Review: A slow start but an enjoyable end
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 8, 2012
Once I overcame my annoyance with the continual, detailed (and quite preachy) premise that a mind can only occupy one body at a time, this settled down to an enjoyable read.The plot is complicated enough to carry the number of characters and neatly ties the various protagonists together in space and time. And while the dialogue is often very stilted, perhaps people **will** talk this way in the future. (OK, that was tongue in cheek, their conversations were too formal to feel natural.)This is military science-fiction set in a milieu where the Hegemony of Suns utilises digitised minds and the Coalition does not. There is more than a whiff of religious ardour in the Coalition's refusal to tolerate digitised minds and this cultural tension drives the narrative.The focus of the novel concerns space battles and they were pretty well written from my zero knowledge perspective of the tactics of space ships that pass in the night.And an author who is not afraid to kill off characters, even ones that appear central to events, gets my vote. Or better yet, resists a Hollywood ending and tie things off the way they most likely would be in the real world. Messily!So why only three stars?Well, a number of the limitations imposed on digitised minds made little sense. The main one was the quantum nature of the mind that means you cannot copy them, you can only move them about. Others included VR environments rendered poorly because doing high grade VR consumes too much computing power. And the strangest one of all, that being in a neural network without access to a physical body would slowly drive you crazy. Literally. All of these items felt like plot mechanisms created to drive the story, rather than the background details of a natural consequence of technology. (And Kalina's need to put quotes around words to highlight the unnatural nature the world when the participants were in VR was especially annoying.)And Kalina has not yet mastered the very subtle art of declaring future events without leaching the tension out of the current events. A couple of times at least we were in the midst of a "will they or won't they" situation and Kalina jumped forward in time using another characters perspective to give us the answer.But most irritating for me was that while the evil puppet master who kicks all this off remains behind the scenes, their rationale for what is set up never quite made sense. Even some of the characters comment on this, and it felt like Kalina was pretty much ignoring it. I like a novel where we're kept in the dark, but not when it seems the author is pretty much washing their hands of their characters crazy behaviour and just muddling along anyway.But despite all that "Hegemony" is a good read and if you like military sci-fi it is worth the 99 cents Kalina charged me.