Review: Good story, but a little slow.  Lack of punctuation distracting
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 4, 2014
The story is interesting if a little slow at times and it skips around a lot.  I read these two books one after the other as neither is very long and they have kind of joined together in my mind as they could easily have been one book with Parts 1 and 2.  So I'm just going to review them in that manner as well.  Tasneem Kyoh and David Dewbury are the characters that tie this story together through all the skipping around as they are the only two around for the 500 years covered in these two stories.The writing style was peculiar in that the author chose not to use quotation marks for dialogue in either book.  I don't know if he was trying to save ink on his printer or what, but I found it somewhat annoying while reading.  I can't think of any reason to choose to write dialogue without proper punctuation unless perhaps quotation marks have committed some horrible crime in the future and have been outlawed.  On the whole it was distracting to me as a reader.  I would have given it a 4 if this had not been so.Nevertheless, once I got past the grammar the story was really pretty well done and I found it interesting.  In the first part, The Settlers, humans are fleeing Earth to live in orbital space stations constructed to save the population from the greed and lack of foresight humankind has shown which has resulted in the planet's weather, volcanoes, etc. being destabilized to such a point that it's becoming unsafe to live on the planet.  Having just been saved from certain death on the planet below that has been destroyed at their hands they are more willing to pull together to try to make a go of continuing the species.By the time we move to the second part of the story, The Colonists, humankind is once again suffering under greed and corruption from those who feel obligated to try to control others in a totalitarian state where the Onyx class lords over the Machine class.  People are mad and revolution is in the wind (or the air filtration systems as the case may be).  I just watched Elysium the other day so it is difficult not to draw a comparison between the two story lines.All in all the story itself was good and I was pretty interested.  As I mentioned above, I would have given these a 4 if not for the distraction of the improper punctuation or lack thereof.