Review: Of two minds
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 11, 2014
I find that I'm of two mends when it comes to Raymond Weil's books.  They're well written and well plotted out.  Ray's a good story teller and he's solidly consistent.The problems always come from the angle of hard scifi.  Great science fiction is 3 dimensional and it's believable because the characters are realistic, but so are the situations. Doug Dandridge does a good job of fleshing things out for instance in his Scifi books.SPOILER!SPOILER!SPOILERThe current book starts off with some solid inconsistencies in the state of the world.  Earth has developed the lift capacity to build a larger international space station, a lunar colony, a Mars colony, a private Earth Orbital station and a private Asteroid base, all of which constitutes over 100,000 people living off planet.Right off the bat, you had enough space lift to take up 100,000 folks past MEO, but you only have 2 space stations?  What happened?  Did the EU, Russian Federation, China, Japan and India fall off the map?  Any crises that would have taken out any of the afor mentioned nations would have taken out the U.S. as well.Who believes any of those national groups would have sat on the sidelines while the US and US companies colonized the Moon and Mars? Watched passively while asteroids were mined out?Earth has sub-light drives that can take you to the Trojan Belt and back in 10 days, but there's less than a three dozen ships poking around the inner solar system? How exactly are the folks on Mars and the Moon being supplied?The weakness in Raymond Weil's books tend to be on the Technical side.  There's a lack of of industrial scale, population growth, weapons development.I still buy his books because he's a good story teller, but his stories require a suspension  of belief rather than an openness to the possibilities.  It's this limitation that keeps him from being a great Science Fiction writer.