text after the writing is done. Time and again I have this complaint about such authors. Am I a total pedant that I expect the books I read to be adequately edited? This is a complaint that I rarely apply to traditionally published authors, although there are notable exceptions, and almost always apply to self-published ones, though again there are notable exceptions. Usually the biggest issue is they are either too lazy to take the time to edit out all the typos or maybe too tight to pay someone else to do it, but in this case whilst there were a significant number of such errors they paled into insignificance against all the other editing errors. There were whole threads of story that seemed to serve no purpose other than to show how clever Campbell has been in his Mars world building and had no relevance to the story being told. The book is 217 pages long and has 76 chapters; that’s an average of less than three pages per chapter! And each chapter is a scene and POV switch leaving the poor reader’s mind reeling especially with the sometimes bad head hopping going on even within a single chapter.
This book is not long but still it is padded out with so much irrelevant detail as well as irrelevant threads that it could easily have covered the same ground in no more than half the pages, probably a lot less. Now I know a little colour is required to put the flesh on the bones of a good book but sometimes a diet is called for; I mean I really don’t need to know the actual bands and track names the protagonists are listening to (all of whom seem to be conveniently enamoured of late twentieth and early twenty-first century music) and I certainly don’t need to be told the actual cards being turned over when one person is (rather inappropriately) playing solitaire to pass the time.
Presented as a hard science fiction story the science is often outright wrong! And some of the fundamental premises are just so implausible it’s staggering. In a Mars colony that contains the remaining fifty thousand remnants of the human race, still without the manufacturing base to build its own space ships they are sending those few that they have got out to mine the asteroid belt for metal. The colonists are sitting on an entire planet that can be comparatively simply and easily mined but, no, their few ships are sent out to the asteroid for weeks at a time to bring back just a few tens of tonnes of metal. Please! Ah but of course without that there would be no story. It is full of implausible aspects like this including one of my favourites that crops up time and again from, mostly, inexperienced authors; inappropriate unskilled person get elevated to sit alongside the real experts and puts them all to shame. In this case it is an astronomy student who has discovered an anomaly in near space and instead of sending a genuine expert like an astronomy professor up to the space station to help them figure it out, they send the student. Well of course they do because they will make an exciting, if implausible, hero.
Rant over; there is so much wrong with this story that I’ve still only scratched the surface. Sorry Mr Campbell but not recommended. I really should have stopped after the first 50 pages!
1/5 stars
