Review: Promising Start to Enjoyable Series
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 17, 2013
Okay -- I got one of those it's free notices on my Kindle. It's cold, the weather is bad, the nights are long, which makes it the best time of year for me to read -- late into the night.I started the book and had some trepidation in the first quarter of the book. The characters including Calvin start out a bit flat and a bit trite. There are some grammatical and some occasional "first your pants, then your shoes" (Thank you, Far Side) mistakes. We learn that the executive officer assigned to our intrepid Calvin (interesting choice of names for a hero -- quite the contrast from say, "Blast Riprock") thinks outside the box, but since he's in the Imperial Navy Intelligence Service and he's been very effective for a young whippersnapper, he's jumped up the chain and been rewarded with his very own command. He gets assigned a blonde goddess as a first officer from the Regular Navy and she hates his lax ways of command. There's a beautiful and smart princess. There's a rugged captain who's a fugitive because he's a patriot. And the really good part is there is a wonderful conspiracy that threatens the Galactic Empire that's the last, best hope of mankind.After the first quarter of the book, we achieve literary "liftoff" and the plot and the characters suddenly begin to lose that cartoonish (not in a good way) quality, and Richard Sanders does two things. He brings his characters (good and bad) into some three dimensionality and the plot begins to move. Sanders avoids some common mistakes, and this book really turns into a fun read as an adventure. There is some plausible "space tech" and some interesting explorations through his characters of age-old conflicts -- "brawn versus intelligence, humans versus aliens, beauty versus professionalism, age versus youth, "by the book" versus "outside the box". Sanders manages to address these issues through his characters and plot without lecturing us about how he sees the universe should work. Yes, there's nothing much really new here, but this young man manages to make it fun, as well as solid science fiction by the end.The improvements continue and our interest grows through the next two books, and frankly, I can't wait for the fourth.RECOMMENDED:Characters - B-Plot - B+Atmospherics - BReadability - B