Review: Terrible, and definitely not worth $4.50
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2013
I read this book based on good overall reviews, and I'm really regretting it.  For $0.99 this would have been a writeoff, but for $4.50 it's really annoying.The writing seems to be almost entirely unedited.  "state of mine" comes to mind (instead of "state of mind"), as well as several misplaced uses of "it's" versus "its".  Following dialogue is often difficult, requiring the reader to go back and look for any hint about who's saying what; sometimes two characters have dialogue in the same paragraph.  Dialogue also tends to be choppy, and switch subject suddenly.The characters are two-dimensional and almost entirely unsympathetic.  They leap to conclusions for no apparent reason, poorly lampshaded as being heavily genetically engineered supergeniuses.  Also, males and females are always introduced in pairs, and the pairs always end up being just perfect for each other.  The initial antagonist turns into the second protagonist; despite killing at least one person, they're let off without punishment because...well, it never actually comes up why they didn't suffer _any_ punishment.The asinine assumptions of physics are particularly problematic.  The "Union" has directed energy weapons ("blasters", they're some sort of either coherent energy weapon, or plasma weapon, or maybe a particle weapon, or whatever else is currently useful), ships that "morph" into radically different shapes and functions, AIs that are apparently not only Turing-complete but apparnetly sentient, FTL travel and communications, fabrication technologies that can crank out a new class of ship in inordinately short periods...but they all run on fission.  Similarly, the protagonists manage to hide from searchers within a planetary system, but a plot point early in the book is a sensor net that can find them over a significant portion of the galaxy.The tactics developed mostly make no sense; spinning the ship at 1,100 RPM wouldn't avoid incoming fire, it would just distribute it over the entire hull.  I'll give a wash for the FTL tactics.  However, the fact that the entire galaxy seems to have lost turret technology is hard to overlook.The labeling is also weird, as many bit characters are referred to by title instead of name.  As well, the antagonist ships are hard to keep up with; is a Major Ship the same as a Major Battleship?  Is there a Minor Battleship?  What is each class, since they're referred to ambiguously depending on, I suppose, when the author wrote a particular section?Regarding the antagonists, why would they bother briefing their (only?  local?  chief?) Admiral only to assassinate him with a satellite weapon?  Why does their computer, despite what's implied to be an internally hostile society, apparently transmit everything in the clear?  (It's a bit of a plot-point that the protagonists are going to encrypt their communication which will keep the antagonists from reading their comms in a tactically useful manner, implying the antagonists don't encrypt).Don't bother buying this book.