Review: Crossing the Border
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 14, 2012
I re-read this book recently in my Kindle app. If I were pretending I was still 14 then I would no doubt thrill at the action and drool at the willing girls. But I'm not, sadly, so this time I paid attention to the actual location of the space action. And that is very weird. You have the human occupied space, which consists of over 150 worlds and moons. Further out on our spiral arm of the galaxy there are the Moosilians with whom we have a treaty. In the other direction, towards the galactic center, there are the K'Rang. We are in a state of hostility, though not outright war, with the K'Rang and that provides the setting for the book.Following a previous war with the K'Rang a border was established and sensor fields and minefields were placed at the border. But wait: how is that possible? A border between a group of stars large enough to contain 150 inhabited worlds and another such empire must stretch across enormous distances - many tens or even hundreds of light years. It would likely be drawn in the empty space between systems. How do you mine that border? Wouldn't you need, like, a gazillion mines?Even more strange is that much of the action in the book takes place within a few thousand kilometers of the border, which is described as though it were a line on the ground. This distance may seem large in earthly terms but is insignificant in terms of the distances between star systems. How could you possibly tell if your ship was on the right or wrong side of a border that stretches for vast distances? How would you even know where it was to any accuracy? Even stranger, some of the ships use tactics that involve hiding behind asteroids. So the border must be in a solar system, because that is where asteroid belts are found. That doesn't make any sense at all. How do you draw a fixed border in a system in constant motion?At one point, the ship returns to a system it had visited before. They hide behind an asteroid some 'several thousand kilometers from the one on which they had hidden last time'. Wow. There are likely millions of asteroids in an asteroid belt, so finding the one you visited last time would be almost impossible especially as the whole belt is orbiting its sun and that asteroid is likely somewhere over the other side of the system now. If you could find it, how does moving a tiny distance to another one make any difference? The author treats asteroids as though they were familiar fixed parking lots just this side of the border, and you just need to pull in off the highway.I know this is obsession with detail bordering on OCD, so I'll stop now.