Review: Just too out there at times
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 21, 2012
I like John Bowers writing style, the story itself was extremely easy to read and with the exception of some formatting glitches I didn't notice any glaring editing errors as I read this story on my Kindle.He even manages to keep the plot moving forward, despite having multiple points of view and switching rapidly between the points of view as he saw necessary.However, while the writing was very good, the plot, characters and universe he set up all disappointed me.  reading this book was like watching a car accident. You know the ending, you know that there is goign to be a lot of tragedy and that you won't really feel satisfied with the ending, but you keep reading just to watch the outcome.And this story has a preordained outcome.  Some events have a deus ex machina feel to them, where they are in the story just to make sure the plot can be shoved forward in a certain way.  The "villians" of the piece ended up making little logical sense at times.  They were a combination of all of the worst societies from history, but given military prowess and economic prowess that far exceeds what a society like there's could possibly produce.  It helps make them more sinister than ever, but it also meant that I just couldn't hate them.  They were characatures of a villian and I ended up feeling like I was reading a comic book where the villian stands ever five pages to make some idiotic pronoucement.The heroes were all that heroic either, which in some ways is realistic, as they make mistakes that have consequences, but some of the mistakes required a complete lack of inteligence to make.  There is little to now foresight used by anyone in this book, which only increased my feeling that John Bowers had a set destination for the plot and put the story on rails to get it there.It's a nice read, but the nature of the villian and the lack of a feeling that the plot was designed to develop characters left me unimpressed.  I cannot recommend this story to others, although I did purchase and read book 2 in the series, as I wanted to see where the story was going.